War & Peace Quote by Ulrich Beck

Ulrich Beck, the sociologist of the risk society, points to a rupture in the traditional grammar of conflict. Terrorist violence is not waged by states that command territory, armies, and diplomats; it is carried out by networks, cells, and lone actors who answer to shifting loyalties and transcend borders. Classic war presumes identifiable parties, negotiable interests, and the possibility of an armistice sealed by signatures and surveillance of front lines. Terrorism aims at surprise and symbolic targets, thrives on publicity, and often seeks absolute goals or apocalyptic gestures. You cannot sign a treaty with a tactic, and reciprocity loses traction when the other side is diffuse, clandestine, and willing to violate the laws of war. That is why the old dividing line between wartime and peacetime blurs: the threat can erupt anywhere, and so can the response.

Beck situates this in the broader transformation of modernity after 9/11, where global risks spill across borders and institutional categories. When danger is decoupled from territory and uniforms, states pivot from war as an episodic event to security as an ongoing condition. Airports, data flows, urban spaces, and everyday routines become militarized through surveillance, preemption, and emergency powers. The dilemma is double-edged. On the one hand, conventional diplomacy and cease-fires are inadequate where there is no stable counterpart. On the other, if societies internalize a permanent war footing, they normalize exceptional measures, corrode civil liberties, and risk reproducing the insecurity they seek to overcome.

Beck’s provocation is not a call to fatalism but to conceptual innovation. Instead of importing the logic of interstate war, he urges cosmopolitan strategies that fit the problem: transnational policing and intelligence, legal frameworks that chase financing and logistics across jurisdictions, and political efforts that reduce grievances and glamorization of violence. The aim is neither naive appeasement nor endless war, but a new politics of risk that can contain terror without letting it redefine the meaning of peace.