Resumen de Private War: Origin and End of the Modern State? From the Nationalisation of Violence to the Depersonification of the jus belli
This article aims to examine from the point of view of philosophy the relationship between the concepts of State, jus belli and private war by distinguishing two analytical moments. The first one focuses on the evolution of the philosophical concepts that made possible the emergence of the modern sovereign State; the second one, on the process of crisis that these concepts seem to be undergoing today. In both cases, private war is at the centre of the question. More precisely, I defend the thesis that private warfare is at the origin of State magnitude and of the current signs of its decline. If the modern State represented in essence what I will call a “personification of jus belli”, the reverse side of this thesis becomes an obligatory step in a reflection that could not confine to the sole historical interest within its disciplinary field. In this respect, this paper is grounded on two questions, namely: 1) Might the process of de-personification of jus belli lead to the disappearance of the differentiations forged over more than three centuries? Can the “new condotta” be interpreted as an attempt to symmetrise warfare in the face of agents who practice war without responding to a state logic?
