AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION ...

of violence. People feel this, are skeptical about "military
solutions", start searching for "political solutions". They tend
to be structural, like drawing geographical borders. Left out is
the cultural aspect, including the possibility that drawing
borders in geography may reinforce borders in the mind, which in
turn may legitimize direct violence in the future. An intra-state
war today may become an inter-state war tomorrow.
Geographical fragmentation may substitute the horizontal
structural violence of "too distant" for the vertical structural
violence of repressing, exploiting and alienating minorities
within a nation-state. We are now in a phase of internal wars of
secession and revolution. But distance may also lead to a new
phase of external wars between newly created states.
In addition, with a cease-fire the motivation for serious
action often suffers a dramatic decline. The obvious thesis would
be: if violent cultures and structures produce direct violence,
then such cultures and structures also reproduce direct violence.
The cease-fire, then, becomes nothing but a between-wars period;
an illusion perpetrated on people with too much faith in their
leaders. A feeling of hopelessness follows as people start
realizing the vicious circle: violent structures can only be
changed by violence; but that violence will lead to new violent
structures, and also reinforce a culture of warfare.
The way out lies in denying the first horn of the dilemma,
the thesis that "the (oppressive, exploitative) structure can only
be changed by violence", itself a part of a culture of violence.
If the contradiction is not too sharp, then the politics of
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