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Mar 28, 2024 · Although war encompasses various dimensions – social, political, cultural, historical, anthropological and ecological – with significant economic implications, recent studies increasingly emphasize the importance of sociological perspectives in unravelling its complexities.
- Devin Foley
- “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”
- “There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.”
- “It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy’s one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide our army into two.
- “In war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.”
The sociology of war is a subfield of sociology that focuses on the macro-level patterns of war making, how societies engage in warfare, the meaning that war has in society, and the relationship between state structure and war making.
The war of all against all is an empirical impossibility: as any successful violent action entails organisation and as organised action requires collective coord-ination, hierarchy and the delegation of tasks, all warfare is inevitably a social event.
Given what we learn from the factual description of war and its interpretation in the social sciences, and given what their epistemic premises are, both models - and more particularly the second one – fail to address important normative issues that arise in the course of warfare.
Meyer Kestnbaum. Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742; email: mkestn@umd.edu. Key Words. mobilization, enemy, signification, state, self-armed, civilian. Abstract. Recent work on war and the military has addressed two broad questions: Why do states and societies wage war as they do? And what difference.
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Overview: War is a large scale social endeavor, often the most sophisticated coordination carried out by a polity. Here we investigate the nature of war, the sociological characteristics of the organizations developed for its pursuit, and its connection with different political forms.
