War as an Escape from Peace: A Structural Theory of Violence and Controlled Dissolution

This essay develops a structural theory of modern violence that reconceives war as an endogenous phenomenon of differentiated social orders. It argues that every order generates internal tensions and depends on culturally framed mechanisms of reversible dissolution. Where such mechanisms are delegitimized, tensions accumulate and reappear in the irreversible form of war. Drawing on historical examples, the essay distinguishes between regenerative and destructive modes of de-differentiation and examines the loss of masculinity’s former role in organizing risk, transition, and affective surplus. In the absence of viable substitutes, war functions as a substitute institution that weaponizes unbound intensity. Peace, therefore, is not a stable end state, but a cultural technique of controlled dissolution.