Hey fellow bloggers,

In today’s blog I want to talk about Butler’s chapter “Survivability, Vulnerability and Affect”. More than just being about war, Butler talks about the cause of main issues of the world throughout history. Before reading Butler, I separated the history of international or to be more accurate intersocietal conflicts in to 3. The first era consisting of conflicts between relatively small scale societies in the ancient world. The second era following the popularization of religion, conflicts are mostly based on religious identity and between larger societies. Finally, the era following the French Revolution brought up conflicts due to nationalism.

After reading Butler, I realized what changed throughout human history in terms of causes of conflicts were forms of identity but the idea of identity stayed the same. Whether this was while defending your village against a group of nomad attackers, or joining a crusade in the name of capturing holy sites for your religion or travelling half of the world just to fight a world war your proud nation is in, it was all because people wanted to serve the identity they belonged to. The problem with humans is that we are not able to see both sides of the conflict, being restricted to our identity. Butler indicates that the need for empathy is critical when thinking of conflict with the quote “the death of ungrievable lives will surely cause enormous outrage on the part of those who understand that their lives are not considered to be lives in any full and meaningful sense”. She further explains “Those we kill are not quite human, and not quite alive, which means that we do not feel the same horror and outrage over the loss of their lives as we do over the loss of those lives that bear national or religious similarity to our own.” Reading these from Butler, pushed me to redefine identity and it’s historical significance as well as how empathy can solve problems caused by identity conflicts.