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Sacral Suicides, Unpunishable Killings, Rites of Power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2013
Extract
Studies of violence relating to the Middle East have sometimes done more harm than they have explained. Like the intended effects of the U.S. military's doctrine of “rapid dominance,” compared by its proponents to “tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes . . . famine and disease,” violence in the Middle East would appear to be “incomprehensible,” though less to “the people at large” who are affected by it than to its prolific theoreticians. Over the past two decades, much of the literature on the region as a “cauldron of war”—generating five times its share (by population size) of total global conflict since the mid-20th century—has tended to update and propagate well-known mythologies of primitivism, authoritarian personalities, and ancient hatreds. The significance of such mythopoeia has been its capacity to realize, at least in part, the conditions of its own truthfulness by shaping perception and policy, framing and enabling the infliction of a new wave of warfare on the region. Much contemporary writing on post–Cold War global crisis, the geopolitics of instability, regional conflict, and the future of warfare has not only signally failed to understand the dynamics of the Middle East but has actively contributed to the spread of violence in the region.
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References
NOTES
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