Opinion Sur
The world is wounded by many conflicts that we cannot ignore. We must confront them and call a spade a spade, without fear, because behind misfortunes a better world often dawns.
From my childhood I remember a peculiar toy. It produced changing and multicolored scenes. All you had to do was look through the end of a cardboard tube and spin it with your fingers. The results of the manipulation were symmetrical, ephemeral, and of apparent precision. The fragments quickly arranged and rearranged. They associated wonder with science.
The name of the toy was also mysterious. Much later, I learned of its three Greek roots: the word “kálos” (καλώς), which means “beautiful”, the noun “eidos” (εἶδος), which can be translated as “image” or “species”, and the word “skopein” (σκοπεῖν) which is equivalent to “see”. It was a kaleidoscope. All very nice, but what if the fragments were ugly and their combinations horrible? We would be facing a different spectacle. Following the Greek etymology, kaleidoscope would be transformed into cacoscope – an observatory of the grotesque. It would be something like contemplating Goya’s well-known engraving (or ‘caprice’): “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” You must do it with your guts. Let’s enter this new year spinning the tube/observatory without knowing for sure if we have a kaleidoscope or a cacoscope in our hands.
My first point concerns the fragments. In today’s world, great binary conflicts have erupted into many particles. The bi-polar conflict of the Cold War is long over. It gave rise first to the unipolar illusion: a planet orchestrated by a single superpower and with a single economic and social system. E pluribus unum?[i] Forget that. The illusion was quickly overcome by a multipolar reality of rival powers with some circumstantial approaches to each other mixed with disparate discord. Within many countries, a binary polarization emerged which was also quickly replaced by a multiplicity of identities in amalgams and conflicts, also circumstantial. The fragments are multicolored, the combinations unstable. They are organized and disorganized very quickly without any superseding control. International regulatory systems are in crisis or paralyzed. As I have pointed out in other articles, anomie is rampant to the point that one is tempted to give it the title of filmmaker Werner Herzog’s recent memoir: Each for himself and God against all.
If I take the tube offered to me by a friend in whom I have full confidence and who today heads the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (OHCHR) and turn it around, I see the data of another high commissioner who deals with displaced persons and refugees: combinations of very sad and even horrible fragments – dead children, mutilated, emaciated by hunger, or playing as all children do, but in refugee camps where they will grow up in a limbo of months and years. They are the victims of a universal tragedy of displaced people who today number 110 million people (more than the entire population of Germany). In the tube of this cacoscope, next to the images of children who have been robbed of their childhood, I see these other facts:
110 MILLION forcibly displaced people in the world
In mid-2023, because of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, or events disturbing public order:
62.5 MILLION people internally displaced
36.4 MILLION refugees
6.1 MILLION asylum seekers
5.3 MILLION other people in need of international protection
52% originate from three countries
| Syrian Arab Republic | 6.5 million |
| Afghanistan | 6.1 million |
| Ukraine | 5.9 million |
3.4 million in Iran and Turkey
| Islamic Republic of Iran | 3.4 million |
| Turkey | 3.4 million |
| Germany | 2.5 million |
| Colombia | 2.5 million |
| Pakistan | 2.1 million |
At the end of 2022, of the 108.4 million people displaced, 43.3 million were children under the age of 18.
1.9 million children born as refugees.
Between 2018 and 2022, an average of 385,000 children per year were born as refugees.
463,500 refugees returned to their place of origin or settled elsewhere.
75% settled in low- and middle-income countries.
69% in neighboring countries of the countries that expelled them
Source: UNHCR’s Refugee Population Statistics Database
This is not an encouraging outlook and unfortunately it promises to get worse. For example, the entire Armenian population of Azerbaijan has been expelled in an ethnic cleansing operation that has not really outraged the world much. On a larger scale and in front of our very eyes, almost the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip (2.3 million people) has been displaced within the strip for now, and I would not be surprised if in the future they are expelled to other countries in the largest ethnic cleansing operation of the century by the state of Israel.[1]
If by chance another acquaintance – a retired military strategist – provides me with a tube that is also global, but this time geopolitical, when I turn it, I see a panorama that is no less bleak. It is a cacoscope again. I see in it a multiplicity of wars in progress or in the making. They are something like simultaneous and sometimes overlapping volcanic eruptions, in the face of which humanity is powerless. There is no containment mechanism to prevent them from leading to a universal and possibly terminal catastrophe, and yet they turn on and off without a final conflagration.
The great wars of the last century began with a single outbreak that spread throughout the world. Today, there are many outbreaks on all continents that are not coordinated in a world war. It is the only consolation of the cacoscope – for the moment. They are localized and at the same time interconnected wars but without final convergence. The most recent one (Israel-Palestine) is very ferocious, but without several major players diving head-on. The war in Ukraine has become bogged down and is likely to be “frozen” without leading to a war between great powers.
If we call this situation “our” world war (it would be the Third), unlike the previous ones it seems to be chronic and plural – continuous and debilitating but without an outcome. In my opinion, the situation produces what I have called a strategic impasse[2] between intervening and not intervening on the part of large and medium-sized actors. By analogy, it would be something like if the powers that finally fought in a World War would have stopped in front of the abyss in a prolonged waiting period.[3] Meanwhile, the death toll and cost of “our” wars continue to rise. The strategic cacoscope gives us this picture of the hot conflicts that have succeeded the old cold war:
In short, it is neither a world war nor a cold war. It is a volatile, multiple, and widespread war. In the face of great planetary challenges, it is a miserable way of acting among humans, and yet we continue to move forward with innovations in various orders that portend a better world: in science, health, and education, among others, including a good use of artificial intelligence.
There are glimmers of hope in the situation, as the brilliant statistician Hans Rosling argued: things are going wrong and at the same time they are getting better[4]. To play with that good kaleidoscope, I suggest you read the annual letter for the end of the year written by Bill Gates.[5] I am committed to exploring some of the trends that will be seen most clearly in 2024, in the light of the day that will follow tonight, when the sleep of reason will cease to produce only monsters.
[1] See this unsettling article https://unherd.com/2023/12/the-truth-about-the-ethnic-cleansing-in-gaza/.
[2] https://www.theportobellobookshop.com/9781138212572
[3] See Isobel Finkel, “The World Risks a New Global War,” Bloomberg Newsletter, December 1, 2023.
[4] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9865514-does-saying-things-are-improving-imply-that-everything-is-fine
[5] https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Year-Ahead-2024#
[i] T.N.: Latin for “Out of many, one,” a traditional motto of the US, that appears on the Great Seal, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pluribus_unum
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