Introduction — The pixel and the bayonet: same screen, same level
On the same smartphone screen, Tyson biting an ear, the Strait of Hormuz, a Zara drop notification, and a war death toll scroll past as equal pixels. The same format, the same weight, the same swipe. This is not a technological accident. It is an architecture.
This article's thesis is simple and uncomfortable: global disorder is not a malfunction of the international system. It is one of its products — organized, tolerated, and in some respects demanded. Three interlocking gears sustain it: producing states that self-immunize from common law; leaders who export instability to protect domestic peace; and populations who validate the system through their silence — and through their appetite.
The question is not who is guilty. The question is how the machine works, and whether it has ever — even once in human history — been stopped.
Title I — Armaments: the world's most controlled market... on paper
I.1 — The formal apparatus
Arms are, on paper, among the most strictly regulated goods in international commerce. The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2013 and in force since 2014, establishes binding obligations on signatory states regarding the export, import, and transfer of conventional weapons. It requires risk assessment before any transfer, prohibits sales to embargoed states, and mandates record-keeping.
At the national level, each major producer — France, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, China — has its own export licensing system. In France, arms exports are subject to prior authorization by the Prime Minister, after an interministerial commission review (CIEEMG). The end-user certificate (EUC) formally commits the purchasing state to being the sole user and not re-transferring without prior consent.
The system, on its face, is rigorous. The gap between the formal architecture and observable reality is structural, not accidental.
I.2 — The structural flaw: control stops at the border
The end-user certificate is a declaration. Once arms are delivered, no mechanism compels the exporting state to verify compliance on the ground. There is no international inspection body with enforcement powers over arms transfers between states. The ATT's Implementation Support Unit monitors reporting — it does not audit warehouses.
This creates a mechanical consequence: the moment arms cross a border under legal cover, the formal chain of accountability breaks. What happens next — diversion, resale, battlefield capture, deliberate channeling to non-state actors — is documented extensively but prosecuted almost never.
I.3 — The four channels of diversion
First channel: internal corruption. In fragile states and conflict zones, underpaid officers sell directly from their own armories. The Iraqi army, equipped at massive cost by the United States, saw thousands of weapons — including M16 rifles, Humvees, and artillery — fall into the hands of the Islamic State in 2014 when units abandoned their positions. These were not stolen: they were left.
Second channel: indirect state deliveries. A state that cannot officially supply a non-state actor does so through an intermediary — an allied government, an intelligence service, a private military company. The CIA's Operation Cyclone (arming Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s), documented in declassified archives, is the canonical example. The practice has not ceased; the legal architecture around it has become more sophisticated.
Third channel: the black market. Small Arms Survey estimates that illicit trade represents 20 to 30% of the global small arms market. The collapse of the Libyan state after 2011 released enormous stockpiles — including weapons originally purchased legally by Gaddafi — into a regional circulation network that supplied conflicts from Mali to Syria. These arms did not appear from nowhere. They were manufactured, sold legally, and then released into uncontrolled circulation.
Fourth channel: historical proliferation. The AK-47 was produced in over 30 countries under Soviet license. An estimated 75 to 100 million units exist worldwide. At less than 300 euros on many black markets, it is the weapon of every conflict. Its ubiquity is not a failure of control — it is the long-term consequence of deliberate industrial scaling by states that knew exactly what they were doing.
I.4 — The producer liability principle applied to arms
If a FAMAS rifle is found in the hands of a terrorist group, the standard legal response is to trace the chain of transfer and hold the last confirmed state-to-state sale as the formal endpoint of responsibility. The French state, as producer, is immunized by the doctrine of raison d'État — national interest overrides common law liability.
This immunity is not a natural rule. It is a derogation from the common law principle of producer liability — the same principle that makes a car manufacturer liable for a defective brake system, regardless of how many intermediaries handled the vehicle between factory and accident. The arm manufacturer knows, statistically and structurally, that a percentage of its production will end in unintended hands. It produces anyway, and the state covers the liability gap.
Applying the producer liability framework to arms would not require proving intent. It would require proving foreseeable harm — a standard well established in consumer and tort law. The political will to apply it does not exist, because the five states that would be most exposed are precisely the five permanent members of the Security Council.
Title II — The conspiracy without a secret plot
II.1 — The dictionary definition revisited
The word conspiracy is conventionally dismissed with an appeal to secrecy: a conspiracy requires a hidden plan. But the Petit Robert is more precise: "projet concerté secrètement afin de nuire" — a project conceived secretly in order to harm (https://dictionnaire.lerobert.com/synonymes/complot). The act of concealment does not have to encompass the entire plan. It is sufficient that the purpose be concealed, even if the mechanism is openly visible.
The Conference of Berlin (1884-1885), which partitioned Africa among European powers, was entirely public. The maps were drawn in open sessions. The diplomatic correspondence is archived and available. What was concealed — or at minimum never stated — was the functional purpose: to engineer fragmentation that would guarantee permanent dependency, make unified resistance structurally impossible, and justify indefinite external presence as a stabilizing force.
II.2 — Berlin 1884, Sykes-Picot 1916: engineering of fragmentation
The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, dividing the Ottoman Middle East between France and Britain, was classified for years. When it was leaked by the Bolsheviks in 1917, the reaction in the Arab world was one of betrayal — because the agreement directly contradicted British promises of Arab independence made to Hussein bin Ali. The act was public enough to be signed; the purpose was concealed enough to be denied.
Both cases share the same structure: borders drawn to separate peoples who shared history, language, and kinship — and to combine peoples whose rivalries were centuries old. Pierre Clastres observed that the smallest human societies actively resist the emergence of hierarchical power. The colonial engineers knew the inverse: impose a hierarchy over rival groups in a confined space, and the groups will fight each other rather than the hierarchy.
II.3 — The material result suffices
In consumer law and in tort, the standard of liability does not always require proof of intent. Negligence, recklessness, and strict liability regimes exist precisely because some harms are structurally foreseeable regardless of subjective intent. The builder who constructs a wooden house with no water supply in a drought zone and distributes lighters to the residents is not exonerated because they did not specifically intend the fire.
The colonial powers did not write 'we intend to provoke future genocides' in any document. They did not need to. They drew borders that mixed populations with centuries of conflict, empowered minority administrations over majority populations, and then departed — leaving the structural conditions for exactly what followed. The material result is the proof. Demanding documented intent is the legal defense of those who structured the harm.
Title III — The Directorate of Five: domestic peace, exported war
III.1 — Five permanent members: judges, parties, and top exporters
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom — hold the unique institutional power to authorize or block any binding international response to armed conflict. They also collectively account for the large majority of global arms exports, year after year.
This is not a coincidence of history. It is a structural feature. The Security Council was designed by the victors of 1945, who ensured that their own strategic interests could never be overruled by the body they created to police others. They are simultaneously the legislators, the judges, the police, and the primary suppliers of the weapons used in the conflicts they are tasked with resolving.
III.2 — Proxy war as structural model
The Cold War established the template: the two superpowers never fought each other directly. The cost — nuclear annihilation — was prohibitive. Instead, they fought through proxies: Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Central America. Populations died; the principals did not. The logic was explicit and rational. It has never been abandoned.
After 1991, the United States, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom continued the model with updated cast lists: the Balkans, the Gulf, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Levant. China has been a quieter participant in the arms supply dimension while building economic dependency as its preferred instrument. The names change. The structure is invariant: keep the conflict away from home, use local populations as the medium of geopolitical competition, and maintain the capacity to disengage when the cost-benefit calculation shifts.
III.3 — The limits of the system: the specter returns
Ukraine broke the model's first assumption: that major European territory was permanently insulated from high-intensity conflict. The war that began in 2022 brought artillery, mass displacement, and economic disruption to a continent that had exported those conditions for seventy years. The supply chain for European security — stable borders, predictable energy, functional institutions — proved more fragile than the model assumed.
The conflict with Iran and the sustained war in Gaza have brought a further complication: the direct military presence of French and American assets in proximity to a regional nuclear-threshold power. The bayonet, previously deployed at comfortable distance, is now positioned where escalation is not controllable by the five-power model.
Prospective — The return trajectory: The pattern established in Afghanistan (1979-2001), Iraq (2003-present), and Libya (2011-present) makes the following projection not speculation but pattern recognition: sustained military involvement in Muslim-majority countries, combined with years of civilian casualties, displacement, and humiliation, historically generates a return wave of political violence directed at the intervening powers. The 2001 attacks, the 2004 Madrid bombing, the 2005 London attacks, the 2015-2016 Paris and Brussels attacks — each followed a period of intensified Western military engagement in the Middle East. The current period of engagement is more intense and more visible than 2001. The probability of a new wave of terrorism targeting France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies is not zero. It is, on historical evidence, close to certain. The only variable is timing.
III.4 — The predator and the food supply
The natural analogy is not metaphorical — it is functional. A predator that consumes its prey population beyond the rate of reproduction destroys the ecological base that sustains it. The system collapses not because anyone decided to collapse it, but because the extraction rate exceeded the regeneration rate.
The arms economy applied to conflict zones follows the same logic. The populations that serve as the medium of proxy warfare — destabilized, impoverished, fragmented — eventually cease to be productive clients for either the arms market or the resource extraction economy that the arms market serves. Libya is no longer an oil state with functional governance. Afghanistan generates no stable return. Iraq required trillions in US expenditure and delivered chaos. The predator's food supply is shrinking, and the predator's costs are rising.
III.5 — The withdrawal hypothesis
What would happen if the Five stopped — not gradually, not rhetorically, but actually — selling arms and ceased speculating on endemic conflicts?
The natural law answer, drawn from ecosystem dynamics, is: a period of violent readjustment followed by a return toward equilibrium. Conflicts sustained by external supply chains do not continue indefinitely without that supply. The 1994 Rwandan genocide — carried out primarily with machetes — demonstrates that internal violence does not require external arms. But the sustained wars of the Sahel, Yemen, and Syria are not primarily machete wars. They are wars of artillery, airstrikes, and precision munitions. Remove the supply chain and the character of the conflict changes. Remove the financial interest and the political will to sustain the supply chain erodes.
This is not utopia. It is a projection by analogy: rivers find new courses when dams are removed. The course is not smooth. It is not instant. But the tendency toward equilibrium is observable in every ecosystem that survives the removal of an artificial distortion.
III.6 — Has it ever been tried? The historical record
The question is essential : has any major arms-producing power ever actually tried — not proclaimed, not announced, but executed — the withdrawal from arms exports for ethical reasons?
The answer is no. Not once. Not by any major producer.
The closest case is Jimmy Carter's 1977 Conventional Arms Transfer Policy. Carter created a formal ceiling on US arms exports, announced that arms would no longer be used as a standard diplomatic tool, and committed to reducing the overall volume of US arms sales. Within two years, under pressure from the Pentagon, allied governments, and the State Department, the policy was being systematically circumvented. Reagan buried it formally in 1981. Carter did not complete his own term with his own policy intact.
Olof Palme of Sweden publicly condemned US intervention in Vietnam, compared it to Nazi crimes, and restricted certain Swedish arms exports. Sweden was not and is not a major arms producer. The gesture was real; the structural impact was marginal.
Costa Rica abolished its army in 1948. Iceland has no military. Panama dissolved its military after 1989. None of these countries produces arms. Abolishing an army you do not have costs nothing economically. The question for a state like France, the United States, or Russia — whose arms industries employ hundreds of thousands and whose geopolitical leverage depends on the supply relationship — has never been answered, because it has never been genuinely asked in practice.
The structural conclusion is not a prisoner's dilemma — a game between two rational actors who might theoretically cooperate. It is the Cain mechanism: in article 350 of Digital Synapse Exchange (De l'écrit naît la parole, de la parole s'éteint la pensée), the first mover acts — kills, writes, captures the space — before any negotiation is possible. The arms economy is already written, already normalized, already crystallized as international law, contract, and industrial infrastructure. The actor who would exit does not face a symmetrical choice between cooperation and defection. He faces a world where Cain has already written the title deed. The bayonet guards the exit. The writing makes it eternal.
Title IV — The people as engine, not victim: the demand for spectacle as the system's fuel
IV.1 — Rome and the gladiators: a market, not an imposition
The standard narrative of the Roman games presents them as a tool of social control — bread and circuses imposed by emperors to pacify a restless population. The historical record is more nuanced and more damning: the demand preceded the supply. Roman crowds actively pressured magistrates and emperors for more elaborate, more violent, more expensive spectacles. Editors who failed to deliver faced public contempt and political consequences. The Colosseum did not create the Roman public's appetite for blood — it answered it, at industrial scale.
This reversal of causality — from 'the powerful impose spectacle' to 'the crowd demands it and the powerful supply it' — is the key analytical move of this section. It does not exonerate the suppliers. It complicates the victimhood of the consumers.
IV.2 — Boxing, MMA, illegal fight clubs: the appetite precedes the product
Mixed martial arts emerged as a legal, regulated product in the early 1990s. But illegal street fighting, underground fight clubs, and bare-knuckle circuits existed in every major city long before the UFC was founded. The market did not create the appetite. It discovered it, packaged it, and monetized it. The legal product is the sanitized version of something that was already happening in basements and parking lots.
Boxing's trajectory is similar: the sport has existed in regulated form for over a century, but the moments of peak audience engagement are almost invariably those where the risk of genuine harm is most visible — the moments of knockdown, the brutal exchanges, the fighter who refuses to fall. The crowd does not come for the technical display. It comes for the edge.
IV.3 — Football: professionalization liberated pre-existing demand
Hooliganism in European football did not emerge from professionalization and gambling. It preceded them. The phenomenon was documented and socially embedded well before the Premier League's commercialization in 1992, before satellite television, before online betting markets. What professionalization did was not create violence around football — it liberated and amplified a demand that was already structurally present.
The entry of money raised the stakes. Higher stakes intensified identification. Intensified identification raised the emotional cost of loss. The violence that had been a fringe phenomenon became a visible feature. This is not the market corrupting a pure sport. This is the market responding efficiently to what the crowd actually wanted — which included, in non-trivial measure, the visceral intensity that proximity to violence provides.
IV.4 — The causal reversal: article 289 completed
Article 289 of Digital Synapse Exchange (Qui déclenche les guerres ?) established that wars are not started by peoples but by those who lead them — and that those who choose a mode of government must assume the wars it produces. What was not yet said there is the question of direction: does the people merely tolerate the system, or does the people actively push toward it?
The Roman precedent, the sports market, the entertainment industry, the arms economy — all suggest the same structural answer: the demand for organized violence, for competition with mortal stakes, for the spectacle of power asserted and bodies subdued, is not an elite imposition on a peaceful population. It is a feature of the population that elites have learned to supply because it keeps them in power.
The people does not merely accept the system. In significant measure, the people generates the conditions for it, rewards its suppliers, and punishes those who would dismantle it — because dismantling it would interrupt the supply of what the people has learned to want.
IV.5 — The virtuous people as statistical fiction: article 225
Article 225 of Digital Synapse Exchange (De l'exception à la norme) demonstrated, from official Ministry of Justice and INSEE data, that nearly one in two persons physically present in France over an 80-year generation will have been condemned at least once by a criminal court — before adding civil, commercial, and administrative condemnations, which push the estimate toward 80% of a generation.
This figure is not a condemnation of individuals. It is a structural observation: the 'virtuous people' capable of giving lessons to its leaders, capable of serving as the moral check on institutional misconduct, is a statistical abstraction. The actual population is one in which the legal boundary between 'law-abiding citizen' and 'person who has been condemned' is crossed, at some point in a lifetime, by approximately half the population. The moral authority of the population over its leadership is not zero — but it is substantially qualified by this reality.
IV.6 — Active delegation and institutional dispossession: article 370
Article 370 of Digital Synapse Exchange (Le politique et la politique) demonstrated that the capture of legislative power by political parties is not a coup — it is a process that the population sustains through active delegation and passive acquiescence. The population votes for party programs rather than legislative mandates, tolerates the discipline of parliamentary votes, and accepts the reduction of elected representatives to ratification machines.
The institutional dispossession is not imposed on an unwilling population. It is ratified, election after election, by a population that has been trained — through the writing of constitutions, the molding of speech by institutional discourse, and the conforming of thought by available language, as traced in article 350 — to mistake the form of sovereignty for its substance.
To Conclude — The Mort-Lockés: passive consent as the system's third pillar — An organized disorder with no single culprit —
The three gears
The system described in this article is not held together by a conspiracy in the classical sense — a small group of identifiable individuals meeting in a room to plan harm. It is held together by three interlocking gears, each of which has an independent interest in the system's continuity, and none of which can be identified as the sole source of the disorder.
The first gear: producing states that self-immunize. France, the United States, Russia, China, and the United Kingdom have structured international law around their own immunity. They write the rules. They enforce the rules. They violate the rules. They sanction those who violate the rules. The circle is closed. The consumer law principle of producer liability — applied without exception to every other industrial sector — has been carved out by the states whose weapons are most widely distributed in conflict zones.
The second gear: leaders who export instability. Domestic peace — the precondition for electoral survival in any regime — requires that the friction of resource competition, geopolitical rivalry, and ethnic tension be managed somewhere. The somewhere is always elsewhere. Ukraine broke this assumption. Iran is testing it. The return trajectory of Islamic terrorism will test it further. The model has limits. It has not yet reached them permanently.
The third gear: populations who validate through silence — and through demand. The Mort-Lockés are not merely passive. They are active consumers of the spectacle. They watch the fights, attend the matches, scroll past the war footage, and re-elect the governments that manage the system. They are not fully culpable — the writing was in place before they were born, the speech was already molded by the time they learned to talk, the thought conforms to the language available. But they are not fully innocent either.
The Mort-Lockés
The word is a construction. Mort — dead, in the sense of cognitive and moral abdication. Lockés — locked, enclosed in a world whose exits they do not see because they have been trained not to look for them. The reference is to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine: the Eloi who live in comfortable surface existence while the Morlocks maintain the machinery underground — and feed on the Eloi who do not resist because they do not understand the mechanism that surrounds them.
The contemporary version has a twist that Wells did not write: the Eloi asked for the cage. They built it gradually, through their demand for comfort at any price, their appetite for spectacle, their willingness to delegate sovereignty in exchange for the daily management of anxiety. The Morlocks supplied what was demanded. The cage is real. The lock is also real. But the key was handed over voluntarily, one election, one purchase, one scroll at a time.
Dark City: the price of lucidity
The film Dark City ends, in its most lucid reading, with two survivors on an artificial island surrounded by void. They have broken the mechanism. They have expelled the manipulators. They have taken control of the machine.
This is the price of full emancipation from the organized disorder: not the reformer's optimism of 'we can change this together,' but the clear-eyed recognition that the system is held together by the desires of its participants, and that the participant who sees the mechanism clearly finds himself outside a world in which everyone else is still inside. The freedom is real. The solitude is also real.
The final law
A civilization that produces its own appetite for disorder cannot be saved by changing its leaders. The leaders are a product of the demand, as much as the arms market is a product of the demand, as much as the spectacle is a product of the demand. Change the demand — change what the crowd consumes, rewards, and re-elects — and the supply will follow. This is not a call to action. It is a mechanical observation, the same observation one would make about any ecosystem in which the predator and the prey are parts of the same organism.
The organized disorder has no single culprit. It has a structure. And the structure holds because each part of it — producers, leaders, populations — finds, in the continuation of the structure, something it is not yet ready to give up.
This article does not prescribe. It observes. The prescription would be another text added to the edifice, another voice in the echo. What it has attempted is more modest: to name the mechanism clearly, so that at minimum, it cannot be said later that no one had seen it.
Miguel Vidal Bravo-Jandia
Engineer — Master II Law, UFR Montpellier I / Paris II Panthéon-Assas
References and Notes
Articles of the author — Digital Synapse Exchange
[1] Vidal Bravo-Jandia M., Qui déclenche les guerres ? Plaidoyer pour une responsabilité non assumée, J-Corporate, DSE, March 2026 — publicInternetArticle/289
[2] Vidal Bravo-Jandia M., De l'exception à la norme : la condamnation judiciaire en France sur 80 ans, J-Corporate, DSE, March 2026 — publicInternetArticle/225
[3] Vidal Brajo-Jandia M., Le politique et la politique — Quand les partis violent la Constitution, DSE Review, May 2026 — publicInternetArticle/370
[4] Vidal Brajo-Jandia M. (Lawrence Noor Hayat), De l'écrit naît la parole, de la parole s'éteint la pensée, DSE / Lawrence Noor Hayat, May 2026 — publicInternetArticle/350
[5] Vidal Brajo-Jandia M. (Lawrence Noor Hayat), Tempus amissum — Ce que l'humanité n'a jamais su qu'elle avait perdu, DSE Review, May 2026 — publicInternetArticle/373
External sources
[6] Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), UN General Assembly, adopted April 2, 2013, in force December 24, 2014 — un.org/disarmament/att
[7] Small Arms Survey, Global Firearms Holdings, 2018 — smallarmssurvey.org
[8] Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), University of Uppsala — 59 state conflicts in 2023, record since WWII — ucdp.uu.se
[9] Carter J., Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, Presidential Directive PD/NSC-13, May 13, 1977 — declassified, available: Jimmy Carter Presidential Library
[10] Lévi-Strauss C., Tristes Tropiques, Plon, 1955, ch. XVIII — 'La fonction primaire de la communication écrite est de favoriser l'asservissement.'
[11] Clastres P., La Société contre l'État, Éditions de Minuit, 1974.
[12] Chollet D. & Goldgeier J., America Between the Wars, PublicAffairs, 2008 — on the Carter arms transfer policy and its dismantlement.
[13] Reporters Without Borders, World Press Freedom Index 2026 — 52.2% of countries in 'difficult' or 'very serious' situation — rsf.org/ranking
[14] Baudrillard J., Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, 1994 (orig. 1981) — on the collapse of the real into its own image.
[15] Wells H.G., The Time Machine, Heinemann, 1895 — Eloi and Morlocks as model of stratified civilization.
© Miguel Vidal Bravo-Jandia — Digital Synapse Exchange — 2026
Want to publish your own articles?
Join the Digital Synapse Exchange community and share your research.