The Changing Character of War
Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers
Abstract
Over the last decade (and indeed ever since the Cold War), the rise of insurgents and non-state actors in war, and their readiness to use terror and other irregular methods of fighting, have led commentators to speak of ‘new wars’. They have assumed that the ‘old wars’ were waged solely between states, and were accordingly fought between comparable and ‘symmetrical’ armed forces. Much of this commentary has lacked context or sophistication. It has been bounded by norms and theories more than the messiness of reality. Fed by the impact of the 9/11 attacks, it has privileged some wars and certai ... More
Over the last decade (and indeed ever since the Cold War), the rise of insurgents and non-state actors in war, and their readiness to use terror and other irregular methods of fighting, have led commentators to speak of ‘new wars’. They have assumed that the ‘old wars’ were waged solely between states, and were accordingly fought between comparable and ‘symmetrical’ armed forces. Much of this commentary has lacked context or sophistication. It has been bounded by norms and theories more than the messiness of reality. Fed by the impact of the 9/11 attacks, it has privileged some wars and certain trends over others. Most obviously it has been historically unaware. But it has also failed to consider many of the other dimensions which help us to define what war is — legal, ethical, religious, and social. This book draws together all these themes in order to distinguish between what is really changing about war and what only seems to be changing. Self-evidently, as the product of its own times, the character of each war is always changing. But if war’s character is in flux, its underlying nature contains its own internal consistency. Each war is an adversarial business, capable of generating its own dynamic, and therefore of spiralling in directions that are never totally predictable. War is both utilitarian, the tool of policy, and dysfunctional.
Keywords:
Cold War,
non-state actors,
new wars,
armed forces,
9/11,
policy,
old wars
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199596737 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199596737.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Hew Strachan, editor
Chichele Professor of the History of War and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; Director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War
Sibylle Scheipers, editor
Lecturer in International Relations, University of St Andrews and Senior Research Associate, Changing Character of War Programme, Oxford University
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