Of War and Peace: Towards an Archaeology of Hope and Reconciliation

Eighty years after the Second World War and thirty-four years after the end of the Cold War, we stand, once again, on the precipice of global conflict. This is not coincidental. Major conflicts recur with troubling regularity, often when the lived experience of previous wars has passed away. And while I am sceptical of ‘generational’ theories that attempt to identify cyclical patterns in national histories (Strauss and Howe 1992), it seems to me that reflec-tions on perceived past failures or national humiliations often congeal and combine at critical junctures to create new conflicts. Many current conflicts have been initiated by powerful septuagenarians with no personal experience of war and a highly idealized, chauvinistic view of the past. The cycle of vengeful destruction continues, as every new generation of old men attempts to re-fight their father’s war.