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- Reflecting changes in the international system, theories of war have passed through several phases in the course of the past three centuries. After the ending of the wars of religion, about the middle of the 17th century, wars were fought for the interests of individual sovereigns and were limited both in their objectives and in their scope.
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Was War a thing of the past?
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Oct 23, 2024 · War, in the popular sense, a conflict between political groups involving hostilities of considerable duration and magnitude. Sociologists usually apply the term to such conflicts only if they are initiated and conducted in accordance with socially recognized forms.
- Joseph Frankel
- What is War? The first issue to be considered is what is war and what is its definition. The student of war needs to be careful in examining definitions of war, for like any social phenomena, definitions are varied, and often the proposed definition masks a particular political or philosophical stance paraded by the author.
- What causes war? Various sub-disciplines have grappled with war’s etiology, but each in turn, as with definitions of war, often reflects a tacit or explicit acceptance of broader philosophical issues on the nature of determinism and freedom.
- Human Nature and War. A setting to explore the relationship between human nature and war is provided by Thomas Hobbes, who presents a state of nature in which the ‘true’ or ‘underlying’ nature of man is likely to come to the fore of our attention.
- War and Political and Moral Philosophy. The first port of call for investigating war’s morality is the just war theory, which is well discussed and explained in many text books and dictionaries and can also be viewed on the IEP.
The work is based on rigorous analysis of the wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, all being wars between nation-states. With the rise of intrastate conflicts, civil wars and, in particular, terrorism in the last two decades, some thinkers consider On War as a relic from the past.
Warfare in the deep past was pervasive and deadly. To understand the past, warfare must be considered as deadly conflict between independent polities and not the type of weapons and sizes of fighting forces.
The history of war is currently a major field of research. The narrow approaches of more traditionally defined military history have been replaced by a broader agenda which seeks to understand conflict as part of the wider human past.
From its inception in 2003, the Changing Character of War research team challenged the claims that war was a thing of the past, which was then the prevailing orthodoxy, in rigorous detail. The Cenbtre analysed the drivers of change and the extent to which the nature of war could alter, if at all.
investigate how the concept of war has been used by different authors in different historical contexts and for what kinds of ideo- logical and political purposes.
