The Great War of Recognition

Abstract

With the removal of the ‘final state’ vision from the perception of historical process recasts the coexistence of (proliferating) differences as a perpetual condition of modernity. Given that ‘difference’ masks all too often inequality, perpetuity of the ‘wars of recognition’ is therefore a likely prospect, since the instability of all extant and emerging power settings triggers reconnaissance-through-battle. The politics of recognition, though, tends to be viewed and practiced, wrongly, as an alternative rather than complement of distributive justice, thereby inflaming rather than mollifying the intensity of ‘recognition wars’.