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War is conflict involving the use of arms and physical force between nations, countries, or other large-scale armed groups.
Sometimes a distinction is made between a conflict and the formal declaration of a state of war. Given this distinction the term "war" is sometimes considered restricted to those conflicts where one or both belligerents have made a formal declaration.
War is contrasted with peace, which is usually defined as the absence of war.
| History of warfare |
| Prehistoric warfare |
| Ancient warfare |
| Medieval warfare |
| Early modern warfare |
| Modern warfare |
War is as old as human societies. Tribes of hunter gathers engaged in skirmishes over territory and resources. The earliest city states and empire in Mesopotamia became the first to employ standing armies. Organization and structure has since been central to warfare, as illustrated by the success of highly disciplined troops of the Roman Empire.
As well as organizational change technology has played a central role in the evolution of warfare. Inventions created for warfare have also played an important role in others fields. The continued advance of technology has led to an increase in the destructiveness and cost of warfare throughout human history.
The study of warfare is known as military history.
Today war is almost unanimously seen as an unfortunate event. Most believe that they should only be fought as a last resort. Others, known as pacifists, believe that all wars are wrong and should never be fought. This negative view of war has not always been as widely held as it is today. Many thinkers, such as Heinrich von Treitschke saw war as humanity's highest activity where courage, honour, and ability were more necessary than in any other endeavour. This attitude was embraced by many societies from Sparta in Ancient Greece to the fascist states of the 1930s. It was the defeat and repudiation of these states and their militarism in the Second World War combined with the unquestioned horror of nuclear war that has led to the current negative view of war.
Today only just wars are seen as acceptable, and it is the goal of organizations such as the United Nations to unite the world against wars of unjust aggression.
There have always been limits placed on war by culture, law, or religion. Inter tribal conflicts are often highly ritualized to limit actual loss of life. Overtime war has steadily escalated, approaching total war with the targeting of civilians and the mobilization of an entire society.
Attempts at codifying International law have been made to reduce the mutually destructive results of war. The signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the development of the United Nations System have succeeded in discouraging the description of any specific instance of warfare, by its participants, as a war. This process has been aided by such euphemisms as
See Articles 2(3), 2(4) and 2(7) of the United Nations Charter.
A number of treaties regulate warfare, collectively referred to as the Laws of war. The most pervasive of those are the Geneva conventions, the earliest of which began to take effect in the mid 1800s.
Treaty signing has since been a part of international diplomacy, and too many treaties to mention in this scant article have been signed. A couple of examples are: Resolutions of the Geneva International Conference, Geneva, 26-29 October 1863 and Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 75 U.N.T.S. 135, entered into force Oct. 21, 1950.
There is great debate over why wars happen, even when most people do not want them to. Representatives of many different academic disciplines have attempted to explain war.
Historians tend to be reluctant to look for sweeping explanations for all wars. A.J.P. Taylor famously described wars as being like traffic accidents. There are some conditions and situations that make them more likely but there can be no system for predicting where and when each one will occur. Social scientists criticize this approach arguing that at the beginning of every war some leader makes a conscious decision and that they are cannot be see as purely accidents.
Psychologists such as E.F.M. Durban and John Bowlby have argued that human beings, especially men, are inherently violent. While this violence is repressed in normal society it needs the occasional outlet provided by war. This combines with others notions, such as displacement where a person transfers their grievances into bias and hatred against other ethnic groups, nations, or ideologies. While these theories can explain why wars occur, they do nothing to explain when or how they occur. Why there are sometimes long periods of peace and other times eras of unending war. Since the innate psychology of the human mind is unchanging such variation should not occur.
A solution adopted to this problem by militarists such as Franz Alexander is that peace does not really exist. Periods that are seen as peaceful are actually periods of preparation for a later war or when war is suppressed by a state of great power, such as the Pax Britannica.
If war is innate to human nature as dictated by the psychological theories then there is little hope of ever escaping it. One alternative is to argue that war is only, or almost only, a male activity and if human leadership was in female hands wars would not occur. This theory has played an important role in modern feminism.
Other psychologists have argued that while human temperament allow wars to occur, they only do so when mentally unbalanced men are put in control of a nation. This school argues that all great war leaders such as Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin were mentally abnormal and thus if some sort of screening process, such as elections, could prevent these types from coming to power war would end.
A distant branch of the psychological theories of war are the arguments based on evolutionary psychology. This school tends to see war as an extension of animal behaviour, such as territoriality and competition. However, while war has a natural cause the development of technology has accelerated human destructiveness to a level that is irrational and damaging to the species. We have the same instincts of a chimpanzee but overwhelmingly more power. The earliest advocate of this theory was Konrad Lorenz.
These theories have also been criticized. Scholars such as John G. Kennedy argue that the organized sustained war of human beings differs more than just technologically from the territorial fights between animals.
Anthropologists take a very different view of war. They see it as fundamentally cultural, learnt by nurture rather than nature. Thus if human societies could be reformed war would disappear. To this school the acceptance of war is inculcated into each of us by the religious, ideological, and nationalistic surroundings in which we live.
Anthropologists also see no links between various forms of violence. They see the fighting of animals, the skirmishes of hunter gathering tribes, and the organized warfare of modern societies as distinct phenomena each with their own causes. Theorists such as Ashley Montagu emphasize the top down nature of war, that almost all wars are begun not by popular pressure but by the whims of leaders and that these leaders also work to maintain the system of ideological justifications for war.
Sociology has long been very concerned with the origins of war, an many thousands of theories have been advanced, many of them contradictory. Some uses detailed formulas taking into account hundreds of demographic and economic values to predict when and where wars will break out. The statistical analysis of war was pioneered by Lewis Fry Richardson following World War I. More recent databases of wars and armed conflict have been assembled by the Correlates of War Project, Peter Brecke and the Uppsala Department of Peace and Conflict Research. So far none of these formulas have successfully predicted the outbreak of future conflicts. A detailed study by Michael Haas found that no single variable has a strong correlation to the occurrence of wars.
Many sociologists have attempted to divide wars into types to get better correlations, but this has also produced mixed results. Data looked at by R.J. Rummel has found that civil wars and foreign wars are very different in origin, but Jonathan Wilkenfield using different data found just the opposite.
Sociology has thus divided into a number of schools. One based on the works of Eckart Kehr and Hans-Ulrich Wehler sees war a the product of domestic conditions, with only the target of aggression being determined by international realities. Thus WWI was not a product of international disputes, secret treaties, or the balance of power but a product of the economic, social, and political situation within each of the states involved.
This differs from the traditional approach of Carl von Clausewitz and Leopold von Ranke that argue it is the decisions of statesmen and the geopolitical situation that leads to war.
A popular new approach is to look at the role of information in the outbreak of wars. This theory argues that all wars are based on a lack of information. If both sides at the outset knew the result neither would fight, the loser would merely surrender and avoid the cost in lives and infrastructure that a war would cause, as Czechoslovakia did in 1938, for instance. Or, for instance, the Taliban elected to resist the United States incorrectly believing they could defeat them the same way that had the Soviets a decade earlier and thus did not surrender unconditionally, as did the junta ruling Haiti when US forces invaded in 1995. According to this theory wars occur when one side overestimates their own ability and underestimates that of their opponent. Thus if each side had complete knowledge of their power and that of their opponent wars would not occur.
Another school of thought argues that war can be seen as an outgrowth of economic competition is an anarchic international system. That wars begin as a pursuit of new markets, of natural resources, and of wealth. Unquestionably a cause of some wars, from the empire building of Britain to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in pursuit of oil this theory has been applied to many other conflicts. It is most often advocated by those of the left of the political spectrum who argue that such wars serve only the interests of the wealthy but are fought by the poor.
The economic theories also form a part of the Marxist theory of war that argues all war grows out of the class war. It sees wars as imperial ventures to enhance the power of the ruling class, and divide the proletariat of the world by pitting them against each other for contrived ideals such as nationalism or religion. Wars are a natural outgrowth of the free market and class system, and not until a world revolution occurs will war disappear.
Smaller armed conflicts are often called riots, rebellions, coups, etc.
When one country sends armed forces to another allegedly to restore order or prevent genocide or other crimes against humanity, or to support a legally recognized government against insurgency, that country sometimes refers to it as a police action. This usage is not always recognized as valid, however, particularly by those who do not accept the connotations of the term.
A war where the forces in conflict belong to the same country or empire or other political entity is known as a civil war.
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