Speaking of the Devil. The Hidden Costs of War Metaphors in World Politics
We live surrounded by ‘wars’. Not just the brutal realities of Sudan, Ukraine, or Palestine, but the endless stream of battles politicians declare against problems closer to home: ‘wars on terror’, the ‘war on drugs’, the ‘war on migration’, or even the ‘war on woke.’ Geopolitical rivalries and international disputes become ‘hybrid wars’ or ‘grey-zone wars’, while political blocks wage ‘information wars’ for global ‘hearts and minds’.
As we become inured to the ‘war-ification’ (or even the militarization) of our politics, these metaphors come to seem casual, harmless, and ‘ordinary’. As a simple way to grab attention, underline urgency, or dramatize a problem. And who could oppose ‘fighting cancer’ or waging war on poverty? Yet the language we use matters more than we think. When we frame political or social challenges as wars, we invite ourselves and our leaders to respond with the logic of war. And that logic carries hidden costs. War language closes down debate. When an issue is cast as a war, it becomes an existential struggle. Doubt, compromise, or dissent are rebranded as weakness, even betrayal. Citizens are rallied not to deliberate, but to mobilize. Opponents are no longer political adversaries but enemies. A society that talks itself into war metaphors risks talking itself out of democracy.
In this way, war language paves the way for a radicalized politics. This is a politics which is prepared to countenance trade-offs in the inviolable value and human rights of others, to accept violence, and to reduce persons into ‘threats’. In real wars, extraordinary measures are justified: secrecy, coercion, emergency powers. When these tools are applied to complex social and geopolitical issues, they often cause more harm than good. We can see the erosion of fundamental human rights and democratic values which continue to attend the brutal ‘drug wars’ and post 9/11 ‘wars on terror’. Both of these discourses produced devastating cycles of domestic and international violence, normalised surveillance, torture, and the permanence of states of emergency, all without any real movement towards resolving the structural issues of world politics which generated the perceived crises they were allegedly intended to address. These are but some striking examples of how war metaphors helped make drastic policies appear not only possible but necessary. Finally, war language is contagious. Once an issue is militarised in public speech, it tends to spread across arenas and borders. Leaders invoke war to galvanise publics, journalists adopt it for headlines, and international actors amplify it in diplomacy. The metaphor gains weight, escalating disputes into zero-sum confrontations. We can see this dynamic in today’s great-power competition. The rhetoric of ‘a new Cold War’ with China or Russia risks hardening relations into the very conflict it describes.
None of this is a call to outlaw metaphors or to police speech. Political language is fundamentally metaphorical, and our current world historical condition ensures that war will loom large in our collective imagination. But we can be more attentive to what is at stake when we speak in this way. War talk is never neutral. It doesn’t simply describe reality, it creates it. By making conflict seem natural, inevitable, even necessary, it risks creating the very conditions it claims to prevent. And there are alternatives. Framing climate change as a ‘war’ may stir urgency, but it may also entrench adversarial politics where cooperation is needed most. What if, instead, we were to speak spoke of stewardship, renewal, or allyship? What if migration was not as a ‘battle for borders’, a threat to exclusive domains which need to be ‘secured’ and guarded, but an opportunity for solidarity and imagination.
Alternative framings which can open space for democratic, plural, and constructive politics and communal life are at hand. The powerful interests who profit from division, conflict, environmental degradation, and human misery will try to pull us towards certain futures and way from others. The metaphorical deployment of violent, conflictual language to talk about politics only strengthens these forces. If it structures how we think about world politics, it will also structure how we act.
