There was a roughly twenty year gap between world wars 1 and 2. Looking at that record, it is pretty remarkable to consider we have gone nearly 70 years since the dropping of the first atom bomb without seeing a world war 3. There are many claimed explanations for this, ranging from views of heightened social standards and human rights to questioning of the profitability of war in general (Joshua Goldstein & Steven Pinker, 2011). However absent traditional war may be in this day and age, violence is still very prevalent all around the world. In an interview with BookForum, Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic memoir Persepolis that tells of a young girl growing up during the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, discusses violence and its role in the world today. “Violence today has become something so normal, so banal–that is to say everybody thinks it’s normal,” (Hajdu 2004, 35).

A way to look at this is violence as an evolved form of war. In a blog post discussing violence in the 21st century, Robert Hariman, professor at Northwestern University, shows us–mostly through images–how war and violence are still prevalent in the 21st century, specifically in developing nations, citing one-on-one cases of commonplace brute force.  He cites author Barbara Ehrenreich in contemplating, “To look at war [or in our case violence], carefully and long enough, is to see the face of the predator over which we thought we had triumphed long ago.” (Ehrenreich, 1997). Through this predator metaphor, Ehrenreich is essentially saying that by examining the evolution of “war” throughout history, we will find it to be pessimistically ongoing. As much as we may think that we have come to a time free of armed warfare, we have unconsciously entered a time of normalized violence, characterized by commonplace brutality masked by the absence of prototypical war.

Sources:

Goldstein, Joshua S., and Steven Pinker. “War Really Is Going Out of Style.”New York Times 17 Dec. 2011: n. pag. Print.

Hajdu, David. 2004. Persian Miniatures.” BookForum, October/November, 32-35

Hariman, Robert. “The Evolution of Violence in the 21st Century.” Web log post. No Caption Needed. WordPress, 4 Feb. 2008. Web. 9. Oct. 2014

Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. New York: Metropolitan, 1997. Print.