Since antiquity thought about war has oscillated between two opposite imaginations: war as a rational instrument of political actors that creates and preserves order (polemos); and war as as a moment of radical contingency that has the potential to destroy and undo all order and certainty (stasis). The paper develops a concept of ‘warscapes’ firmly premised on the latter understanding of war. Warscapes are ‘liquid’ phenomena to the extent that they cannot be neatly contained in ‘solid’ frameworks of order and ordering: they always cross and transgress boundaries, be this spatial borders, moral thresholds or the limits of knowledge itself. What is more, warscapes can never be fully eradicated or overcome; they remain an integral and ‘pure’ element of individual as well as collective life. The paper thus explores whether the only proper ethical response to the problem of organized violence lies in unconditionally affirming the contingency and fluidity of warscapes against those futile attempts of rationally appropriating them (polemos) and/or violently negating them (‘peace’).
