About a Will to Power: Post-cold War Conflicts and the Politics of Knowledge Production

Abstract

This paper proposes a critical interrogation of the dominant interpretations of the post-cold war conflicts in order to demonstrate their political nature and how they internalised the causes of conflicts. By internalisation, I refer to the move to locate the causes of conflicts in internal sources. It argues that the region of emergence of the dominant interpretations of conflicts—the so-called new wars— and the internalisation of their causes is the attempt by the West to ideologically suppress or discredit third world anticolonial solidarity and worldmaking. To make this argument, the paper pays specific attention to the broader historical contexts and structural conditions within which internalisation emerged, which it argues are significant for understanding not only the political nature of the dominant interpretations of conflicts, but also the material forces and social processes that informed their production and circulation. In other words, that the framing of the post-cold war conflicts and the internalisation of their causes were never innocent or impartial acts of knowledge production, but political, ideological, and temporal acts linked to power, interests, and specific agenda.