French perspectives on conflict

A special issue on conflict with a French focus and a timescale stretching from the nineteenthcentury to our contemporary moment poses a number of challenges for the editor writing the introduction. Conflict is an event and a metaphor; a perpetual presence and a historical fact which reverberates and resurfaces. Conflict can be necessary, may even be inescapable – and yet conflict is always regrettable. Conflict is tension, irritation, grievances and passive-aggressive power plays; it can be play, a safety valve for aggression in the boxing ring or friendly rivalry between colleagues which brings out the best in both. It is also destruction, unspeakable violence, and anguish physical, mental, emotional, suffusing every aspect of human life. Folded within this one capacious term, we can find the silent struggle of one isolated individual, and the mobilisation of millions. It defeats definition, because rather than being a theme or a topic, it is a phenomenon which can only be studied in the particular; a particular which can hint towards a universal but never quite coalesce into a unifying, homogenising whole. There is conflict at the heart of conflict. The last resource of the opening paragraph – the etymological word history – offers us a definition which is striking in its neutrality: con-fligere, to strike together. It is this striking together which this special issue seeks to achieve, and surpass. [Opening paragraph]