Society as a Garden

In this work, I investigate certain aspects of how, among the multitude of unviable tasks that it set itself, modernity failed to invest in the management of social peace and restriction of warfare. The aim of my work is, therefore, to demonstrate and examine the fact that never before the modern times did we witness wars of such destructive potential. I place myself in the contemporary context of the 20th and 21st centuries with an effort to understand the agenda which is used as a basis for wars nowadays being led and justified while pronouncing their victims collateral damage. In doing so, I seek theoretical foundation in the scholarships of Michel Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman. Foucauldian concepts of biopower and state racism are presented as the ideological staple of modern warfare, while Bauman's arguments serve to showcase the organizational and technical facets of modernity which ensure social consent to armed conflicts through the processes of bureaucratization and technologization. Finally, I apply the conclusions of the work to identify biopolitical and Baumanian patterns in the current American foreign policy and the mechanisms behind its "war on terror".

Autorentext

Olivera Radovanovi was born in Kragujevac, Serbia. She completed her Bachelor and Master studies in social sciences at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. She lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.