Rethinking Peace: Absorption Capacity and the Poverty of Grammar in Generative Relational Being

This paper offers a relational account of peace within the framework of Generative Relational Being. Peace is defined as the maintained capacity of a relational system to absorb, at the rate of its own generation, the asymmetry that its generation produces. Two claims follow from that definition. The first holds that a system which continues to generate continues to produce asymmetry requiring absorption, so that on the premises adopted here no terminal condition exists in which the demand for absorption has ended. The second holds that the failure of absorption fixes destabilisation without fixing its direction, and that what a system does with an asymmetry it cannot absorb depends on the operations its relational grammar admits. Organized violence is characterised as the operation available to a grammar whose only admissible response to destabilisation is the determination of an enemy, and the account declines the reading on which violence is itself generative, on the ground that a system described as generative has thereby been supplied with a reason. Taken together the two claims decompose the question of perpetual peace into two questions carrying different answers, which is offered as the paper's reply to the demand for a verdict in the form of yes or no. Four conditions are stated under which the operations available to a system at destabilisation are enlarged. The paper is a discussion paper: it supplies mechanism and conditions, and it supplies no forecast, no criterion of outcome, and no political adjudication.