Dreaming of peace amidst the nightmare of war: Responding to my interlocutors

Abstract

While domestic civil spheres extend Lockean ties of mutual understanding, they often legitimate a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ among nations outside their national boundaries. As cultural trauma theory suggests, however, there is a sociological pathway for extending civil solidarity beyond the nation state, such that war between nations is prevented. The European Union underwent just such a process in the wake of the Second World War. Even as Civil Sphere Theory develops an empirical understanding of Kant's universalizing moral claims, the frustration of these claims in ‘actually existing’ civil spheres is conceptualized in a Hegelian manner – as generated by the fundamental contradictions of space, time, and function. These contradictions generate extraordinary strains inside and outside of nationally bounded civil spheres, triggering social movements for peace and justice.

‘Permanent warfare is back on the radar’, avers David Inglis (2026) in his erudite response to my paper ‘The civil sphere in war and peace’ (CSWP) (Alexander, 2026), especially in ‘those privileged parts of the world whose people thought such a condition had been overcome in 1945 and/or 1989’.

The ambition of CSWP is to cut through the hazy self-conceits of what such ‘people thought’ during those only recently foreclosed ‘postwar’ eras: the American intellectual fantasy that history had ended with the triumphs of capitalist democracy, the European delusion that expanding the EU and NATO would protect it from the violent predations of Russia, the Soviet Union's successor state.

In place of wistful, ultimately dangerous illusions about the putative existence of a ‘rule-based’ international order, my essay suggests a darker vision, conceptualizing a tragic connection between civil peace domestically and violent war internationally. I aim not at a philosophical anthropology of violent war but rather at a sociological theory of what legitimates violence and allows war. In order to do so, I have argued, we need to return to theories about how peace is achieved on the domestic scene. Not to a Weberian faith in the state's monopoly of violence but to the long tradition of democratic thinking about civil society – in the sociological form of civil sphere theory (CST). ¹

Weber's state makes war and builds empire, activities that Weber-as-nationalist rather than value-free social scientist had in mind (Mommsen, 1989 [1974]). The civil sphere makes peace, providing an architecture for understanding how morality can exercise control over the violence-monopolizing state. To enable such control requires, not just any morality, but the civil rather than primordial kind. It is not just Kant-versus-Hobbes, of principled citizenship over ruthless leviathan, but Kant-versus-Schmidt, of cosmopolitan universalism over ethnic particularity – of ‘civic’ versus ‘ethnic’ nationalism in the language of contemporary sociology.

Avoiding hostility is possible, Kant emphasizes, if ‘both parties exist in the civil juridical condition’ (Kant, 2006 [1795]: 73). Translated into CST terms, this means that both parties must enter into a solidary relation such that each recognizes the other to be fully as human as oneself.

Why has such a civil juridical relationship not yet extended to include all humankind? Addressing this question, CSWP points to a cultural contradiction that the optimism of the Enlightenment's greatest thinker made it impossible to see. ² The very moral discourse that stipulates the conditions for civility, and that informs institutions of a civil juridical kind, creates a category of ‘others’ whose supposedly anticivil qualities motivate their hostility and legitimate, and indeed often seem to require, their repression.

It is ironic that the very idea of the ‘civil’ has its origin in early democratic theorizing about a social contract that leaves the hostilities of the state of nature behind. For Locke, the contract guaranteed democratic self-regulation, for Hobbes it meant controlling nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. Contract theory did not specify the universe to which such obligations were to apply. Its implicit reference was the boundaries of the national state. But if the civil sphere remains circumscribed nationally, the discourse that sustains domestic peace legitimates repression, war, and violence against foreigners outside. If the bloody history of the twentieth century proves anything, it is that civility does not hold up when civil spheres remain nationally confined.

How can the civil sphere become trans-national, if not fully globalized? Not by contracts, no matter how well intentioned pre-and-post war treaties, the foundational documents of international organizations, or academic disciplines like peace studies, though such virtuous activities certainly are all good things. As Durkheim insisted in The Division of Labor in Society, contracts can bind only if they can draw upon the ‘non-contractual’. For contracts to become more than the paper they are printed on, the signers must recognize one another as fellow human beings, and such an experience of solidarity can be extended only sociologically.

‘Peace, no less than war’, Andriana Benčić Kužnar (2026) writes, ‘is an active social process that requires sustained collective effort to be achieved’, an effort that depends on ‘transnational empathy and moral imagination’. The task before us, she explains, ‘is to reimagine the civil sphere through the communicative and affective capacities of twenty-first-century media … by bringing into public life every word, image, and moral impulse that strives to feel the pain of others’.

How groups of people may learn to experience the pain of others, creating solidary bonds that powerfully reconstruct earlier hostilities, has been the subject matter of Cultural Trauma Theory (Alexander et al., 2004; Alexander, 2012; Eyerman et al., 2011). Engaging in the contingent and complex social process of ‘trauma work’, collectives can transmute social suffering into empathy. Formerly stigmatized victims – individuals, groups, nations – can be reconstructed as collective representations of civic virtue; once admired perpetrators can be transformed into polluted symbols against whom moral outrage is directed. It was via such a process of ‘trauma drama’ that the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews came eventually to be symbolized as ‘the Holocaust’ (Alexander, 2002), a collective representation mandating that grievous racial and ethnic violence should ‘never again’ happen. As moral consciousness about the Holocaust expanded, international law codified the crime of genocide, translating ‘raw facticity into a binary code [of] legal/illegal’ and evoking ‘jargon such as “right”, “responsibility”, “competence” and “privilege”’ (Koskenniemi, 2025; cited in Kivisto, 2026).

Susan Worschech (2026) argues that trauma work was central to the post-war creation of the European Union, which is ‘a transnational civil sphere, supported and secured by civil regulative institutions’ that has been ‘constructed only once in recent history’. She finds a similar process to have been triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Arguing that transnational civil spheres are often the products of crises, she points to a ‘longue durée process’ that ‘builds upon collective experience, memory and decisions of what is considered uncivil and therefore [should] not [be] part of the future civil sphere’.

As Russia's war against Ukraine has been being framed as anticivil, Worschech suggests, this process of cultural deconstruction has drawn upon the transnational solidarity that transmuted European suffering in World War II. ‘Despite all attempts by Russia as imperial power and hegemon’, Worschec writes, its ‘oppressive strategies [have] instead contributed to the binary coding [supporting] the Ukrainian civil sphere’, a coding that has polluted Russia's deployment of force while sacralizing ‘rule of law, democracy and independence’.

The trauma process has strengthened democratic civil solidarity not only inside Ukraine; it has ‘include[d] a wider audience outside Ukraine, via mass media, and the political, legal and scientific realms, thereby establishing a transnational sphere of solidarity and … cooperation' among allies. As Worschech (2026) observes, ‘since the beginning of … the full-scale invasion’, there has been intense identification with Ukraine throughout Europe, triggering a ‘solidarity with Ukrainians – in particular from societies which are also more exposed to Russian aggression, such as the Baltics, Moldova, Finland, and Poland, but also from the Czech Republic, Germany, and Scandinavia’, a solidarity that was ‘rather uncommon before’.

But the social movement against war involves more than building outward, extending civil spheres beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. As Peter Kivisto (2026) reminds us, the collective effort also entails repairing national civil spheres from within, challenging the domestic institutions, whether private companies, government agencies, or think tanks, that constitute what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower called ‘the military-industrial complex’. The binarism that legitimates war-making against ‘anticivil’ outsiders encourages the domestic construction of something even more paradoxical, not only vast organizations dedicated to forging weapons of war, but also an anticivil culture of machismo, aggression, and violence.

Illustrating this pernicious paradox in the modern era of ‘industrial warfare’, Kivisto points to the Darth Vader-like Prussian Chief of Staff General H.K.B. von Moltke, ‘an advocate of warrior culture’ who, contending that ‘eternal peace is only a dream, and not even a happy dream’, insisted that ‘without war the world would fall into decay, and lose itself in materialism’ (quoted in Kivisto, 2026). ³

For a parallel in the classical world, Kivisto turns to Greek literature. Reading Aristophanes’ cynical comedy Peace as a response to Athena's paeon to war-making in Aeschylus’ grimly tragic Oresteia, Kivisto observes that, ‘although peace is achieved at the play's end … the precariousness of that peace is evident when it becomes clear that there are those who benefit from war, and for whom peace is an unwelcome threat to lucrative businesses manufacturing weapons’, who ‘bemoaned the peace as leading to their financial ruin’. If Aristophanes’ art illuminates ‘the inherent tension between the peacemakers and the warmakers’ inside the world's very first civil sphere, Kivisto suggests ‘this reality [also] haunts us today, made all the more foreboding by the fact that the weapons of war are far more lethal than the spears and lances of the ancient world’.

Antiwar movements inside nation-states have been triggered by the same trauma process that has fostered postwar transnational solidarities. The trauma process can invert attributions of guilt and innocence, such that once stigmatized victims of wars become transformed into symbols of purity; with the once hallowed military-industrial perpetrators who make war in the name of democracy can becoming polluted, in turn. Peace movements are the vehicle for repairing the destructive intrusion of war-making into the very heart of civil societies. ⁴

‘What is involved here,’ Kivisto suggest is nothing less than ‘an agonistic struggle between the forces of war and the forces of peace’ inside the domestic sphere. He goes on to observe that ‘a generation of young people in the United States came of age politically via their involvement in … the antiwar movement that opposed the Vietnam War’. It is hardly a coincidence, I would add, that this non-violent antiwar struggle occurred during the same years as the non-violent Black civil rights movement was so dramatically advancing the repair of racial relations in the United States.

David Inglis (2026) interprets CSWP as arguing that war is a ‘foundation-stone of democracy’, theorizing a logic of necessity such that there is a ‘double embrace of civility within the polity and incivility outside of it’. As an alternative, he suggests that we conceptualize war as ‘contingent and not necessary’. While I disagree with his reading of CSWP, I agree with the conclusion he draws from it. War-making by civil spheres is, indeed, contingent, not necessary. The signifiers that constitute democratic motives, relations, and institutions do necessarily specify a category of objectified ‘others’ as anticivil, but they do not specify the nature of the collectivity to which this denigrated category belongs – the concrete signifieds that specify the who, the what, and the where of the others who threaten what Martin Luther King called ‘our beloved community’.

Such anticivil others could be other tribes, other cities, other empires, other nations, or, indeed, other planets. To vastly simplify human history, we might say that tribes gave way to cities, cities to empires, and empires to nations, and that each successive social formation extended the boundaries of solidarity. There is no necessary reason, either in logic or in social life, that prevents the national boundaries of ‘actually existing’ civil spheres from being so extended that civil bonds that currently create solidarity among nations might be extended in a more transnational and global way.

Recall Puck's boast about those quick travelling fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

‘We the globe can compass soon, Swifter than the wandr’ing moon’.

What poets have dreamt and social theorists thought out, societies might someday embrace. The phrase ‘From your lips to God's ear’ originated in the Yiddish culture of nineteenth century European Jews. In idiomatic English it can be paraphrased thusly: ‘May it be so’.

May it be so, David, may it be so.