Reframing Our Understanding of War and Conflict

On 4 July 2015, a day before my twenty-eighth birthday, I found myself with a few friends in the quiet Polish town of Oświęcim, 66 kilometres southwest of Poland’s second largest city, Kraków. It was a quiet, primarily agricultural town, except for one feature. It is in this town where the biggest monument to remind us of the horrors of World War II is located – the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, which the Polish government converted into a memorial museum to remember the martyrdom of those who suffered during the Holocaust. As someone who only knew about the horrors of World War II through studies, the media, and accounts from my grandparents who lived through its horrors, seeing the memory left behind by the victims of the Holocaust made me feel like I was also experiencing war at that moment. To say that the experience was life-changing is an understatement. It also felt emancipatory, but at the time I did not understand why.

The mainstream, rational understanding of war almost always involves understanding the geopolitical landscape that led to that war and what happens after the war. And for many who are outside the academic or professional circles of politics, this understanding of war is amplified by the thought that war is unjust and evil, and those who wage war are bound for eternal damnation. But growing up more like a ‘rebel’ within a tight-knit, suburban Catholic family amidst political upheaval of the 90s in the Philippines, the thought of war always bothered me. Why is there war? Why does humanity have to suffer from the violence brought about by wars? And why do past wars get to be commemorated – should we be moving on from the past? Not even my grandparents’ accounts of their experiences of the Japanese occupation during the Second World War in the Philippines satiated my inquisitive mind. And seeing the horrors of Somalia, Rwanda, and Srebrenica on TV further fuelled my interrogation of state of the world around me.

While studying law and international relations helped me understand war from a political and legal perspective, my deepest understanding came from looking beyond traditional frameworks and engaging with more critical perspectives. War is something that is beyond the political. An exclusively political analysis of war would make it something that seems to be far removed from the everyday, – and the mainstream, rational analysis would tend to provide us with such far-removed answers – completely ignorant of the fact that caught between the politics of war are real people with real lived experiences and real stories to tell.

The from-the-ivory-tower approach of the mainstream rationalist, exclusively political understanding of war is almost always coming from the perspective of power and how it governs or affects relationships. For the record, I do not totally dismiss this approach; indeed, I reckon that this approach offers an essential, if not fundamental, explanation and tools for analysis about the wars that the world experiences. But, and even rationalists agree, this approach is not the be-all end-all of political analysis. I am fortunate enough to have been provided, through this course, a critical theory lens to understand war with. Critical theory offers a much more grassroots, and oftentimes more human-based (as opposed to power-based), understanding of the world around us, including war. Engaging with the works of leading critical theorists like Gillian Rose, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno deepened my understanding of war—not just as a geopolitical event, but as a deeply human experience. Slowly, the questions I had as a child were being answered one by one. 

As Swati Parashar argues, people affected by the war are not interested in how wars began or how it would end; wars are not even extraordinary for them as the goriness of the daily violence they experience becomes something normal. Adding to Parashar’s argument, I reckon that these people are rather asking the question “what’s next?”, assuming they live to tell their tale. The question that matters most for those who survive war is not how it started or how it will end, but what happens next. True political emancipation begins with active listening—only by truly hearing the voices of those affected can we begin to answer that question. Political emancipation begins with active listening, because it is only through active listening that we are able to answer their what’s next question. When I came to this realisation, I reflected on my experience in Auschwitz. Maybe it was the reason why I felt emancipated while inside the concentration camp. The stories that were being told in the memorial museum engendered the stories of those who suffered and those who survived but might not be with us anymore. People were finally listening to their stories. People were finally doing something to ensure that what they have been through will not be experienced by anyone again (sadly though, the rhetoric that brought the world to that point seventy years ago are once again being proliferated by people who seem to not have learned the lessons of history). 

Understanding war through a more humanistic lens has reshaped not just how I see conflicts, but how I see the world itself. It makes concepts like justice, reconciliation, and peace feel less like distant ideals and more like achievable realities. The post-war concepts of justice, reconciliation, and peace are no longer far-removed, impossible entities, but rather reachable goals. If we approach war with a more humanistic lens, we can be assured of more humane solutions to ending it. And again, we begin with taking the stories of those with lived experiences of war.

As I end this reflective piece, I look back on that hot summer day in Oświęcim, a day prior to my twenty-eighth. I look back and recall the photographs of the prisoners of that camp. I look back and recall the cramped barracks where the prisoners were kept and dehumanised by the Nazi regime. I look back and recall the remnants of blood spattered on the execution wall. I look back and remember the stories of those who suffered in that place. Yet while they were no longer with us at that point, I intently and actively listened to their stories as told by the images and items that were left there and used as a memorial. As I once again look back and remember these stories, I take what I have learned from this course and continue my journey towards full political (and now, even personal) emancipation.   

N.B. This is a rewriting of a reflective essay I wrote for the course "War and its Aftermath" during my master's in international relations programme.