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O N WAR: CONCEPTS , DEFINITIONS , RESEARCH DATA - A SHORT LITERATURE REVIEW AND
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Johan M.G. van der Dennen
1 WAR: CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS
1.1 Introduction
Even casual inspection of the literature reveals the following, incomplete, list of ‘war’ terms: limited war and total (or all-out) war, cold war and hot war, local war and world war, controlled and uncontrolled war, accidental war and premeditated war, conventional and nuclear war, declared and undeclared war, aggressive or offensive war and defensive war, general war and proxy war, international war and civil war, tribal and civilized war, preventive or pre-emptive war, protracted war, absolute war, war of liberation, war of conquest, war of commerce, war of plunder, revolutionary war, political war, economic war, social war, imperialist war, guerilla war, psychological war, strategic war, counter-insurgency war, dynastic war, monarchical war, ritual war, agonistic war, sacred war, instrumental war, genocidal war. Much of the complexity stems from the fact that the epithets refer to different aspects of, and perspectives on, war: e.g. war as condition, techniques of warfare, alleged motives and/or objectives of war, or assumptions about belligerent behavior and the causes (causative factors, determinants, conditions, etc. ) of war (cf. Grieves 1977). War is a species in the genus of violence; more specifically it is collective, direct, manifest, personal, intentional, organized, institutionalized, instrumental, sanctioned, and sometimes ritualized and regulated, violence. These distinguishing features and dimensional delineations are not limitative. It should be perfectly clear, however, that war, or the state of belligerence, is a very special category of violence (van der Dennen, 1977). Some of the listed war terms reflect concern for attitudes and behaviour, linked with assumptions about the cause of war. The term ‘imperialist war’ reflects both an attitude about the root causes of the war and an assumption about which States are guilty of having caused it. Also, much of the ‘nature of war’ is found not on the battlefield, but in the hostile behaviour and attitudes that characterize a state’s foreign policy. Q. Wright (1942; 1965) calls attention to the discussion of this psychological aspect of war in Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’, where the oscillations of war and peace are compared to the weather:
As the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together; so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. (Hobbes, 1651)
Hobbes’ view raises an interesting question for modern students. Can peace be defined simply as the absence of war (using ‘war’ in the sense of actual military combat) (Grieves, 1977)?
1.2 Formal and material distinction of peace and war
The important point is that peace and war as facts differ formally rather than materially, and are distinguishable by their locus and implements rather than by their intrinsic
qualities as human behavior. Peace, it would appear, is the aggregation of chronic, diffuse, unorganized domestic conflicts: war is conflict, acute, organized, unified and concentrated at the peripheries of a society’s habitat. (Kallen, 1939)
War and peace differ not in the goals pursued, only in the means used to attain them. (Barbera, 1973)
Clausewitz’s formula - war is the continuation of policy by other means - has been replaced by its opposite: policy is the continuation of war by other means. But these two formulas are, formally, equivalent. They both express the continuity of competition and the use of alternately violent and non-violent means towards ends which do not differ in essence. (Aron, 1966)
... the nature of war itself has changed. In particular there is no longer a dividing line between a state of peace and a state of war. (Eccles, 1965)
Behind both phenomena, war and peace, lies the same dimension of power. (Barbera,
Many political realists point out that the common basis of policy in both peace and war, namely the quest for power, makes them two inseparable parts of the same social activity. Blainey (1973) contends that the causes of war and peace dovetail into one another: “War and peace are not separate compartments. Peace depends on threats and force; often peace is the crystallization of past force.” Or formulated most succinctly: “In a system of power politics, there is no difference in kind between peace and war”. (Schwartzenberger, 1950)
War is a means of achieving an end, a weapon which can be used for good or for bad purposes. Some of these purposes for which war has been used have been accepted by humanity as worthwhile ends: indeed, war performs functions which are essential in any human society. It has been used to settle disputes, to uphold rights, to remedy wrongs: and these are surely functions which must be served... One may say, without exaggeration, that no more stupid, brutal, wasteful or unfair method could ever have been imagined for such purposes, but this does not alter the situation. (Eagleton, 1948)
These formulations are reminiscent of Ambrose Bierce’s sardonic definition of “peace” as: “a period of cheating between two periods of fighting” (Devil’s Dictionary), or Orwell’s famous dictum from 1984 : “Peace is War”.
Diametrically opposed to the vista of peace and war as a bipolar continuum is the view of a sharp and clear-cut borderline existing between the two conditions, thus implying a boundary-transgression in the transition from one state of affairs to the other. Brodie (1973), for example, states:
Although war represents human violence in its most intensive form, it is not simply human violence. It is something else besides, something with a distinctive and quite special configuration. The characteristics of this configuration cover a wide variety of phenomena, including the following: First, wars have tended, since antiquity, to have a clear and sharp beginning and an equally clear and sharp ending; and various ceremonials have been involved both in the initiation and the termination of war.
includes any type of population units which is capable of resorting to arms as a method of settling disputes. Perhaps the definition is too general, since it does not specify the duration of the conflict or the magnitude of the conflicting parties. As it stands this definition could be made to include riots.
B. Russell’s ( 1916) definition of war as “conflict between two groups, each of which attempts to kill and maim as many as possible of the other group in order to achieve some object which it desires” is even more general and uncritically inclusive. Russell states the object for which men fight as “generally power or wealth”.
Wallace (1968) considers war to be “the sanctioned use of lethal weapons by members of one society against members of another. It is carried out by trained persons working in teams that are directed by a separate policy-making group and supported in various ways by the non-combatant population”.
Ashworth (1968): “Mass or total war may be defined as a type of armed conflict between large nation-States in which populations and resources are rationally and extensively organized for conquest. It is important to note that populations are mobilized both in terms of activities and psychological states: the former implies comprehensive military and civilian conscription; the latter implies the systematic development of belligerent and hostile attitudes towards the enemy among all or most of the population.”
Deutsch and Senghaas (1971): “By ‘war’ we mean actual large-scale organized violence, prepared and maintained by the compulsion and legitimacy claims of a State and its government, and directed against another State or quasi-State, i.e. a relatively comparable political organization”.
Barringer (1972) considers war to be “one possible mode of policy activity aimed at effectively and favourably resolving an ongoing conflict of interests. In this sense war is but one of numerous conflict procedures, others being negotiation, conciliation, mediation, arbitration, and adjudication. It is merely a particular subset of the larger set of all conflict modes, encompassing all the socially (if not legally) recognized situations in which armed hostilities of considerable magnitude are conducted on a systematic and continuing basis by the armed forces of two or more political factions, organizations, nations, governments, or States. Because the term ‘war’ carries legal implications and connotations that no political body cares any longer to suffer or risk publicly, the de facto situation of war will be referred to as `hostilities’.
Bernard (1944) attempts an all-purpose definition of war which is neither so general that it is indefinite and vague nor so detailed that it is confusing. It may be stated as follows: “War is organized continuous conflict of a transient character between or among collectivities of any sort capable of arming and organizing themselves for violent struggle carried on by armies in the field (or naval units on water) and supported by civil or incompletely militarized populations back of the battle areas constituted for the pursuit of some fairly well-defined public or quasipublic objective.”
This objective is of course not always defined to the satisfaction of all concerned and it is liable to change according to circumstances during the continuance of the struggle. But upon the popular understanding of these objectives depends in large measure the degree and loyalty of the people’s support. While the war is between or among organized groups or
collectivities, the fact of organization implies leadership (generals, military staffs, civilian economic, political and moral organizers and leaders) and collective effort, both military and civilian. The need for discipline and coordination also implies obvious regimentation within the army and of the belligerent populations as wholes, as well as more subtle manipulation of the psychological and social factors contributing to both military and civilian morale (Bernard, 1944).
Beer (1974) presents a minimum definition of war as “the presence of direct international violence”.
Crew (1952) defines war “as organized, intraspecific conflict, in which force, coercion is displayed”.
Similar concise “political” definitions are presented by White (1949), Malinowski (1936; 1941), Mead (1964), Bouthoul (1959; 1962), Sokol (1961), Nieburg (1963), Valkenburgh (1964), Withey and Katz (1965), Plano and Olton (1969), van Doorn and Hendrix (1970), Czempiel (1971), Krippendorff (1971), Zsifkovits (1973), Barbera (1973), Harrison (1973), Van den Berghe (1978), The Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Oxford Dictionary, etc.
Bozeman (1976) has argued that the term “international war” no longer refers exclusively to violent conflicts between States. Rather, he says,
It now stands also for a broad spectrum of armed belligerence within the State, ranging from sporadic urban guerilla activities to civil wars, wars of liberation and secession, insurrections and other revolutionary uprisings, many of which are initiated and maintained in behalf of causes espoused by foreign principals. Moreover, this interpenetration of the domestic and foreign environments effaces altogether the conventionally accepted lines between legitimate and illegitimate force, and puts in question the theoretically established distinctions between war and peace. These interlocking conditions support the conclusion that the State, having forfeited important controlling functions customarily ascribed to it in world affairs, can no longer be regarded as a reliable medium for realistic differentiation among types of war and between the conditions of war and peace. Next, the erosion of the State as the fundamental, shared norm of political organization, together with general acquiescence in the coexistence of States and anti-State bodies as equal actors in foreign policy arenas, has gradually but ineluctably led also to the devaluation of the two State-based superstructures that provide the context for official foreign relations: (1) the world society of sovereign, equal States and (2) the law of nations, which stipulates the rights and obligations of these States.
Bozeman proposes civilization as an alternative:
Today, several factors combine in support of civilization as the proper focal point of war research. As preceding comments on the variegated forms of war and violence throughout the modern world have suggested, the Occidental model of the State has ceased to be a reliable indicator or measure of such phenomena as international war and internal war. Indeed, a survey of actually functioning power centres makes it doubtful whether one can still legitimately view the nation-State as the politically controlling, and hence unifying, organizational norm in international relations. Observations such as these, together with reflections on the conspicuous failure of recent war-related policies of the United States,
1.5 The judicial conception of war
Closely related to a political definition of war is the judicial conception. Q. Wright (1942;
- describes war as “a legal condition which equally permits two or more hostile groups to carry on a conflict by armed force”. The Marqués de Olivert is quoted as declaring that “war is a litigation or suit (litigio) between nations that defend their rights, in which force is the judge and victory is the judicial award”. This analogical and figurative characterization of war is perhaps more literary than factual (Bernard, 1944).
Eagleton (1933), after quoting numerous legal definitions of war from Cicero to the present, comes to the conclusion that “the preceding discussion leaves one with a great deal of uncertainty as to the meaning of war... [and that] to define war [juridically]... would present difficulties. Furthermore, it is desirable to eliminate the word, with all its unpleasant psychology, from the vocabulary of international affairs”.
Q. Wright (1926) defined war in the legal sense as “a condition or period of time in which special rules permitting and regulating violence between governments prevail, or a procedure of regulated violence by which disputes between government are settled”, and war in the material sense as “an act or a series of acts of violence by one government against another, or a dispute between governments carried on by violence”.
In his classic “A Study of War” (Q. Wright, 1942; 1965) war in the broadest sense was defined as “a violent contact of distinct but similar entities. In this sense a collision of stars, a fight between a lion and a tiger, a battle between two primitive tribes, and hostilities between two modern nations would all be war”. He therefore proposes a narrower definition: “the legal condition which equally permits two or more hostile groups to carry on a conflict by armed force”. He also noted the convergence with the traditional legal concept of war:
International lawyers and diplomats have usually followed Grotius’ conception of war as “the condition of those contending by force as such”, though they have often excluded from the conception duels between individuals and insurrections, aggressions, or other conditions of violent contention between juridical unequals. Furthermore they have insisted that “force” refers to military and naval activities, that is, to “armed forces”, thus excluding from the definition contentions involving only moral, legal, or economic force. With these refinements, the legal concept of war becomes equivalent to that adopted here.
Kelsen (1942) has distinguished two basic modern interpretations of war, and in each of them it is assumed that the existence of war is a matter for objective determination. His concern is with the legal status of war. According to the interpretation war is neither a delict nor a sanction. It is not a delict because war is not forbidden by any general international law. It followed, thus, that any State could war against any other State without violating any law. Obviously no State would violate its own laws in going to war, and, in the absence of international law forbidding war, there could be no question of a delict. On the other hand, war cannot be a sanction either, since there is no international law authorizing war. While every State authorizes its own wars and condemns its enemies, this hardly constitutes a legal state of affairs. War is, thus, beyond legal praise or blame.
The other position held that there was a general international law forbidding war on principle, except where an illegal act, a delict, had been committed. On this account war is either blameworthy, because it is a delict, or praiseworthy because it is a sanction.
In summing up this matter of the legal definition of war, Grob (1949) concluded that “there can be no such notion as war in the legal sense”. And Wells (1967) adds: “If there were some sense in the expression ‘legal war’, the existence of some international body which assigned the criterion for legality would at the same time make the expression otiose or contradictory”.
1.6 The legal definition of war
Those who stress the legal aspects of war maintain that a belligerent status implies sovereignty. A struggle can be considered a war only if the contenders are sovereign political units (tribes, fiefs, empires, nation-States, etc.). A rebellion against a sovereign authority may assume the character of a war, an internal one, only if the rebellious party succeeds in establishing a structure for asserting the sovereign power it claims. A certain amount of ambiguity is involved, however, in defining the warring parties as both sovereign and political. The point can be illustrated in the work of Quincy Wright.
In “A Study of War” Q. Wright (1942; 1965) tries to combine the legal, sociological, military, and psychological views of war and offer a synthesis. The resulting definition holds that war is a state of law and a form of conflict involving a high degree of legal equality, of hostility, and of violence in the relations of organized human groups; in a simpler wording: war is the legal condition which equally permits two or more hostile groups to carry on a conflict by armed force. Similar definitions are presented at other points in his study. In one, he asserts that war may be regarded “from the standpoint of each belligerent” as an extreme intensification of military activity, psychological tension, legal power, and social integration; and “from the standpoint of all belligerents” as an extreme intensification of simultaneous conflicts of armed forces, popular feelings, jural dogmas, and national cultures; he also repeats here the definition of war as a legal condition (p. 698). In another place he writes that war is at the same time an exceptional legal condition, a phenomenon of intergroup social psychology, a species of conflict and a species of violence (p. 700). In all three definitions, each of the four viewpoints is represented, but prominence is given to the legal aspect.
In a later study (Q. Wright, 1955), he distinguishes between “war in the legal sense” and “war in the material sense”. The legal conception, which he calls the narrower of the two, describes situations in which the participating groups are equally permitted to combat each other with the use of armed force. If war is seen in a material sense as armed struggle of considerable magnitude without regard to the legal status of the contenders, then, Wright concludes, “war has usually been employed by States as a method of international politics; it has also been employed by insurgents and rebels to gain independence, by governments to suppress domestic and colonial revolts, and by international organizations to suppress aggression”. This is a description of war as a political instrument. A general definition of war has been added: “War is the art of organizing and employing armed force to accomplish the purpose of a group”. In an article (Q. Wright, 1968), however, he once more repeats the assumption of the primacy of the legal concept of war.
It may be suggested (Lider, 1977) that the ambiguity of Wright’s position derives from his combining the constituent elements of war as a social phenomenon (war as a phenomenon of intergroup psychology, as a species of conflict, or a species of violence) with certain legal regulations to which war was submitted as it became institutionalized (cf. Kotzsch, 1956). The general impression that remains from his very valuable contribution to the study of war is
military-technical correlates (Kingston-McCloughry, 1957). “Why wars take place is not at all clear... even more problematic is why a given war occurs between the given States at a given time” (Levi, 1974). “... any theory of the causes of war in general or of any war in particular that is not inherently eclectic and comprehensive, i.e. which does not take into account at the outset the relevance of all sorts of diverse factors, is bound for that very reason to be wrong” (Brodie, 1974). Similar “agnostic” visions may be found in the works of Rapaport and Aron.
In recent years, many attempts have been made to place war in some other perspective in which the State as actor is not the only unit of analysis. One approach has been to choose another main actor, for example, the system (e.g. Midlarsky, 1975). Another has been to achieve a synthesis by combining kinds of actors- men, State, and the international system (e.g. Waltz, 1959) - or by including internal wars as part of a synthetic concept of war (e.g. Rosenau, 1969).
One of the most important challenges to the concept of the State as an actor has come from the contention that the behaviour of States is really the behaviour of the men who act in the name of the State. Those who have power may not represent the national interests but rather the interests of those groups whose views the decision-makers consider relevant. The role that interest-groups have in the making of foreign policy of developed countries is a subject of recurrent interest. Three different groups have been indicated. The first group is big business which it is maintained, gains by war through the close ties between business magnates and political leaders. Secondly, special interest has been devoted to the arms industry, which through its direct contact with military establishment constitutes an important lobby. The lit- erature concerning the activity of the “merchants of death” or the “military-industrial complex”, as this combination is called, is quite large. Finally, in some analyses those who carry out the foreign policy are mentioned as having many opportunities to influence it, and as being liable to act in the interests of the ruling class. Moreover, it has been suggested that the rules by which international diplomacy is carried out give diplomats an interest in creating tensions, crises, and even war.
On the other hand, some scholars deny that the influence of interest groups, although important, is decisive for the explanation of war (e.g. Deutsch, 1966).
1.8 Typologies of war
Q. Wright (1942; 1965) has developed a typology of war which distinguishes among four categories: (1) the civil war, which takes place within the boundaries of a sovereign nation; (2) the balance of power war, in which members of a State system are at war among themselves; (3) the defensive war, which acts to guard a civilization against the intrusions of an alien culture; and (4) the imperial war, in which one civilization attempts to expand at the expense of another.
In this set of distinctions, the boundary conditions of the conflict appear to be the primary criteria of classification. Whether a war is categorized as an imperial or civil war apparently depends upon the extent to which the conflict is contained within, or extended beyond, certain boundaries, implying the presence of both structural differentiation and participation (Midlarsky, 1975).
Singer, Small and Kraft (1965) follow Wright’s classification in distinguishing among civil, colonial and international wars, but with a more focused emphasis in that wars between civilizations are not explicitly introduced.
Luard (1968) introduces a somewhat different perspective in his treatment of war; he places greater emphasis on the motives of nation-States in their initiation of war, although implicit in these reasons for expansion are the notions of complexity and participation. Luard divides “Wars of Aggression” into four categories. Expansive wars are defined as those concerned with the “conquest of foreign territories not previously controlled”. The Japanese invasions of Manchuria and China are examples of this type, as are the German and Soviet invasions of various European countries in the interwar period. Irredentist wars are, according to Luard, “directed against territories inhabited mainly by people of the same race as the conquerors”. The Nazi occupations of Austria and the Sudetenland belong in this category. Strategic wars, as a third category, may be motivated by a desire on the part of a nation to enhance its logistic and military position vis-à-vis some real or imagined threat. The Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 may have been induced by such a perceived threat, and the Israeli participation in the Suez campaign might have been similarly motivated. Finally, Luard speaks of coercive wars as those which entail the placing of constraints on the operations of a sovereign government. Examples of this type provided by Luard are the Arab invasion of Israel in 1948 and the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.
Midlarsky (1975) developed a classification of wars, based on a combination of the premises of rank order and scope, along with the explicit use of the variables “structural differentiation” and “participation”. In addition, two variables specific to political violence are included. These are the intensity of violence in the form of the number killed, and duration, as a temporal indicator. Finally, the motivation of actors is taken into account.
Table 1: Varieties of War:
Type of war Structural differentiation (a)
Participation (b)
War duration No. killed Motivation of at least one set of protagonists Normative High High Long Very high Fundamental change in the policy framework within nations and within the international system Coercive Moderate Generally moderate
Moderate High Fundamental change in the policy framework within nations and within a particular region Regional Low to moderate Moderate generally
Moderate Low to moderate
Moderate changes within a regional policy framework Territorial Very low Limited to two Short to moderate Low to moderate
Territorial change
(a) Alliances and/or military-industrial organization (b) Protagonists and size of armies
rejection by the Axis Powers of the Treaty of Versailles and League Covenant constituted a challenge to the dominant norms of the international system.
Perhaps it is only when human beings clash over important abstractions and modes of civilization that the most widespread and intense wars occur, just as the bloodiest civil wars are fought over the “appropriate” forms of domestic socio-political relationships. In any event, four categories are posited for the occurrence of international warfare. These form a rank-ordered set in which each element in a lower rank also is found at all levels above it.
Midlarsky (1975) points to certain similarities between his categorization and those developed for internal violence. For example, Rosenau (1964) lists three types of internal war, “Personnel” wars, seen as fought only over the issues as who is to occupy the roles of government (as in many Latin American coups); “Authority” wars, seen as fought in addition over the arrangements for occupancy of these roles (such as electoral methods or opportunities for indigenous as opposed to colonial persons to occupy them) (e.g. the struggle in Rhodesia); and “Structural” wars, seen as fought over the social and economic structure of the society as well as the other two issues (as in the French or Russian revolutions, or the Spanish Civil War).
Lasswell and Kaplan (1950) made the same distinction fourteen years earlier, naming the three types Palace, Political, and Social Revolutions, while Huntington (1962) distinguished Governmental, Reform and Revolutionary Coups in essentially the same way.
Table 2: Typology of behavioral Violence (Eckhardt & Köhler, 1980)
Symmetric Imperial Involvement No Imperial Involvement Relations Imperial Power Conflicts International Conflicts Involving one or more Without any active, military imperial powers on both involvement of imperial powers, sides of the conflict, such as the Chaco War, 1928-35. such as the two world All border conflicts were placed wars in this century; in this category and also imperial inter- vention on both sides of a civil conflict, such as the Spanish Civil War.
Asymmetric Imperial Conquests Relations of nonimperial nations or territories, such as the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-
Imperial Civil Conflicts Civil Conflicts involving one or more with no apparent imperial imperial powers on one involvement of an active, side of the conflict only, military nature, such as such as the Vietnam War, the Civil War of Nigeria 1960-74. 1967-70.
2 WAR: RESEARCH ON DATA
2.1 Statistics of deadly quarrels
An effort to examine and classify violent deaths was made by Lewis F. Richardson, a mathematical physicist and meteorologist, who devoted many years to the careful collection and analysis of statistics on violent deaths from all causes. Quincy Wright and C.C. Lienan prepared the manuscript of Richardson’s “Statistics of Deadly Quarrels”, published after Richardson’s death in 1953. Before he died, Richardson had collected exhaustive statistics on violent conflicts from 1820 to 1929 and supplemental statistics on those from 1930 to 1949. The magnitude of a fatal quarrel is defined to be the logarithm to the base ten of the number of people who died because of that quarrel. The magnitude will be denoted by μ [mu]. The range of magnitude extends from 0 for a murder involving only one death, to 7.4 for the Second World War. Other well-known wars had magnitudes as follows: 1899-1902 British versus Boers 4.4; 1939-40 Russians versus Finns 4.83; 1861-65 North American Civil War 5.8. The magnitude of a war is usually known to within ± 0.2; so that a classification by unit ranges of magnitude is meaningful. The ranges have been marked off at 7.5, 6.5, 5.5, 4.5, 3.5, 2.5, 1.5 and perhaps at 0.5 and -0.5.
Steinmetz (1907; 1929) formulated the “law of relatively diminishing war casualties”. Discussing the casualty figures from wars, Q. Wright (1965) notes the following:
A fifth trend has been toward an increased human and economic cost of war, both absolutely and relative to the population. The human cost of war is a difficult problem to get data upon. The proportion of persons engaged in a battle who are killed has probably tended to decline. During the Middle Ages 30 to 50 percent of those engaged in battle were often killed or wounded. In the sixteenth century 40 percent of the defeated side might be killed or wounded and about 10 percent of the victors. The latter cut down the members of the defeated army as they ran away. Thus at the beginning of the modern period the average casualties in battle were probably about 25 percent of those engaged. In the three succeeding centuries the proportion has been estimated as 20, 15, and 10 percent, respectively, and in the twentieth century about 6 percent. Prior to 1900 about a quarter of the battle casualties died, and in the First World War about a third; thus the proportion of those engaged in a battle who die as a direct consequence of the battle seems to have declined from about 6 percent to about 2 percent in the last three centuries. The proportion of the population engaged in the armies, however, has tended to become larger, and the number of battles has tended to increase. As a result, the proportion of the population dying as a direct consequence of battle has tended to increase. The losses from disease in armies has declined. Dumas and Vedel-Peterson (1923) give figures of the Napoleonic period suggesting that 80 or 90 percent of the total army losses were from disease. Von Bloch (1899) states that in the nineteenth century this proportion averaged 65 percent. In the First World War, while disease accounted for 30 percent of the losses in the Russian army and 26 percent in the American army, in the German army only 10 percent of deaths were from this cause. It has been estimated that, of 1,000 deaths in the French population in the seventeenth century, about 11 died in active military service. The corresponding figure for the eighteenth century is 27; for the nineteenth, 30; and for the twentieth, 63. For England the corresponding figures for these four centuries are 15, 14, 6, and 48. (Q. Wright, 1965).
contributed much less to the total. The total deaths because of quarrels should be compared with the total deaths from all causes. There are particulars given by de Jastrzebski (E, Death Rate), and in the Statistical Year Books of the League of Nations, which allow the total to be estimated. A mean world population of 1.5 times 10^9 and a mean death rate of 20 per thousand per year would give during 126 years 3.8 times 10^9 deaths from all causes. Of these the part caused by quarrels was 1.6 percent. This is less than one might have guessed from the large amount of attention which quarrels attract. Those who enjoy wars can excuse their taste by saying that wars after all are much less deadly than disease (Richardson, 1960).
Thus, during that 126-year period, less than two out of every hundred deaths appear to have been due to lethal violence. Even if one includes suicides, plus unintended deaths from starvation and disease, the deaths traceable to lethal violence appear to be fewer than three out of every hundred. Indeed, one striking fact that Richardson’s data underline is that the greatest risk from even this degree of lethal violence over the 126-year period was from very large-scale wars. World Wars I and II together account for 36 million out of the entire 59 million deaths in his table. Apart from these two conflicts, a person’s chance of dying from the direct results of any form of lethal conflict was far less than one in one hundred. The chance of eventually dying as a murder victim was a little over one in four hundred (Prosterman, 1972).
2.2 Incidence and frequency
In modern civilization - since about 1500 - Q. Wright (1942; 1965) found there had been at least 284 wars and some 3,000 battles. He defined a battle as involving more than 1, casualties on land or more than 500 at sea; a war was a hostile encounter which involved more than 50,000 troops or which was legally declared as war. But, he warned, these were inadequate measures of human violence. The United States, for instance, had been involved in only 165 of the “official” battles but it had fought in more than 9,000 hostile encounters. “There have probably been over a quarter of a million such hostile encounters in the civilized world since the year of 1500, an average of over 500 a year”.
Table 4 Sorokin’s estimate of war casualties in Europe, by centuries, 1000-1925 (000’s omitted)
Country 11th 12th 13th 14th 15th 16th 17th 18th 19th 20th Averag e since 1600 France 1 4 11 59 61 107 658 1,055 1,769 3,682 1, Austria 8 11 7 100 257 1,560 1,505 226 3,000 1, G. Britain 1 7 17 64 86 91 160 310 141 3,095 901 Russia 5 12 29 37 38 118 119 752 777 6,371 2, Germany 360 459 6,060 2, Spain 160 559 94 166 44 216 Netherlands 64 290 170 34 124 Italy 17 41 54 1,783 474 Poland^1 66 91 348 219 Total 7 31 68 167 385 863 3,454 4,635 3,845 24, Per 1, population
2 5 8 10 15 37 33 15 54
(^1) Poland and Lithuania
Table 5 shows some of the main statistics of war over the past four centuries.
Century 16th 17th 18th 19th 20th No. of wars 63 64 38 89 30 (to 1964) No. of battles 87 239 781 651 > 1, No. battles/war 1-2 4 20 7 > 30 Average length of war (years) 2.9 2.7 2.7 1.4 4. % time at war 65 65 38 28 18 Average no. nations/war 2.4 2.6 3.7 3.2 4. Average size forces on each side
18,000 22,000 22,000 35,000 100,000 (to 1940)
% battles outside Europe 0 0 2 13 25 (to 1964) % of forces killed - 25 15 10 6 % of warring nation killed 1,5 3,7 3.3 1,5 8. Violence Index 180 500 370 120 3, Wars: those legally declared or involving more than 50,000 troops. Battles: those involving more than 1,000 casualties on land or 500 at sea. Table after Clarke (1971) based on data from Q. Wright (1942; 1965), Sorokin (1937) and Institut Français de Polémologie, “Periodicité et intensité des actions de guerre (1200 à 1945)” in Guerres et Paix , Vol. II, 1968.
The “Violence Index” (intensity of wars) shows that even before the Second World War violence was more than 25 times greater in this century than the last; it was more than 150 times greater than in the twelfth century.
Battles, as well as becoming more frequent, are becoming much larger - as their names reveal. “They were once called after the bridges or towns where they took place. By the time of the First World War they were named after rivers - the Battle of the Somme - or even regions - the Battle of Champagne. By the Second World War they were called after countries or oceans: the Battle of Britain, the Battle of France and even the Battle of the Atlantic. The trend appears to lead inevitably to the nuclear holocaust that would be the Battle of the Globe (Clarke, 1971). Also Klingberg (1966) discovered how quickly violence was escalating:
Table 6: The escalation of violence
War Date Average deaths per day Napoleonic 1790-1815 233 Crimean 1854-1856 1, Balkan 1912-1913 1, World War I 1914-1918 5, World War II 1919-1945 7, (Hiroshima) August 6th, 1945 80,
So far nearly 90 people out of every thousand have been killed as a direct result of war in this century compared with only 15 in the last. The number of people involved in the increasing number of battles is also getting much larger. The battles themselves last much longer than they used to. Since the Second World War about 20 million men have been under arms, roughly 7 out of every 1,000 (and this excludes the huge numbers of people employed in war industries of various kinds). In seventeenth-century Europe only 3 in every 1,000 were under arms (Clarke, 1971).
Finally, there are signs that war has recently become more common. Greaves (1962) has counted no less than 14,542 wars in the period 3600 B.C. to 1962 A.D. He found that there
If the trend we have suggested is correct, it carries somewhat paradoxical aspects for the past, the present, and the future. First, the distant past may have involved more wars but fewer casualties - people fighting more but killing each other less. A second paradox concerns the present. Our times may include both more peaceful life and less peaceful death than the past. Progressive war concentration also implies peace concentration. If wars were more numerous, long, and frequent in the past, peace was necessarily shorter and more fragmented. If today wars are indeed fewer, less frequent, and shorter, peace by definition is longer and more continuous. Increases in individual life expectancy resulting from developing technology complement the peaceful effects of war concentration. At the same time, there is also more war-related death. In the past the absolute number and relative proportion of those who met warlike deaths were smaller than today. While today the absolute amount of peaceful life may be greater, the chances of the average citizen completing his life in peace are also reduced. Finally, a historical trend of war concentration and aggravation has paradoxical implications for the future. Declining general incidence of war or the termination of any particular military conflict is obviously welcome. Yet they do not necessarily imply the elimination or even reduction of the human or material costs of war. Instead, longer interwar periods may be way-stations for subsequent wars which may inflict even greater casualties than the ones which preceded them. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, we may see more peace, but war will continue to be a problem of much more than historical interest.
Eckhardt and Azar (1978) compiled a list of 265 major world conflicts and 105 major interventions for the years 1945 to 1975. The list was analysed as to the regional, temporal, and typal distributions of conflict-years, intervention-years, and intervening years of external parties.
The finding that most major conflicts from 1945 to 1975 were happening in the Third World was quite consistent with the results of other authors. The finding that major conflicts were increasing from 1945 to 1970 was also quite consistent with the results of previous studies. The finding that the various types and sub-types of conflict were increasing at a relatively equal rate was a new finding which questioned Kende’s (1971) emphasis on the relative increase in civil anti-regime wars. Admittedly, Eckhardt and Azar’s civil types of conflict did not necessarily coincide with Kende’s civil anti-regime wars, but there was presumably considerable overlap between them. The measure of intervention followed the same temporal pattern as the measure of conflict, which questioned Kende’s (1971) emphasis on the relative increase in foreign interventions, but this emphasis was changed by Kende (1977). Although these interventions did increase from 1945 to 1970, they did not increase any more than the increase in conflicts.
Finally, Eckhardt and Azar’s finding that both conflicts and interventions decreased in 1971-1975 questioned SIPRI’s (1975) contention that conflicts were continually on the increase up to 1974. This new finding, however, was quite consistent with Kende’s (1977) results. This new finding was extremely important in suggesting that something new was happening in the world since 1970. This new happening in 1971-1975 was associated with relatively more conflicts in the Middle East and far fewer conflicts in both regions of Asia, fewer internationalized civil conflicts, more self-management of major conflicts in the Middle East, and less Western intervention in world conflicts generally. These findings for 1971-1975 may be compressed into two basic phenomena: (1) less conflict in the world in
general, and (2) even less Western intervention of the overt military kind in world conflicts (Eckhardt and Azar, 1978).
Kende’s (1978) general examination of the wars of the last ten years partly confirms his earlier findings, partly discloses and proves new phenomena. The overall pattern has not altered, he reports. The picture is still characterized by the fact that the wars are parts of the great international processes and are far from having ceased. Their arena is still the Third World. They are, as before, primarily internal wars which gain their international character from the activity, often coupled with military participation, of the armed forces of countries far away. However, another change has also taken place: the decreasing war trend, a fundamental characteristic of the last ten years.
A further change is the fact that one of the fundamental motives of the wars of the last 32 years - the determination of the colonial people to attain independence - has largely ceased. The world atlas is today covered almost exclusively with the colours of independent national States. As a practical consequence, the cause of internal conflicts within the frontiers of the country will increasingly be rooted in social, class, etc., conflicts and anti-regime fights. The achievement of national independence and the transformation of certain regions into national States lead necessarily to the intensification of internal power conflicts, which may result not only in the outbreak of anti-regime wars of a social character; it also leads to the intensification of other internal-tribal, minority, religious-conflicts which again can easily lead to war.
Q. Wright (1965) claims in the second edition of A Study of War that “conditions relevant to war have changed more radically since 1942... than in any equal of human history”. Yet, as seen above, many of the measures of war have not changed appreciably since the end of the Second World War. Conflicts may have become somewhat more frequent, but as they have also been waged on a lesser scale, there is doubt that the overall level of violence is higher today (Wood, 1968). Even the outcomes of conflicts have been shown to be little different in the 1945-1965 period from the 1919-1939 period (Holsti, 1966).
There is general consensus, however, that during this period there has been (1) a decline in conventional inter-State wars, in wars fought for territorial gains, in colonial-imperial wars, and in wars fought in Europe or America, and (2) an increase in ethno-national (including irredentist and secessionist) wars, fought within the boundaries of a single State, and in wars fought in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (for short, the “Third World”) (Denton, 1966; Kende, 1971 et seq.; Huntington, 1962; Luard, 1968; Wood, 1968; Q. Wright, 1965). Most of these assertions are supported statistically, but there is argument over the meaning of the figures. Is it true, for example, that internal wars have increased significantly since 1945? Wood (1968) examines 128 conflicts since 1898, of which 84 took place since 1939. Of these 84, only 28 were inter-State conflicts while the remainder were insurgencies, civil wars, or coups d’état on a scale large enough to meet his operational definition.
Wood’s figures show that conflicts in Asia, Africa and the Middle East have in fact outnumbered those in Europe and the Americas during every decade since 1898 except 1908-
- The prominence of Third World conflicts is therefore not new, though the nature of wars in that area has changed. Moreover, some of the reasons cited for the rise of Third World violence are not proven. Rosecrance (1963) believes that internal instability may be a lesser cause of foreign aggression now than in the nineteenth century, since better means of internal control exist.
