On the collective level, peace is the absence of war (Latin pax absentia belli), of violence between human groups. In this sense, totalitarian or dictatorial societies may be at peace militarily, but not socially: for example, class struggle is a state of social war. Maintaining international peace is one of the objectives of organizations such as the UN. There are also non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that support peace talks where there is a state of war, such as Neve Shalom - Wahat as Salam, the joint Israeli-Palestinian movement Pacifists, like Christian anarchists, believe that any kind of violence will only breed more violence. Other groups of people take a variety of positions on violence, many of them espousing the just war theory. Communism's ideologues also repeatedly affirmed their attachment to the "struggle for peace," but their anti-war slogans often concealed expansionist intentions. Politicians and soldiers have claimed at various times that they want peace, but a "just peace", by which they could understand a peace that only takes into account the interests of one of the conflicting parties (theirs).

Peace as stasis between two punctuations
CHANGE

According to the theory of Niles Eltridge and John Sepkoski (1972), in both individual and family life as well as social life, in human history and in natural history, periods of peace alternate with periods of conflict called punctuations. In periods of peace, the evolution is gradual: a personal or family balance is formed, habits settle, the political regime remains the same, the climate, flora, fauna change little and gradually. During the punctuation periods, various incidents or accidents, births, deaths, illnesses, marriages, divorces, job changes, business openings or closures, major political changes, revolutions, civil or international wars, state collapses, territorial changes, natural catastrophes , climatic, volcanic or meteoritic end the state of peace, destroy the previous balance and inaugurate a new balance, a new period of peace (stasis), on new bases. This theory was called the "punctuated equilibrium theory". The preamble of UNESCO's founding declaration states: "since wars spring from the spirit of men, it is also in their spirit that the foundations of peace must be laid." Indian politician Mohandas Gandhi stated, "There is no way to peace, for peace is the way" and "Justice can only be achieved through a just peace, and peace cannot last without justice for all, including the enemy", adding however : "In the face of men like Hitler or Stalin, violence is less harmful to peace than cowardice disguised as non-violence.” The way in which humanity has evolved towards modernity can very well be analyzed from the perspective of changing forms of consciousness, of the remodeling of social relationships and structures, of technological developments, or from the relationship of the individual to the environment that surrounds him. But the modern man, like the man of any historical era, continues to be completely described by the way he relates himself as an individual, but also the community of which he is a part as a whole, to the forms of conflict with which he is contemporary. It is like a sum of attitudes sensibly complete of its external dynamics, but also of its inner feelings, anxieties and aspirations.
Today, wars without winners and losers, or undeclared preventive wars, are possible. Man recently also discovered conflict-as-a-spectacle.
War and peace of modern man thus define a new form of consciousness, which states must organize and which also has a measurement tool: economic growth. For the historians of the future, the forms of peace and those of the current war will provide a perfect description of the times with which we are contemporaries.
War, as well as periods of peace, are forms of balancing social energies, and the way in which they behave or manifest themselves bears witness to the culture and the stage of social development. The modern man is the man of individual conscience, sure of his free will, and his claim to gain was to relate contractually to the social community of which he is a part. He is the recent man.
Man has recently elevated reason to the rank of divinity and placed himself at the center of the Universe. In an attempt to define modern humanity, Horia Roman Patapievici characterizes those who we are as "...the best fed, the most prosperous, the freest (in terms of space travel) that humanity has known. At the same time, people are the weakest of angels, the most dependent on comfort and consumption, the most enslaved to the pleasure of free will, the least autonomous in their judgments, the most gregarious and servile (…) that he has ever known humanity. (…)
The recent man is the man who, wanting to be fed up with all the phenomena of the world - mastering them, possessing them, changing them as he pleases and permeating himself with all their materiality, he woke up one fine day that he is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of their flow, drain and trickle.”
Modern man took note of the statement of Friedrich Nietzsche, who found that God is dead, killed by the desire to question him and question him according to rational logic. Without God, modern man was also left without a number of landmarks, which he replaced with material targets. He thus became vulnerable and weak in the face of the need to satisfy his immediate desires and fearful of tomorrow. He became easily manipulable and replaced his fear of an ineffable court with a morality that he constantly builds and adapts.
His desires, especially those dictated by erotic impulses of all kinds, are today what particularly characterizes the recent man, and not the heroism, chivalry or unshakable faith of another time. Of course, all these changes will be found and examined by future generations and by analyzing our ways of waging war or keeping peace. Some of them are also the subject of this work.

The great change of modernity

Robert Nisbet sees as a consequence of the French Revolution the opportunity for the emergence of new types of property, more fluid. In the modern world to "have liquidity", i.e. to have "cash", liquid receivables, is generally a desirable thing. It wasn't always like that. The essence of feudalism was that the lords rewarded their faithful with properties (feuds), which included the inventory of goods and related settlements.
Modern man took note of the statement of Friedrich Nietzsche, who found that God is dead, killed by the desire to question him and question him according to rational logic. Without God, modern man was also left without a number of landmarks, which he replaced with material targets. He thus became vulnerable and weak in the face of the need to satisfy his immediate desires and fearful of tomorrow. He became easily manipulable and replaced his fear of an ineffable court with a morality that he constantly builds and adapts.
His desires, especially those dictated by erotic impulses of all kinds, are today what particularly characterizes the recent man, and not the heroism, chivalry or unshakable faith of another time. Of course, all these changes will be found and examined by future generations and by analyzing our ways of waging war or keeping peace. Some of them are also the subject of this work.

The great change of modernity

Robert Nisbet sees as a consequence of the French Revolution the opportunity for the emergence of new types of property, more fluid. In the modern world to "have liquidity", i.e. to have "cash", liquid receivables, is generally a desirable thing. It wasn't always like that. The essence of feudalism was that the lords rewarded their faithful with properties (feuds), which included the inventory of goods and related settlements.
Giordano Bruno went further. He considered that the intellect is of a fantastic nature, and the philosopher is the one who must be able to handle the phantasms and become "a great painter of the spirit". The paternity of the equation "eros=magic" still belongs to Marsilio Ficino. He shows for the first time the identity of substance of the two techniques of manipulation of phantasms, as well as of their operational procedures. Ficino also uses the term "net", to explain how the lover, like the magician, do the same thing: they cast their nets to attract what they want.
Giordano Bruno additionally proposes the terms "binding" (vincire) and "linkage" (vincula) to describe the same process. Bruno's magician (the manipulator, or the great manipulator) is the one who is aware that, in order to "attach" an individual (or a group of individuals), he must take into account the complexity of the expectations of the target subject(s). Thus, the more knowledge the manipulator has about those he has to "tie", the more his chance to succeed increases, because he will know how to choose the right means to create a bond.
Bruno's fundamental assumption is that there is a great tool of manipulation and this is eros in the most general sense of the term (what we love, from physical pleasure to unsuspected things, passing through wealth, power, etc.). The main entrance of all magical operations is fantasy, the only gateway to all internal effects and "link of links". The operator (magician) who wants to exercise control over others must first be himself sheltered from any control coming from others. Then, both the operator and his subjects must "believe" in the effectiveness of his actions. Faith is a prerequisite for magic. However, the operator is the only one who is aware of the magical mechanism.
Ioan Petru Culianu opines that the Magician (Bruno's great manipulator), the one capable of controlling and directing phantasms, did not disappear with modern man. Bruno's magician today deals with public relations, advertising, information, counter-information and disinformation, censorship, cryptography, etc., and the principles of the Bruno operator continue to be followed, even if in an impersonal and technical form. Of course, technology has not replaced magic on the ground that was its own, that of intersubjective relationships, to the extent that applied psychology and psychosociology are direct extensions of Renaissance magic.
Moreover, the function of the great manipulator was institutionalized, being taken over by the states. A state that wants to survive must be able to provide its citizens with an infallible education and, as far as possible, be able to satisfy their wishes. If it fails, the state must take care to produce its own counter-culture, whose ideological components must be organized in order to avoid the cohesion of the marginals and the increase of their power.
This last observation contained in Culianu's works is particularly important, as will be seen below. If manipulation is taken for granted as an effective weapon used in a conflict to confuse your opponent, in the world of modern man, peace is written with manipulation operations.Forms of peace, forms of war in the world of modern man
In the early 1990s, Alvin and Heidi Toffler expanded their social theory of the "wave" development of human society, publishing "War and Anti-War." Consistent with the idea of "power in motion", the Tofflers explain their vision in the preface: "The thesis of this book is clear but, nevertheless, little understood: the way we fight reflects the way we make wealth and the way we anti- we war must reflect the way we war. (...) War and anti-war, however, are not antagonistic, in the sometimes system. (…) In a complex world, there are times when war itself becomes a necessary tool to prevent a bigger and more terrible war. War is anti-war.”
The Tofflers explain society throughout history with the help of a scheme that made them famous, by theorizing the waves of development: the first wave, of pre-industrial society, the second wave, of industrial society and the third wave, which humanity entered in the third millennium AD, the wave of post-industrialism. The merit of this simplification is that it helps a lot to outline common forms of peace and war throughout history and allows understanding of future forms of belligerence and, obviously, peace.
The first forms of warfare, of wild hunters and gatherers fighting for the natural resources of a given territory, were obviously cruel. Once nature began to be mastered and agriculture made it possible to create food surpluses, it became more profitable to enslave opponents than to decimate them. Slavery represented one of the many innovations of the First Wave of social development, which had the effect of reducing the inventory of corpses on the battlefield. Slavery is one of the forms of peace of the First Wave civilization.
Industrialism, when it appeared for the first time in Europe, offered as a social innovation relations established on the basis of contractual agreements. Contracts have become an integrated part of everyday business. Political systems were justified in terms of a "social contract" between rulers and the ruled. Treaties and agreements became key elements in the forms of war and peace of the Second Wave.
Second Wave warfare has evolved into organized violence between nations, fully committed and led by governments at the helm of integrated economies. In order to maintain peace, institutions were created: the League of Nations after the First World War, respectively the United Nations Organization, after the Second World War, which were established around the nations. The treaties recognized national sovereignty, the inviolability of each national border and the full right of independent nations to be represented under equal conditions in international cooperation and regulatory organizations.
The Cold War marked the last great confrontation of industrial society. Its end was not the result of a violent confrontation, commensurate with the forces that could have been employed, but of the acceptance of the idea of the superiority of the opponent, at the same time and the evidence that a mass conflict, on a planetary scale, could mean the end of humanity, the end of history .
Another end of history was later theorized by one of the ideologues of American neo-liberalism, Francis Fukuyama, in "The End of History and the Last Man", by proclaiming the need for all nations to move towards democracy and the free market as a goal of the postmodern society without conflicts. Toffler does not believe in the end of conflicts and takes the analysis further, noting: "...the Second Wave type idea according to which national governments are the only ones that can have military force is today outdated". And if the nations have already lost the monopoly of violence, why "...would we not consider the creation of voluntary forces (...) organized by private corporations to fight wars on the basis of salary contracts, for the United Nations...". Maintaining the idea of contract and free initiative, which he transfers to the sphere of the organization of armed conflicts, Toffler complements Fukuyama.
Jeremy Scahill, describing the beginnings of Blackwater, one of the most visible private full-service war companies heavily engaged in the war effort in the Iraqi theaters of operations, noted: "Blackwater was born just as the (U.S.) military , n.n.) was in the midst of a massive, unprecedented privatization campaign that had begun in force during Dick Cheney's tenure as Secretary of Defense, between 1989 and 1993, under the presidency of George H. W. Bush. (…) The idea was to let the troops fight, while the private soldiers took care of the logistics." Scahill's analysis proves that not only the theory of war has changed.Toffler then notes that in the society of nations of the Second Wave, the global system was characterized by balance ("balance of power"). Therefore, if one nation tended to become too powerful, then the others would coalesce against it. Or this conception can no longer be valid after the collapse of one of the two great powers that waged the Cold War. On the contrary, the current global system is "far from equilibrium" (Toffler is inspired here by the theories of the physicist Ilya Prigogine), because there are political leaders who are not averse to risk, on the contrary, they prosper politically by causing crises.
To prevent wars in such a global society, the solution is rather a surgical one. Because "systems far from equilibrium" behave "non-linearly", small causes can be at the origin of huge effects. Punctual armed interventions are therefore advisable to prevent conflicts from escalating to an uncontrollable level. Surgical interventions (anti-war) can very well be done by "specialists" provided by private security agencies as well and not necessarily by the regular armed forces. The state's security agencies can thus become employers for the purpose of administering the peace options that the political factor takes into account. Technological, knowledge, but also social and ideological developments make this form of peace, which we can call the Third Wave, perfectly possible.
The administration of peace through anti-war means, however, involves advanced forms of "intelligence", in a weight far beyond what was considered tactically useful in the wars of the Second Wave. The confrontation thus moves massively in the plan of information or misinformation and technological advance, becoming much more important to correctly and judiciously plan the forms of knowledge and analysis of informational resources, than a battle in its form of violent confrontation.