Social Science Research Council

War, Then and Now
Monica Hirst and Itty Abraham
October 2002

If, at one time, war was taken to mean formal declarations by states and combat between professional armies seeking the capture of territory, that picture seems positively nostalgic in capturing the great variety of violent conflicts underway in the world. As so many scholars and others have pointed out, wars now involve a complex mix of international networks of mercenaries and exiles, refugees and displaced people, flows of illicit war materiel and resources, organized crime and corporations, humanitarian organizations and peace keeping troops, paramilitaries and formal armies. Wars are no longer easily bounded in time, or, put another way, the balance of forces arrayed against each other are so complex that bringing conflict to a close is no guarantee of peace breaking out. The incentives to perpetuate a lucrative 'order of disorder' allows conflicts to continue for decades -- with periods of aggressive conflict bleeding into periods of lesser conflict, rearmament, negotiations and then return to full scale war again -- making hollow familiar distinctions between war and not-war.

The location of war is no longer necessarily a battlefield or a border, but can be found in the heartland as much as in the peripheries, overseas as much as 'home', in global capitals as well as refugee camps. Under the forces of communication, modernity, and cosmopolitan values, human identities are more fluid than ever, even as new ideological conditions of purity are regularly imposed on communities by authoritative claims privileging one religion, race, or nation. The proclamation of a singular ethnic, religious, political, national identity -- the more imagined the better -- is often the precursor to conflict. Civilians, especially women, are subject to war and its ravages in ways greater than before, adding to the breakdown of distinctions between warriors and others. The global development crisis feeds into ongoing violence in complex and contradictory ways, even as we can put to rest the simple-minded nostrum that poverty breeds violence.

These developments have taken place at the same time as there has been a greater concentration of political, military and economic power in one country than ever before. The hegemonic status of the United States is built upon its economic wealth, its possession of vast reserves of weapons of mass destruction, and its willingness to use combinations of military, political and economic weapons to achieve its objectives. As noted above, unipolarity has not meant greater international security, far from it. However, a corollary of this problem seems to be that the attention of the US becomes a precondition for the temporary cessation of violence; going even further, we might find US inattention becoming a reason for conflict to break out. If all conflicts are extra-local, in the sense outlined above, the space for political negotiation is increasingly subordinated to the instigation of violence. Where violence becomes an over-determined substitute for dialogue, compromise, and agreement, the effect is to sharpen the choice between anarchy and order, at the immediate cost of democracy.

Based on this very brief discussion, we argue that (a) it is more useful to speak of violence rather than war (b) what we mean by security today is inherently international (c) states are only one among a range of actors involved in international conflict.

What are the right questions?

If we take security to mean, at a minimum, economic well-being and the end of violent conflict, analysts still find it difficult to frame the right questions to bring that condition to life. One reason for that inability is our degree of tacit dependence upon categories drawn from Max Weber's formulation of the modern state. Weber, writing from the disintegrating German empire in the early XX century, argued that the following categories best described the modern European state. The state was sovereign, namely that it respected no higher authority and it could create its own laws. These laws were accepted by the people because the state was seen as legitimate. If these laws were violated, only authorized representatives of the state could deploy punitive actions or violence, because it had successfully monopolized the means of violence. Laws were administered and adjudicated by a professional bureaucracy and were equally valid anywhere within the fixed and accepted territorial boundaries of the state.

Practically all of these conditions are the unstated assumptions underlying frameworks of international law, international organization and international relations. The taken-for-granted quality of these conditions have led to their identity with the security of the state. A violation of any of these conditions is understood as a threat to state security, and, by extension, worthy of all the force that the state can muster. What some have called securitization is the culmination of the process where very little of daily social activity can be held outside the sway of state scrutiny and possible (including coercive) action.

The centrality of Weberian definitions in shaping our conception of the present international order perversely highlights their distance from present day reality. As we have pointed out above, sovereignty, territoriality, monopoly of violence, and legitimacy are more absent than present. The countries of the world, from North to South, are racked with daily violations of their financial and political sovereignty. A considerable number of states face long standing wars of insurrection or secession emanating from territorially-based political authorities. Rarely do even governments with high degrees of political legitimacy manage to control completely the territories ostensibly their own.

The Way Forward

Weber was correct to identify the essence of modern politics in terms of the nature of political authority (legitimacy, sovereignty), its scope (territory), and its means (violence). However, each of these terms has gone through significant variation in the century since he wrote, and is situated differently wherever their forms might be observed. The first task of this project is therefore to identify the variations in the relationship of three key variables - sovereignty (political authority), territory (scope) and violence (means) - across different parts of the world and within different political contexts. The objective will be to offer a non-teleological approach to the study of human insecurities, located within a deep understanding of local histories. This approach permits a necessary second step, namely, a contextually defined and politically viable understanding of a sustainable and legitimate social order. Suspending our common sense assumptions of the locus of international security - the modern state - without replacing it with another foundational unit is the only way of escaping the vise of past understandings if we are to interrogate the problem of security on its own historically situated terms.

To describe these developments is a long way from proposing ways of understanding them, let alone proposing solutions to them. In order to begin the process of understanding, we invite the SSRC committee on global security and cooperation (GSC) to collectively reflect on the relationship of territory, sovereignty and violence in the world, bringing together its wide variety of experience, expertise and insight to produce a volume of essays that will offer a new understanding and approach to the study and practice of international security.

Primary questions:

(1) What are the principal threats to security facing us in the world today, which are most important, and why?

(2) What are the traditional functions of the state with regard to the provision of security, and what are the principal security functions of the contemporary state? Has there been a change over time, and what are the sources of change? In many cases, the state no longer monopolizes the use of violence and can even become a source of insecurity for society. Has the state changed its functions and/or has the nature of the state been transformed?

(3) [Bringing 1 and 2 together] Who or what have begun to take the place of the state in the provision of security (non-state actors? multilateral institutions? transnational social movements?), and what are some of the implications of this phenomenon?