This is an excerpt from The Praeter-Colonial Mind: An Intellectual Journey Through the Back Alleys of Empire by Francisco Lobo. Download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

I looked the enemy in the eye, and he looked right back at me. I was ready to strike. I didn’t know his name and he didn’t know mine; but we hated each other’s guts. My palms were sweaty, and a chill ran down my spine. My brothers were watching. I could not fail them. His brothers were watching too; he was resolved not to let them down. Only one of us would leave the field victorious that day. It was a matter of seconds now. I finally took the shot: I kicked the ball as hard as I could, but the goalkeeper stopped it. That was it: I blew the last penalty kick and that cost us the match. Because of me, we lost the soccer game. But what it really felt like was that, because of me, we lost the war.

I was nine years old. I was a member of a boy scouts group in Chile, ‘Manqueman’, which means ‘Great Condor’ in Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche tribe. I joined one of the two wolf cubs (‘Lobatos’) groups or ‘packs’. My pack was called ‘Gran Rey’ (Spanish for ‘Great King’). Our motto was: ‘Cumplimos la ley. Manada Gran Rey’ (‘We obey the law. We are the Great King Pack’). The other pack was called ‘Gurumanque’ (Mapudungun for ‘Fox-Condor’). Their motto: ‘En la selva gritaré. Manada Gurumanque’ (‘In the jungle I shall cry. We are the Gurumanque Pack’). At Gran Rey we saw ourselves as the team of lawful good, rule-following, compassionate and honorable. In contrast, we saw Gurumanque as a rowdy band of rebels who didn’t play by the rules, where brute force and deception were worth more than justice and honor. I have no idea how they saw themselves or what they actually thought of us; we never really talked to the other side. We knew enough already, and that was that we hated each other and that’s the way it was supposed to be.

Of course, the scouts’ philosophy is completely at odds with such an outlook. Boys and girls do not join the scouts to learn how to hate other kids. The scouts movement is all about getting in touch with nature, with your local community, and sometimes with a superior being in the religious varieties (Manqueman was a Catholic scout group at the time, today secularized). Our elders never encouraged any kind of vitriol or animosity towards the other pack. The hatred was something you would just come to learn as a member of the group, a bonding mechanism as well as a tool for collective identity building.

Without even knowing what was going on we were effectively tribalized, remaining at a state of perpetual war with the other pack. We may have prided ourselves in voluntarily following the law for the right reasons, but this was one law that we could not escape: the law of the jungle.

‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’. I will draw on these powerful words from UNESCO’s constitution two more times in this study. I already used them in the previous chapter to underscore the importance of the mental gymnastics the praeter-colonial mind must pull off as it negotiates the cognitive dissonance resulting from colonialism and its discontents – to try and make sense of the lingering effects of colonialism in a supposedly post- colonial present. Before finally moving on to the ‘defences of peace’, namely the rules-based international order (Chapter Seven), in this chapter I will address the very threat those defenses are built to fend off: war. Since political violence, in particular war, is a quintessential instrument of colonialism, the praeter-colonial mind would be remiss not to inquire into its nature and changing character, including the ways it has impacted and continues to shape our supposedly post-colonial present.

Sugar Wars

In a book published in recent years titled The Weaponisation of Everything, Mark Galeotti points out that ‘Today, culture is a growing arena for contestation’ (Galeotti 2023, 171). He is referring to the so-called ‘culture wars’, an expression originally coined in Bismarck’s Germany as Kulturkampft, namely a struggle between German authorities and Catholic institutions (Carroll 2002, 486), and then rehashed in the US in the 1990s as the opposition of irreconcilable worldviews about the kind of society we want, with conservatives or orthodox views on one side, and ‘woke’ or progressive views on the other (Duffy and Hewlett 2021).

It is not just about party politics or one particular vote in the legislative agenda; the culture wars are about profound disagreement or contestation about the very essence of a society, of what it means to be American, British, or Chilean. Indeed, although not framed as such, the culture wars have already reached the faraway shores of Chile. A few years ago, in 2019, the country experienced a deep political and social crisis, resulting in the drafting of a new constitution to try and replace the one bequeathed to us by Pinochet’s dictatorship. It didn’t work.

Surprisingly resilient, Pinochet’s constitution managed to stay in force as most Chilean voters did not like the new text the constitutional assembly came up with. Although there are many nuances and theories as to the reasons why (García Pino 2022), it all boils down to the fact that most Chileans thought the text went too far, that it was too broad in its protection of rights, that it was too politically correct and out of touch with the problems of common citizens. In a word, it was too ‘woke’, and Chileans – the same people who took to the streets en masse only a few years before to ask for meaningful reforms and nominated representatives to draft a new proposal – did not see themselves reflected in it.

But the cultural battle did not take place just at the end of the line, once the draft was ready to be voted on. During the months leading to the final text, political factions argued bitterly over the most important constitutional issues........

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