Book excerpt: Plots of War: Modern Narratives of Conflict discusses the dynamics of change and transformation that underlie the troubled project of modernity and shows how deeply it has been shaped by war and violence. The narrative of war, the emplotment of violence in historic and mainly in symbolic terms, is deeply embedded in the construction of individual and collective memories, but it also helps to shape the mediation of future conflicts.What is ultimately at stake here is the complex figuration and mediation of the violence of war in ever more hyper-mediated ways with direct consequences to the production of identities and processes of cultural memory.