Postmodern War
The New Politics of Conflict
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- $77.99
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- $77.99
Publisher Description
Postmodern War poses an urgent challenge to the ways we conceptualize and actually wage war in our high technology age. Computerization and artificial intelligence have brought about a revolution in warfare spawning both increasingly powerful weapons and a rhetoric which disguises their apocalyptic potential in catch phrases like smart weapons and bloodless combat. Postmodern War examines: * contemporary practices of war, defining and critiquing trendy military doctrines hidden behind phrases like Infowar and Cyberwar * the roles of those who manipulate high technology, those who are manipulated by it, and those who are increasingly merging with it * the role of peace activists and socially responsible scientists in countering dangerous assumptions made by a postmodern military. Far from opposing technological change, however, Gray finds new hopes for peace in the twenty-first century. Provocative and far-reaching in its scope, the book argues that postmodern war has left us poised between the most dreadful and most utopian of alternatives: we may eradicate either the human race or war itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Population growth, industrial expansion and communication proliferation are, according to Gray (editor, The Cyborg Handbook), combining to create new wars. Nuclear, chemical and biological technologies are developing and proliferating, making it highly probable that they will be used in regional or terrorist conflicts. At the same time, theorists predict the coming of "cyberwar" and armed forces seek to integrate soldiers ever more closely with machines. This "technophilia," according to Gray, represents an effort to manage war scientifically while also limiting causalities. Its ultimate consequence, however, is to conflate total and limited war. In the cyber age, domestic dissent and external conflict are handled by essentially the same methods. Gray is most effective when he describes the evolution of planning and management concepts in the U.S. military after WWII. His demonstration of the emotional relationship between humans and "technoscience" is provocative. His assertion that war has a life of its own will hardly surprise his readers--who may be limited, as his analysis of postmodern war is written in postmodern style, making it inaccessible to most anyone without a good command of cyber-age and deconstructionist vocabularies. Gray's final conclusion, that war can be "deconstructed" by restructuring its discourse through verbal and physical intervention, invites dismissal as a restatement in contemporary language of the 1960s mantra "give peace a chance." Even linear thinkers unimpressed by his call for a paradigm shift will, however, find in it an incentive to expand their definitions of reality.
