War & Peace Quote by Ulrich Beck

Peace, in Beck's framing, isn't a handshake you withhold out of stubbornness; it's a category error. Calling terrorists a party you can "make peace" with smuggles in assumptions from interstate diplomacy: stable leadership, territorial interests, enforceable agreements, a shared baseline of legitimacy. Beck's punchline is that the very grammar of Westphalian politics fails when the actor is networked, deniable, and often invested in perpetual spectacle rather than settlement.

The second sentence does the real work. By saying the dividing lines between war and peace "do not apply", Beck isn't cheering a permanent state of emergency so much as diagnosing a social condition: risk society under asymmetrical threat. Terrorism, in his view, is less a conventional military contest than a technology of fear that migrates into everyday life. It turns airports, subway platforms, news cycles, and policing into front lines without formally declaring them so. That collapse of boundaries is the point: citizens are asked to live as if at war while still shopping, voting, and watching sitcoms.

The subtext is a warning about how states respond. If war and peace blur, governments gain incentives to treat politics like combat and to normalize extraordinary measures as ordinary governance. Beck's intent is analytical but edged with alarm: once you accept that the old lines don't hold, you must decide whether you redesign institutions for a new kind of conflict or let the exception quietly become the rule.