This is the English translation of the original introduction to our book, Nella Terza guerra mondiale. Un lessico politico per le lotte del presente (DeriveApprodi, 2025). We are now publishing its English translation as a free ebook. Read online the 2026 Preface to the English edition, and download and share the book.
In the Third World War. A Political Lexicon for Today’s Struggles
This book emerges from three years of struggle against the war. Immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we—together with hundreds of activists from the Permanent Assembly Against the War, which was formed within the Transnational Social Strike Platform—worked to find ways to break the fronts that were rapidly solidifying. Activists from Russia and Ukraine began to speak with others from virtually every part of the world, and at times we managed to build forms of joint initiative. After 7 October 2023 and the invasion of Gaza, the assemblies grew to include Palestinians and Israelis as well. Again, we tried not to get sucked into the logic that builds existential enemies outside of any consideration of the social, sexual and historical relationships within which war conflicts mature. This political choice has never meant practising an easy equidistance; instead, it has required taking a clear stand against war and its world.
However, the experience of these many assemblies—and of the many agreements they produced—also revealed the limits of the discourses and initiatives. Divergent positions often led to paralysis and even aphasia, or to a conscious decision to bracket the war in order to find convergence on almost anything else. Without cataloguing everything we have seen and heard over these three years, we want at least to note this: without reflecting on how we speak about war, and how we try to read it alongside all the other conflicts in everyday life, we cannot come to terms with it.
This book was written as a response to this need. It does not claim to describe the current war in all its facets and internal dynamics, nor to situate it fully within the history of wars. Nor do we aim to retrace the myriad of ways in which peace and war have become tools of domestic political legitimisation since Donald Trump’s election. Instead, we argue that it is essential to recognise war as an urgency that cannot be ignored by anyone unwilling to accept the present order of things. For this reason, we discuss several key terms through which the discourse of war extends beyond the battlefield. These terms redefine large domains of political intervention—migration, climate conflicts, the state—as well as the concepts that legitimate war (militarism) and those that make its contestation so difficult (decoloniality and resistance). Our aim is to help build a lexicon for the struggles of the present: one that equips us with tools to oppose war and overcome the deadlocks that have hindered us in recent years. Faced with the omnipresence and apparent omnipotence of weapons, we have taken a step back and returned to the weak weapon of criticism, armed with the conviction that it can move us a few steps forward in our opposition to war.
Beyond rejecting the rule of weapons, we hold that a radical critique of war is necessary because war cannot serve as a model for class struggle. War claims to establish compact and homogenous fronts by simplifying and neutralising social relations, making it impossible to grasp or develop their complexity. Its logic is the ideological and material elimination of everything—and especially everyone—that exceeds the war fronts. It is the armed denial of the multiplicity of differences that make up contemporary living labour and gives no practical guidance on how these differences might be organised.
The political hypothesis underlying this work begins from this critique of war and the recognition that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the start of the Third World War. By this, we do not intend to conjure up the image of an unstoppable escalation and inevitable widening of the conflict. We are not interested here in pursuing the geopolitical dimension of the war or drawing up future scenarios of an international order. We are not interested in war as a system of order in which different regimes can be identified, each with its own capacities of governance. Instead, we approach war from the standpoint of living labour in all its heterogeneity, convinced that locating our own position within and across war’s fronts is the first step toward overturning its logic.
As in the first two world wars, the decisive issue in this Third World War is not the hegemony of one or several states, but the governance of the living labour in the world market. The Third World War hypothesis allows us to move beyond the particularities of individual conflicts—conflicts in which some wars are deemed paradigmatic and others secondary, some enemies the only true ones. Speaking of a Third World War creates a field of visibility in which a common logic can be recognised across acts of war, whether in Ukraine, Taiwan, Gaza or Rojava. Above all, it opens the possibility for different forms of anti-war struggle to communicate with one another. In this way, we aim to inscribe onto the map of geopolitics a different history: that of other conflicts and divisions.
This political hypothesis can be fully understood only within a transnational dimension—one that today marks the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of politically governing the world market and what has been called globalisation in recent decades. Within this transnational framework, the governance of living labour becomes increasingly complex, and war and militarism return as plausible instruments of command. The tensions in the Middle East (Iran, Israel, Turkey, Syria), as well as those in the United States and Russia, clearly reveal a shared attempt to respond to the fractures running through regimes of social governance across vast regions of the planet.
While it remains possible that war could assume a genuinely global dimension, our question is not how to prevent war from spreading, but how this war can end. We ask whether living labour, in all its multiplicity, can exert a political claim on the ending of war. Can the peace we seek be something other than a condition that must simply be endured? Because violence, devastation and massacres overwhelmingly fall upon the poor, women, migrants and wage-earners in every case, it is absolutely necessary to open space for action and reflection against war. What is at stake is the possibility of producing organisational processes commensurate with the transnational importance of living labour.
It would seem reasonable, at this point, to note that the hypothesis of an emerging Third World War is not contradicted by the fact that it is not fought with the same intensity everywhere—from Donald Trump’s actions to Vladimir Putin’s intentions to the European Union’s ‘rearmed peace’. Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu is allowed to ignore that the hour of peace has come, enabling Israel to continue slaughtering Palestinians with impunity. The Pax Trumpiana—for now more proclaimed than concretely achieved—likewise includes the bombing of Yemen and the continual threat toward Iran and its oppressive regime, from which many Iranians also seek liberation.
Many will insist that a bad peace is almost always preferable to any war. And it is undeniably true that those living under bombardment, facing hunger, cold and imminent death, welcome any peace or even a fragile truce. In the face of war, of any war, the first demand is always that the weapons fall silent.
Yet despite the peace plans and ceasefires that have been proposed, we still consider the Third World War hypothesis valid. The fragments of peace currently granted to us appear to be merely the continuation of war by other means. The Pax Trumpiana is justified as necessary for processes of capital valorisation—above all US accumulation—and is presented as a “Versailles of capital”: a series of peace agreements proposed, imposed or coerced in the name of the needs of US capitalism. After World War I, Lord Keynes argued that the Versailles peace contradicted economic reason and would therefore lead inevitably to another war. We, by contrast, argue that Pax Trumpiana’s attempt to crush the social and political conflicts proliferating worldwide prevents the causes of war from being eliminated.
Peace cannot consist in the territorial concessions that the Ukrainian government may be forced to accept in exchange for access to rare minerals. Peace cannot rest on the pacification of the Middle East through legitimising Israel’s war of extermination against the Palestinians. Peace cannot mean that economic supremacy is pursued through threatened or imposed trade tariffs. And peace cannot be built upon the persecution of migrants—by legal or illegal means—or upon the legal suppression of all forms of sexual freedom.
Trump’s supposed pacifism is not the opposite of Biden’s warmongering; it is its continuation. In both cases, war is severed from the social contradictions of the US and the world, and social relations are overwritten according to its logic. Their synthesis is easily visible in the European Commission’s policies: it first rearmed Ukraine and now resolutely aims to rearm the EU, fully aware that, in both cases, war erases any possibility for social reconstruction. Because the political and social roots of war are not being addressed, we do not believe that a genuine prospect of peace is emerging.
Commenting on Zelensky’s theatrical ouster from the White House, Viktor Orbán declared: Strong men make peace, while weak men make war. In this formulation, peace becomes the legitimating privilege of the “strong man,” the figure to be trusted—or rather, submitted to. It becomes the misogynistic and patriarchal fantasy of a man who imposes a hierarchy of interest through his superior will, a peace that coincides with subservience to power. This is the opposite of what we have understood in recent years as the transnational politics of peace.
This is not a pacifist book. Our concern is not to end the war by imagining peace treaties or proposing truces. Those who seek peace at any cost fail to see that in doing so, they simply reproduce the old conception of peace as the mere absence of war. They overlook the fact that peace is the continuation of war by other means, that it is a peace subservient to the despotic power of a capital in its political incarnations. For such perspectives, the absence of bombs is enough: social conflicts, tensions, and daily oppressions are assumed to resolve themselves. We disagree. While we welcome every truce and pause in wartime violence with relief and joy, in this book, we attempt to look at war not only through the lens of danger, death, and destruction—though these must be avoided at all costs—but also from the standpoint of the organisational processes we can create within and against war (TSS Platform 2023). Our problem is not simply to condemn war but to oppose its harsh reality with words and practices that escape its logic.