Abstract:

War is often taken as ‘natural’. From the Mahabharata to Hobbes to today’s media, wars are continually justified through the belief that they represent the natural order of things. This removes from sight vast vested interests that promote wars for profit. After the First World War, there was a move in the League of Nations to make the sale of arms for private profit illegal. This was defeated through lobbyists working for US arms companies. As the Times newspaper put this, it was realised that “War is not only terrible, but terribly profitable” for those making and selling the hardware.
The way that arms technology and trade have proliferated in the hundred years since the First World War has placed this industry at the heart of the world’s, and most nations’, economies, though economics students are not exactly encouraged to focus on understanding this. Shouldn’t economists be encouraged to work out how to transform the present system into a collective focus on raising everyone’s standard of living and sharing the earth’s resources fairly? Wouldn’t real development focus on the arts of peace, and making peace, instead of escalating conflict?
At present, in the name of “development”, thousands of people continue to be displaced from lifestyles based on long-term sustainability. Arms technology leads the way in technology as a whole. Mining in particular feeds the arms industry, since the most complex, highest priced alloys and uses of metals go into armaments, and every missile fired in Afghanistan or anywhere needs to be replaced, preferably with a new model. Though wars are usually dressed up as ideological, it is increasingly clear that behind the rhetoric, most wars are basically resource wars, especially as the resources that we depend on and are presently consuming so swiftly get scarcer and scarcer...

 

About the Speaker:

Felix Padel has dual trainings as an anthropologist/sociologist and as a musician. In the former, he did his main degrees in Classics (ancient Greek and Roman history, literature and philosophy) and social anthropology at Oxford University, his M. Phil in sociology, and doctoral guidance at the Delhi School of Economics, under J.P.S. Uberoi, Veena Das, Andre Beteille and A.M. Shah. 
He is the author of Sacrificing People: Invasions of a Tribal Landscape (Oxford University Press 1995, new edition Orient BlackSwan 2010); Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel (OBS 2010, with Samarendra Das); and Ecology, Economy: Quest for a Socially Informed Connection (2013 OBS with Ajay Dandekar and Jeemol Unni). He was Senior Visiting Fellow at IRMA, Gujarat in 2010-11; Professor of Rural Management, Indian Institute of Health Management Research, Jaipur, 2012-14; and is presently Consultant Adviser to the Gujarat Ecological Society, Baroda.
Perhaps of interest to scientists and science students is his link to Charles Darwin as his great-great grandson.