Over the last decade (and indeed ever since the Cold War), the rise
of insurgents and non-state actors in war, and their readiness to
use terror and other irregular methods of fighting, have led
commentators to speak of 'new wars'. They have assumed that the
'old wars' were waged solely between states, and were accordingly
fought between comparable and 'symmetrical' armed forces. Much of
this commentary has lacked context or sophistication. It has been
bounded by norms and theories more than the messiness of reality.
Fed by the impact of the 9/11 attacks, it has privileged some wars
and certain trends over others. Most obviously it has been
historically unaware. But it has also failed to consider many of
the other dimensions which help us to define what war is--legal,
ethical, religious, and social.
The Changing Character of War, the fruit of a five-year
interdisciplinary program at Oxford Univeresity of the same name,
draws together all these themes, in order to distinguish between
what is really changing about war and what only seems to be
changing. Self-evidently, as the product of its own times, the
character of each war is always changing. But if war's character is
in flux, its underlying nature contains its own internal
consistency. Each war is an adversarial business, capable of
generating its own dynamic, and therefore of spiralling in
directions that are never totally predictable. War is both
utilitarian, the tool of policy, and dysfunctional. This book
brings together scholars with world-wide reputations, drawn from a
clutch of different disciplines, but united by a common
intellectual goal: that of understanding a problem of extraordinary
importance for our times.
This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Program on the
Changing Character of War.
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