Rethinking Peace Thinking

ANALYSIS, 1 Sep 2025

Timothy Bryar - TRANSCEND Media Service

29 Aug 2025 – In a text titled ‘Against Peace’, philosopher Agon Hamza succinctly summarises the problems with existing forms of peace thinking:

Peace presupposes that there is a world of stability to return to. It implies there is a neutral ground, which should be maintained at all costs by making all the necessary compromises. Peace is a retroactive fantasy that obfuscates the contradictions which produced the conflict in the first place. What we call peace is really a state that has yet to be observed as conflictual.

Underpinning Hamza’s critique is a fundamental Lacanian-Hegelian point that any society is structured around a social antagonism or a founding violence. This founding violence is wonderfully rendered in a joke told by both Slavoj Zizek and Alenka Zupancic: an explorer encounters a remote indigenous tribe for the first time and asks, ‘Are there cannibals among you?’. The tribe replies, ‘No, we ate the last one yesterday’. In other words, any social order is grounded in an ontological violence that must remain occluded or hidden if the social order is to appear stable and consistent.

Based on this foundational violence inherent in every social order, Hamza highlights how the concept of peace obfuscates or covers over this violence through ideological fantasy. One form of ideological fantasy common amongst peace theorists and practitioners is a fantasy of social fullness, that is, of a society of peace free from violence. Indeed, logically speaking, peace is typically seen to be something that is disturbed by violence, that is, prior to violence. From this perspective, violence interrupts a prior peaceful state and the aim of peace action is a return to stability or a predictable social order. Thus, Hamza argues, a problem with peace thinking today is that it supposes there is a world of stability to return to.

Two further points of critique arise here from a Lacanian-Hegelian perspective. Firstly, the appearance of an a-priori state of peace that is ruptured by violence is a retroactive illusion. That is, the idea of a peaceful, harmonious society is created retroactively through its loss, it does not exist as a substantial entity prior to this loss. In other words, peace is nothing but this appearance of lost substantiality and the peace thinker comes to know or think peace only after it is already lost. Rather than this simply being a limitation for the field of peace and conflict studies, it is only in losing its object (a prior state of peace) that peace thinking establishes a relationship with peace in the first place. Indeed, I would argue that the multiplicity of different theories and approaches to peace are all (ultimately failed) attempts to overcome this loss. In this way, to paraphrase Adrian Johnston (2021), the only thing peace thinking has to lose is this erroneous sense of loss itself.

The second point building on Hamza’s critique is that not only is the idea of a return to a stable, predictable social order theoretically unsound, but today’s global situation of serial crisis also puts into question a return to stability. Zupancic (2024) draws our attention to the fact that in today’s context many crises remain unresolved, resulting in the persistence of undead crises. In fact, crisis has become so ubiquitous that even crisis itself appears to be in crisis (Dolar 2024). Whereas previously a major crisis would be followed by a return or rebound to some sort of stability that would be relatively enduring, today our very ability to gain respite and rebound to a sense of normalcy is itself in crisis. Indeed, for Zizek (2023) the serial crisis is leading us beyond simply questions of war or peace towards considerations of whether we will adapt to a global state of emergency in which crises overlap and converge and our priorities must change all the time. It is in such an apocalyptic context that Wittgenstein (1998, p. 72) claims, “peace is the last thing that will then find a home”. It is in this way that I claim that peace thinking and action are in crisis today.

The context of serial crisis then puts into question the inexorability of the dialectic of peace and violence (Etim & Akpabio 2018). That is, the latter regards violence as mutually inclusive of peace, such that without violent conflicts, the much desired peace will remain a mirage (Etim & Akpabio 2018). The presence of violence necessarily opens up opportunities towards peace. However, following the preceding discussion, we should ask what happens when conditions of violence no longer open towards peace? As Ben Ware (2024, p. 28) asks, if thinking “comes into being when night falls, what occurs when this night, losing its dialectical relationship with light, seems no longer to be a precursor to a new dawn, a new age?” Therefore, rather than relying on a guaranteed return to a stable order, what should be emphasised is the way the presence of violence provides a glimpse of the antagonism structuring the existing social order. And for a Lacanian-Hegelian, not only does this violent antagonism structurally undermine any claim to a stable and predictable social order, it also provides the very conditions for violent conflict to emerge.

What is required then is not a return to a state of peace but rather, in the first instance, something else to give body to the fundamental violence/antagonism, to make it resonate louder. In this way, Zupancic (2017) appeals to the need for the right word (not more words) that gives us access to reality in a whole different way, not a correct description of a reality but the introduction of a new reality. As Zupancic (2017: 300) writes vis-a-vis Marx, “The concept of class struggle is an example of a ‘new signifier’, one that reveals a hitherto invisible dimension of social reality and gives us tools to think it. It does so because it names a point where the impossibility of social justice gets disentangled from the necessity to repeat this impossibility”. In concrete situations of violent conflict, struggles for peace needs new concepts that open a rift in social reality, exposing the ontological violence driving the conflict and allowing it to resonate. As Zahi Zalloua (2025: 4) writes with reference to both Fanon and Zizek, “resistance to ontology is thus twofold, taking the form of a violent undoing/decompletion that vigilantly guards against re-inscribing and naturalising a new kingdom/order (the lie of a lost or regained social harmony), and an invention – the creation of new desires and new modalities of social existence”.  The latter refers to transforming the situation such that the conditions supporting the possibility for violent conflict are minimized – or rather, new conflicts are generated and the way we understand what is violent and what is not is reconfigured. Indeed, here we should define conflict transformation as the making of choices that lead “materially, toward the building of a new situation – that change the situation” (Flisfeder 2024: 267).

To do so, peace thinking must reorient itself towards ontological violence rather than covering it over through fantasies of a return to peace, or through ideological guarantees provided by inclusivity, participation, nonviolence and an emphasis on the local. Indeed, from a Lacanian-Hegelian orientation, an irreducible lack of ontological certainty means that there are no transcendental guarantees for the outcomes of our actions, including claims that violence only breeds more violence or that nonviolence is a privileged horizon of action (Zalloua 2025). Rather, as Zizek (2011) argues, the choice of violence or nonviolence must always be attentive to the situation, based on a concrete analysis of the concrete conflict situation. There are no guarantees, each situation imposes on us what measures are appropriate, but even then there are no guarantees of a sustained outcome.

References:

Dolar, Mladen, interview by Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda. 2024. “Mladen Dolae on the Limits of Psychoanalysis, Marx and Hegel, Beckett, Theatre/ Opera…and a Lot More.” Crisis & Critique Podcast. (May 30).

Etim, Francis, and Maurice Kufre-Abasi Akpabio. 2018. “Hegelian Dialectics: Implications for Violence and Peace in Nigeria.” Open Journal of Philosophy 8: 530–548.

Flisfeder, Matthew. 2024. “The Persistence of the Jewish Question in Socialist Struggle: Rethinking Global Antisemitism and Emancipatory Universality.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 42 (2): 259–282.

Johnston, Adrian. 2021. “Capitalism’s Implants: A Hegelian Theory of Failed Revolutions.” Crisis & Critique 8 (2): 122–181.

Ware, Ben. 2024. On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End. London: Verso.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1998. Culture and Value. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Zalloua, Zahi. 2025. Fanon, Zizek and the Violence of Resistance. London: Bloomsbury.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2011. “The Jacobin Spirit”. Jacobin (May 26). https://jacobin.com/2011/05/the-jacobin-spirit

Zizek, Slavoj. 2023. “The Dark Side of Neutrality.” Project Syndicate,February 17. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/neutrality-functions-as-support-for-russian-aggression-by-slavoj-zizek-2023-02?barrier=accesspaylog.

Zupancic, Alenka, interview by Michael O’Sullivan and Timothy Bryar. 2024. “Disavowal w/ Alenka Zupancic Part One.” Zizek And So On (June 24).

Zupancic, Alenka. 2017. What is Sex? Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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Timothy Bryar is an independent researcher and writer and author of the book A Lacanian-Hegelian Perspective on Peace and Conflict Studies.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 1 Sep 2025.

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