The Relativity of Warfare: When Other People’s Wars Become Background Noise

Saturday 22 August 2026 War is absolute for the person underneath the artillery shell. It is curiously relative for everyone else. A Russian missile descending upon an apartment building in Ukraine is not experienced by its victims as an episode in geopolitics. Nor is a Sudanese family fleeing militia violence engaged in an academic exercise concerning post-colonial state formation. To those…