What Is War For? 9781529228403

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. War in the Contemporary World
2. War in Theory and Practice
3. The Changing Context and Character of War
4. The Problems of War
5. The Future of War
6. Conclusion
Notes
Further Reading
Index

Citation preview

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

JACK MCDONALD

“War is a human universal. It is also fractal – it is always the same and always different. And it is still very much alive, as McDonald explains in this compelling and thought-provoking book.” Christopher Coker, LSE IDEAS “McDonald’s frank analysis comes at a time when war is reshaping international relations, and so is more than a refresher course on war in all its different guises. What Is War For? primes its readers to think carefully about how war, and controlling war, will shape the future.” Daniel Brunstetter, University of California Irvine “Distinguishing between lasting characteristics and functions of war, and its present manifestations, this lucidly written book provides an excellent introduction to the topic, especially with its discussion of the law of armed conflict, so often neglected.” Beatrice Heuser, University of Glasgow “This is perfect as a short, sharp guide to the character of modern warfare – who fights, why and how they do so, and what if anything can be done to stop wars or at least mitigate their effects.” Lawrence Freedman, King’s College London

“For those who have never previously reflected on the significance of war as a driver for social and political change, this makes for an indispensable guide. For those with more in-depth knowledge, an excellent way to provoke engagement and shape discussion about this important field.” Matthew Ford, Swedish Defence University “A fascinating insight into the role of war in the contemporary world. Sweeping in scope and fresh in tone, this is the book that anyone interested in the international politics of war has been waiting for.” Cian O’Driscoll, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, ANU

The status quo is broken. Humanity today faces multiple interconnected challenges, some of which could prove existential. If we believe the world could be different, if we want it to be better, examining the purpose of what we do – and what is done in our name – is more pressing than ever. The What Is It For? series examines the purpose of the most important aspects of our contemporary world, from religion and free speech to animal rights and the Olympics. It illuminates what these things are by looking closely at what they do. The series offers fresh thinking on current debates that gets beyond the overheated polemics and easy polarizations. Across the series, leading experts explore new ways forward, enabling readers to engage with the possibility of real change. Series editor: George Miller Visit bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/whats-it-for to find out more about the series.

Available now WHAT IS CYBERSECURITY FOR? Tim Stevens WHAT IS PHILANTHROPY FOR? Rhodri Davies WHAT IS WAR FOR? Jack McDonald Forthcoming WHAT ARE ANIMAL RIGHTS FOR? Steve Cooke WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGY FOR? Kriti Kapila WHAT IS COUNTERTERRORISM FOR? Leonie Jackson WHAT IS FREE SPEECH FOR? Gavan Titley

WHAT IS HISTORY FOR? Robert Gildea WHAT IS THE MONARCHY FOR? Laura Clancy WHAT ARE MUSEUMS FOR? Jon Sleigh WHAT ARE NUCLEAR WEAPONS FOR? Patricia Shamai WHAT ARE PRISONS FOR? Hindpal Singh Bhui WHAT IS RELIGION FOR? Malise Ruthven WHAT ARE THE OLYMPICS FOR? Jules Boykoff WHAT IS VEGANISM FOR? Catherine Oliver WHAT ARE ZOOS FOR? Heather Browning and Walter Veit

JACK McDONALD is Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is the author of two previous books and has published on the relationship between war, technology, ethics and law, as well as the use of targeted killings in international politics.

WHAT IS WAR FOR? JACK McDONALD

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +44 (0)117 374 6645 e: [email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Jack McDonald 2023 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5292-2838-0 paperback ISBN 978-1-5292-2839-7 ePub ISBN 978-1-5292-2840-3 ePdf The right of Jack McDonald to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Tom Appshaw Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners. Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow

To Heather, Grayson and Lucian, with all my love

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements xii 1

War in the Contemporary World

1

2

War in Theory and Practice

7

3

The Changing Context and Character of War

46

4

The Problems of War

81

5

The Future of War

6

Conclusion 140

111

Notes 143 Further Reading

151

Index 153

xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A book like this is partly a product of its environment. What you read here is the result of research, reflections, discussions with colleagues, and over a decade of teaching students about war and armed conflict. Particular thanks, then, to my colleagues at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and to my students past and present who have kept me on my toes. A number of colleagues and friends read early drafts of this work and their comments helped to improve it greatly. Thanks, then, to Mark Condos, Anna Plunkett, Martin Melia and Matthew Ford. In addition, John R. Emery and Neil Renic kept me in good spirits while getting the book over the line. Thanks must also go to George Miller at Bristol University Press for setting this project in motion, as well as the most thorough editing, which has improved the manuscript immeasurably. Any errors or omissions in this work are, of course, entirely my own. I wouldn’t be able to write a book without the love and support of my partner, Heather Swain, who took wonderful care of our family while I was tapping away at a keyboard for nights on end. Grayson McDonald helped by making me smile every morning before I

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Acknowledgements

had to go back to the manuscript. Lucian McDonald arrived halfway through the writing of this book, which slowed down progress somewhat, but his arrival made a good life even better.

xiii

1 WAR IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

W

ars and warfare have caused death and destruction throughout human history. Wars have ranged from prehistoric settlement raiding to the industrialized slaughter of the Second World War and selective killing with precision-guided weapons in the present day. Wars destroy humans, property and the environment alike as it’s usually impossible to restrict the consequences of a war to its armed participants. This potential for death, destruction and escalation is why the prospect of war weighs heavily on the minds of political leaders and civilian populations alike. War serves a political purpose, as in some circumstances military force has political utility for the leaders of states or armed groups. The nineteenthcentury Prussian soldier and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz defined war as ‘an act of force to compel

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WHAT IS WAR FOR?

our adversary to do our will’.1 Wars in history have ranged from highly ritualized activities between similar political groups to no-holds-barred slaughter between groups seeking to eliminate each other.2 Clausewitz explains war as being akin to a duel, albeit on a large scale, which captures the fact that war is fundamentally adversarial: it involves an opponent who threatens physical harm. It’s also strategic, in the sense that governments cannot ultimately dictate or control their opponent’s actions. Given that wars often feature more than two warring parties, this book defines war as ‘the use of organized armed force between two or more sides for political purposes’, emphasizing the necessary criterion of organized violence by social groups. What characterizes war in the present day is a tension between uniformity and diversity. On one hand, contemporary wars take place in an international system that is more uniform than ever. That system consists of sovereign territorial states that recognize and legitimize one another as the primary political units in international politics and they also share a single common set of rules – international law – that provides a global standard for regulating war and warfare. On the other hand, there is more diversity in contemporary war than ever: states find themselves fighting transnational insurgent movements such as Islamic State (ISIS) that leverage the Internet to their advantage. Wars are waged with technology ranging from basic firearms to stealth jet fighters using satelliteguided missiles. Old ways of war such as murdering, terrorizing and starving civilians for strategic effect

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War in the contemporary world

Non-state armed groups ‘Non-state armed groups’ refers to the myriad social groups that pose military threats in international politics and which are not formally part of a state’s armed forces. They range in size from small militias up to organized armed forces able to conduct sophisticated military operations. The moniker ‘non-state armed group’ signifies that the group lacks formal legitimacy in the international system. Many of these groups are, however, either seeking to create a state (separatist movements) or capture a state (rebels and insurgents). Some non-state armed groups effectively govern the regions that they operate from, whereas others lack that authority and capacity. The importance of non-state armed groups is that, while they may lack formal recognition and legitimacy in the eyes of the state, they use organized physical violence and so must be taken seriously by their state opponents. Often nonstate armed groups are in conflict with one another, or form alliances with states that intervene in civil wars.

coexist with Western ways of war that utilize precision weapons to minimize civilian harm, and in many cases eliminate the possibility of harm to their own combatants by using remote-piloted drones. The political and strategic goals of warring parties don’t entirely explain the actual impact of wars. At minimum, we also need to consider what kinds of

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entities the parties are – be they states or non-state armed groups – as well as their social capability for violence, and the degree of restraint that political elites and military leaders are able to exert over their forces. It is for this last reason the relationship of opposing sides in war in part dictates the ferocity and limits of conflict. Civil wars, in which societies are split by two or more warring factions, are often especially brutal due to the way they tear communities apart along lines of ethnicity and religion, but also create conditions in which loosely organized armed groups prosper. Wars in the contemporary world vary hugely in terms of their scope and consequences. Consider that the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan resulted in the deaths of over five thousand service personnel.3 Compare that to the Tigray war (2020–present) in northern Ethiopia, which has already killed up to half a million people – mostly civilians – through a mix of fighting, starvation and lack of access to healthcare,4 or to the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war that as of this writing has created over 5.6 million Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced a further 7.1 million people.5 Contemporary wars also vary considerably in terms of who is fighting, and how. Long-running, low-intensity conflicts, such as the multiple ongoing conflicts in the Sahel region, exist alongside devastating civil wars like those in Syria, Libya or Myanmar. The sheer range of means and methods of warfare contributes to the diverse character of contemporary warfare. The Coalition war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria combined local ground

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forces and some of the world’s most advanced airpower to attack a transnational insurgency. Some conflicts involve states attacking one another directly; others involve indirect attack via proxies. How, then, to make sense of war in the world we share? This is a book about the role that war plays in the contemporary world. In particular, it’s about why war is still useful to many governments and non-state armed groups. Despite international legal constraints on war, the use of military force remains a latent possibility in international disputes and internal conflicts – and sometimes that latent possibility becomes a reality. Such are the destructive consequences of war that even the threat of it can be a useful bargaining tool. To rebels and insurgents seeking to control or create a state, military force may appear the only way to achieve their political goals. States often struggle to explain and legitimize the use of military force to their citizens and other states. The ways in which wars are waged often bear little relation to the popular image of war, which is shaped by the industrial wars of the twentieth century that killed tens of millions of people. Another reason they struggle, I argue, is that there is a gap between how wars are fought in practice and the way war is framed and regulated in international politics. That gap can be manipulated for strategic reasons to gain an advantage against a law-abiding opponent. Understanding how and why this divergence has come to exist, and what can be done about it, is key to understanding how war works and what it is used for today.

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WHAT IS WAR FOR?

What this book seeks to explain is how and why we arrived at a world in which global institutions regulate war, and why the differences between the practice and institution of war cause problems – in particular, how and why these divergences are manipulated for political or strategic gain. Understanding this explains why war retains its practical utility (what war is for), despite attempts to suppress it, the myriad problems this causes in international politics, and points to how we might avoid more wars in future, or at least reduce the harm that they cause.

6

2 WAR IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

T

he contemporary world contains a huge variety of wars, fought with the widest range of weapons in history. Occasional largescale inter-state wars co-exist with civil wars, messy clandestine conflicts and highly asymmetric uses of military force such as special forces raids, drone strikes and missile attacks. At the same time, contemporary warfare is also characterized by its uniformity. The states that constitute the international system differ in many ways, but are mostly homogenous in the sense that each is a sovereign territorial entity: a country with its own borders and government and laws. Moreover, states that have armed forces organize them in a relatively standard pattern – armies, navies, air forces – ostensibly adhering to a global set of rules in the form of international law. In contrast, non-state armed groups can differ considerably. Some are armed

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militias, others are part of wider political movements, answering to a civilian leadership group. This chapter explains how war works in theory and practice. How and why states and non-state armed groups use military force today is influenced by international law and sometimes conforms to it closely. Often, however, states and their opponents use military force in ways that diverge significantly from the purpose and standards of international law. This is because war is fundamentally a political and strategic phenomenon, which international institutions like international law can influence but ultimately cannot prevent. The concept of war Defining war is as much about what it excludes as what it includes. War is a form of violence, but there are many forms of violence not commonly classed as war. War is a specific form of violence defined first by its political nature. It can be an existential challenge for a political community, even if only a fraction of a society fights or directs the war effort. Its actual consequences may be minimal, but they are theoretically unlimited – wars can lead to state death (the loss or dissolution of a society’s political autonomy), though this is now rare.1 Second, wars require significant social coordination in terms of organization and planning, even if confusion and disorganization have been a hallmark of conflict throughout history. The ability to effectively recruit, train, equip and supply a military

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War in theory and practice

force is essential to avoiding catastrophic defeat. Third, war occurs when the threat or use of armed force against opponents is met by an armed response. Onesided violence and repression are important aspects of war, but conceptually war requires at least some armed resistance from an opponent. Fourth, war is accepted (at least by those who wage it) as a legitimate activity, even though much of what is done in war violates social norms in peacetime. Fifth, war is usually distinguished from everyday life – times of peace – though what differentiates the two has changed over history. Lastly, war is a socially sanctioned activity, even if what justifies the resort to war has changed over time. In some times and places, war has been a legitimate means for rulers to right perceived wrongs; today, at least in theory, it’s only acceptable in self-defence. Taken together, on a social level war is not just about fighting, but how this violence is understood by participants and their societies – and between opponents – as war. This matters because what counts as legitimate military activity in war has changed over time. The legitimacy of force also depends on the relationship between warring parties. After all, the course and experience of war can reshape how societies understand the limits of legitimate violence in war. One problem this raises is that there are forms of violence that have historically been included within the scope of war that are now excluded. What is now commonly understood as war is a public form of violence, directed and waged by political leaders who represent social groups or communities, ostensibly on

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their behalf and for their benefit. But in history, private wars, directed by individuals for personal gain and benefit, were common in Europe.2 We therefore face the problem of consistency over time – a definition of war that includes everything that has ever been considered as war doesn’t give us an accurate guide to how war is understood today. A second problem with such boundaries is that they are often used to exclude forms of violence that conceivably could or should be included in the concept of war. Consider genocide, the attempt by one group to eradicate another, usually through physical violence. Shouldn’t that count as war? After all, such campaigns are both intense and abnormal, meeting all the criteria for war except that of fighting. Given the existential nature of genocidal violence, be it perpetrated by machete or death march or gas chamber, it seems as though it should. In fact, if we look at the history of war, genocidal outcomes are relatively common. This was particularly the case in wars of imperial conquest, such as Russia’s war with Circassia in the North Caucasus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or the Herero and Nama war in the early twentieth century that led to genocide committed by the German Empire in what is present day Namibia. Attacks on civilian populations, regardless of whether they were considered legitimate or not, were commonplace, and remain so. A reason to be hesitant about considering all acts of genocide as war is that some were (and are) one-sided. This is not to say that one-sided violence is unknown in war. Far from it: military raids, sieges

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War in theory and practice

and slaughter of civilians occurred throughout history. But one-sided violence against a civilian population that has no means of mobilizing to defend itself differs in kind from a raid that might provoke a counterraid or a siege that might lead to a battle. For this reason, this book includes genocide to the extent that it is concurrent with war, a consequence of war or a political aim in war. War is a label that legitimizes violence, even if the types of violence that are considered legitimate have changed over time. However, there is a distinction between a state of war – open hostility between armed opponents – and the physical fighting or combat of some sort – warfare – that is central to the conduct of war. This is what the legal expert Yoram Dinstein explains as the difference between war in the technical sense and war in the material sense. Whereas war as a legal condition – as defined by international law – can exist without fighting, he points out that ‘[t]here is no war in the material sense without some acts of warfare’.3 Wherever in history we find organized violence that results in fighting and strategic uses of military force, we might objectively describe this as war, but this may not have been labelled or treated as such by those who fought them. European empires often distinguished between military campaigns of colonial repression (sometimes dismissively referred to as ‘small wars’) and military campaigns between states, though both resulted in fighting and killing. When in the present day we say that crimes against humanity or genocide ‘aren’t war’, it’s because states,

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WHAT IS WAR FOR?

via a range of treaties, have consciously distinguished between legitimate forms of violence (regulated killing in war) and illegitimate forms (genocide, crimes against humanity). Importantly, there are many wars that states wage, and have waged, which they do not, or did not, describe as war because they reserve the term for opponents they consider legitimate (usually other states). European states in the nineteenth century fought one another according to that era’s law of war, which limited the severity of their wars by providing for treatment of wounded or captured combatants. Such protections and limits were rarely given to their internal opponents or targets of imperial conquest. What is distinct about the present day is that such differences have been erased, at least in theory. A single body of law, international humanitarian law, is meant to regulate the conduct of any war, not just the ones that states choose to recognize as such. International law and international humanitarian law, however, have their own specific ways of defining and interpreting organized armed violence in the contemporary world. So if we want to understand how war works, we also need to understand this institutionalized idea of war in international politics. The institution of war War is a political phenomenon that reflects the values of the societies that engage in it. A key question, then, is whether the concept of war has an unchanging

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essence that transcends the social or cultural context of any given war. Carl von Clausewitz distinguished between the nature of war, which he thought did not change, and the character of war, which changes depending on context. This idea has been attacked repeatedly by those who think that the nature of war changes alongside the societies that wage it and the social systems that it exists within.4 Nonetheless, there are constant and recurring features of war such as the presence of armed fighting, and the others outlined in the definition earlier in this chapter. However, war is also a social institution. Institutions are the ‘relatively enduring collection[s] of rules and practices’5 that shape social and political interactions. War, in this sense, is not just a set of practices associated with organized violence, but practices tied to rules of behaviour. These range from war powers – the constitutional arrangements that define when, why and how political leaders can authorize the use of military force on behalf of the state – to the professional values and laws that shape the armed forces of a given country. The institution of war, then, is also a means by which individuals understand and interpret their actions.6 Socially, we can interpret a sequence of violent interactions as war because the phenomenon is institutionalized in society. What is important about war is that it is also an international institution anchored in the shared beliefs and practices that exist between states. This matters because international institutions shape how states and other entities in the international system interact. By

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increasing the predictability of the world, institutions enable cooperation in the international system, and thereby all kinds of complex phenomena, such as stable global trade networks. In the case of war, this often takes the form of shared customs or law that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable types of warfare. Where two societies share no such institution or understanding, wars between them are liable to descend into ever greater brutality. How, then, to connect social values and cultural concepts to the way a society wages war? The historian Wayne E. Lee argues that we need to understand the cultural values of a society, its capacity for generating military force and the political goals of those in charge.7 In essence, it’s necessary to look at both the practical dimensions of war as well as the way the idea of war is defined and embedded in a given culture. The way a society understands or evaluates war can change over time. Societies often discover that their shared ideas about how war should be waged don’t match the reality of military operations, or their lethal consequences. The shock of large-scale death and destruction can change how a society (or its military) perceives and evaluates war.8 In previous eras, different international systems simultaneously evolved their own sets of standards that guided warfare between constituent members of each system, often not applied to outsiders. The rules of war tend to reflect culturally specific answers to common practical problems found in war that transcend a particular context. For example, in land warfare there

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is usually the question of what to do with people who surrender; in naval warfare there is the issue of how to treat survivors of a ship that your navy has sunk. In some societies, treating prisoners of war well matters; in others, they might be killed out of hand. In the present day, however, international law provides a global set of rules and principles that regulate warfare. International law is itself an institution, perhaps the most important feature of the contemporary international order. Its modern structure is European in origin, but it is now global in scope owing to the expansion of European empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its adoption by the states created in the process of their retreat. While all states have differing views on international law, it is the dominant institution in international politics. The emergence of a single collection of institutional concepts related to war and the use of military force between states that covers the entire planet is both unique and relatively new in human history. States often disagree about the precise constraints of international law itself, or the way that treaties can or should be interpreted. They all, however, recognize its existence and centrality in international relations. Contemporary warfare is therefore shaped by the fact that a very specific institutionalized understanding of war – and war’s limits – exists. In this book I refer to the institution of war as the shared concepts of war and military force embodied in international institutions. The importance of thinking about war as an institution is that there are 193  Member States of the United

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International law International law is the body of law that governs international relations. It evolved from the diplomatic practices of states and helps them to cooperate in international affairs. International law covers many discrete areas of international politics, such as war and international trade. It provides a set of rules and principles for defining the rights of sovereign states, as well as how they should behave towards one another. The difference between international law and domestic legal systems is that the international system lacks a singular sovereign entity able to enforce international law. The UN Security Council can authorize action against states in some circumstances, and international courts exist with jurisdiction over different areas of international law. But the ability of either of these to hold states to account depends on the power of the state in question. International law governs and constrains the use of or resort to force (ius ad bellum). Importantly, states have the inherent right to self-defence and to act in collective self-defence, but otherwise are obliged not to threaten or use force against each other. International law also regulates war and armed conflict (ius in bello). This specific body of international law is nowadays referred to as the law of armed conflict or international humanitarian law. It governs the conduct of war, primarily setting limits on the use of violence in war, including provisions related to the care of captured combatants. It also defines states’ responsibility to limit the harm caused by their military operations to civilians and protected objects such as religious or cultural sites.

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Nations (UN), each of which might have its own idea about what war is (or isn’t) and what’s permissible in it.9 Non-state armed groups, too, are likely to have their own ideas about the limits of war. At the same time, the current global international order says only states can legitimately wage war. Contemporary international law is inseparable from the UN, where Member States discuss global politics in the UN General Assembly, and a select group of states sit in the UN Security Council, responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security. The reason for this is that the UN Charter is central to the architecture of contemporary international law. Some legal terms in international treaties, such as self-defence, are vague or ambiguous by design. They are, however, essential to understanding how war is conceptualized and regulated globally. The power of this institution is such that even when states violate both the spirit and the letter of international law, they still speak its language to justify their actions. However, the inter-state system and its institutions are challenged by those excluded from it – sub-state separatist groups and transnational threats such as piracy, organized crime and insurgent movements like ISIS. When states respond to these threats or to other states breaking the rules of international law, they often find themselves fighting at or beyond the boundaries of the law. Regardless of the degree to which it is sometimes violated, international law structures the interactions of states, and international humanitarian law gives states a common language to conceptualize and evaluate war.

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What counts as war and why does it matter? Wars are classified according to the political entities fighting one another. The three main types of war today are: wars between two or more states; civil wars, where a state fights non-state armed groups on its territory; and civil wars with external state interventions, which mix the two.10 If we want to know how war works, the differences between these types of conflict are important, as they help us to understand how a conflict relates to the international system. Different types of conflict also have distinct dynamics; wars between states differ from those between states and non-state armed groups because the international system is designed to legitimize and support states. Conflict types also describe the varying patterns of warfare over time in the international system. In relative terms, inter-state war is in decline and occurs far less often than civil wars or their internationalized variants. Inter-state wars are still important, however, as they are what most states with a substantial military prepare for. They are also the class of war that is most likely to escalate to extremes (even nuclear war) and remake the international order. The classification of war in international law is similar to the political/strategic one above, yet also distinct in significant ways. The importance of this difference is that the practice of war is best defined in political and strategic terms, but international law contains a specific typology of armed conflict. The legal concept of armed conflict is not, however, identical to war. Only two types of armed conflicts exist in international

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law: international armed conflicts between states, and non-international armed conflicts between states and non-state armed groups on a state’s territory.11 This makes civil wars with external military intervention legally complex, as both types of armed conflict exist in parallel. In international law, both types of armed conflict have distinct threshold conditions that need to be met in order for that type of armed conflict to be held to exist. That then triggers the application of international humanitarian law. The purpose of this is to prevent states (or non-state armed groups) waging war without international law regulating their actions. The reality is that this creates a legal framework for evaluating the existence of war that is not entirely aligned with war in the contemporary world. International law regulates direct conflict between states in a relatively unambiguous fashion. If states go to war with one another, the threshold conditions for an international armed conflict’s existence are very low, so they cannot fight one another without it counting as such. So, for example, when Russia sent military forces into Ukraine in 2014, it started an international armed conflict with Ukraine that continues to the present day. The distinction between the concept and institution of war is notable here: some people might consider there to have been two wars between the countries – in 2014–15 and from 2022 onwards – but the fact that hundreds of people were killed on both sides annually between these intense phases means that the international armed conflict, however low-level and frozen, has continued since 2014.

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A harder problem is distinguishing between civil wars and non-international armed conflicts. This is because the threshold conditions for a non-international armed conflict require that fighting exists between two or more organized groups at a higher intensity than for internal disturbances or unrest. But this threshold is uncertain, as internal political unrest is much harder to place on a spectrum of intensity than inter-state conflict. In this case, a civil war or internal conflict below such a threshold might be considered a war by some or all of its participants, but not count as a noninternational armed conflict under international law. Secondly, in civil wars it is relatively common for the government to deny that a war or non-international armed conflict is taking place for practical reasons: a government might prefer to treat an insurgent group as ‘terrorists’ rather than as rebels, as the latter have some protections under international humanitarian law. A government in the midst of a civil war won’t want to give its opponents legitimacy by recognizing it as such. Contemporary military practice throws up all sorts of problems regarding conflict thresholds because states have adapted to these constraints. They have adopted means and methods of warfare that are hard to define as such, and they coerce and use force against one another in ways that are open to varying interpretations as to whether or not they trigger an armed conflict in a legal sense. One explanation for this is that great powers have typically avoided direct conflict since the development of nuclear weapons. Instead, they have competed for global or regional dominance by attacking

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one another indirectly by supporting governments or non-state armed groups in internal conflicts across the world. Given that many forms of coercion infringe state sovereignty and are thus illegal, states often do so secretly. However, secrecy in such scenarios often results from collusion between competing states, as they seek to keep such armed conflicts from escalating to direct confrontations.12 Better, for example, for two nuclear superpowers to bleed each other secretly in the shadows of wider conflicts, as happened during the Vietnam war, than for hawkish politicians and public opinion to force political leaders to escalate a conflict into open warfare. In the contemporary world, all manner of states have proved remarkably adept at using proxies to wage war on each other in order to avoid direct clashes that might be costly and risk escalation. An institutional explanation for this open-secret warfare is that states want to avoid being seen to break the rules, even when rule-breaking is hard to avoid.13 In practice, this means international law shapes how states use force against one another, even when they violate its rules. Its general prohibitions are open to interpretation and argument by states. The issue of conflict classification matters as it plays into wider inter-state politics as states make claims and counterclaims over whether individual uses of force are legitimate and lawful. In this regard, international disputes over the recognition and non-recognition of an armed conflict’s existence are integral to the course of some wars. As sovereign entities, states have the

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power to stay silent in the face of criticism – refusing to make public statements or engage with criticism, factfinding missions, or otherwise acknowledge their own actions that may be unlawful. One of the most notable examples of this in recent years was Russia’s refusal to admit responsibility for its role in the shooting down of the civilian airliner MH-17 over Ukraine, despite ample evidence of its involvement, as doing so would have required it to acknowledge its role in the ongoing armed conflict on Ukrainian soil. Strategy and defence States prepare for war because they exist in an international system in which their main competitors for influence and prosperity are other states, alongside non-state armed groups that can pose them military threats. States are ultimately responsible for their own defence and must judge where their survival, autonomy or interests may be threatened by other armed actors under conditions of uncertainty. Preparations for war are necessary because a state’s military capabilities enable it to deter adversaries and respond to the threats that other states (and armed groups) might pose. Military force, then, serves multiple purposes: it can be used to coerce an opponent or deter them, or, if deterrence fails, defend against attack. In all of this, the nuts and bolts of military capabilities matter. Without credible armed forces, it’s hard to deter potential adversaries or defend against attack, much less deny them what they seek once war has begun.

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A state’s military capabilities also limit what it can achieve through threats and uses of force. Small, hightech professional forces might be very good at defeating another state’s military, but are usually too small to effectively occupy a country. Military capabilities also shape a state’s ability to escalate a crisis or war. This limits its ability to control escalation dynamics in a war, as well as the scope of policy aims that can be achieved through force. Small all-volunteer forces can’t be scaled up quickly without considerable resources and political will, which might give an adversary a reason to escalate a conflict early on in hopes of a fast victory. Conversely, possession of nuclear weapons by two adversaries creates strong incentives to keep conflicts between them limited, as the downsides to a nuclear exchange far outweigh the potential gains. Strategy is a means of understanding both the role that threats of military force play in international politics and the use of military force in war. In both cases, the question facing politicians and military leaders is how to get what you want, given your circumstances, resources and adversaries. We live in a world in which resources are constrained, and many people and states have irreconcilable goals. As a concept, strategy is the way decision-makers align their goals with the limited resources available to realize them, choosing between alternate ways of achieving their aims and expending their resources in an attempt to succeed. Given that in any strategic situation there is someone else pursuing a competing set of goals, this can get complicated.

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WHAT IS WAR FOR?

One of the central issues that Clausewitz addressed in On War was the problem of escalation – why, he asked, didn’t war escalate to extremes from the outset? As wars escalate, they can become politically counterproductive. This political limit to escalation makes further sense when we recognize that adversaries don’t just fight; they also interact in numerous often seemingly incompatible ways. Typically, there is limited cooperation between adversaries that limits the costs of conflict – for example, taking prisoners and engaging in prisoner exchanges. Since wars are destructive, adversaries are collectively worse off, and escalation usually increases the degree to which both sides lose. At the same time, they are also by default in long-term competition with everyone else in the international system. Therefore, it makes sense for a state to consider how allocating resources to a particular war, or escalating it, might harm its wider interests. In circumstances where one side cannot simply impose its will by force, it needs to think and act strategically to understand its adversary’s goals, motivations and means of achieving them. While war is at root dyadic (at minimum, two sides are needed), adversaries are likely to have a range of differing, competing conditions that might result in victory or defeat. More to the point, contemporary wars do not occur in localized political vacuums, so adversaries also need to consider how their actions might lead to other states, or non-state armed groups, intervening. Military force, then, is a means of attacking, controlling and bargaining with an adversary. The

24

War in theory and practice

American strategist John C. Wylie observed that the aim of war was to achieve ‘some measure of control’ over one’s opponent, and that the ‘ultimate determinant in war’ was the presence of military forces in a given place and time.14 Strategically, the use of military force to control an opponent and achieve one’s political aims must be balanced with how these actions affect relations with other actors in the international system. As Lawrence Freedman has observed, ‘The most effective strategies do not depend solely on violence … but benefit instead from the ability to forge coalitions’.15 The reason coalitions are a primary deciding factor in war is because it usually pays to be on the side with greater resources and partners. Even in a war between just two adversaries, each is likely to have actual or potential allies and coalitions in place. The ability to build and maintain a coalition, while preventing one’s opponent from doing either, is of vital importance in any war. This is why the deck is stacked against insurgents fighting states: the rules of the international system mean that it’s hard for them to form lasting coalitions with other states that draw in the full range of their partner’s military capabilities. That said, it is common for insurgents to gain some support from a neighbouring state in terms of supplies and safe havens, even if this merely prolongs the conflict. At a domestic level, the sustainment of war requires that the government, military and those responsible for keeping the government in power work largely in concert. If this domestic coalition crumbles, so does the war effort.

25

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

Coalitions provide a partial answer to Clausewitz’s problem of escalation: conduct that alienates allies, generates counter-coalitions and breaks the domestic consensus that sustains a war effort is self-defeating. The need to generate a supporting coalition, or prevent a counter-coalition from forming, provides a good explanation for why both states and non-state armed groups need to be mindful of international law and the wider norms of the international order. Actors who break central rules, say by committing crimes against humanity or genocide, limit the number of states willing to come to their aid, while simultaneously giving other states or armed groups reasons to rally against them. In earlier times, coalitions may have mattered less than they do today – now they are central to success given the increased ability of many states to project military power abroad. This brings us to the role of international law and the global norms that govern war. If there was no penalty for coercion, aggression or breaking the rules of war, then we might expect them to be widely flouted. As it stands, many conflicts involve a spectrum of interactions, from cooperation through to breaches of the law of armed conflict in a way that establishes a sort of common understanding of conflict limits between adversaries. Furthermore, the degree to which belligerents adhere to international standards will affect the forms of support they might get from other states. Of course, there are wars with very few breaches of international law, just as there are conflicts that involve huge breaches and almost no cooperation

26

War in theory and practice

between adversaries. The point is that we should not discount the importance of international law and the institutionalized limits to war just because they are breached. They matter because their existence shapes the patterns of warfare via coalition dynamics and relations between adversaries. Ideology, uncertainty, calculation: why do states go to war? One way of approaching the question of why states go to war is to consider war as the failure of a bargaining process. When two states have irreconcilable political goals, they typically manage to find a bargain that does not involve violence. Given that war is incredibly costly and has unpredictable outcomes, it makes sense for both sides to arrive at a peaceful agreement or continued standoff, rather than fight one another. For this reason, most crises and confrontations don’t result in wars.16 Where two states have irreconcilable policy aims, this can escalate to a military crisis, and from there to armed conflict. War can therefore be thought of as a failure of bargaining processes over time, as a conflict escalates in importance for at least one of the sides to the point where it is something it’s willing to fight over. Ideally, states would be able to head off a crisis, and even when war is a possibility, find a way of de-escalating the conflict. Bargaining can also explain the strategic rationale for uses of military force short of war. The ability to use force is useful to politicians

27

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

because it enables them to make credible threats to their competitors and adversaries. Credible military threats are an important aspect of statecraft as they demonstrate the ability and willingness to cause harm and impose costs on an opponent. Threats typically form part of bargaining strategies aimed at getting what a state (or non-state armed group) wants without escalating to armed conflict. This way of thinking is very flexible, as it enables us to analyse, say, the causes of the 1990–91 Gulf War in more or less the same terms as the causes of the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war. In both cases, war followed the refusal of a government to accede to demands made by another state threatening military intervention. In the first instance, Saddam Hussein refused to withdraw Iraqi forces from Kuwait; in the second, Ukraine refused to change its political alignment with Western states. In both cases, the demands being made were considered intolerable and the Iraqi and Ukrainian governments were willing to risk war rather than accede. That these unheeded threats of military intervention led to war also highlights the role of perception and misperception in international politics.17 States can underestimate or overestimate their own military capabilities or those of their opponent. Similarly, they can misinterpret the price an opponent is willing to pay to hold on to a piece of territory, or the level of popular support for a long, open-ended counter-insurgency campaign on the other side of the planet. From a bargaining perspective, the ultimate function of war is psychological. Both sides communicate with

28

War in theory and practice

one another via credible threats, military force or going to war, and thereby alter the other’s perspective. What it is important to recognize, however, is that war itself is a way of improving one’s bargaining position. Warfare is in this sense a bargaining process within a bargaining process. Significant military victories or setbacks can alter the wider bargaining process between counterparties. We should, however, be wary of thinking about war purely in rationalistic terms. Often in the past revolutionary or religious motivations for war have foreclosed the possibility of bargaining and accommodation. The use of military force is also highly emotive. To generate support for war, political leaders call on cultural values and beliefs, not the dry language of bargaining positions. Professional militaries are held together by their members’ shared institutional values, which laud acts of individual sacrifice for one’s comrades or abstract concepts such as nation or country.18 The use of military force can therefore unleash social forces that are hard to contain, particularly today, when war usually requires the support and engagement of a state’s citizens. War is therefore both rational and irrational. Clausewitz did not see this as a contradiction. Instead, he considered it a ‘strange trinity’ of passionate emotions, chance and rational calculation.19 Wars can swing between these poles, but each is always present to some degree. As wars intensify, the less controllable they become, as emotions overtake populations and leaders alike. In such circumstances it gets harder for

29

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

political elites to strike the bargains they want to end the conflict. This brings us to the question of peace. The end of most wars involves a bargain between opponents, and sometimes external forces. Some wars end when opponents agree to stop fighting (peace deals). But such peace deals might require external support (peacekeeping forces) to ensure they stick or might be imposed by the UN Security Council (peace enforcement). It is also rare for civil wars to end with a single deal. Peacebuilding processes that aim to reduce the intensity of war and set the conditions for a lasting peace deal are also important. Still, military operations matter: wars can functionally end by default if one side is defeated and its military collapses. Equally, two sides might de-escalate a conflict that neither can sustain without formally entering into negotiations to stop it. When considering how wars end, it’s always important to remember that they exist in the context of the international system. The death, destruction and disruption that wars cause usually mobilizes states, the organs of international society (such as the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly and other UN bodies) and various non-governmental organizations to seek to end the war as swiftly as possible. Conflict termination therefore usually involves multiple external actors. This didn’t hold true for all wars across history, but it’s important today. Secondly, states (and other political groups) aren’t monolithic entities. They include governments that want to stay in power, political elites pursuing their

30

War in theory and practice

own private goals, populations that get unhappy at continued armed violence and so on. As the costs of war mount, so can aspirations for peace. In this sense, war can also be thought of as a series of concurrent races – are the armed forces able to take a piece of territory before popular support collapses? Will the costs of war bring an anti-war party to power at the next election? And so on. These don’t have to be short-term concerns. Long-running conflicts can be dominated by them too: the US-led intervention in Afghanistan after 9/11 aimed to set up a friendly, functioning, relatively democratic state that could defend itself, prior to the collapse of political will in Western states to fight the Taliban, who were seeking to prevent this. In the end, it turned out that creating a stable democratic Afghanistan – if it were ever possible on terms set by the West – was a longer-term project than political will in the West could sustain. This brings us to an important caveat about bargaining. Like war itself, interests do not need to be rational. A state’s political goals are the product of social processes and are ultimately social constructs. Bargaining requires a shared social frame to make sense of competing interests. International institutions provide such frames, but states can still view and interpret the world very differently. At extremes, some ways of viewing the world – be it in terms of religious faith or political ideology – are impossible to reconcile with differing belief systems. This can lead to situations where any kind of bargain between opponents appears impossible by definition. Genocide and wars in which

31

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

one state seeks to conquer and eliminate another are salient examples of this. Existential conflicts, where at least one side in a war thinks their survival is at stake, are hard to reconcile with a bargaining model. They lend themselves to de facto conclusions, where one side is functionally eliminated or both sides are too exhausted to continue, rather than negotiated peace. That said, such conflicts are rare. More common are conflicts that metastasize as the conflict itself creates opportunities for power and enrichment that establish a range of conflict actors as warlords. In such cases, the continuation of war, destructive as it might be, can be beneficial for a small range of participants. This then raises the question of post-conflict justice. After all, why would those state actors or armed groups make peace, if they are subsequently threatened with the loss of their power and wealth, and even face jail? The use of force While war involves organized armed violence, it is fundamentally a political contest involving as many tools of power and coercion as states can muster. Regardless of the constraints of international law, war is a continuation of inter-state coercion and bargaining in which states use many tools besides military operations. Positioning military forces – for example naval fleets or armies – is itself a form of signalling and even coercion. So, too, are sanctions and economic warfare aimed at disrupting or strangling an opponent’s economy.20

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War in theory and practice

That said, violence is central to war because it forces a response. If a state wants to annex a portion of its neighbour’s territory by force and possesses the means to do so, then the only way for the neighbour to restore its territorial integrity is to successfully defend it militarily. After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, most states refused to acknowledge the territory as

Modern warfare Modern warfare originated with the growth in army size and state capacity during the nineteenth century. The relatively rapid pace of technological change in this period resulted in a range of weapons that fundamentally altered how wars were fought: the firepower of these weapons made old tactics, such as infantry advancing in closely packed lines or columns, suicidal. The hallmark of modern warfare is combined arms: the use of a range of specialized units in combination to lethal effect. Infantry, artillery, tanks and other vehicles, work in concert to fix and destroy their opponents, often in combination with the air force. Modern warfare is challenging because commanders have to organize their forces to fight in a range of domains (land, sea, air) simultaneously. At their peak, the armies fighting the Second World War contained millions of soldiers, which meant that the complicated road and rail logistics to move and supply them, and the industrial capacity to equip them, became central problems in waging war.

33

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

Russian, but Russia remained in effective control of it despite the unlawful nature of the action. Armed conflicts between states can vary in intensity between industrialized slaughter and intermittent border skirmishes. In the years since 1945, inter-state wars have not matched the combined scale and intensity of the First and Second World Wars. That is not to say that large-scale warfare between states has been absent. The Korean war between 1950 and 1953 and the Iran–Iraq war that lasted much of the 1980s both demonstrated the continued ferocity inherent in large-scale, inter-state war. They were, however, outliers. This is because, as wars escalate in intensity, they fundamentally become economic contests, requiring economic and societal adjustment in order to sustain them. Large-scale warfare can only be sustained through conscription that forces significant sections of the population (usually young adult males) into military service. Conventional warfare is also hugely destructive in terms of death tolls and equipment losses. Most states retain relatively small amounts of the military equipment needed to fight a high-intensity war against a state opponent and loss rates of equipment in contemporary inter-state warfare are significant. More to the point, modern military equipment is more expensive and time-consuming to produce, making re-supply of many advanced weapons systems difficult. The prospect of large-scale social dislocation due to conscription, economic disruption and relatively low industrial capacity to build more equipment at speed combine to make inter-state armed conflict a highly risky venture.

34

War in theory and practice

Most wars are therefore fought with limited aims on both sides. Very few inter-state armed conflicts are intended to completely defeat an opponent and end their political autonomy. One reason for this is the existence of nuclear weapons, which would make such complete war aims between the major military powers in the international system self-defeating. Until the invention of nuclear weapons, war between leading competitors might lead to the elimination of one of them – Austria-Hungary disintegrated under the pressure of the First World War, while Germany was divided in two by the Allied powers in the wake of the Second World War. Now, any conflict between major powers runs the risk of escalation and the use of nuclear weapons, so the biggest states have a very good reason to avoid war with each other, and also to significantly limit their war aims where they might lead to a nuclear crisis. The character of contemporary warfare is therefore dominated by an absence of sorts: we don’t get intense great power wars in part because they are extremely costly in economic terms, but also because the potential downsides of a nuclear crisis or exchange are so great that states work to avoid this. Since the webs of interests, alliances and security guarantees across the world ultimately connect back to states with nuclear arsenals, all major wars in the contemporary world take place in the shadow of nuclear weapons. A war’s intensity is not just defined by the political aims of the participants. It’s also a result of how opponents seek to achieve their goals. Military

35

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

commanders pursue outcomes through the deployment of military force that will help achieve wider policy aims and objectives. Strategy connects ends, ways and means: the political goals of war, the ways that they might be achieved and the means available to achieve them. Misalignment of the three is typically blamed for failure in war. This puts blame in different places; for example, unrealizable political objectives (or unrealizable through force), poorly conceived military operations or lack of appropriate means to wage the kind of war the commander requires. This explains why large-scale conventional wars are rare: they are often an inappropriate, or too risky, way of achieving political objectives. Importantly, military strategy highlights that military force can be used to defeat an opponent in a variety of ways. Antulio Echevarria II explains this through four concepts: annihilation, where military force is used to defeat and destroy an opponent’s material ability to fight, contrasted with attrition, where military force is used to wear down an opponent’s material ability to continue fighting over time. Both can be contrasted with psychological concepts – dislocation, where military force is used to disrupt an opponent’s capability for collective action and resistance, versus exhaustion, where military force is used to wear down an opponent’s will to continue fighting.21 Each of these contains an idea of the most effective path to success, be it the physical destruction of an opponent’s main fighting force (annihilation) or overwhelming that force through manoeuvre or

36

War in theory and practice

destruction of command-and-control elements so that it can no longer organize itself effectively (dislocation). International humanitarian law permits the general destruction of an opponent’s military forces, but a lot of unlawful destruction in war can be explained by the intention to attrit (wear down) an opponent, either physically or psychologically. This was the logic of large-scale warfare in the twentieth century – it is not only necessary to think about how to defeat an opponent on the battlefield, but also how to destroy or disrupt an opponent’s economy, and influence both popular and elite opinion towards peace on favourable terms. State militaries are typically equipped and trained to fight inter-state armed conflicts against other states’ military forces. Conventional warfare is grounded in the fact that professional militaries understand the threats they pose to one another. Underlying this is what is known as combined-arms warfare – the integration of a considerable range of specialized elements across the land, sea and air in order to win on the battlefield.22 That different elements of an army have specialized functions is nothing new; foot soldiers have fought alongside cavalry for thousands of years. However modern militaries are composed of a huge range of distinct elements that have to be organized to work in close synergy, given that each on its own is highly vulnerable to destruction. Non-state armed groups can also fight campaigns in this way, but often pursue attrition to wear down their state opponents over years or decades.23 Still, there is a

37

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

scale difference between the armed forces of large states and sizeable non-state armed groups. Historically, this was not always the case – the Chinese Communist Party mobilized around two million people in militia units and 900,000 regular troops in the end stages of the Chinese civil war – but in the contemporary world, only states are able to raise and maintain military forces on that scale.24 This doesn’t mean that states are all-powerful. Non-state armed groups still vie for the control of territory and states across the world, using military force effectively against state and nonstate opponents. But, in material terms, state armed forces usually outnumber and outgun their non-state opponents, forcing the latter to use terrorist tactics or irregular warfare to keep fighting. State militaries typically undertake a wide range of operations, from fighting in armed conflicts to peacekeeping, training partnered military forces and disaster response. In practice, this means military capabilities are often deployed in imperfect situations, as no state can prepare for every eventuality. State military forces therefore balance training for a variety of roles or missions alongside high-end conventional warfighting and often perform operational tours that involve no warfighting at all. These balances and trade-offs are most apparent in low-intensity conflict, such as counter-insurgency operations. Preparation for such missions comes at a cost of training for highend conventional warfare, and equipment needs are often quite different; states and their armed forces therefore constantly seek to understand their current

38

War in theory and practice

and potential future operational needs in order to optimize their military capabilities for present and future operations. Considering military capabilities is also a good way to understand the limits of what can be achieved with military force. In practical terms, it’s important to recognize that defence is but one of many policy areas that demand the attention and resources of a state and its civil service. For all the talk about the importance of foreign policy and defence, defence budgets have declined as a proportion of state spending across the world since the end of the Cold War.25 As the world’s largest military power, the US is unique in the range and scale of military capabilities that it can bring to bear, as well as its ability to project military power across the globe. In contrast, non-state armed groups can operate a variety of land systems, but are usually unable to maintain crewed aeroplanes, helicopters, ships and submarines due to the difficulty and expense of doing so. Most states are, however, content to have armed forces that can defend their territory and population, as well as perhaps contributing units to UN peacekeeping missions. Civil wars and internal conflicts Most contemporary conflicts, in places as diverse as Myanmar, Syria and Ethiopia, are civil wars. Across the world, a state fighting against non-state armed groups on its own territory is the primary type of war. Civil wars are fought for myriad reasons, and

39

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

lines that divide societies can range from ethnic identity to religious affiliation, political ideology, or a combination of all three. These different ways of identifying distinct communities within a society – in many circumstances harmless – often crystallize into dividing lines when communities fear for their safety. In tandem, shared identities that once served to unite different groups within a population often lose their importance as communities begin to identify friends and enemies along ethnic or religious lines. This means that civil wars are usually the most brutal in terms of their consequences for civilians, with atrocities committed by both states and their opponents, because civil wars are inherently about the defence or forcible reshaping of political order within a state.26 Whoever wins, outright victory tends to lead to mass killings as order is restored or a new order imposed. The contemporary world is also replete with civil wars that attract military intervention by other states. A number of states have developed expeditionary capabilities that enable them to intervene at large or small scale around the world, including in ongoing civil wars. In Syria, where anti-government protests in 2011 spiralled into civil war, the intervention of numerous states, including neighbours like Turkey, Jordan and Israel, as well as major powers including the US and Russia, fundamentally changed the dynamics of the conflict. Outside intervention – be it in support of the government or rebel factions, or targeting non-state armed groups like ISIS or the Syrian Democratic Forces

40

War in theory and practice

(SDF) in Syria – changed the conflict to what in legal terms is called an ‘internationalized non-international armed conflict’. Internationalized civil wars are now as common as ones without external military intervention because in a globalized world there are substantial ties between states and sub-state groups, and between coalitions of states. Since external powers can sustain local partners and often have substantial economic and military resources, they can intensify local conflicts and tip the balance of a civil war with military equipment and resources. This often leads other states to intervene to counterbalance them, risking regional or global escalation. Proxy wars – in which parties to a civil war enter into long-term patron–client relationships with external states – are a recurring feature of contemporary wars, even if the context, form and aim of such relationships varies dramatically.27 What therefore characterizes contemporary warfare is the way in which states and non-state armed groups are interdependent. Western states seeking to achieve foreign policy aims often have no choice but to work alongside local partners, which in turn are often reliant on external backers for resources, equipment and small numbers of professional troops to tip the balance.28 The ultimate effect is that international intervention often prolongs civil wars that might otherwise result in  the  defeat of either side or a peace deal. Since external powers experience little of the downside of civil war, they have less inclination to agree to an unfavourable peace.

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WHAT IS WAR FOR?

Civil wars are difficult to end, with or without external military intervention. Unlike international armed conflicts – which are costly to sustain and therefore most of them quickly shift to peace or frozen conflict – peaceful bargains are hard to generate in civil wars. One reason for this is that conflict creates economic opportunities for warlords and armed groups. The war economies that emerge during civil wars usually centre on extractive industries or drug production that feed into global trade networks and are able to sustain states and non-state armed groups alike. This makes control of certain resources (often locations such as mines) highly valuable to anyone fighting a civil war. Due to the potential benefits of continued conflict to warring parties, convincing them to cease killing people (or threatening to do so) requires careful diplomacy, and often the intervention of outside actors like the UN as guarantors or enforcers of peace. This was the case in the former Yugoslavia, and more recently in Sierra Leone. Even then, the relationship between trade and governance extends even into peacetime, as former guerrillas and militias transition into extra-legal governance providers after the armed conflict ends. In places like Liberia, these groups enable trade and commerce by providing social goods such as contract enforcement and dispute resolution in regions beyond state authority.29 Imbalances in military power usually force nonstate armed groups to fight using raids and irregular warfare.30 Since internal conflicts are often about the control and governance of populations, territories and resources, they need not involve defeating or

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War in theory and practice

debilitating the state’s military. In most cases, it would be suicidal for state-challengers to take on a state’s military directly. Furthermore, their political goals are often served by using military force to coerce or govern civilian populations, rather than all-out attacks on a superior military. In some instances, irregular warfare might be indistinguishable from conventional warfare at the tactical level, but since the strategic logic of force differs, so too does the overall character of war. This leads to an emphasis on surprise attacks and raiding, rather than organizing for big battles and attempting to destroy a state’s military capacity directly. Unless they draw level with the state in terms of military power, non-state armed groups and insurgents mainly survive by staying hidden. This poses a problem for the state, as it first needs to identify its opponents before it can use military force against them. Since control of an area can change, civilians are often best-off hedging their bets on which side to support to avoid reprisals if a different side takes over. States confronted with non-state armed groups therefore not only need to use military force to take and hold population centres, resources and territories, but also to impose or reimpose state governance on those territories. This often descends into armed political repression of civilian populations and targeting of perceived rebel or insurgent sympathizers. Civilians often take advantage of this tension, settling scores with their personal enemies by denouncing them to whichever side is able to cause them harm.31

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WHAT IS WAR FOR?

What truly distinguishes civil wars, therefore, is that violence is often used to govern populations, rather than to defeat opponents. Civil wars are effectively contests over how a state should be run or relate to the populations within its legal jurisdiction, as well as a contest over people, territory and resources. States and non-state armed groups not only vie for power relative to one another, but also for control of key elements of the state through a mixture of persuasion and coercion. 32 This state of competitive armed governance is why, for example, non-state armed groups like the Taliban might provide services such as judicial systems when they were vying for control of the state, or why groups such as Colombia’s FARC often focus on regions where it’s possible to exploit valuable natural resources. This explains one of the defining features of civil wars: the frequent open use of military force against civilian populations. This is of course unlawful under international humanitarian law. Whereas political scientists often distinguish the study of war from the study of political repression, civil wars show that they are inseparable. Civil wars also typically involve ethnic and/or political cleavages within the state, meaning that while governments and non-state armed groups sometimes use force to govern a population, they may also see some sections of the population as enemies. It is a short step from this to the crimes against humanity and acts of genocide found in many civil wars. Civilians are also particularly vulnerable to becoming bargaining chips in civil wars. Sieges, starvation or

44

War in theory and practice

forced population transfers are ways in which states and armed groups can use populations as a bargaining tool. This can include controlling or shaping neutral activity, such as the flow of humanitarian aid provided by aid organizations in conflict zones. While in theory such aid should be purely humanitarian, it is often used as a political tool because aid organizations rely on whoever controls a location to provide access. In the Syrian civil war, for example, the government’s ability to constrain aid flows to rebel areas became an important tool, particularly when coupled with its willingness to use siege and starvation as weapons. We see glimpses of what happens when such aid is almost completely denied in the Tigray war, where hundreds of thousands of people have died from famine and millions more risk starvation due to the Ethiopian government blocking aid delivery to the rebel region of Tigray.33 Ultimately, civil wars have far more in common with inter-state wars than many people like to think. They are wars fought for political purposes, even if that purpose might be self-aggrandizement, and carving out zones of free-agency outside state authority. The two types of war often overlap and it’s hard to find examples today of ‘pure’ civil wars – ones fought without any involvement or intervention from other states or international organizations. Even where foreign military forces don’t intervene, or external arms shipments or cash aren’t used to support the government or non-state armed groups, the international system still shapes the course of many civil wars via global trade networks and flows of humanitarian aid.

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3 THE CHANGING CONTEXT AND CHARACTER OF WAR

W

hat differentiates contemporary warfare from what came before? The aim of this chapter is to explain the development of contemporary warfare and how it differs from war in the twentieth century. This means considering how modern warfare – a form of warfare that took advantage of the social, technological and administrative developments of the industrial revolution – evolved, as well as thinking about how far the conduct of war has changed since the mid-twentieth century. To do so, I trace the long-term changes in the international system – the context of war – and changes in the way wars are fought – the character of warfare – to the present day. Following this, I provide six ways of thinking about how and why war in the twenty-first century is distinct from previous times.

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The changing context and character of war

First are structural changes in human societies: wars reflect the societies that wage them, so their integration into a single global system matters, as do subsequent transformations in this system. Second, the consolidation of the varied forms of independent political organization into an international system ordered by sovereign territorial nation states is also important. Combined, these two are important elements of the third change: the emergence of a single set of global norms that govern international politics and war. While regional differences and state interpretations still exist, the fact remains that having a single body of law by which all state interactions are evaluated is unprecedented. Fourth, military institutions have transformed since the development of industrialized modern warfare as technological change has reshaped the ability of states to use force against one another. Fifth, technological change has also reshaped the relative balance of power between state militaries and non-state armed groups. Lastly, the development of the Internet and digital communications networks has transformed the way that war is experienced by global publics, with important ramifications for the legitimacy of warfare itself. Patterns of war and the changing character of warfare What does it mean for war and warfare to change? The Prussian theorist Clausewitz, whom we met in Chapters 1 and 2, argued that war had an unchanging nature,

47

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

but the reasons and ways wars were fought reflected the particular social and political context in a given time and/or place. The problem with periodizing both war and warfare is that each reflects the state of the world at a given moment, but that state is constantly changing due to long- and short-term processes. Longterm processes, like change in the global economy and international order, can be contrasted with short-term ones, such as the rapid end of the Cold War after 1989, or medium-term ones, like the reorganization of international politics that has followed in the decades since 1989. To bring some order to the vast, intractable history of war and warfare, scholars usually focus on changing patterns of war and the changing character of warfare. Patterns of war are the dominant forms of military activity over extended periods of time, often centuries long: what kind of wars get fought, by which types of political entities and why.1 The character of war refers to how wars are fought in a shorter period of time, usually years or decades. Tracing trends of war in this way illuminates transitions within an international system. For example, in eighteenth-century Europe, wars were primarily waged by monarchies, whose limited aims and means meant that they could not afford large standing armies. The nineteenth century brought larger-scale wars between states, many of which invoked nationalism to raise larger armies. The problem with this approach is that it can focus too exclusively on European history at the expense of different patterns of war found in global

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The changing context and character of war

history. Often it is also focused on the wars that were most important between leading members of a given international system, which can be misleading. And it produces bias towards inter-state warfare. This bias towards ‘big wars’ often obscures the importance of ‘small wars’ and patterns of raiding, annexation and military repression in history. The US’s annexation and conquest of Native American territory in North America is as important a part of what made the modern US as the American Civil War or Second World War. This is not to dismiss the importance of inter-state warfare, which can, after all, permanently change an international system by crippling a large power, as happened to the British Empire following two world wars. Instead, a more holistic view of patterns of war, taking into account, for example, the different ways in which empires might wage war at the same time, or changes in the importance of non-state warfare, produces a more rounded account of war across time and space. In many respects, contemporary warfare is defined by how states learned to fight one another in light of social and technological developments over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nation states and empires could draw on large populations to boost relatively small standing armies with millions of conscripts. Industrial transportation networks built around trains and motorized vehicles enabled these forces to be mobilized and moved into position quickly. Huge increases in firepower, due to rifles, machine guns and rifled artillery, meant that the massed infantry

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charges, which in the early nineteenth century could determine the outcome of battles, became suicidal endeavours. Advances in communications, notably the telegraph and the wireless radio, allowed vast military forces to be directed and synchronized by military staffs far from the battlefield. The point, however, is that war during the industrial era was as diverse as it is in the contemporary world. Most of the main powers in the First and Second World Wars were empires, or nation states with imperial pretensions. Both wars included conventional clashes of armies, alongside irregular warfare and mixtures of the two. Inter-state wars in both cases were also bound up with civil wars, insurgencies and imperial annexation, most notably in the overlap between the Second World War and the Chinese civil war. The change in the pattern of war since the mid-twentieth century lies mostly in a decline in the number of inter-state wars compared to civil wars, and the delegitimization of imperial conquest and rule, rather than some epochal shift where one kind of war isn’t important any more, and the other is. This leads us to the changing character of warfare. If patterns of war describe the types of wars that are waged and why they are fought, the character of warfare refers to how different types of war are fought, notably the multiple domains of warfare involved, the ways of generating military forces and the means available to fight.2 There are a range of explanations for the changing character of warfare. Chief among them are

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developments in societies (for example, the ability of nation states to mobilize large armies), military institutions, and military techniques and technologies.3 Often these are interrelated – the character of military institutions reflects their social context, and in turn affects the development of military doctrine and the development and use of weapons.4 More to the point, changes in the ways that wars can be fought – new technologies, for example – can lead to changes in the effectiveness of different forms of warfare, and therefore alter the utility of military force by states. Equally, high-level political changes – such as a state’s embrace of nationalism – can transform how it generates military forces and the kinds of wars it can successfully wage. The changing context of war The first way of distinguishing the present from the past is in terms of changes to the international system. The economic and political structures that define the international system provide the context for wars between different societies and groups. Significant political and economic changes in the structure of the international system will ultimately affect the conduct of war. The industrial revolution, which transformed the means of production over the course of the nineteenth century, had huge global economic consequences – shifting the centre of the global economy from Asia to Europe.5 Modern warfare, which fully developed in the early to mid-twentieth century, depended upon many

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underlying social and economic changes caused by the industrial revolution. In particular, much of the military equipment that defined modern warfare – artillery, tanks, submarines and the like – could not have been made without the industrial processes developed during the nineteenth century. The economic context of contemporary warfare, on the other hand, is post-industrial global economic interdependence, with the centre of the global economy shifting back to Asia. Such big structural changes cannot explain many small-scale choices or developments, but changes to the means and modes of production within a society and international system affect the conduct of war in the long term. For most of human history, the rates of economic development and transformation were incredibly slow. Furthermore, structural change and human development are long-term processes that are usually uneven in their spread between and distribution within human societies. Economic structures frame human societies, often being so pervasive as to seem invisible. We don’t, for example, consider the fact that most of our daily food comes from intensive agriculture to be remarkable, though this is relatively recent in the history of our species. As economic structures define and shape both modes of production and economic activity, they also structure trade relationships between societies and therefore underpin international systems. Considering underlying structural changes in human societies helps to explain patterns of war and makes the character of warfare intelligible. Long-term processes

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can have significant political consequences. For instance, the development of sedentary agriculture was an important element in the history of state formation.6 In this sense, we could divide the history of warfare (over an extremely long time-frame) in terms of the agricultural revolution approximately 12,000  years ago that enabled humans to survive on sedentary agriculture, which later made possible the rise of states and state systems in what is now the Middle East. Such a differentiation would, however, simply separate most of what we consider to be military history from prehistoric warfare. The diffusion of technologies and practices developed during Britain’s agricultural revolution in the eighteenth century, on the other hand, dramatically increased agricultural production, which meant that more people were available to work in manufacturing or serve in the military. This was an important precursor to the industrial revolution, which matured through the nineteenth century, bringing advances in a myriad of technologies and production processes that fundamentally changed global trade. Combined, this shifted a large proportion of the population of European states from primary production (agriculture) to manufacturing. This left an increasing proportion of populations available to fight – a key factor in the growth of nineteenth- and twentieth-century armies – and enabled the scale of modern warfare. In structural terms, what separated modern warfare from previous eras was the harnessing of fossil fuels as a source of energy. This enabled manufacturing,

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new industries such as the chemical industry, steam transportation and, later, motor vehicles and cars. In this context, a third significant change occurred in the late nineteenth century – what Vaclav Smil refers to as the transition to high-energy societies, dependent on intensive energy use.7 Steam power is one of the motifs of the industrial age, but the development of electricity, gas turbines and petrol engines heralded our current levels of high energy use in developed countries. Much of the military equipment we associate with modern warfare, such as tanks and planes, relies on high-powered engines, which in turn depend on global supply chains of fossil fuels. How, then, is the context of contemporary warfare different from that of the mid-twentieth century? After all, we still live in energy-dependent societies organized around mass-produced consumer goods. One difference is the huge increase in global population over the mid- to late twentieth century. At the time of writing (summer 2022), it is estimated that there will be over eight billion people alive by the time this book appears in 2023. Considering that there were fewer than two billion people a century ago, and fewer than one just over a century before that, this is an extraordinary increase. The population growth over the twentieth century can make it difficult today to understand the terrifying scale of major conflicts such as the Second World War – the tens of millions of people it killed amounted to around 3 per cent of the global population at the time. The combined population of India and China is now

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roughly equivalent to the population of the planet in 1960, yet armed forces are now far smaller than they were then, so as a fraction of the global population, the number of people directly involved in war has reduced over time. Another structural feature that defines the contemporary world and differentiates it from the recent past is commonly called globalization – global economic integration and interdependence. Levels of economic interconnectedness previously peaked prior to the First World War and then collapsed. The process of globalization (or reglobalization) during the late twentieth century has resulted in a planet where no state is truly self-sufficient in economic terms. Many states have transitioned to service economies, in which the provision of services is the largest sector (compared to agriculture and industry). However, service economies are particularly vulnerable to shocks. A striking example of this came during the RussoUkrainian war, when states supporting Ukraine with military equipment and other aid were also purchasing Russian fossil fuels. Contemporary warfare is therefore partly characterized by the context of global financial markets. Even if wars occur on a relatively smaller scale, they can cause outsize economic shocks and have global consequences. Although the benefits of modernity are far from equally distributed between and within countries, another difference in contemporary wars is that the world is largely richer, with better healthcare services. Human beings tend to have a different relationship

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to mortality from previous generations. Nowhere is this more apparent than in child mortality statistics; the proportion of children dying before the age of five has fallen from 30–40 per cent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to less than 1  per cent in developed countries today.8 Setting aside states that have endured civil wars, the routine experience of human death at relatively large scale – the norm for most of human history – is now a rarity. It’s not just that contemporary wars tend to be waged with less intensity than the industrial-era conflicts that preceded them; the social context of these smaller numbers of deaths has changed, too. Lastly, one of the major structural changes in human civilization is the shift to urban living. For most of history, a small proportion of humans dwelt in towns and cities, and the majority lived in rural communities. By the end of the Second World War, just over 50 per cent of Europeans lived in urban areas, whereas today most people do, and the percentage is set to increase over this century.9 What does this mean for war? Wars have had devastating effects on cities for thousands of years. It is inherently difficult to sustain life in high-density environments as they are dependent on complex infrastructure, which is vulnerable to disruption and destruction in war. The destruction and recovery of cities such as Kobane in Syria and Mosul in Iraq are a reminder of the increased long-term costs of warfare. Even as war has been waged by a smaller number of people, at a lower overall intensity, its capacity for long-term disruption and destruction has

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grown, owing to our increased reliance on fragile urban infrastructures to support life and economic activity. At the same time, the political and economic importance of urban centres has increased, meaning that battles for control of them have greater significance. But holding on to them is difficult: many cities are now so large as to be ungovernable by an occupying force, and the number of mega-cities will only grow. International order Modern warfare developed at a time when European sovereign states and empires dominated much of the world. Of these two forms of political unit, only sovereign states have survived and become the primary form of legitimate political entity. The lack of competing sovereign units means that the contemporary international system is a monoculture of territorial states. How did this happen? In early modern Europe, states and empires out-competed other forms of political organization, such as the city state or confederate leagues.10 As states vied for dominance in Europe, they also began to explore outwards, building trade networks between Europe and those that already existed in other regions. In the process, they acquired territories across the globe through a mixture of local alliances, force and colonization. European empires effectively integrated the globe through trade relations and force as they expanded to every inhabited continent on the planet. This culminated in the late nineteenth century ‘scramble for Africa’, in which imperial

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European powers laid claim to vast swathes of that continent, and subsequently conquered many parts of it using military force. This expansion had two effects. First, non-European states and state systems were brought into close contact with the European system, forcing them to interact with it and thus propagating the European system globally. Second, over time this global political integration also largely eliminated other international systems. International politics became politics between territorial states which recognized one another as such. This had the effect of subsuming many non-state forms of organization and societies beneath the umbrella of nation states and empires.11 But why did sovereign states survive and empires didn’t? European empires took on many different forms: some were the extension of European monarchies; others were private–sovereign partnerships. In both cases, they transformed over time. British rule over India in the late nineteenth century was the result of the British state absorbing the territorial acquisitions of the East India Company. The day-to-day reality of colonial rule differed across the world, but it was always backed by the use or threat of force. European empires therefore faced dissent and rebellion from imperial subjects well before the twentieth century’s world wars dealt mortal blows to them.12 In the decades of decolonization that followed the Second World War, the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese empires disintegrated in the face of nationalist movements and popular revolts. This left territorial states as the sole

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legitimate sovereign unit in the international system. Arguably, however, it wasn’t until the break-up of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s that this primacy of territorial states became absolute. The system of states today differs from prior international systems for a number of reasons. First, there is a single global system of states, not different regional ones loosely tied by long-distance trade routes. Second, the international system is predicated on the formal equality of states, even if in practice huge power disparities exist between them. Lastly, the current international system is characterized by the presence of intergovernmental organizations that perform all sorts of governance roles at the global level. These are part of the global economic and financial integration mentioned above. Some of these institutions, such as the World Bank, can exert tremendous power over developing countries as they can make economic aid conditional on structural changes to a country’s laws or economic policies. This means that contemporary warfare can be distinguished from modern warfare in part because of the changes in the international order between the mid-twentieth century and the present. The exact date of transition is debateable – it could be the formal change inherent in the UN charter in 1945, after the major phase of decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s, or the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Regardless of the precise date, this international order is fundamentally different from the international order of the early twentieth century.

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Why is this important in contemporary warfare? Because the relative simplicity of an international system of states exercising sovereign control over their territory does not reflect political reality in many places. The difference between legal sovereignty and reality can be somewhat benign; many states have odd constitutional or territorial quirks, or contain large varieties of ethnic groups with variable relationships to the state. However, the current international system is distinct from previous ones because states retain legal claims to territories that they may lack the power to control. Power to govern a territory or population is no longer tied to the legal authority to do so, which means that when states collapse, it can create problems for neighbours, who may be affected by cross-border security threats, such as piracy, but are also constrained in how they can respond to them by the legal architecture of the international system. State power and state capacity matter because the limits of state authority in previous eras could be described in terms of what they could protect from external forces (either directly or through vassals). Modern warfare required high levels of state capacity, including the development of state bureaucracies and social surveillance capabilities. In many states, this was reflected in increased centralization of decisionmaking, as well as the increased influence of state regulation on everyday life. In practice, the size of the state increased, and therefore required more taxes to sustain large bureaucracies capable of implementing widespread political repression. At extremes, systems

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of state surveillance enabled highly organized campaigns of crimes against humanity and genocide, most infamously in the Holocaust. In the present day, weak or failed states retain their legal sovereignty. Therefore, the system itself has erased a form of political dynamism that might previously have led to war (when other states stepped in to the vacuum created by a neighbour’s collapse). This does mean, however, that very weak states keep going, often lacking the power or capacity to deliver public goods, and in situations of near perpetual conflict with nonstate armed groups within their formal borders. Many states also have to cope with borders that reflect the history of imperialism and decolonization. This is most apparent where they contain ethnic groups that are divided by state borders and seek to form their own state. Kurdistan, the homeland of tens of millions of Kurdish people, for example, is divided across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and parts of the Caucasus. While in theory sovereignty means a state’s internal affairs are its own business, the political reality of transborder ethnic communities means that many ostensibly internal conflicts have international dimensions, almost by definition. States also resist claims for secession and recognition of statehood, which lie at the heart of long-running conflicts such as that between Israel and Palestine. So unless a non-state armed group can gain control of a state’s territory by force, it’s unlikely to ever attain independence. Even when armed groups win internal wars – such as the Taliban’s overthrow of Afghanistan’s government in 2021 – other states

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may refuse to recognize them as legitimate rulers. It also means that transnational forms of political mobilization cannot be reconciled with the system itself. Independent of the fact that ISIS was widely reviled for its conduct in Iraq and Syria, the political project of this transnational movement – creating Islamic states through force in a variety of countries worldwide, with a view to ultimately consolidating them in a present-day caliphate – is completely at odds with the logic of the international system. Global norms Warfare is shaped by ideas of right and wrong. These reflect values and institutions, and the strategic interactions of opponents. One of the hallmarks of contemporary warfare is that there is a single set of global norms – international law – with a common language to define and debate the limits to war and warfare. Throughout history, different traditions of right and wrong have bound together opponents even as they waged war on one another. Conversely, for opponents who don’t share any values or common understandings of what is and is not permissible in war, warfare easily tips towards indiscriminate slaughter. Modern warfare was rooted in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. This was also the period when international humanitarian law began to be codified in its current form. One of the important differences between modern warfare and previous eras was the existence of sets of rules, such as the

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Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. At the same time, states primarily sought to regulate war between states, not their internal conflicts against rebels and insurgents. It was not until after the Second World War that international law developed further into a single set of norms to guide all states worldwide, including during civil wars. In contrast with the past, then, war and the use of military force in the contemporary world is primarily legitimized and evaluated with reference to a single set of rules and norms, even if the meaning of these is constantly contested by states themselves. Modern international law has its roots in Europe, regulating the clashes between European monarchs, states and empires. These origins matter because they have created the structure of these rules. International law was in part shaped by how it excluded other forms of political organization, notably indigenous communities around the world, from parity with European states, and also by the way it underpinned European imperial dominance of the globe.13 The codification of international humanitarian law in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries largely reflected the wishes of states to regulate their violent conflicts between each other, and also to exclude non-state entities from legal recognition and protection.14 Even the 1949 Geneva Conventions – primarily aimed at limiting the excessive harms war inflicts – were in part a product of empires wishing to exclude regulation of their colonial conflicts as much as possible.15 But that is not to say that the current global legal order has been entirely imposed by Europe.

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Contemporary international law reflects its origins, but is not the sole product of Western states. It spread via conquest and the globalization of the European international system. As European empires conquered the planet, they disseminated their ideals by default. As states sought recognition in the wake of empire, they often argued in terms of international law in order for European states to recognize them as sovereign entities, and thereafter consciously began to transform international law themselves.16 As the international system expanded in the twentieth century, the newly sovereign states formed during decolonization also began to shape international law. The 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, for example, reflect the fact that many new states created following the collapse of European empires wanted a say in the regulation of war and warfare. Once taken up by newly decolonized states, international law has been shaped by governments across the globe, not just the West. In the grand scheme of human history, a single way of thinking about how international relations should be conducted is a novelty. Of course, many cultures and systems have thought their own values to be universal.17 Historically, traditions of just war have always been localized to particular regions, even if they have addressed common problems across time and space. In the past, relations between states have depended on a range of factors, notably power and culture. If we were able to view all such sets of relations (many are lost to the historical record), we would find plurality and diversity, not uniformity.

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The uniformity of the present is therefore very novel, but also relatively inflexible. The universal nature of international law and international humanitarian law means that it changes at glacial pace. States cannot simply write the rules as they wish, even when new situations emerge that would once have resulted in new laws, customs or de facto understandings. What further differentiates contemporary warfare from that of the early twentieth century is the emergence of international human rights law as something that also (in theory) binds state actions. Not only are there universal rules about how war should be regulated, but they are underpinned by the understanding that all human beings have inherent rights and moral worth. Adherence to international law is far from uniform. It has also outlawed a range of activities in war that used to be regarded as legitimate. Hence one feature of contemporary warfare is the persistence of practices that are now categorically unlawful under international law. Despite global norms, some military forces still execute combatants after their surrender; others wantonly launch explosive weapons into heavily populated urban areas; civilians are still targeted with violence, and so on. It is therefore fair to question the efficacy of such pervasive standards if they cannot prevent war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Debates about the lawfulness (or illegality) of conduct in war are a significant aspect of contemporary warfare. Some states have developed a legalistic approach, integrating lawyers throughout command

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structures to ensure that military operations adhere to their own legal standards. For these states, being seen to be lawful is a key element of legitimating military operations. Logically, therefore, one way their opponents have reacted to this is to use international law to gain strategic advantage by manipulating its constraints. Often known as ‘lawfare’, this creates an intractable problem for some states.18 However, as critics have pointed out, government officials and lawyers who use the term often call perfectly normal legal challenges to state authority lawfare, thereby undermining the legitimacy of law itself.19 Critics of some of these states’ military operations also argue that states themselves manipulate legal categories and boundaries for their own advantage, in effect applying a legal gloss to otherwise unlawful acts. International law has therefore permeated contemporary warfare, making legal arguments about the use of force and conduct of war inseparable from war itself. The emergence of a single set of ideas by which to evaluate war and warfare binds any entity involved in it, including non-state armed groups.20 The strategic consequences of this are important. Where states flout international law, as Russia has done in its war with Ukraine, it makes it far easier to form coalitions to oppose illegal action. When military forces commit war crimes, they can have strategic consequences due to global understandings of right and wrong in war. International law might not prevent war crimes, but it shapes how states respond to them.

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Technology and military transformation Contemporary warfare can also be differentiated from twentieth-century warfare in terms of technological change. In many cases there is continuity with key elements of what went before, such as the use of airpower or sub-surface warfare. But in others, there’s a clear break with the past – in the military use of space satellites, for example.21 The atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were devastating, but it was the advent of thermonuclear weapons in the early 1950s and intercontinental ballistic missiles in the late 1950s that fundamentally transformed the strategic calculus of great-power conflict. One significant aspect of contemporary warfare is its reliance on advanced weapon systems that use digital computers and microprocessors. Computation has long been a significant aspect of war. Military logistics requires calculations, as does the practical use of artillery or other long-range weapon systems. Throughout history from the time of the abacus, humans have used tools to extend their ability to solve complicated mathematical problems. One important aspect of modern warfare was the recognition that computer systems capable of quick calculation could enable otherwise impossible actions, such as accurate long-range naval gunfire and aerial bombing using fire control systems. Early computers were, however, large, unwieldy and slow compared to digital computers using electronic chips. What separates war in the midtwentieth century from today is the advent of battlefield electronics, where computers are integrated into all

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manner of weapon systems. This has enabled, among other things, a sea change in the accuracy and precision of weapon systems and the reorganization of military forces around precise firepower. In the decades since the Second World War, militaries have had to adjust to the advent of precision weapons in the form of missiles. The development of guided missiles forced states to devise both effective means of employing them and countermeasures. Electronic guidance systems meant that anything from anti-tank weapons to antiship missiles could be fired from longer ranges and to better effect than unguided weapons. Contemporary systems designed to defeat missiles usually rely on sensor networks and computer-controlled automated defensive systems. Electronic warfare – using the electromagnetic spectrum to interfere with or defeat sensor systems and computer networks – has therefore become a critical issue in military operations. Military thinkers on both sides of the Cold War understood the implications of advanced computerized weapons as these technologies began to mature from the 1970s onwards.22 The use of large volumes of relatively inaccurate firepower could be replaced with smaller numbers of precision weapons, able to strike targets accurately at longer ranges. The US experience of the 1991 Gulf War, where technological differences and airpower resulted in an overwhelming Coalition victory without a grinding war of attrition on the ground, led the US defence establishment to conclude that a ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA) was under way.

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In the view of RMA advocates, smaller, light-footprint forces directing expensive missiles from a distance would be the future of war.23 This generated intense debates in defence establishments across the world, not least because this period of military transformation also coincided with declines in defence spending after the Cold War. The lethality of modernized military organizations is intertwined with the fact that states cannot risk the kinds of military losses associated with inter-state warfare. The lack of financial resources, and even defence production, to sustain them through any potential war of attrition means that many resemble glass cannons – able to deal significant damage, but also extremely fragile and therefore rarely placed in serious jeopardy. Competition to develop and field the latest military equipment means that military power varies greatly from state to state. States also faced an optimization problem – military forces have to be optimized to achieve particular kinds of objectives. A military force optimized to defeat an opposing state’s army might not be best placed to occupy or govern a territory, or for that matter to extend state authority to areas of low governance or fight against domestic rebels and insurgents. Many militaries contribute to a wider range of tasks than just fighting; notably, armed forces are often a key element of the state’s ability to respond to natural disasters. For these two reasons, while many states have very large military forces – India and China, for example – only the US can field large armies trained and equipped with the latest generation of military

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equipment, able to perform a wide range of military operations and able to project power worldwide. Many Western states that are NATO members have instead opted for smaller militaries and rely on their ability to fight together with their partners to deter aggression and conduct operations abroad. Other states rely on mixtures of new and old equipment, though the latter wouldn’t last long in a war with an advanced military force. As Western military forces have transformed, the benefits and limitations of reliance on high technology have become clearer. The trend for ‘remote warfare’ – distant interventions largely conducted using airpower, special forces and local partners – worked in some cases, notably in NATO’s bombing of Kosovo in 1999 and the destruction of ISIS’s caliphate between 2014 and 2019. In other cases, the record of military transformation appears to have been a failure. Light-footprint forces could overthrow the Taliban government of Afghanistan in 2001, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government in Iraq in 2003 and help bring about the downfall of Muamar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. But in all three cases, the ensuing civil wars and insurgencies ended in real or apparent failure for Western governments. Moreover, we are beginning to see the effects of the diffusion of advanced military technologies through the international system.24 The Predator and Reaper drones that symbolized the onesided nature of many of America’s wars since 9/11 have since been joined by Turkish Bayraktar-2 drones which have wreaked havoc on conventional military

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forces from Libya to Nagorno-Karabakh and in the Russo-Ukrainian war. Looking beyond Western states and China, what characterizes contemporary warfare is the uneasy coexistence of a large range of ostensibly outdated military platforms with expensive advanced capabilities. States increasingly rely on private military and security companies (PMSCs) to perform roles that might otherwise be done by their armed forces. In most cases, this involves maintaining or supporting military equipment, or logistics and base security. In some cases, PMSCs, such as Russia’s Wagner Group, carry out combat operations and exist as paramilitary tools of state influence. The sometimes-unclear boundaries between public military forces and private entities contribute to the blurred character of contemporary warfare, which often defies the neat military– civilian delineations.25 War in the information age Beyond the specific military impacts of computers, contemporary warfare is also distinct because how human beings communicate with one another has fundamentally changed with the advent of the Internet and digital communications networks. In this sense, the Internet is the latest global communications network to reshape warfare. The past two hundred years have seen the development of an extraordinary range of communications methods, including electrical telegraphs, telephones, radios, cinema and television.

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Alongside physical postal networks bringing news from the front, each has affected the way that publics perceive war and the conduct of war itself. The Internet is distinct from previous communications networks because it enables a seemingly endless array of human interactions using computers. Secondly, computers can do things for us automatically or autonomously using programmes and various forms of artificial intelligence. The forerunner of the Internet, ARPANET, was originally designed to enable people to access remote computers, but then developed into a means for them to communicate with one another via computer networks. Direct person-to-person communication via the Internet – using email or social media platforms – is now a fraction of overall Internet traffic. Its impact on society and politics has been profound, particularly following the commercialization of the Internet and widespread adoption of digital communication. Whether in war or peace, the Internet now permeates everyday life to the point that access to it has become essential in most societies. Communications networks are closely associated with war because military forces rely on them for internal communication and coordination.26 Being able to communicate faster than an opponent is a distinct military advantage. For that reason, mobile forms of communication, notably radios, are standard pieces of military equipment. Changes in communications networks also transform the relationship between political leaders, military commanders and frontline troops. Digital communications technologies enabled

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Barack Obama in 2011 to watch the US special forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden in real time, impossible until the last decade of the twentieth century. Since orders can also be issued via the same networks, digital communications networks potentially place frontline forces under closer supervision from remote military commanders. Computer networks have also introduced new possibilities to attack adversaries. Most of the hightech weapons developed and used by states rely on computers and computer networks to function. This means military forces are also at risk from cyber attacks that collect intelligence on, disrupt or destroy essential computer networks and individual systems. In this sense, contemporary warfare is characterized by vulnerability to cyber attacks, even if relatively few state actors can use them effectively against military targets. Cyber attacks are important because they enable states and their militaries to achieve effects without causing physical damage. They also make possible forms of hostile activity that are continuous with prior forms of statecraft but also unique in scope or scale. Computer networks are hard to defend, meaning successful cyber attacks can steal data in unprecedented volumes. The Chinese hack of the US Office of Personnel Management in 2015 meant that its intelligence services could access 22.1 million sensitive records of US citizens.27 Equally, the Stuxnet cyber attack that disrupted the Iranian nuclear programme at Natanz in 2010 achieved a strategic effect on a key target that was hardened against other forms of

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attack. Old forms of statecraft, such as covert action, subversion and influence operations have also been transformed by the Internet, as states leverage online information on social media networks to shape public opinion. All this leaves states uncertain about how to respond to digital espionage, especially when operations are publicized, which can lead to tension and strategic instability. Contemporary warfare is therefore characterized by changes to the information environment and the way information about war propagates through global information networks. Smartphones, combining mobile communication, access to the Internet and the ability to record sound and video, have transformed the ability of anyone in a war zone to record and broadcast events.28 Whereas civilians were once mostly isolated from one another in times of armed conflict, they can now easily mobilize online, sharing information about the progress of a conflict with both states and their opponents. Such information can have military utility, as demonstrated in Ukraine, where a mobile app enabled civilians to drop pins on a map to identify the locations of Russian units, which could then be attacked by Ukrainian forces.29 It also has strategic implications as evidence of civilian casualties and war crimes can be easily circulated online. This in turn has led to groups of opensource investigators harvesting evidence from online sources to check and contest state claims regarding their responsibility for carnage in war.30 It is important to recognize that we still don’t know the full impact that widespread use of the Internet will

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have on war. Consider that when America bombed Afghanistan after 9/11, less that 0.01  per cent of Afghanistan’s population had access to the Internet. Similarly, around 0.6  per cent of the population of Iraq had Internet access when the US-led 2003 invasion occurred. Compare this to the 22.5 per cent of people online in Syria at the onset of its civil war in 2011 or over 75 per cent in Ukraine by 2022.31 We are entering an age where every new armed conflict will be observed and recorded by civilians, and imagery shared and distributed worldwide. One of the important features of the Internet is that it is also physical infrastructure and amenable to centralized control. While it’s hard for states to filter the Internet unilaterally, numerous states have developed technical and legal mechanisms for censoring what their citizens can see. Similarly, states also shut down Internet access as a means of social control.32 So-called digital authoritarianism enables states to censor and control civilian communications networks, also facilitating pervasive surveillance of individuals and communities. We can see the impacts of this in civil wars such as Myanmar’s. States’ wartime use of digital technologies, such as the collection of biometric information of civilians and refugees, further complicates the relationship between war and human rights. Although it is an emerging issue, the relationship between war and digital rights (human rights in the context of digital technologies) looks set to expand as states begin to exploit the computer revolution further.

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Technology and military power Centuries ago, what we now call non-state political groups – usually armed pastoral nomads – used to pose significant threats to states. Until roughly the seventeenth century, states feared the incursions of horseback riders who could plunder and pillage their territory or even conquer the state itself.33 The development of military technologies such as firearms reduced the ability of such groups to pose an existential threat, however it was not until the nineteenth century that states effectively carved up what remained of the non-state world and divided it between themselves, often subjugating or eliminating pastoral societies in the process as they incorporated them within imperial systems. In theory at least, modern warfare significantly increased state power relative to non-state armed groups. Non-state entities could sometimes defeat the forces of states in battle, but no longer had the capacity threaten states’ existence. Modern weapon systems such as aircraft also enabled states to project lethal power into territorial hinterlands, further diminishing spaces for resistance.34 The contemporary world, however, features a different balance between states and non-state armed groups. Any state that wants to use military force now has (in theory) access to vastly more lethal weapon systems than were available in the early to midtwentieth century. In practice, there is an expanding gap between what the most powerful states are capable of and everyone else due to advances in precision weaponry. But in other ways the gap between states

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and non-state armed groups is closing. Whereas the indigenous forces that resisted European empires in the nineteenth century could rarely count on acquiring substantial stocks of modern weapons, now the baseline armaments of rebel movements the world over include automatic rifles, heavy machine guns and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). This is significant because since the 1970s there have been few wars between states but many large civil wars involving states. The impact of cutting-edge military equipment on these wars has been limited. Yet they are distinct from the civil wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in terms of the availability of lethal weapons (notably automatic rifles), the background technologies in use (such as motorized vehicles, radios and latterly the Internet) and the interweaving of these conflicts into global supply chains. Understanding contemporary warfare, then, requires a wider focus than the high-profile inter-state wars such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war. States now have to grapple with the fact that relatively basic modern military technologies used against them can be surprisingly effective. Combined with developments in communications technologies mentioned above, contemporary insurgencies are remarkably robust. They benefit from the ability to communicate at low cost, including distributing propaganda or evidence of state atrocities to garner support.35 The illicit international trade in small arms and light weapons means that there are also ready supplies of firearms to sustain them. States can cause

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far more trouble for their competitors than before by supplying non-state armed groups with niche military capabilities. Iran’s ability to supply Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthi rebels in Yemen with advanced rockets and missiles means that they can both pose significant strategic challenges for governments in the region.36 The spread of effective and relatively cheap long-range precision weapons might not be a major issue for states that can afford defensive systems, but most cannot. In contrast to the RMA’s focus on military innovation in the form of cutting-edge technology, non-state armed groups have proved adept at repurposing commercial technology. This has ranged from ISIS’s use of commercial and custom-built drones for attacks and capturing propaganda videos,37 through to 3D-printed firearms by armed groups in Myanmar.38 Defending against drone attacks has proved particularly troublesome for states, as counter-drone systems are expensive and require high levels of professionalism to operate effectively. Non-state armed groups are also adopting technologies that once gave state militaries a tactical edge, such as the use of night-vision goggles by the Taliban or radio-jamming equipment by Mexican drug cartels.39 There is even greater parity between states and nonstate actors in cyberspace, where states have never had an equivalent to the monopoly on violence that characterizes state sovereignty. States have to work with commercial companies to ensure the integrity of their computer networks and critical national infrastructure,

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as well as persuading commercial organizations to keep their networks secure. While some states have considerable expertise in both attacking and defending computer networks, large commercial companies such as Google and Microsoft possess far greater reserves of cybersecurity knowledge than most states. Ranged against them are hostile state intelligence and military organizations, state-sponsored hacking groups and non-state groups attempting cyber attacks for a range of motivations. Given the centrality of computer networks to everyday life – and the functioning of government organizations – there are myriad ways in which states, criminals and hackers can use cyber attacks in war.40 These can disrupt key physical infrastructure such as pipelines; they can be used to steal or delete large datasets; and, in the case of the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, can even destroy physical machinery. Following from the observations about civilian participation in war above, however, one of the most interesting aspects of cybersecurity is the ability of motivated technical individuals to form groups and launch disruptive cyber attacks. These show the levelling power of emerging technology, since a handful of people – or even individuals – with the relevant expertise can initiate devastating or highly disruptive attacks on huge companies or state agencies. As we’ve seen, contemporary warfare is far from a clean break from the industrial-era conflicts of the twentieth century. At the same time, the context of warfare has changed significantly since major

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twentieth-century conflicts such as the Second World War, or the Korean War which followed closely after it. What characterizes contemporary warfare is the coexistence of old and new forms of warfare in a world of economically interdependent states, all notionally bound by international law. But war and warfare often violate these rules, and unlawful forms of warfare persist. Furthermore, it appears to be getting harder to regulate war due to changes in technology and shifts in the relative power of states relative to non-state armed groups. These are some of the core problems related to war that we will turn to in the next chapter.

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4 THE PROBLEMS OF WAR

C

ontemporary warfare reflects the transformation of modern warfare in the twenty-first century but many of its problems are inherent to the phenomenon itself. Wars cause death, destruction and social dislocation regardless of when or where they occur. Importantly, much of this harm is considered legitimate by belligerents and legitimized within the international system. The current institutions regulating war embody concepts of how war can and should be fought, and in what circumstances. However, this regulation is distinct from the reality of war today. Contemporary warfare is disconcerting because of this divergence between the practice and institution of war. In an ideal world, states and non-state armed groups would understand war in a way that aligns with the institution of war in international politics – and wage it accordingly. But our world is far from ideal: wars still happen even though war is a heavily suppressed activity in international politics. State practice reflects

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both the changing realities of war – different ways of organizing for war and fighting it – and the relatively static rules of international law. States use military force with international law in mind, even if they often violate its spirit and letter. The practice of war is still therefore often shaped by the institution of war. This chapter provides an overview of the problems related to contemporary warfare. First, we return to the distinction between war in practice and the institution of war in the international system. The ban on wars of aggression has not stopped wars from occurring. This points to the role and problem of power in the international system – states can manipulate thresholds and rules for strategic advantage. Next, where wars do occur, they can cause widespread destruction and harm, which is often lawful under international humanitarian law. Furthermore, new means and methods of warfare are extending the range of possible destruction that states can cause. Warfare that violates international humanitarian law also persists in the world today and in some cases offers strategic advantages. Linking these issues, a key problem of contemporary warfare is how states often work with each other or with nonstate armed groups in ways that make it hard to hold anyone to account for war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law. The present situation largely suits powerful states, whose consent would be needed for significant changes to international law, a challenge for those seeking change. While the institution of war is highly contested, not least by non-governmental organizations seeking fundamental

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transformations in international humanitarian law, strategic competition between the US and China means that present problems are likely to persist. In the long run, this may undermine international cooperation required to change international law and to confront global challenges such as climate change. The continuity of war The international system’s institutions are designed to avoid war by promoting diplomatic solutions to crisis and conflict. Wars of aggression are now expressly prohibited and states typically uphold norms that outlaw territorial acquisition through force by refusing to recognize border changes that result from conquest. Self-defence aside, only the UN Security Council can authorize the use of military force, and even then, only for the purpose of upholding international peace and security. Yet wars are still waged, wreaking havoc and destruction. International law has not changed the fact that wars occur and by definition cause widespread harm and destruction. Yet from the perspective of states, much of the destructive potential of war is permissible within the boundaries of international law. International humanitarian law is, after all, founded on the idea that some forms of destruction and death are inevitable and permitted in war, even as it seeks to limit harm overall. Members of the armed forces are expected to be ready to cause and suffer death and injury in armed conflict, and while civilians are not to be targeted, it

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is also expected that warfare on any scale will cause them some harm. Even the most carefully managed inter-state warfare, for example the bombing of Kosovo in 1999, causes civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure. In total, it is thought that 13,157  civilians died in that conflict.1 Worse, many armed conflicts have featured intentional attacks on civilian populations and other war crimes. There are, it seems, fundamental limits on international law’s ability to protect civilian populations from harm in war. The harms of war extend beyond the direct casualties inflicted by weapons. Wars cause largescale socio-economic dislocation as violence forces populations to move to protect themselves or destroys critical infrastructure. Identifying and measuring the consequences of warfare is a difficult but necessary task. Humanitarian aid and international donations that rely on accurate assessments are often necessary to support civilian populations during armed conflicts. The second-order effects of war have long been understood in aggregate, notably that wars produce refugees and can generate the conditions for famine or outbreaks of deadly diseases. Humanitarians, health professionals and academics now refer to armed conflicts as ‘complex emergencies’, which feature interwoven processes that result in harm to individuals.2 The concept of complex emergencies means that specialists focus on total excess mortality resulting from armed conflicts, since people can die due to disruption to food supplies, healthcare or shelter, alongside bullets and bombs.

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That is not to say that war harms civilians equally. Feminist scholars have highlighted the fact that women bear the brunt of war differently from men. War can cause women more harm since it exacerbates preexisting gender-based inequalities, and women are often a target of gender-based violence.3 We should, however be careful in depicting women only as victims of war; they are also participants and combatants in many conflicts the world over. Other disparities in civilian populations also exist. For example, children can also lose years of education during armed conflicts, undermining their life-chances. These examples are part of two wider trends that are changing the way we evaluate armed conflict: individualization and identity. Drawing from human rights thinking, much more emphasis is now placed on considering how war harms people as individuals, down to how specific acts of war infringe a person’s rights.4 Many scholars and activists criticize the way in which international humanitarian law creates a framework for understanding harm in war that ignores key aspects of person’s identity, such as age, gender or ethnicity. These aspects of identity can have a dramatic impact on how armed conflict affects an individual, or class of individuals, that is not captured in the label ‘civilian’. One way of understanding how the effects of war are being re-evaluated is to consider sexual violence in conflict (also termed conflict-related sexual violence). Rape and other forms of sexual violence have occurred in wars throughout history. Yet it was only following atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra

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Leone in the 1990s that rape in war was recognized as a war crime by states and courts, leading to the first explicit conviction for rape as a war crime by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2016.5 Given the nature of the offence, and social stigmas around rape, sexual violence in times of war was typically not spoken about or officially unacknowledged, despite its huge personal consequences and subsequent social ones. The term ‘sexual violence in conflict’ further expands the scope and focus of attention in two ways: first, to the fact that there exist a range of harmful actions beyond rape in war, as sexual violence includes acts of humiliation, torture and coercion. Second, to the existence of sexualized cruelty in war that can be inflicted on men or perpetrated by women. The term also captures the fact sexual violence in war is not only committed by soldiers. The subsequent conceptual development of ‘conflict-related sexual violence’ draws attention to the fact that wars create conditions for patterns of increased sexual violence that extend into peace, and therefore if we are to consider the harms of war, we need to understand its long-term consequences after the fighting stops.6 Wars can also have systemic effects. The interdependence of the global economy means that war – particularly between major states – represents a latent threat to the infrastructure and trade flows that underpin it. The 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war disrupted wheat supplies, causing food prices to spike around the world. Western states’ coercive sanctions on Russia also led to spikes in energy prices, as

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sanctions and Russian responses to them restricted the flow of Russian fossil fuels into the global market. Many similar theoretical scenarios are also extremely worrying, even ignoring the latent possibility of nuclear war between superpowers. One key example of this is the development and testing of anti-satellite missiles by states such as the US, Russia and China. Space has been an area of military activity since the first rockets and satellites, but a future great power conflict might result in so much debris that it would render significant regions of Earth’s orbit – vital for communications satellites – too hazardous to use safely. Legitimacy, power and war The second big problem with war in the contemporary world is that there is considerable disagreement about the legitimacy of using military force. In one sense this is not new, as states have always disagreed about aspects of international law, but the dispute about the lawful limits of military force now takes place at two levels. First, about what the correct interpretation of international law is, but second, regarding who creates or interprets law legitimately. The old state-centric view that international law is a matter for states and a small number of institutions of international law has been challenged by those who argue that legal expertise beyond governments matters, be it subject matter experts or academics.7 Who, then, gets to say what international law is? The consequences of this contest can be stark, notably due to the existence of

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international courts and tribunals that can deliver judgment on states, political leaders, officials and forces involved in war. Equally, the fact that powerful states like the US can ignore the judgments of international courts without facing significant legal consequences demonstrates the role of political power in this debate. This disagreement plays out in policy debates at national and international level. While states can point to the relatively broad ranges of acceptable action in international treaties, the legitimacy of the way states wage war is under sustained attack from global civil society groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. One important reason for this is the growth and coherence of other normative structures in international politics since the Second World War, in particular the development of the concept of human rights. Some states, notably the US, consider human rights law to be inapplicable in war.8 After all, the law of war (which is now the law of armed conflict/international humanitarian law) existed specifically to govern the conduct of war. Civil society groups disagree, pointing to the multiple treaties dedicated to the protection and promotion of human rights for all human beings, signed after many of the key treaties that constitute international humanitarian law. Global civil society groups work to promote the idea that international human rights law can, and should, apply in wartime. This would place extra restrictions on what states can do in war, and why. After all, perhaps the most basic human right is the right to life,

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and killing people is a defining feature of war. Adopting a human rights perspective would mean, for example, that many of the arbitrary exercises of state power in war, such killing or detaining people, would need to be evaluated through a lens which is far less permissive than IHL. Some courts, such as the European Court of Human Rights, have ruled that human rights law does apply to some actions during armed conflict, notably related to the detention of prisoners in war. The wider problem is that states themselves don’t agree about the nature of international human rights law – in particular, whether a state has obligations to consider or uphold the human rights of individuals outside its own territory. This means that in practice the protective function of human rights law in war comes down to state interpretations. At heart, this contest is about the legitimate reasons to use force and the permissible limits of violence in war. One consequence is increased critical attention being paid to state justifications for their conduct and criticism of states that refuse to acknowledge or explain their military operations. What exacerbates this issue is that the central institution of the UN responsible for deciding such matters is fundamentally a political body. Collective military responses to international problems within the UN system rely on UN Security Council agreement. Since five states wield effective veto power at the Security Council, this means that when at least one of those states objects to the UN taking action in a given situation, it can veto any official – and therefore lawful and legitimate – collective response. In the

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absence of Security Council approval, individual states or groups of states often take military action, justifying it with the language and principles of international law. One key post-Cold War example of this was NATO’s intervention in Kosovo to prevent crimes against humanity and genocide. NATO forces engaged in a sustained bombing campaign against Serbian military positions that was described as ‘illegal but legitimate’ by a subsequent independent commission.9 Relying on political legitimacy or morality to justify unlawful uses of military force is a Pandora’s box, given that societies differ in their political outlooks, social character and values. Such justifications could be put forward for any violation of international law. At the same time, reliance on strict interpretations of international law – notably the inviolability of state sovereignty – seemed unsatisfactory to many after the Cold War. One reason – highlighted by the Rwandan genocide in 1994 – is that an absolutist interpretation of state sovereignty coupled with Security Council inaction would give a free hand to governments that wished to massacre sections of their own population or commit genocide. The international community responded to this issue in the early 2000s with the UN-endorsed principle of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P). This asserts that recognition of a state’s sovereignty is in effect conditional on its the obligation to protect the inhabitants of its territory. Violating this – by committing genocide, for example – would entitle the international community to take action, even if that meant infringing state sovereignty.

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Yet the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, which agreed on R2P, framed such intervention as being channelled via the Security Council making it, in circular fashion, again subject to the political agreement or abstention of its five permanent Members.10 Because this is so hard to achieve, most military interventions in response to genocide or crimes against humanity are unilateral, and therefore either unlawful or of questionable legality. The problem for civil society groups and many smaller states is that the current state-centric arrangements for regulating war and warfare benefit powerful states. Permanent Security Council Members or their allies are unlikely to be sanctioned by the UN beyond rhetorical denunciations. For powerful states that wage war, the relative permissiveness of the law of armed conflict means that they can use a wide range of destructive means lawfully. In many cases, powerful states appear able to avoid punishment from international courts. Again, the international system – even with the ICC – is structured in such a way that many of the most powerful states need not fear prosecution of their political leaders and service personnel. This has been highlighted by the conflict in Ukraine, where Russia’s wanton commission of war crimes appears to many experts to be a natural candidate for international trials, but because of Russia’s status as a permanent Member of the Security Council, and because getting hold of potential war criminals would mean extracting them from the sovereign territory of a nuclear weapon state, the likelihood of this occurring seems slim.

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Manipulating conflict thresholds The regulation of war penalizes aggression and misconduct, but in so doing creates incentives to circumvent the system. This should not surprise us, as the states that created international law did so partly for their own strategic benefit. Even limited regulation of war relies on international order to sustain it, but that order is dynamic – a product of contest between states as well as cooperation. Those seeking to challenge or change the current international order take advantage of its restrictions to gain a strategic edge. The asymmetry of commitment to the current international order produces problems for those seeking to defend it. After all, if or when liberal democracies violate its restrictions in order to defend it, they undermine the very thing they seek to champion. Institutional restraints on war can in practice be circumvented by powerful states. Indeed, a hallmark of real state power today is the ability to evade the constraints of the international system. The divergence between the institution of war and the reality of how states use force leads to some apparently puzzling practices. For example, on 24 February 2022, a large build-up of Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Russia had form – it had previously annexed Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, and had backed separatist forces in a frozen conflict in the east of the country since then. At the start of the 2022 invasion, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, claimed that Russian forces had been ordered to engage in a ‘special military operation’ in self-defence.11 This action

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was quickly called a war of aggression by the Ukrainian government and its international allies. Countries lined up to condemn Russia in various international forums, notably the UN. However, voting at the UN also reflected the political ties and long-term strategic interests of states, with Russia’s scarce allies voting in its support, and some states abstaining from votes on the matter altogether. One hallmark of contemporary warfare has been this intentional blurring of boundaries between war and peace, exacerbated by states’ legal justifications of their use of military force. Modern military capabilities also enable states to strike at one another with precision, at considerable geographical distance, using a range of means such as missiles, airpower, special forces and proxies. As states’ capabilities to use force at a distance increase, so too does the opportunity – or temptation – to use force to attack perceived threats. States now rely on justifications of self-defence when using force thousands of kilometres away from their own territory, as the UK did when it conducted lethal strikes against its own citizens in Syria in 2015. This, it has to be said, is also a reflection of the fact that attacks and threats from non-state armed groups and terrorists can be plotted, launched and commanded from halfway around the world. Many of these military missions are clandestine; states often refuse to discuss or explain the details of these operations, either to international audiences or their own populations. One specific issue here is the use of force outside of war. There are three key ways of thinking about this.

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First, there are selective uses of military force where a state is not at war – for example the use of drone strikes or special forces to eliminate terrorist suspects. Second, there is what is known as sub-threshold competition, or the use of military force in ways that do not rise to the threshold of war or are impossible to respond to without triggering a war. Lastly, there is the use of non-military means to achieve similar effects to military force. This includes all manner of hostile statecraft such as economic warfare, sanctions and cyber attacks, all of which can have potentially devastating long-term effects on targeted states. The use of drones for targeted killings is central to contemporary debates about the boundaries of war and armed conflict. Should drone strikes in a foreign country be considered one-off uses of force in self-­ defence? Or should they count as part of an armed conflict between a state and a non-state armed group? In theory, we might discuss a strike where a drone is used to kill a single person as possibly the minimum required for armed conflict. In reality, these strikes often kill civilians, and the identity of those targeted is often unclear. Such strikes raise many legal questions and second-order problems. For example, if a state can lawfully kill someone in a distant country as an act of self-defence, should that be evaluated in terms of international humanitarian law, human rights law, both or neither? Furthermore, if it is lawful for states to kill individuals like this on the basis of an individual’s membership of a terrorist organization or non-state armed group, then what’s to stop any state killing

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people it claims are terrorists or insurgents anywhere they like? What such debates point to is the legal uncertainty that permeates many of these activities.12 As states that use targeted killings seek to justify their actions, they also have to recognize that other states may use the same legal arguments to explain their unlawful actions. This matters because, although drones remain the most visible symbol of this in popular imagination, the same legal principles and logic apply to the wide variety of means that states have developed to use military force abroad, from ballistic missiles to special forces raids. One of the peculiar consequences of such military capabilities is that they open up the possibility of extremely short-lived but consequential conflicts. For example, in January 2020 a US drone killed Qassem Soleimani, a senior Iranian military leader, while he was in Iraq. This strike formed part of a decades-long military competition between the US and Iran, but by itself was a singular event. In legal terms, any use of military force between states triggers the existence of an international armed conflict, since the threshold for this is very low, yet the question of when it might end points to the fact that it would be extremely short lived – a ‘flash’ armed conflict. We have moved, it seems, from a world where people think of war as a series of battles, to one where distinct battles might form their own short-lived wars. Some states are also happy to blur the boundary between war and peace for strategic advantage. Given that armed conflicts are so consequential, a number of

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states work to coerce their adversaries by using military force in ways that make it hard for their opponents to respond. This has been called ‘hybrid warfare’ and is fundamentally about using a mix of military and non-military tools to attack and undermine opponents, while also putting the onus on them to escalate to an armed conflict.13 Hybrid warfare has its roots in strategic competition and power asymmetries. In effect, states that seek to challenge international order must contend with the fact that its defenders are much stronger in aggregate. By using force and coercion below the threshold of armed conflict, these states seek to weaken their adversaries, who often find it difficult to respond lawfully. Much of the sub-threshold competition involves a mix of military and non-military means. This ranges from salami slicing territory (taking possession of it by a series of small increments) using special forces and proxies, through to Chinese fishing fleets being used to drive off other states’ ships in the contested waters of the South China Sea. ‘Non-military warfare’ however, refers to the way in which states have turned to other methods of achieving strategic effects that might previously only have been achievable with military force. In recent years, states have begun to weaponize foundational elements of the global economy to coerce their opponents.14 Given the US’s centrality to the global financial system, it has been able to cut competitors out of the international banking networks that enable them to trade.15 Does that even count as war? To those on the receiving end, it feels like it. States

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such as China and Russia challenge the contemporary international order because they perceive it as favouring Western states at an institutional level. Part of this is also a response to military imbalances between major powers. For decades, the assumption has been that the US would win in a peer fight against either country. Why, then, is anyone surprised that both China and Russia developed methods to deal with and mitigate this strategic asymmetry? We also shouldn’t ignore Russian, Chinese or Iranian statements calling Western actions or responses acts of war: the West cannot, and should not, rely on its own conceptual boundaries being accepted by its opponents or the wider world. The worry for Western states is that effective responses to attempts to undermine international institutions may lead to their unwinding anyway. A tit-for-tat disintegration of international cooperation might play out in many different areas of international politics, be it free trade or the international forums that standardize the computer infrastructures underpinning the Internet. The fact that supposedly neutral elements of international politics such as standards organizations have become arenas for international competition means that there is no safe harbour from such competition any more. Technology and lawful killing What are the limits of lawful warfare? A further problem today is created by states developing ever more lethal and destructive means of warfare. New

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technologies and ways of fighting mean that practical restrictions designed to limit the conduct of war no longer work, while the treaty law governing their use remains static. For example, when the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions were signed, cruise missiles were in their infancy. Now, a range of states have the capability to selectively use missile strikes as means of coercion or retaliation, as happened during the 1998 US Operation Infinite Reach, which struck targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for al-Qaeda’s bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The crux of the matter is that a lot of the death and destruction inflicted during wars is lawful. International humanitarian law permits militaries to use lethal force against one another, even though everyone understands that it is impossible to use military force without killing civilians or causing considerable collateral damage. International humanitarian law seeks to balance the four principles of military necessity, distinction, proportionality and humanity. Of these, military necessity and humanity are often in conflict. After all, military necessity without any counter-balancing principles can justify a huge range of destruction, whereas humanity without any counter-balancing reason to use force would rule the latter out in most circumstances. So long as military force is used in accordance with these principles and the law, it is lawful under international humanitarian law. The issue for many NGOs is that much of this turns on military evaluations of what is and is not permitted by international humanitarian

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law. In essence, states determine for themselves what international humanitarian law permits, and rarely acknowledge challenges unless forced to do so by more powerful states. This is particularly relevant when it comes to civilian harm. Western militaries argue that they take all possible steps to prevent this, including significant limits on strikes that might injure or kill civilians. Key here is the principle of proportionality, which obliges commanders to weigh the military advantage from an attack or operation against the civilian harm it may cause. Yet proportionality calculations involve consideration of more than direct destruction and injury. This can be difficult, requiring military staff to assess, for example, how harmful eliminating the electricity supply to an urban area might be when they have limited knowledge about it. The proportionality of many military strikes is challenged by independent investigations, but outsiders usually have no access to the logic behind individual attacks beyond the brief outlines provided by military spokespersons. A further question is how, if ever, a military commander might be able to evaluate and balance short-term advantages against longer-term harms. For example, warfare often causes significant ecological damage that can far outlast a conflict. The use of explosive weapons leaves behind unexploded ordnance that can kill civilians decades later. Some critics and NGOs also argue that new technologies mean that we should re-examine the relative permissiveness of international humanitarian law. In particular, there is great emphasis on the importance of

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the principle of humanity as new weapons and methods of warfare have raised uncomfortable questions about the limits of lawful killing. For example, Western states’ reliance on airpower in Kosovo meant that NATO forces suffered only two deaths during the entire campaign (in a training accident), while inflicting over a thousand deaths on Serbian forces and killing around 500 civilians. In recent years the issue of such radical asymmetry has focused on drone pilots’ ability to kill their opponents from thousands of miles away without exposing themselves to risk of physical harm, even if many suffer from the psychological consequences of killing.16 Is it inhumane to wage war like this? States largely say no. After all, killing is killing, and so long as it conforms to international humanitarian law, it’s fair game. Remote, targeted killing might even be better, since there is greater control over the timing of strikes. What this points to is the fact that advances in military technology often raise new conceptual and ethical questions. The advent of precise long-range means of killing, for example, cuts both ways. On one hand, states can ‘reach in’ to wars and selectively kill people and destroy military targets with greater precision. On the other, the very possibility that precision weapons are available raises moral questions about using older, unguided weapons to attack the same target.17 Even as states such as the US hew to a very traditional interpretation of the limitations of IHL, civil society groups are pushing for a treaty to ban explosive weapons in populated areas. At heart, this argument

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is also about how violence in war should be evaluated. It plays out in disagreements over whether or how human rights law applies in war, but also in disputes about the purpose and interpretation of international humanitarian law itself. For states, this means it is getting harder and harder to defend their actions as legal in the court of public opinion. Accountability for killing A further problem is that flagrantly unlawful warfare persists in the present day and war crimes appear to go unpunished. This is despite the renewed development of international criminal law in the 1990s. Following from tribunals authorized by the UN Security Council – notably the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) – and the signing of the Rome Statute (1998) that established the ICC, there was (and remains) hope that such tribunals might end impunity in armed conflicts. Many considered the demonstrative effect of the trials in these courts to be an important step towards deterring breaches of international humanitarian law in future. The effectiveness of international humanitarian law depends on states and non-state armed groups respecting its underlying norms, or, where violations occur, being able to prevent or punish war crimes. There are many states and non-state actors that have no (or only nominal) respect for the rules and institutions of the international system. Groups such

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as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) work tirelessly to inform organized armed groups and other participants in armed conflict of their legal obligations. The foundation of their authority, however, is a neutrality that means they must act impartially and have no authority to punish violations. Again, power differences between states are important. Enforcing the rules of war during an armed conflict effectively requires coercive threats, non-military forms of coercion (such as sanctions) or military intervention. The effectiveness of these tools varies depending on the relative power and resources of the targeted state or group. International humanitarian law does include mechanisms of punishment intended to coerce counterparties into compliance. These are, however, now at odds with the prevailing norms of human rights. One traditional – and still technically lawful – response to breaches of international humanitarian law is the use of reprisals – performing an otherwise unlawful action – aimed at coercing an opponent to respect international humanitarian law. These are now greatly restricted within international humanitarian law itself, and also very difficult to reconcile with human rights law and Western states’ self-image as respecters of human rights.18 Many states are therefore faced with opponents who are willing to engage in criminal warfare. This can be for strategic reasons (that the aim of war is itself criminal, such as genocidal conflicts). Also, as we have seen earlier, many forms of violence in civil wars differ from the legitimate purpose of violence in international

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humanitarian law. So, too, at an operational or tactical level, unlawful means and methods of warfare can arise due to specific dimensions of an armed conflict. Often, we associate this with irregular or asymmetric warfare, as the means by which the weak choose to attack stronger powers are typically unlawful under international humanitarian law. However, in many cases war crimes are committed by states due to their own weaknesses or fragilities. The Syrian government’s lack of military capability to control the country explains its resort to mass internment, torture and murder, including the use of chemical weapons on civilians as a means of terror, alongside sieges and intentional starvation. Illegal warfare poses a fundamental dilemma to opponents who seek to adhere to international humanitarian law. Unlawful behaviour – such as blending military forces and equipment into a civilian population – confers an advantage so long as the opponent sticks to the rules. This leads to pressure to bend or break rules in response, but to do so would most likely lead to greater civilian casualties and carnage, and thus doubly undermine the legitimacy of the state – first in terms of its campaign aims, and second in terms of its wider self-image as a legitimate lawful entity. In recent years, both states and non-state actors have taken advantage of the fact that some states are willing to unilaterally adhere to international law in war, by deploying human shields or using the domestic legal systems to challenge state conduct. This brings us to accountability – holding individuals, organizations or governments responsible for violations

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of international or domestic law. Accountability is usually discussed as part of a trio of terms, alongside transparency and responsibility. Civil society groups want access to more information about how states wage wars, and they want justice when things go wrong or for unlawful policies. This requires that someone or some entity bears responsibility for acts of war and can be punished for unlawful actions. But state armed forces and governments are non-transparent in many military matters, and with good reason: their opponents would benefit from knowing how and why they make military decisions. Traditionally, they have not been open to providing journalists or NGOs with detailed information about military operations. This position, however, is increasingly being challenged by conflict-monitoring groups, such as the UK’s Airwars, which collate substantial datasets of civilian harm in war using news reports, social media posts and digital evidence in the form of photographs and videos. This enables them to challenge the narratives of state armed forces that deny responsibility for civilian harm. The problem of accountability is complicated by the fact that most warfare today involves coalitions of states, sometimes including non-state armed proxies. This complicates accountability because the structure of partnered operations blurs responsibility for individual acts. Further, coalition structures are typically more opaque and less responsive to inquiries than national armed forces.19 It may also put states in the position of working with armed groups or other military forces who are willing to commit war crimes,

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even if states are not. And states often lack direct control over client states and non-state armed groups. Ultimately, the problem is political: states are answerable to their own populations and state peers. International society is based on consensus, backed with threats of punishment if powerful states agree to it. Again, this highlights a central problem in international order: some states can – and do – violate the rules of the international system without fear of punishment. What does this mean for international law, and by extension, the institution of war? One key issue is that state silence in the face of challenge is often an overlooked feature of international law, and therefore an important aspect of war and the regulation of warfare.20 Many states participate in institutions such as international courts that can effectively compel them to present a case or evidence in their defence. Some, however, do not. These states therefore aren’t penalized for refusing to admit their actions, and some international institutions are functionally prevented from engaging in truth-finding exercises, as when Russia vetoed the continuation of the UN-OPCW Joint Investigation Mechanism for investigating the use of chemical weapons in Syria.21 Concurrent with legally questionable state justifications for war, then, are powerful states’ refusals to discuss or engage with criticism. The pernicious effect of this is that it can make efforts to increase compliance with the rules – bringing accused war criminals to trial before international tribunals, for example – appear biased, and therefore further undermine the international system.22

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Great power competition The emergence of China as a serious strategic competitor to the US in the late 1990s and early 2000s set the stage for great-power conflict in the twenty-first century. A significant aspect of US–China competition is that both vie to shape international order, including international law. In some senses, the differences between them are relatively small – both are strong advocates of state sovereignty and limiting international institutions’ ability to interfere with their domestic affairs or foreign policy. In other regards, the distinctions are stark: the US has typically advocated for human rights and liberal democratic norms, whereas China is a one-party state that is currently engaged in political repression that includes cultural genocide in Xinjiang.23 The core problem is that US–Chinese strategic competition over the course of the twenty-first century could result in war. This problem can’t be separated from the shared challenge all states face in the form of climate change. The strategic competition between the US and China, and the threat of the major global conflict that it would cause (the US mainland is, after all, located on the other side of the Pacific Ocean from China), threaten to undermine the universal cooperation between states that is needed to address the multiple problems that climate change is already generating. In the short term, competition between the US and China means there is less room for cooperation between states to address many of the conflicts in the world. There are also fewer resources, as states dedicate

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more of their budgets to defence in order to prepare for, and hopefully deter, major power conflict in future. Arising from this, there is little universal will to update international law to address many of the issues we have considered so far because agreeing new international law requires international cooperation. There have been several treaties signed that restrict means and methods of warfare since the Cold War, notably the Ottawa convention banning antipersonnel landmines, and the recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). These treaties have, however, only been signed by some states, and sometimes not the ones that matter (the TPNW, for example, wasn’t signed by any states possessing nuclear weapons). Such treaties aim at normative change – delegitimizing certain weapons in international politics – but do so in a context where non-signatory states can still point to the wider body of international law for legitimacy. We are therefore left with a relatively static set of treaties and customary international law, as the contest over the legitimacy of war and warfare intensifies. Powerful states are content to defend their position and freedom, whereas other states want more restrictions on warfare and equality of punishment for rulebreakers. For this and many other reasons, there have been compelling arguments to reform the UN Security Council. After all, why are a small handful of states accorded such privileges? The problem is, first, that this system cannot be readily reformed without the consent of the permanent five Members. Given the benefits of

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having a Security Council seat, it seems unlikely that incumbents would agree to major changes. Second, the US–China competition plays out in the creation of stable alliances both large and small to counterbalance one another. This feeds into the wider issue of war in the contemporary world, which often involves a relatively large number of states and nonstate armed groups due to existing alliances, coalitions and proxy relationships. Given that the major states have nuclear weapons, war today is primarily waged in cooperation with a range of actors at the inter-state and sub-state levels. This shouldn’t surprise us. Across history, there have been wars that were restricted to two opponents and those that involved a range of other political groups. In a globalized world, however, it’s easier for states to intervene at a distance via military or economic assistance. So, as the institutions that regulate warfare and penalize the resort to war grow more salient in international relations, the relative payoff of waging war indirectly increases.24 Where a state intervenes to back the government in another country’s civil war, it makes exacerbating that conflict an easy way for a third state to drain the intervening state’s resources and attention. Enabling state security forces, or their adversaries, is therefore a way in which states challenge one another. These kinds of efforts run the gamut from long-term training and mentoring arrangements to one-off arms shipments. This external intervention increases the pervasiveness of war. The international ties of rival armed groups in a civil war inevitably drag internal conflicts into

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wider strategic competitions between states. All of this makes conditions worse for the local population. A civil conflict that might start from local grievances can spin into an internationalized conflict that can only really end once third-party states agree it should, or disengage. This makes these wars harder to end. After all, international backers are less likely to respond to peace calls at a local level. They are also less exposed to the punishing realities of war as they can calibrate their interventions in ways that protect their forces. The effect of this is that wars with significant consequence in international politics tend to drag on. Even efforts to reduce the carnage through international humanitarian assistance can get caught up in strategic competitions between external states. Again, a situation that works for a small group of powerful states has markedly deleterious effects on the people on the ground. Taken together, what this means is that the powerful states competing for dominance also rely on the maintenance of networks of states and non-state armed groups to support them. The institutional arrangements that work to avoid open conflict between the major military powers also affords them relative impunity for their actions. The US will never have to face charges of aggression over the 2003 invasion of Iraq, just as Russia is unlikely to be punished at an institutional level for its aggression and systematic campaigns of war crimes in Ukraine. More perniciously, strategic competition also incentivizes powerful states to protect their partners, as Russia has shielded Syria, and the US protected Saudi Arabia from criticism of its military

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intervention in Yemen. We are therefore faced with a world in which the major states are unlikely to cooperate over advancing international law, and are also incentivized to look away when their partners breach it. So, given such a range of problems, what can be done about them?

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G

iven that war is a central problem in global politics, what are the prospects for a more peaceful world? Is there a solution to the problem of war itself? Or is the best that we can hope for a reduction in the number of wars and the harms they inflict on people and the planet? The world’s most powerful state, the US, is now faced with a rising power, China, which is now the second largest economy in the world, and is building up military forces to back its territorial claim over Taiwan and its wider maritime claims in the South China Sea. This strategic competition, from most views, is likely to impact every aspect of international politics as the US and its allies seek to defend a world order built around liberal principles, and China seeks to assert itself on the world stage. Any solutions to the issues identified throughout this book must therefore take account of this overarching political dynamic.

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What, then, for war and armed conflict in the twenty‑first century? Conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding can all help to stop political conflicts becoming armed conflicts as well as to generate sustainable peace in the aftermath of war. These are particularly important due to the large number of civil wars that currently exist and are likely to remain the dominant form of war in the future. At a political and institutional level, there appears to be slim chance of significant change while the US and China are engaged in strategic competition. At the same time, the rise of regional powers and Asia means that we are likely entering a period of multipolarity, where a single state or handful of states cannot dominate the international system. What does this mean for international order? This chapter focuses on the prospects for peace that embrace that multilateralism, thus avoiding both the weaponization of global infrastructure and the possible division of the globe in a new cold war, which would have disastrous consequences for tackling climate change. Within this framework, there is still scope for states to develop new arms control regimes to dampen and stabilize competition, as well as to promote greater adherence to international humanitarian law. Can war be eliminated? A key fault line running through the study of war and armed conflict separates those who believe that ultimately – however improbable the circumstances

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required – war can be eliminated and those who believe that it cannot, and that it therefore will remain a problem to be managed in international politics. For those in the first camp, there is nothing inherent in humans or human societies that prevents us from collectively relegating war to history. This kind of utopian vision has taken different forms over time. The philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that war could be eliminated if states and the international system were ordered in a particular way. By arranging humanity into a federation of republics, perpetual peace was therefore possible.1 Liberal thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century such as Norman Angell thought that peace through trade was possible. If free trade increased the economic interdependence of states, then war would become entirely irrational between them. After the First World War, some international lawyers thought that international peace required formally banning war and pushed to outlaw it as a normal feature of international relations, resulting in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928.2 In this view, war is a political problem, but one that is enabled by weak international institutions that are unable to prevent it. By changing the nature of the problem (moving towards world government or increasing the various interdependences of national governments to the point that war becomes too costly) or else creating strong institutions and getting states to abide by and collectively enforce their own rules, war can – and should – be eliminated. Among those who believe war cannot be eliminated there are still many who think that it can be largely

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avoided, or at least managed and regulated to reduce its impact. There is a distinct difference between small military disputes and conflicts that run their course in a matter of days or weeks, and industrialized wars of attrition replete with war crimes that can dislocate global politics for years. So if human societies cannot avoid waging war, then perhaps at least the most destructive forms of warfare can be avoided. Again, there is a long history of regulating the conduct of war. Most societies in history placed limits (for a variety of reasons) on what can or should be done to their opponents.3 War in the present day reflects the first attempts to regulate it on a global scale. The questions, then, are whether we can do better, and how? Is it by updating international law, or enforcing it better? Or does the answer lie in handing more power to international organizations such as the UN, or eliminating constraints on their action, like the veto power wielded by the five permanent Members of the UN Security Council? Taken together, arguments and questions related to the elimination or significant reduction of war point to four key issues. The first is that the structure of international politics sustains war. The fact that states exist as sovereign entities, lacking an overarching political sovereign, means that they are always liable, in theory, to resort to war to advance or defend their interests. The power balances between states only reinforce this. It goes hand in hand with another factor: distributive justice, or the abject lack of it in international politics. The world’s nations are

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profoundly unequal in terms of resources and wealth. Some are fabulously rich, with the average citizen having a standard of living far above that enjoyed by the upper tiers of society in the richest countries in history. Others, largely in the Global South, are by and large poor, with substantial portions of their populations living in poverty. In this regard, a more equal world might also address some of the power imbalances that exist. The second way war might be eliminated is institutional. This means altering the structure of international politics – perhaps by creating more effective collective security mechanisms or changing how breaches of international law are punished. For example, if heads of state or officials were routinely held accountable for the crime of aggression in the same way that domestic criminals are tried and punished for murder, then they would be much less inclined to start wars. As it stands, the ICC’s ability to deter aggression is extremely limited.4 Similarly, if international humanitarian law was respected and followed, it would be far harder for all parties to wage war. In both cases, by increasing the costs of launching a war of aggression, or waging war itself, armed conflict might slowly slip into oblivion as fewer and fewer leaders resorted to it. Then there is an argument for delegitimizing war. Some argue that focusing on the regulation of war is a dead end.5 Critics point out that the highly regulated forms of warfare that are now found in Western militaries serve to legitimize war-making, and thereby

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make it appear tolerable, even routine. To their way of thinking, the effort invested in making warfare humane enables war to persist. Better, as Samuel Moyn argues, to refocus on eliminating it. By pursuing the path of intellectuals and pacifists who sought to delegitimize war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we might therefore make war such an abhorrent option that domestic audiences would never support it, and political elites might work much harder to strike bargains and resolve conflicts before resorting to arms. Lastly, some make the point that war requires weapons and weapon systems, so by eliminating those, it might be possible to eliminate war. This point is perhaps self-evident, particularly given the reliance of modern warfare on complex weapon systems. The key target for those who believe this is the global arms trade. Were states to cease developing and selling new weapons, it would at least limit the military capabilities used in warfare to their present – admittedly high – levels of destructiveness. If states then steadily eliminated the systems needed to wage war, it would render war largely impossible on a point of practicality. Reducing and eliminating armed forces could also achieve the same goal. Each of these arguments contains logical pathways to the elimination of war. Some of them are more utopian than others – achieving a global redistribution of wealth or significantly changing the institutions of international politics is substantially more difficult than restricting or eliminating the global arms trade. Still, the central problem remains – humans exist

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in societies that are functionally autonomous. Ties that bind a community together in social solidarity usually outweigh cosmopolitan ties that bind humans together as members of one species. As long as political autonomy and communal solidarity exist, there is always the possibility that one society might use force against its neighbour. Similarly, if some form of world government were to be created, then conflicts over control of it would quickly become existential. Disarming states to stop them fighting one another would also disarm them in the face of criminal networks or insurgents who seek to control the state itself. Inter-state competition and cooperation If war cannot be eliminated, what might reduce the number of wars and their impact? The principal challenge linking many of the problems that war causes is the lack of cooperation between states. Where states cooperate, they are better able to find peaceful bargains that prevent war, limit the intensity and scope of armed conflicts, or bring them to a close quickly. Without such cooperation, disputes are prone to escalate into armed conflicts with no determinate end. We live in a world that is sliding away from American hegemony. The collapse of the bipolar system of the Cold War left the US as the sole superpower, a position now threatened by the rise of China. While Russia remains an important strategic challenge for the US, its economy is a fraction of the size of the US’s. Conversely,

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the European Union (EU)’s economic output is on par with the US, but it isn’t a security threat – the US, after all, currently underwrites European security through its military commitment to NATO. Some argue that China’s economic growth and developing military capabilities make great-power war almost inevitable this century. Others reject this and insist that talking up its inevitability is part of the problem. Either way, we appear far from the 1990s, when international cooperation founded the ICTY and the ICC. Creating and maintaining such cooperation between powerful liberal democracies and powerful autocratic regimes is key to avoiding great-power conflict, but also to addressing many of the problems identified in the previous chapter. One of the dangers of the current US–China competition is that it threatens to divide the world in ways similar to the Cold War. Then, East/West blocs formed coherent, stable sets of rivals, with actual conflicts played out in proxy wars across the developing world and non-aligned countries. In the present day, the cohesion of the West versus either China or Russia is more questionable. Europe is currently dependent on Russia for much of its energy supply. Equally, many Western companies have significant dependences on China. More to the point, while many countries in the international system are seeking to join together in free trade agreements, they prefer to hedge their bets rather than to align themselves with one major power against others. The question is whether it is possible for the US and its allies to compete with China without

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deglobalization, forming antagonistic political blocs, or politicizing and weaponizing the infrastructure of international order to the extent that it falls apart. One of the strengths of the present international system is the degree to which states are economically interdependent. Economic interdependence has underpinned peace between states in western Europe, and now the EU, since the 1951 Treaty of Paris, which bound together the economies of France and West Germany, alongside a number of other European states, by pooling their coal and steel production. Global economic interdependence has not eliminated inter-state wars, but it has made them much more costly. It has also increased the costs of war for the global system, notably when wars disrupt trade flows, as the Russo-Ukrainian war disrupted the export of Ukrainian wheat in 2022. However, the present system also has its weaknesses. Economic interdependence can be weaponized by states with functional control over core elements of the institutions and infrastructures that underpin global trade. This ranges from the US’s influence over global banking and the UK’s influence over global insurance markets, to China’s key role in manufacturing much of the world’s consumer goods. Also, this means that smaller states can have outsized global economic influence due to their central role in specific industries – in Taiwan’s case, semiconductor production. Webs of sanctions and economic warfare can have a devastating effect on a country’s economy, but the secondary effects often ripple out as disrupted trade flows cause economic stresses elsewhere.6

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A way forward is to embrace the fact that the twenty-first century can, and likely will, feature a multipolar international order. This reflects changes in global economic power. While China is drawing level with the US in its share of the global economy, their economies have jointly increased to about 42 per cent of global GDP.7 But China’s astronomical growth rate is slowing, meaning that it is unlikely to ever assume the dominance that the US once held over the global economy. As more mid-sized powers grow in wealth and stature, the future is likely to see networks and alliances of countries working together to advance their interests, rather than the large, static economic blocs of the Cold War. Rather than create sharp fault lines in global trade and commerce, working within multipolarity can help avoid wars. Forming smaller alliances built around specific economic and security interests is a way to achieve this. Such alliances might, in theory, deter aggressive states, while not threatening the interconnectedness of the world’s political structure or economy. If increased cooperation between states is a means of reducing wars and conflicts, then economic interdependence needs to be sustained in a multipolar world. The challenge to this is that, in the long run, weaponized interdependence and economic warfare threaten to unravel the global economy. The rational response of any state witnessing the West choke Russia’s economy following its unlawful invasion of Ukraine is to seek to ensure that they cannot be isolated in the same way. The question, then, is how to prevent the

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architecture of international order being weaponized. Is that even possible? Is the temptation to politicize the infrastructure on which the world runs too great? What would be needed, ultimately, is temperance from the states entrusted with the infrastructure of the international system, or a move towards federated governance structures that are resistant to domination by a single state. Those would, however, transform the underlying networks that support and maintain global infrastructure. This kind of transformation is already at work in terms of Internet governance, where the original global information network is now divided along territorial boundaries subject to the filtering and control of states themselves. At heart, this means that global standards cannot be raised without dialogue and are unlikely to be raised uniformly. Since adherence to the law of armed conflict also limits a state’s ability to wage war, the refusal of powerful autocratic states to abide by it also limits the degree to which their peer competitors (the US) can change. Democratic states might raise their standards unilaterally, but they cannot take some options off the table without risking weakness in future conflict. Conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding The proposition that war can’t be eliminated doesn’t change the fact that some conflicts can be prevented from escalating into armed conflict and violence. Nor does it alter the ability of the international community

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or regional organizations to intervene in conflicts to lend weight to peace agreements via peacekeeping missions or even use force to bring warring parties to the negotiating table. And breaking cycles of violence through peacebuilding measures can stabilize countries and regions, lessening the likelihood of future wars. Competition between the US and China is widely thought to raise the chances of an armed conflict between them. In particular, the primary crisis scenario that might lead to war is a Chinese attempt to annex Taiwan using military force. For some, this kind of military confrontation is the almostinevitable by-product of changing power balances in international politics. Others think that it can be prevented through deterrence and skilful diplomacy. Crucially, these kinds of great-power conflicts can be distinguished from smaller inter-state wars, like the second Nagorno-Karabakh war of 2020. Strategic competition incentivizes major powers to prevent small armed conflicts outside their primary areas of concern and contention. This is because these armed conflicts can divert attention and drain resources that could otherwise be dedicated to the primary challenges that they face. In the US’s case, this means that active diplomacy to prevent any kind of large-scale, inter-state armed conflict in the Middle East is important, as one would drain some of the resources it needs to compete with and deter China in Asia. Equally, while the US is committed to supporting Ukraine, it is ultimately in its own best interests that the Russo-Ukrainian war ends as soon as possible, albeit in circumstances that make

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long-term strategic sense. Peace is preferable to war, but capitulation to Russia would make future Russian revanchism more likely. Civil wars are harder to predict and prevent. It is unlikely that every future civil war can be prevented, but policymakers now have access to more useful information than in previous decades. In the 1990s, faced with the outbreak of conflicts seemingly from nowhere, international civil society groups formed conflict-monitoring organizations to alert states and civil society groups where political instability threatened to escalate into armed conflict. In the present day, the level of granular data available on political instability – the kind that might lead to civil wars – is astonishing. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) tracks 246 different countries and territories around the world, providing researchers and conflict-monitoring organizations with near real-time data with which to identify trends that might lead to conflict.8 The importance of this is that a watched world might well be a safer one. Information about distant wars used to be transmitted by mass media companies, whereas the advent of the Internet has enabled a huge range of actors to communicate about wars via social media platforms and websites. The streams of information available to global publics are inherently political, and are often used by participants to shape perceptions about their actions. As incomplete a view of war as it may provide, the Internet still enables vastly more information to circulate than in previous

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eras. Might this help prevent wars? It makes it much more difficult for states to mass military forces for an attack without both states and the public being able to detect and understand it. This reduces the ability of states such as Russia to use force in a covert way for territorial annexation, even if it doesn’t preclude overt assault, as in 2022, or lower-level false flag operations. It is also difficult for states to deny involvement in a conflict when evidence of it can freely circulate. This increases the political costs and consequences of covert intervention. This is particularly important when considering how to prevent civil wars from escalating and drawing in external powers. Unfortunately, irregular warfare and sub-threshold conflict is a feature of great-power competition. Notably, it is an effective tool for regional powers competing for influence in their local region. States now use a range of means of intervening in armed conflicts using professional armed forces or PMSCs to assist local governments, expecting payment and influence in return. We should therefore expect more of these kinds of internationalized armed conflicts to happen over this century. If these kinds of interventions cannot be prevented, then at least open-source monitoring means that they will always be open secrets, rather than covert interventions. As such, it raises the political stakes for state involvement, although this is affected by the character of the intervening state. Russian and Chinese PMSCs operating in Africa, for example, are far less visible than Western special forces operating in Iraq and Syria are to Western publics.9

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What is perhaps most important to recognize about the current US–China competition is that, unlike the Cold War, China is seeking to create a world safe for authoritarian states such as itself. This goal can be interpreted in a defensive sense – making the international system safe for authoritarian states – or an aggressive sense – undermining the international order for its own benefit. Either way the goal of widespread influence is more limited in scope than the revolutionary aims and ideologies that drove the Cold War. This means that the logic behind many of the ideologically driven proxy wars of the Cold War is absent, which likely means less use of irregular warfare to destabilize states as part of US–China competition. This does not, however, preclude either side getting caught up in ideologically or religiously motivated regional rivalries. The struggles to prevent, ameliorate and end wars will always be imperfect enterprises. As wars are fought for many reasons, there can be no silver bullet to prevent them. Likewise, there are many factors that might enable people to reduce or mitigate the violence in war, but a truly humane war must by definition remain an impossibility. Where wars are restricted to just two states, peace deals are easier to agree and enforce, but contemporary wars have many more interested parties.10 Long-running civil wars are particularly difficult to end since the fracturing of a state into violent groups creates a political ecosystem where armed groups benefit from continued insecurity. Against all of this there is, however, room for optimism

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and hope. The UN’s Women, Peace and Security agenda, for example, has sought to transform the way states and international organizations approach questions of war and peace by challenging the dominance of men in areas such as conflict prevention and peacebuilding. What holds further promise for the future are developments in peacekeeping and peacebuilding. UN peacekeeping relies on the consent of states, but it can still be a powerful tool to stabilize postconflict situations. Peacekeeping has also evolved considerably from the 1990s, when UN peacekeepers were sometimes inserted into conflicts with unclear rules of engagement. Clarity of purpose and clear rules of engagement make peacekeepers better able to defend themselves and civilian populations. Importantly, the competition between the US and China does not preclude cooperation in authorizing peacekeeping missions where there is local appetite for them, even if does likely rule out authorization for peace enforcement missions against the will of the local state. If wars will remain hard to prevent and difficult to regulate, what about the ability to end them? Wars end via political bargains or de facto stalemates that might then be transmuted into stable, peaceful relations. How can societies or international institutions promote peacebuilding? Experience of the successes and failures of these, and post-conflict truth and reconciliation processes, have enhanced our collective understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Recognition, for example, that the exclusion

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of women from peacebuilding processes can lead to long-term harms to civilian populations means that peace processes can be designed to reduce post-conflict instability and cycles of violence that can re-ignite a civil war.11 Again, such issues are not affected by the overarching competition between the US and China, and therefore points to the fact that while some conflicts are likely to be exacerbated by the contest over international order, it need not exacerbate all conflicts, and might even help to generate cooperation to resolve some civil wars. Alliances Alliances, collective security agreements and bilateral security guarantees deter wars by signalling to any would-be aggressor that attacks on members are likely to provoke collective military responses. One of the primary reasons NATO still exists is that Europe is collectively unable to defend itself against Russia, and therefore a stable transatlantic alliance is necessary to deter any future Russian aggression. Can alliances prevent war? Or do they generate insecurity and cause wars? Much depends on the perception of the countries targeted by a particular alliance. NATO, for example, was focused on the Soviet threat, and, in the post-Cold War world, Russia. It is now, however, developing a common political posture on China, which has resulted in the inclusion of China in its 2022 Strategic Concept, a key document that outlines its strategic posture.12 This, predictably,

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triggered outrage in China. The problem facing a defensive alliance such as NATO is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to convince its likely opponents of its defensive intent. This is because NATO also has to deter Russian aggression at the same time that it seeks to convince the Russian government of its defensive character. Luckily it does so in a relatively static strategic environment in Europe. East Asia, on the other hand, is a fast-developing environment, where long-term US allies such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have to contend with growing Chinese military power, and across the region states are split by rival maritime claims in the South China Sea. In thinking about the role of alliances in East Asia, the key challenge is to build a stable – and persuasive – set of military linkages that deter territorial aggression against Taiwan, or conflicts in the wider region arising from competing maritime claims, without sparking war with China. In this regard, the ‘NATO model’ of a single alliance structure with a common strategic aim and posture (even though NATO itself can be quite divided at times) seems improbable. Instead, forms of ‘minilateralism’ – smaller strategic pacts that build capabilities and shared postures to counter inter-state aggression – appear to be the way forward.13 Through such means, many hope, Western states can support their allies in the region and deter Chinese action to conquer Taiwan using military force. The non-monolithic nature of such agreements means that states do not need to generate region-wide agreements on military spending or strategic aims, and

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therefore these small agreements stand more chance of working. Such an approach embraces multipolarity. It also does not require states to share an identical diplomatic view of the region in relation to maritime claims or the sovereign status of Taiwan. It also enables European states with the will and capability to support their partners on the other side of the world. The drawback is that linking both the US and leading European states to any conflict in the South China Sea threatens to magnify the global consequences should war break out. A second drawback is that it is relatively expensive for European states to adjust their forces and commit them to the region, compared to maintaining them primarily for the defence of Europe. Their ability to maintain the resources and political will necessary for these commitments in the coming decades is unclear. It appears that we are entering a period in which the ability of the UN to ensure collective security via the Security Council is going to be limited by intense strategic competition between great powers. That does not mean that the UN itself is moribund, but the scope for UN action is likely to be greatest where the core interests of the five permanent Members are not at stake. With this in mind, however, multilateral regional security arrangements to maintain peace and security remain a possibility in many areas of the world. Multilateral security cooperation that functions well within the wider framework of strategic competition and multipolar international order is likely to be the best hope for preventing future wars.

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Climate change This brings us to the central challenge facing all states this century: climate change. The Earth’s climate is changing as a result of human activity and the planet is heating up. The best available scientific modelling predicts that the average temperature globally will increase by at least 1.5 degrees centigrade by 2050, with a very limited and unlikely set of circumstances that permit it to end the century below that level.14 Such rapid changes in temperature have dramatic consequences for both animals and plants, threatening to drive many animal species to extinction and changing where staple crops like wheat can be grown. With the addition of other factors, such as rising sea levels and water scarcity, climate change will force large numbers of people to move over the coming century. More succinctly: all these factors increase the risk of war in the context of climate change. This is in part because climate change itself is thought to be a driver of armed conflicts. Many expect that the economic and social pressures that climate change causes will exacerbate existing social tensions and therefore increase the risk of future armed conflicts.15 Some things are less likely to change. Waging war will remain an energyintensive, as well as destructive, activity. State armed forces are reliant on vehicles and weapon systems that consume large volumes of fuel, and therefore produce considerable carbon emissions. Many platforms like fast jets and tanks don’t appear to have a viable path towards electrification so states will retain weapon

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systems that depend on fossil fuels and require continued access to oil to wage war. Climate change, however unwelcome, does bring with it an opportunity for greater cooperation. It will, over the long run, generate domestic and international problems for all states. Deadly heatwaves of increasing lethality will affect China as well as the US.16 So, too, will global food insecurity as climate changes alter patterns of food production. Currently, the US and China compete in terms of economic growth and both countries are hooked on cheap energy. While the US’s use of natural gas and coal for electricity production has remained largely the same over the past two decades, China has increased its use of coal-fired power, and its overall energy use increased 2.5 times in the period, reflecting the fact that its economy (and energy use) started from a relatively low base at the turn of the millennium.17 But as the costs of climate change come due, a variety of scenarios might play out. The global economy is locked in a dilemma – domestic populations want to preserve or improve their quality of life, which requires economic growth, competition, and greater energy use, the generation of which can contribute to climate change and long-term disaster for all. Exiting this dilemma by making the global switch to renewable fuels and zerocarbon (or less) economies requires careful cooperation between states, because an accelerated move towards net-zero by one state might harm its short-term economic competitiveness relative to others. Climate change therefore has the potential to increase states’ willingness to cooperate. Liberal democracies

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will have to work with authoritarian states to strike bargains that avert climate disaster. The question, then, is whether the need for such bargains will ever outweight the importance of traditional security threats. In objective terms, the price of non-cooperation over climate change is so high that it should trump all state threats and strategic dilemmas mentioned so far. In practice, states’ priorities are not always rational and sometimes highly ideological. One potential solution, therefore, is to work to persuade political elites and domestic publics of the collective nature of the threat that climate change poses. Governments are unlikely to be able to form stable bargains over climate change without persuading their domestic audiences of the need to do so, because many of these bargains will require changes to individual behaviours, and foregoing economic activity or growth. However, the need to strike such bargains might help to put many individual political problems in international affairs in perspective. In the long term, it will reshape international politics, notably by changing the world’s dependence on fossil fuels produced in key regions like the Middle East. Perhaps, in this way, some of the worst possibilities of US–China competition can be avoided. If not, the consequences could be disastrous. War and enhanced competition between the two countries might destroy the possibility of global cooperation over climate change, and therefore doom efforts to prevent even higher levels of global warming by the end of the century.

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Arms control One of the principal tools of statecraft that has reduced or limited the carnage of war is arms control agreements – bilateral or multilateral agreements to reduce the number of certain classes of weapon systems, not field them, or prohibit them entirely. These might help to avert future wars by building trust between opposing states and preventing arms races, and they can also limit the consequences of conflict by restricting the availability of key weapon systems. One of the remarkable features of the Cold War was that the West and the USSR managed to reach to a series of arms control agreements that limited the weapons that either party would field or develop and thereby reduced the possibility of conflict escalation or catastrophic nuclear mistakes. Arms control agreements serve multiple purposes in international relations. First, they reduce uncertainty – the limits set within agreements also serve as thresholds which states understand as politically important. Second, by placing physical limits on the number or location of deployed forces, or their location, arms control agreements limit the early potential consequences of military crises. Third, they can reduce the overall intensity of conflicts by limiting the means available to participants. The Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention have helped to eliminate the large stockpiles of those weapons that were developed by states during the twentieth century, even if they have not entirely eliminated their possession and use.

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This cooperation also extended to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which eliminated blinding lasers, among other weapons. In addition, treaties banning anti-personnel landmines, cluster munitions and nuclear weapons have also been signed, but they have not achieved universal consent, and look unlikely to do so. A sticking point with arms control agreements is ensuring compliance from states that are liable to use a given type of weapon system.18 In many cases, cooperation is in both sides’ strategic interest – building large numbers of nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles is, after all, expensive. However, non-compliance can give one side a strategic edge. This is why verification measures that provide for inspections of a state’s arsenal or production capacity are an important part of arms control regimes. The Biological Weapons Convention’s lack of one, for example, makes it a weaker regime than the Chemical Weapons Convention. A second problem, however, is that changes in international politics can affect the strategic calculus behind a treaty. In recent years the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) has prevented both Russia and the US from producing and possessing land-based ballistic and cruise missiles with a range of 500–5,000 km. This created a ‘hollow middle’ in the arsenals of both countries, which could only field relatively short-range missiles or long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles. The problem is that the calculus on both sides changed after the Cold War. Russia began to develop missiles that purportedly

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had effective ranges over 500  km and the US was confronted with China, which was not part of the INF, developing intermediate-range missiles.19 China’s rise, in this case, destabilizes the INF regime, independent of Russia’s compliance or non-compliance, because it changes the importance of intermediate-range missiles for the US. Beyond this, some weapons are hard to subject to such agreements. In recent years, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons has engaged with the issue of lethal autonomous weapon systems, sometimes called ‘killer robots’.20 Activists, and some states, want a ban on weapon systems that can select and kill targets without human supervision. But autonomy, as a property of a system, is far less definable than an effective range measured in kilometres, and different degrees of automation and autonomy have existed in weapon systems for decades, particularly in defensive systems. Consequently, the process appears stalled, with leading states that might develop and deploy such weapons showing little interest in progressing talks from their present state towards negotiating a treaty to ban lethal autonomous weapon systems. Emerging technologies are hard to subject to preemptive bans because their potential impact and controllable characteristics are sometimes unknown or hazily defined. This is particularly the case in cyberwarfare, where ‘cyber weapons’ effectively escape characterization. Offensive cyber capabilities rest on the ability of states (or non-state groups) to generate and sustain organizations with the technical capability

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to access, disrupt or subvert other computer networks. While key organizations and states are well known, quantifying their relative capabilities is difficult, much less defining key aspects of cyberwarfare that might be amenable to arms control agreements. The few that are definable – for example ‘zero-day exploits’ that enable cyber attacks which target vulnerabilities in software and systems previously unknown to its developers and users – are also used in intelligence operations, making international regulation difficult. In total, then, arms control and similar forms of statecraft can help, but there are still barriers to effectiveness. Agreements related to cybersecurity, in particular, are more difficult than equivalent agreements on nuclear weapons due to the underlying technology and problems of verification and ensuring adherence. Changing the rules Regardless of whether war can be completely eliminated, its conduct can be more strictly regulated. Any pathway to the elimination of war would involve heavy regulation of armed conflict. Regulation also affects the legitimacy of war and warfare; we cannot explain the visceral shock of viewing conflicts such as the Russo-Ukrainian war without reference to the social expectations set by the regulation of war. Some peace activists agree with this approach, hence the emphasis in the post-Cold War world on banning weapons such as cluster bombs and anti-personnel landmines. Every ban chips away at the freedom of

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states to wage war, a fact recognized by states not party to these treaties, who vocally defend their right to use such weapons. There are numerous ways in which the regulation of war and warfare might be changed to lessen the harms war causes. One is to make international humanitarian law more coherent by getting rid of existing discontinuities between international and non-international armed conflicts. Another is to promote human rights in armed conflict so that their importance is properly acknowledged and respected. Lastly, militaries and non-state armed groups could change the way that they operate, further integrating international law into the training of their forces and the design of their operations. Can any of these potential solutions be made to work under conditions of US–China competition and Russian revanchism? One problem is that any universal bargain to update international humanitarian law has to take into account the different degrees of adherence to international law between competing states. Russia’s conduct of the Russo-Ukrainian war – and its other recent conflicts such as its 2008 war with Georgia and the Chechen wars of the 1990s and early 2000s – indicates that its military has no problem with committing war crimes including systematic looting, rape and murder, alongside indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations. Equally, US attitudes to human rights law in war means that it is unlikely to agree on how that law applies in armed conflicts that involve many of its own allies.

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One potential path forward is unifying international humanitarian law so that it treats international and non-international armed conflict alike.21 This would have the direct effect of increasing the protections afforded to civilian populations in civil wars. Such a unification would make logical sense, particularly given the fact that international and non-international armed conflicts overlap in almost half of current wars. It would, however, mean states accepting more regulation over internal armed conflicts, which is an area that they have typically resisted. A second way forward would be to increase military forces’ compliance with international law. In a sense, this has been the ongoing project of the ICRC for over a century. We can, however, point to significant divergences between state armed forces, even before we consider non-state armed groups, in the degree to which the constraints of international humanitarian law are built into their practices. This is not a panacea, as those studying the role of military lawyers have pointed out: it won’t necessarily produce perfect outcomes.22 Still, it’s better that the legal considerations are built into planning and operations, and so measures to transfer best practices between militaries in this area may help. Improving the highly legalistic approaches developed by the US and NATO states is important, but ensuring that conscript armies receive appropriate training in international humanitarian law is likely to have more impact. Many state armed forces rely on conscripts, rather than the professional all-volunteer forces of NATO states. Since states engaged in civil wars often

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use conscript forces and state-aligned armed groups, working out the best way to ensure legal compliance by these troops would therefore be highly effective in reducing the overall harms inflicted by wars in the twenty-first century. Even if war is unlikely to be eliminated, states can still work for a more peaceful world. The point, as ever, is that even though international politics is difficult, diplomacy can produce results. The fact that no silver bullet exists does not mean there is no point in trying.

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6 CONCLUSION

W

hat is war for? The question that animates this book has no single answer. War is a tool in international politics, but it is one that can be used to achieve a huge variety of political goals. For some, war is something to be contemplated only when the vital interests of the state are at stake; for others, war may be worth gambling on to take back what they see as rightfully theirs. There are occasions when war is a necessary evil and circumstances mean that standing by permits greater harm and injustice to unfold. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that civilians will always bear the brunt of war and warfare. In this regard war, however justified, is always something to regret. Regardless of its cause, the possibility of future conflict requires societies the world over to prepare for it. In some ways, preparing for war can bring a society together. The creation of strong institutions like the armed forces can symbolize the collective unity of a country. But in other ways, it

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can be detrimental: armed forces can prey on societies without strong civilian control and effective domestic institutions. The resources expended on training, equipping and maintaining a military cannot be used to support social welfare or healthcare systems. Either way, we live in a world replete with wars, and therefore prudence dictates that states prepare for the possible future threat of war. The question, then, is how to reduce the impact of war on everyday life, both in times of war and in times of peace. Academics consider wars to be important for a variety of reasons. Some wars heralded the arrival of a new form of warfare that would become dominant. Others changed the course of great power politics. We often study contemporary wars to glean insight into the potential impact of emerging technology on the conduct of war. These are all good reasons to study and examine war in the present and past. In this book I have aimed to avoid ranking wars in terms of their importance. This is because I think it’s vital to remember that for the people and societies directly involved in any war, it’s likely to be one of the dominant experiences of their lives. I have also tried, to the extent possible in such a short book, to give the reader a sense of the wars that exist around the world today. For reasons of space, I have not, however, been able to convey a sense of the variety of wars across the globe throughout human history. My rationale for including as wide a range of wars as possible is that I think we miss much of what is important about war in the contemporary world if we focus too much on the wars that are important to

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us for personal, professional or political reasons. War remains a common scourge of humanity, and it’s right to recognize it as such, wherever it occurs, as well as acknowledge the suffering it causes. It’s justifiable to be pessimistic about the future of war. This century appears every bit as prone to violent conflict as the last – perhaps more so as the effects of climate change kick in. The possession of nuclear weapons means that some states will be able to wage wars of aggression without fear of effective punishment by other states or international institutions. The language of international law is, after all, a way of thinking and speaking about the world without having to admit that significant power imbalances exist between states. We might compare that to the way that the language of strategic and political calculation is structured to dismiss the importance of normative constraints in international politics. Between extremes in either field, however, there are people who understand that defending and upholding values requires careful attention to the role that power plays in international politics, or that strategy and politics, while necessarily focused on what is possible, is ultimately about realizing social values. The fact that Vladimir Putin is unlikely to ever stand trial for leading a war of aggression on Ukraine – in no small part because Russia possesses nuclear weapons and is a permanent Member of the UN Security Council – should not stop the search for achievable ways to hold Russia and its armed forces to account for their conduct.

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Carl von Clausewitz, On War in Peters (ed.), The Book of War (Modern Library, 2000), p. 264. Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2006). BBC News, ‘Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict Killed 5,000 Soldiers’, 3 December 2020. Geoffrey York, ‘Tigray War Has Seen up to Half a Million Dead from Violence and Starvation, Say Researchers’ (Globe and Mail, 14 March 2022). UNHCR UK, ‘Ukraine Emergency’, 7 July 2022, https://www. unhcr.org/uk/ukraine-emergency.html.

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Tanisha M. Fazal, State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton University Press, 2008). Beatrice Heuser, War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices (Oxford University Press, 2022) pp. 85–9. Yoram Dinstein, War, Aggression and Self-Defence (Cambridge University Press, sixth edition, 2017), p. 12. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Polity, 2012); Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (Free Press, 1991). James G. March and Johan P. Olsen. ‘Elaborating the “New Institutionalism”’, in Goodin (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Science (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 159. Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First-Century Combat as Politics (Hurst & Co., 2012). Wayne E. Lee, Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History (Oxford University Press, USA, 2016), pp. 4–7.

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John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture from Ancient Greece to Modern America (Basic Books, 2004). There are also two observer states: the Holy See and Palestine, as well as Taiwan, which has not been able to rejoin the UN since its seat was transferred to the People’s Republic of China. Shawn Davies, Thérèse Pettersson and Magnus Öberg, ‘Organized Violence 1989–2021 and Drone Warfare’, Journal of Peace Research 59(4) (July 2022), pp. 593–610. Dapo Akande, ‘Classification of Armed Conflicts: Relevant Legal Concepts’, in Wilmshurst (ed.), International Law and the Classification of Conflicts (Oxford University Press, 2012). Austin Carson, Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2018). Michael Poznansky, In the Shadow of International Law: Secrecy and Regime Change in the Postwar World (Oxford University Press, 2020). J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (Naval Institute Press, 2014), pp. 66–72. Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 9. Christopher Blattman, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace (Viking, 2022). Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 1976). Siniša Malešević, The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Ch. 6. Carl von Clausewitz, On War in Peters (ed.), The Book of War (Modern Library, 2000), p. 282. Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (Yale University Press, 2022). Antulio J. Echevarria II, Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017). Christopher Tuck, ‘Modern Land Warfare’, in Jordan, Kiras, Lonsdale, Speller, Tuck and Walton (eds.), Understanding Modern Warfare (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Stephen Biddle, Nonstate Warfare: The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords, and Militias (Princeton University Press, 2021). William Wei, ‘“Political Power Grows Out of the Barrel of a Gun”: Mao and the Red Army’, in Graff and Higham (eds.), A Military History of China (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

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Data available via SIPRI, see https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex. David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Yale University Press, 2017). Vladimir Rauta, ‘Framers, Founders, and Reformers: Three Generations of Proxy War Research’, Contemporary Security Policy 42(1) (January 2021), pp. 113–34. Rubrick Biegon and Tom Watts, ‘Security Cooperation as Remote Warfare: The US in the Horn of Africa’, in McKay, Watson and Karlshøj-Pedersen (eds.), Remote Warfare: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (E-International Relations Publishing, 2021). Christine Cheng, Extralegal Groups in Post-Conflict Liberia: How Trade Makes the State (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 253–4. Ivan Arreguín-Toft, ‘How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict’, International Security 26(1) (2001), pp. 93–128. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Ch. 7. Ana Arjona, Nelson Kasfir and Zachariah Mampilly, Rebel Governance in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2015). World Food Programme, ‘Severe Hunger Tightens Grip on Northern Ethiopia’, January 2022.

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Larry H. Addington, The Patterns of War since the Eighteenth Century (Indiana University Press, second edition, 1994). Hew Strachan, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, ‘Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion’, International Security 44(1) (2019), pp. 42–79. Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Cornell University Press, 1994). Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2000). James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2018). Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History (MIT Press, 2017). https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

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United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs/ Population Division, ‘World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision’ (United Nations, 2019), p. 9. Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton University Press, 1996). Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2015), Ch. 7. Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Allen Lane, 2020). Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850 (Harvard University Press, 2016). Kyle M. Lascurettes, Orders of Exclusion: Great Powers and the Strategic Sources of Foundational Rules in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2020). Boyd van Dijk, Preparing for War: The Making of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (Oxford University Press, 2022). Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Rory Cox, ‘The Ethics of War up to Thomas Aquinas’, in Frowe and Lazar (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War (Oxford University Press, 2015). Orde F. Kittrie, Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War (Oxford University Press, 2016). David Luban, ‘Carl Schmitt and the Critique of Lawfare Beyond Traditional Concepts of Lawfare’, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 43(1) (2010), pp. 457–72. Daragh Murray, ‘How International Humanitarian Law Treaties Bind Non-State Armed Groups’, Journal of Conflict & Security Law 20(1) (2015), pp. 101–31. Bleddyn E. Bowen, War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr, The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2002). Keith L. Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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Michael C. Horowitz, The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2010). Jan Ångström and Sofia Ledberg, ‘“Civil and Military” as a Constitutive Categorization of the Study of War and Politics’, in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (Oxford University Press, 2021). Jon R. Lindsay, Information Technology and Military Power (Cornell University Press, 2020). Ellen Nakashima, ‘Hacks of OPM Databases Compromised 22.1 Million People, Federal Authorities Say’, Washington Post, 9 July 2015. Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins, Radical War: Data, Attention and Control in the Twenty-First Century (Hurst & Co., 2022). Drew Harwell, ‘Instead of consumer software, Ukraine’s tech workers build apps of war’, Washington Post, 14 March 2022. Jakob Hauter, ‘Forensic Conflict Studies: Making Sense of War in the Social Media Age’, Media, War & Conflict (August 2021). World Bank Indicator: Individuals Using the Internet (percentage of population). https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS Tiberiu Dragu and Yonatan Lupu, ‘Digital Authoritarianism and the Future of Human Rights’, International Organization 75(4) (2021), pp. 991–1017. Scott, Against the Grain. Bruce Hoffman, ‘British Air Power in Peripheral Conflict, 1919–1976’ (RAND Corporation, 1989). Audrey Kurth Cronin, Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation Is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists (Oxford University Press, 2020). Sidharth Kaushal, ‘Lessons from the Houthi Missile Attacks on the UAE’, RUSI Commentary, 2022. Emil Archambault and Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, ‘Drone Imagery in Islamic State Propaganda: Flying Like a State’, International Affairs 96(4) (2020), pp. 955–73. Thomas Eydoux, ‘How Rebel Fighters Are Using 3D-Printed Arms to Fight the Myanmar Junta’, France 24, 7 January 2022. John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker, ‘Mexican Cartel Strategic Note No. 18: Narcodrones on the Border and Beyond’, Small Wars Journal, 2016. Daniel Moore, Offensive Cyber Operations: Understanding Intangible Warfare (Hurst & Co., 2022).

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Chapter 4 1

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Nicholas P. Jewell, Michael Spagat and Britta L. Jewel, ‘Accounting for Civilian Casualties: From the Past to the Future’, Social Science History 42 (2018), pp. 379–410. David Keen, Complex Emergencies (Polity, 2008). Laura Sjoberg, Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War (Columbia University Press, 2013), Ch. 9. Jennifer M. Welsh, ‘The Individualisation of War: Defining a Research Programme’, Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi LIII (June 2019), pp. 9–28. Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo’s conviction was overturned on appeal, but it remains a landmark case. Elisabeth Jean Wood, ‘Conflict-Related Sexual Violence and the Policy Implications of Recent Research’, International Review of the Red Cross 96(894) (June 2014), pp. 457–78. Eliav Lieblich, ‘The Law of Warfare: 1989–2022’, in Benvenisti and Kritsiotis (eds.), The Cambridge History of International Law (Vol. XII): International Law Since the End of the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, n.d.). Gary D. Solis, The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War (Cambridge University Press, third edition, 2021). pp. 19–21. The Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 4. UN General Assembly, 2005 World Summit Outcome Document (a/RES/60/1). Andrew Osborn and Polina Nikolskaya, ‘Russia’s Putin Authorises “Special Military Operation” Against Ukraine’, Reuters, 23 February 2022. Sam Selvadurai, Law, War and the Penumbra of Uncertainty: Legal Cultures, Extra-Legal Reasoning and the Use of Force (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Frank G. Hoffman, ‘Hybrid Warfare and Challenges’, in Mahnken and Maiolo (eds.), Strategic Studies: A Reader (Routledge, second edition, 2014). Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022). Theo Farrell, Sten Rynning and Terry Terriff, Transforming Military Power Since the Cold War: Britain, France, and the United States, 1991–2012 (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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Neil C. Renic, Asymmetric Killing: Risk Avoidance, Just War, and the Warrior Ethos (Oxford University Press, 2020). Human Rights Watch, ‘Explosive Weapons Devastating for Civilians’, HRW.org, 2020. Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg, Introduction to Heinegg and Schmitt (eds.), The Implementation and Enforcement of International Humanitarian Law (Routledge, 2012). Chris Woods, Limited Accountability: A Transparency Audit of the Coalition Air War against So-Called Islamic State (Airwars, 2016). Helen Quane, ‘Silence in International Law’, British Yearbook of International Law 84(1) (2014), pp. 240–70. Rodrigo Campos, ‘Russia Vetoes Extension of Mission Probing Chemical Weapons Use in Syria’, Reuters, 24 October 2017. Lucrecia García Iommi, ‘Whose Justice? The ICC “Africa Problem”’, International Relations 34(1) (March 2020), pp. 105–29. Joanne Smith Finley, ‘Why Scholars and Activists Increasingly Fear a Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang’, Journal of Genocide Research 23(3) (July 2021), pp. 348–70. Dominic Tierney, ‘The Future of Sino-U.S. Proxy War’, Texas National Security Review 4(2) (2021), pp. 49–73.

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Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay (Cosimo, Inc., 2010). Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, The Internationalists: And Their Plan to Outlaw War (Penguin UK, 2017). Alexander Gillespie, A History of the Laws of War: Volume 1: The Customs and Laws of War with Regards to Combatants and Captives (Hart Publishing, 2011). Kevin Jon Heller, ‘Who Is Afraid of the Crime of Aggression?’ Journal of International Criminal Justice 18(1) (2020). Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Verso Books, 2022). Creon Butler, ‘The Russia Sanctions Will Transform the Global Economy’, The World Today, 2022. World Bank Data: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP. MKTP.CD?locations=CN-US-1W. https://acleddata.com/.

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21

22

Christopher Spearin, ‘China’s Private Military and Security Companies: “Chinese Muscle” and the Reasons for U.S. Engagement’, PRISM 8(4) (2020), pp. 40–53. David E. Cunningham, Barriers to Peace in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Claire Duncanson, Gender and Peacebuilding (John Wiley & Sons, 2016). NATO, NATO 2022 Strategic Concept, 2022, https://www.nato. int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2022/6/pdf/290622-strategicconcept.pdf. Bhubhindar Singh and Sarah Teo, Minilateralism in the IndoPacific: The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism, and ASEAN (Routledge, 2020). Alison Ming, Isobel Rowell, Sam Lewin, Robert Rouse, Thomas Aubry and Emma Boland, ‘Key Messages from the IPCC Ar6 Climate Science Report’, Cambridge Centre for Climate Science, October 2021. Katharine J. Mach, Caroline M. Kraan, W. Neil Adger, Halvard Buhaug, Marshall Burke, James D. Fearon, et al., ‘Climate as a Risk Factor for Armed Conflict’, Nature 571(7764) (July 2019), pp. 193–7. David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Crown, 2020), pp. 43–53. Laëtitia Guilhot, ‘An Analysis of China’s Energy Policy from 1981 to 2020: Transitioning Towards to a Diversified and Low-Carbon Energy System’, Energy Policy 162 (March 2022), 112806. Andrew J. Coe and Jane Vaynman, ‘Why Arms Control Is So Rare’, American Political Science Review 114(2) (May 2020), pp. 342–55. Shahryar Pasandideh, ‘The End of the “INF Treaty” and the USChina Military Balance’, The Nonproliferation Review 26(3–4) (May 2019), pp. 267–87. Frank Sauer, ‘Stopping “Killer Robots”: Why Now Is the Time to Ban Autonomous Weapon Systems’, Arms Control Today 46(8) (2016). Lindsay Moir, ‘Towards the Unification of International Humanitarian Law?’ in Morris, White and Burchill (eds.), International Conflict and Security Law: Essays in Memory of Hilaire McCoubrey (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 108–28. Craig Jones, The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare (Oxford University Press, 2020).

150

FURTHER READING In constructing this list, I have selected recent works over established works and aimed for books that would give the reader a broader understanding of war in general, or specific themes relevant to contemporary war and warfare. War Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World (Profile Books, 2021) Lawrence Freedman, Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine (Allen Lane, 2022) Beatrice Heuser, War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices (Oxford University Press, 2022) Margaret Macmillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Profile Books, 2021) Cathal J. Nolan, The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019, 2022) Jennifer E. Sims, Decision Advantage: Intelligence in International Politics from the Spanish Armada to Cyberwar (Oxford University Press, 2022)

151

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

War in the contemporary world Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins, Radical War: Data, Attention and Control in the Twenty-First Century (Hurst & Co., 2022) Mark Galeotti, The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022) Daniel Moore, Offensive Cyber Operations: Understanding Intangible Warfare (Hurst & Co., 2022) Hugo Slim, Solferino 21: Warfare, Civilians and Humanitarians in the Twenty-First Century (Hurst & Co., 2022)

152

INDEX A

accountability 103–5 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions (1977) 64, 98 Afghanistan 31, 61, 70, 75, 98 Africa 124 agricultural revolution 53 agriculture 52 Airwars 104 alliances 108, 120, 127–8 al-Qaeda 98 Amnesty International 88 annihilation 36 anti-personnel landmines 136 anti-satellite missiles 87 Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) 123 arms control 112, 133–6 arms trade 116 ARPANET 72 Asia 51, 122, 128 asymmetric warfare 103 attrition 36, 37, 69, 114 Austria-Hungary 35 authoritarianism 125

B

bargaining processes 24, 27–32 bin Laden, Osama 73 Biological Weapons Convention 133 British Empire 49

C

censorship 75 Chechen wars 137 chemical weapons 103 Chemical Weapons Convention 133 China 54, 73, 83, 96, 106, 111, 117, 119, 122, 126, 127, 135, 137 Chinese civil war 38, 50 Chinese Communist Party 38 Circassia 10 cities 56 civilians in war 44, 65, 74, 84, 94, 98–101, 103, 109, 127, 137, 140 civil war 4, 20, 30, 39–45, 62, 77, 108–10, 112, 123, 125, 127, 138 Clausewitz, Carl von 1, 13, 24, 26, 29, 47 climate change 106, 112, 130–2, 142 cluster bombs 136 coalitions 25, 66, 104, 108 Cold War 59, 68, 117, 120, 125, 133 colonization 57 combined-arms warfare 37 communications 50 communications networks 71 computers 67, 72 conflict classification 18–22

153

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

conflict dynamics 18, 41 conflict-monitoring 104, 123 conflict prevention 123–6 conflict-related sexual violence 85 conflict resolution 42 conflict termination 30 conflict threshold conditions 19, 20, 95–7 conscription 34, 49, 139 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons 134, 135 counter-insurgency 38 credible threats 29 Crimea 33, 92 crimes against humanity 11, 26, 44, 61, 65 criminal warfare 102–3 cruise missiles 98 cyber attacks 73, 78–9, 94, 136 cybersecurity 79, 136 cyberspace 78 cyberwarfare 135–6

D

decolonization 58, 59, 61, 64 de-escalation 30 defence production 69 defence spending 39, 107 deglobalization 119 deterrence 70 Dinstein, Yoram 11 dislocation 36 distributive justice 114 drones 70, 78, 94

E

East India Company 58 Echevarria II, Antulio 36 ecological damage 99 economic interdependence 119 economic warfare 119 electronic warfare 68

energy sources 53, 55, 87, 118, 131 escalation 18, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 34, 41, 96, 117, 121, 124, 133 Ethiopia 45 ethnic identity 40 European Court of Human Rights 89 European Union (EU) 118, 119 exhaustion 36

F

failed states 61 famine 84 firepower 49 First World War 35, 113 food insecurity 131 fossil fuels 132 Freedman, Lawrence 25

G

Gaddafi, Muamar 70 Geneva Conventions 63, 64, 98 genocide 10, 11, 26, 31, 44, 61, 65, 90, 102, 106 Georgia war (2008) 137 German Empire 10 Germany 35 global economy 51, 57, 77, 80, 86, 96, 119, 131 globalization 55, 108 global norms 26–7, 47, 62–6 Global South 115 global trade 14, 45 Google 79 guided missiles 68 Gulf War (1990–91) 28, 68

H

hacking 73 Hague Conventions 63

154

INDEX

Herero and Nama war 10 Hezbollah 78 Hiroshima 67 Holocaust 61 Houthis 78 humanitarian aid 45, 84 humanity, principle of 100 human rights 85, 88–9, 94, 101, 102, 106, 137 Human Rights Watch 88 Hussein, Saddam 28, 70 hybrid warfare 96

I

illicit arms trade 77 imperialism 15, 49, 57, 61, 63 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) 77 independence struggles 61 India 54, 58 industrial revolution 53, 62 infrastructure 57, 78, 84 insurgency 2, 17, 20, 25–6, 42–4, 69, 70, 77–9 intercontinental ballistic missiles 67, 134 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) 134 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 102, 138 International Criminal Court (ICC) 86, 91, 101, 115, 118 international criminal law 101 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 101, 118 international humanitarian law 12, 17, 19, 37, 44, 62, 65, 82–3, 83, 85, 88–9, 94, 98–101, 103, 112, 115, 137, 137–8 international institutions 31

international law 2, 8, 11, 12, 15–17, 18, 26–7, 62, 63–6, 80, 82, 83, 87–92, 103, 105, 106–7, 110, 114, 115 international order 106 international relations 64 international system 46, 51 Internet 71, 72, 75, 97, 121, 123 inter-state cooperation 117, 120, 131, 134 inter-state war 18, 20, 34–5, 37, 49–50, 77, 84, 86–7, 122 Iran 73, 79, 95 Iran–Iraq war 34 Iraq 28, 56, 62, 70, 75, 77, 109, 124 irregular warfare 38, 42, 124 Islamic State (ISIS) 2, 4, 40, 70, 78 Israel 61

K

Kant, Immanuel 113 Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) 113 killer robots 135 Kobane 56 Korean war 34 Kosovo 70, 84, 90, 100 Kurdistan 61

L

lawfare 66 Lebanon 78 Lee, Wayne E. 14 legitimacy of force 9, 87–91 Liberia 42 Libya 70

M

Microsoft 79 Middle East 122, 132 military capabilities 22, 28, 39 military equipment 34, 54

155

WHAT IS WAR FOR?

military logistics 67 military strategy 36 military training 38 ‘minilateralism’ 128–9 mortality rates 56 Mosul 56 Moyn, Samuel 116 multilateralism 112, 129 multipolarity 112, 120, 129 Myanmar 75, 78

precision weapons 76 prisoners of war 15, 89 private military and security companies (PMSCs) 71, 124 private wars 10 propaganda 78 proportionality 98 proxies 21, 93, 96, 104, 108 proxy wars 41 Putin, Vladimir 92, 142

N

R

Nagasaki 67 Nagorno-Karabakh war (2020) 4, 122 nationalism 48, 51, 58 NATO 70, 90, 100, 118, 127–8, 138 non-military warfare 96–7 non-state armed groups 3, 7–8, 17, 22, 38, 41, 42–4, 47, 61, 76, 93, 105, 137 nuclear war 18, 23, 35, 67 nuclear weapons 20, 23, 35, 67, 108, 133, 134, 142

O

Obama, Barack 73 Operation Infinite Reach (1988) 98 Ottawa convention banning anti‑personnel landmines 107

P

Palestine 61 peacebuilding 122, 126 peace deals 30, 112 peace enforcement 30 peacekeeping 30, 38, 122, 126 political elites 30, 116 political repression 43 population growth 54 post-conflict justice 32

rape as a war crime 86, 137 refugees 4, 84 remote warfare 70 reprisals 102 responsibility to protect (R2P) 90 ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA) 68, 78 right to life 88 Rome Statute (1998) 101 Russia 10, 19, 22, 33, 55, 66, 71, 74, 86, 92, 97, 105, 109, 117, 120, 123, 124, 127, 134, 137 Russo-Ukrainian war 4, 19, 28, 55, 66, 71, 77, 86, 109, 119, 120, 122, 137, 142 Rwanda 85, 90

S

sanctions 32, 87, 94, 102, 119 Saudi Arabia 109 scramble for Africa 57 Second World War 50, 54 self-defence 9, 17, 22, 39, 83, 92, 93 Serbia 90, 100 service economies 55 sexual violence in conflict 85–6, 137 Sierra Leone 42, 86, 101 social media 123

156

INDEX

Soleimani, Qassem 95 sovereign states 2, 57, 64, 114 Soviet Union 59, 133 Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) 101 state capacity 60 statecraft 28, 74, 94, 133, 136 state death 8 state formation 53 state sovereignty 2, 21, 58, 60, 64, 76, 90, 106 strategic competition 83, 111 strategy 22–7, 36, 82, 95, 102, 142 Stuxnet 73, 79 sub-threshold conflict 124 Sudan 98 Syria 40, 56, 62, 75, 93, 103, 109, 124 Syrian civil war 45 Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) 41

T

Taiwan 111, 119, 122, 128 Taliban 31, 44, 61, 70, 78 targeted killings 94–5, 100 technology 53, 67, 70, 98, 99, 135, 141 terrorism 20, 38, 94 Tigray war 4, 45 torture 86 transportation networks 49 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) 107 truth and reconciliation processes 126

U

Ukraine 19, 22, 55, 66, 74, 75, 92, 109, 120, 122, 142; see also Russo-Ukrainian war

United Kingdom 58, 93, 119 United Nations 17, 42, 89, 93 United Nations Charter 17 United Nations Security Council 17, 30, 83, 89, 91, 101, 107, 114, 129, 142 United States 49, 83, 88, 95, 97, 100, 106, 109, 111, 117, 122, 126, 134, 135, 137, 138 UN-OPCW Joint Investigation Mechanism 105 US–China competition 106–10, 111–12, 117–121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 137 USSR 59, 133

V

violence 9, 11, 12, 33, 65, 89, 101, 125

W

Wagner Group 71 war aims 35 war crimes 65, 66, 74, 82, 84, 86, 101–5, 109, 114, 137 warlords 32, 42 weapon systems 67, 116 women in war 85, 127 World Bank 59 World Summit Outcome Document (2005) 91 Wylie, John C. 25

X

Xinjiang 106

Y

Yemen 78, 110 Yugoslavia 42, 85

Z

‘zero-day exploits’ 136

157