Abstract

We are witnessing a worldwide expansion of war and violence, which should be countered by a new containment, just as George Kennan emphasized as early as 1987: “And for these reasons we are going to have to develop a wider concept of what containment means (…) – a concept, in other words, more responsive to the problems of our own time – than the one I so light-heartedly brought to expression, hacking away at my typewriter there in the northwest corner of the War College building in December of 1946.” Sixty years have already passed, since George Kennan formulated his original vision of containment. Although his original concept would be altered, in application by various administrations of the US-Government, in practice it has been incorporated within the concept and politics of common security, which has been the essential complement to pure militarily containment. These ideas are still valid – and as Kennan himself pointed out, they are in more need of explication and implementation than ever. The idea behind this concept is very simple: if the “world” is “flat” and something like a global network, the task is to protect our connections in the net and to contain the spreading of war and violence through this network.

About the Author

Dr phil. habil. Andreas Herberg-Rothe is a permanent lecturer at the faculty of Social and Cultural Studies at the University of Applied Sciences, Fulda and was a private lecturer of Political Science at the Institute for Social Sciences, Humboldt-University Berlin (up to 2012). He was an associate of the Leverhulme Programme, “The Changing Character of War” (2004-2005) at the University of Oxford and convener (together with Hew Strachan) of the conference “Clausewitz in the 21^st Century” (Oxford 2005). He was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Centre for International Studies (2005-2006).

He is the author of “Clausewitz’s Puzzle: The Political Theory of War,” Oxford University Press, 2007 and edited together with Hew Strachan the anthology “Clausewitz in the 21^st Century,” Oxford University Press, 2007.” His articles include “New Containment Policy: Grand Strategy for the Twenty-first century?”RUSI-Journal, Whitehall, London Whitehall Vol. 153 No. 2, (April 2008), pp. 50-55; “The Re-Politicisation of War and Violent Conflict – The World Powers are Striking Back.”Ralph Rotte/Christoph Schwarz (Eds.), War and Strategy, New York (Nova Science), 2010. His last book about Clausewitz (together with Jan Willem Honig and Dan Moran) has just been published, Clausewitz: The State and War, Stuttgart, 2011. In 2010 and 2011 he held lectures at West Point Academy about Tolstoy and Clausewitz as well as in Washington about a new containment policy, the emergence of world order conflicts, Clausewitz and partisan warfare and in Oxford about the democratic warrior. Some of his political-philosophical articles are collected in his volume “Lyotard und Hegel: Dialektik von Philosophie und Politik.Wien,” 2005 (Lyotard and Hegel: The dialectics of the political and philosophy). He held his most recent lecture about the last topic at the 29^th international Hegel conference in Istanbul in October 2012.