Indeed, the concept of wartime itself suggests a processual and extendable temporality, rather than a straightforward binary. This is the case since the division between wartime and peacetime is never as clear cut as any formal cessation of hostilities or signing of a treaty would suggest.
World War I clearly did not end with the Armistice, and neither did it cease with the signing of the Versailles Treaty. For some, the World War has never really ended at all given that its promises of meaningful forms of (particularly racial and gender) equality as recompense for serving one’s country have still failed to materialize. The war had an enormous impact both upon the fabric of the earth and natural resources, while its legacy for the ways such categories as state, democracy, representation and capitalism, have become fixed parts of Euro-American political thinking, has been equally profound.
It might therefore be productive to think about the Anthropocene as a form of ‘deep-war time’, both practically and intellectually. This means considering the Anthropocene as an ongoing battle over what it means to think across both planetary and global perspectives, and across the arc spanning World War I and into the present.
D. Kelly (2022). Wartime for the Planet? Journal of Modern European History (DOI: 10.1177/16118944221113281; excerpted above without embedded footnotes)
Emergencies are one thing, like that for the climate. But not all emergencies are wars.
If the Anthropocene is recast as its own wartime, then how is this war different from all the other wars, namely, as massive engines of unpredictable, unimaginable and ungovernable contingencies?
Why ever would we say “wartime” better captures there being no real boundary between war and peace, when the Anthropocene is also about neither human war nor human peace only?
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 