War

THE STUDY OF WAR

War in the ordinary sense is a conflict among political groups, especially sovereign states,
carried on by armed forces of considerable magnitude for a considerable period of time. In
this sense, war is not sharply distinguished from peace. Conflicts between states may be
carried on by diplomacy, economic pressures, propaganda, subversion, or other forms of
intervention without the use or even the threat of armed force. Even if armed force is used, its
use may be on such a small scale or of such short durationas in suppressions of mob
violence or insurrection, colonial expeditions, and reprisals by large against small statesthat
it is not called war. The progress of war and peace between a pair of states may be
represented by a curve: the curve descends toward war as tensions, military preparations,
exchange of threats, mobilizations, border hostilities, and limited hostilities culminate in total
conflict; and it rises toward peace as tensions relax, arms budgets decline, disputes are
settled, trade increases, and cooperative activities develop.
Sociologists and lawyers seeking a clear concept of war have sought criteria sharply
separating it from peace. They have followed Hugo Grotius, who, criticizing Ciceros
definition of war as a contending by force, said that war is not a contest but the condition
of those contending by force, a condition marked by precise points in time separating a
state of war from a state of peace. According to this definition, war is an institution
permitting types of behavior and action that are defined by law as inappropriate to a state of
peace. This concept implies clear criteria for determining the beginning and the end of war
and for distinguishing belligerents and neutrals during that period. As defined by jurists of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the main characteristic of a state of war is the juristic
equality of the belligerents, their freedom to use armed force against one another, and the
impartiality and abstention of neutrals. War in this sense has been defined as a legal

condition which equally permits two or more hostile groups to carry on a conflict by armed
force (Wright [1942] 1965, pp. 8, 698). Accordingly, it is clear that a state of war may exist
with no actual hostilities, and, conversely, hostilities of considerable magnitude may exist
without a state of war. War can be initiated by a formal declaration, by an ultimatum with a
time limit, or by an act clearly manifesting an intention to create such a state. It is normally
ended by a treaty of peace, although a long suspension of hostilities or an armistice providing
for an indefinite suspension can also be regarded as manifesting an intention to end the war.
The outlawry of war. While war in this institutional sense was recognized throughout most
modern history and was to some extent codified in the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907,
it has been outlawed by recent generally ratified conventions. The League of Nations
Covenant of 1920 obliged members not to resort to war until the League had had nine months
to attempt a settlement of the dispute, not to engage in aggression against the territorial
integrity or political independence of other states, and to establish economic sanctions against
the state that violated these obligations. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 obliged its 63
parties to renounce it [war] as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one
another and never to seek the settlement or solution of disputes or conflicts of whatever
nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among themexcept by pacific
means. The pact also asserted in its preamble that a state that violated its prescriptions would
not be protected from defensive or policing action by other states; thus the aggressor and the
defender would not be legally equal. These principles were reasserted by the League of
Nations when it brought about a ceasefire in hostilities between Albania and its neighbors in
1921, between Iraq and Turkey in 1924, between Greece and Bulgaria in 1925, and between
Colombia and Peru in 1932; and when it recommended discrimination between the aggressor
and the defender after its cease-fire order had failed to end hostilities in the Chaco in 1928, in
Manchuria in 1931, and in Ethiopia in 1935. The League did not act successfully in the Vilna
dispute in 1920, in Corfu in 1923, in Spain in 1936, or in the Sine Japanese hostilities in
1937, nor did it stop the Axis aggressions that led to World War n. The United States and
other states, however, while still nonparticipants in World War n, discriminated between the
Axis aggressors and the defenders, and the Nuremberg and other war-crimes tribunals
imposed penalties upon individuals found to have been responsible for these aggressions.

The United Nations Charter clarified this law by obliging its members to settle their
international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and
security, and justice, are not endangered to refrain in their international relations from the
threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or
in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations to give the United
Nations every assistance in any act it takes in accordance with the present Charter and to
refrain from giving assistance to any state against which the United Nations is taking
preventive or enforcement action. These provisions make it clear that if the United Nations
organs fulfill their responsibility of determining the aggressor (arts. 24, 39) and if provisional
measures do not stop the hostilities (art. 40), then the participants cannot be equally entitled
to settle their conflict by force. These provisions were put into effect in 1950 when the United
Nations found that North Korea and Communist China were aggressors in the Korean
hostilities and initiated sanctions against them. The United Nations also found the Soviet
Union guilty of aggression in its invasion of Hungary in 1956 but did not recommend
sanctions. It ordered a cease-fire with relative success in the cases of Indonesia in 1946,
Greece in 1946, Kashmir in 1948, Palestine in 1948, Suez in 1956, and West Irian in 1957;
but cease-fire orders were less successful in the cases of Korea in 1950, Hungary in 1956,
Yemen in 1959, the Congo in 1960, Cyprus in 1962, and Malaysia in 1964.
In spite of these legal prescriptions and their implementation, history has made it clear that
outlawry of war has not eliminated the possibility, or even the probability, of hostilities or of
war: Hostilities in Manchuria in 1931-1933, in Ethiopia in 1935-1936, in Spain in 1936-1939,
during World War Ii, 1939-1945, in Korea in 1950-1953, in Indochina in 1947-1954, and in
Algeria in 1953-1960 were of a magnitude sufficiently large to be called war; since 1920 a
total of 40 instances of hostility have been counted in each of which more than five hundred
participants were killed (Wright [1942] 1965, appendix C). The cold war between the
communist and Western states started shortly after World War ii; propaganda, subversion,
guerrilla activities, border hostilities, and, especially, threats of nuclear war created anxieties
on both sides of the iron curtain that a third world war could occur.
The problem of war, therefore, continues and has indeed become a greater problem than ever
before. The shrinking of the world, through improved communication and transportation, has

increased the probability that hostilities anywhere will affect people everywhere; the
acceleration of history through the development of modern science and technology has
diminished the prospect of a stable balance of military power; the invention of weapons of
extraordinary destructiveness and delivery means of extraordinary speed has made direct
defense impossible; and the rise of popular awareness of world conditions has increased
general anxiety about the possibility of war and its danger to mankind.
Metaphorical meanings. In addition to the popular and the legal conceptions of war, the
term has been applied metaphorically to numerous types of oppositionboth conflict and
competitionthat have been distinguished from relations of peaceful coexistence and
cooperation. People refer to the war of words, of economic classes, of competing forms, and
of organic species in the struggle for existence wars between the sexes, the generations, and
the races; wars against poverty, disease, crime, and, indeed, against war itself. In all these
cases, discrimination has not been made between conflicts, where the entities involved are
conscious of and hostile to one another, and competition, where such awareness and
hostility does not necessarily exist. The inclusion of the competitive relationship is an
extreme extension of the idea of war, hardly justifiable even as metaphor, particularly as it
has been used to justify war in the usual sense as necessary for progress. Thus, according to
Ernest Renan: War is in a way one of the conditions of progress, the cut of the whip which
prevents a country from going to sleep, forcing satisfied mediocrity itself to leave its apathy
(1871, p. 111). Social and political Darwinists like Gum-plowicz, Ratzenhofer, Treitschke,
and Steinmetz considered the social need for war eternal. According to Steinmetz: War is an
ordeal instituted by God, who weighs the nations in its balance. Its dread hammer is the
welder of men into cohesive states, and nowhere but in such states can human nature
adequately develop its capacity. The only alternative is degeneration (James [1910] 1911,
pp. 280, 281). However, sociologists like Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and Yakov
Novikov, while recognizing the constructive influence of war under certain technological and
social conditions, believed that civilization creates conditions under which wars influence is
negative (Wright [1942] 1965, pp. 1037, 1146). War created and expanded states and then
destroyed them. It unified civilizations and then disintegrated them (ibid., p. 165). Thus
war has stood out more and more as a recurrent catastrophe in civilized human existence
(pp. 378-379).

History of war
The history of war can be conveniently divided into five great periods: animal, primitive,
civilized, modern, and recent war, distinguished by the technologies utilized in lethal
conflicts.
Animal war. Animals generally utilize only bodily equipment, provided by heredity,
although monkeys occasionally throw stones and higher apes sometimes use clubs. Animals
differ greatly in their equipment for aggression and defense. Although an animal cannot
change this equipment, the manner of using it may be developed by experience. Lethal
hostilities between animals of the same species are usually disadvantageous to the survival of
the species and are rare. Nonlethal hostilities occur but are largely confined to hostilities
between males for possession of females, hostilities to defend the nesting site against
intrusion, and hostilities to maintain leadership of the group. Aggressive behavior among
young monkeys, as among children, usually arises from rivalry for possession of an object,
from intrusion of a stranger into the group, or from frustration of activity. Among animals of
different species the predators attack other species for food, and the attacked defend
themselves more often by flight than by counterattack. Such activities, however, resemble the
activities of man in the hunt rather than in war.
The study of hostilities among animals can throw light on the drives leading to aggression in
man, on the influence of specialized techniques of aggression and defense on the frequency
and intensity of hostilities, and on the survival of the individual, the group, or the species.
Such specializations as the lions striking power, the antelopes fleetness, the buffalo herds
mass charge, the elephants size and relative invulnerability, and the cooperative activity of
social insects have analogues to human military instruments and tactics. The relationship of
conflict, competition, cooperation, coexistence, territorial control, and hierarchic dominance
to the nature of hostilities and the course of evolution can also be studied in animal species.
From the study of animal relationships, behavior patterns, and instruments, ecologists have
gained insight into the behavior of human groups in a state of nature in relation to one
another that is, under conditions in which each guides its behavior only by consideration of
its own interest.

Primitive war. Primitive man, prior to any contact with civilization, was equipped with
speech but not with writing and was organized politically in clans, villages, or tribes on
principles of blood relationship; both in the hunt and in war he utilized stones, clubs, spears,
and the bow and arrow for attack, and animal skins and the shield for defense. It has been
contended by some anthropologists that the most primitive peoples were peaceful and that the
institution of war was unknown until learned from advanced civilizations. Yet, customs of
warmaking have existed among most primitive peoples that have been observed (the
Greenland and Labrador Eskimos and the peaceful Andamans have been cited as exceptions),
and the cave pictures drawn by ancient man seem to indicate that wars occurred. Among
primitive people, men generally did the fighting, although they were seldom specialized
except by age for this purpose, and their hostilities, although often initiated by elaborate
ceremonials, were usually conducted by sudden and brief raids, their legs being the only
means of mobility. War was usually a highly formalized institution with the object of
vindicating the group mores that were thought to have been offended by a member of another
tribe, usually through wife stealing or witch doctoring. Economic gain or political conquest
was not a motive among hunting and collecting peoples but played an increasing role with the
advent of herding and agriculture. Whatever its ostensible purpose, primitive war served to
manifest the unity of the fighting group, its distinctiveness from its neighbors, and the reality
of its customs and institutions. It contributed to social solidarity by distinguishing the
cooperating in-group from all opposing out-groups. The clan was the ultimate in-group,
but peaceful relations among neighbors might develop, creating a tribe as a larger in-group.
As primitive peoples advanced to agriculture and herding, the in-group became even larger
through the integration of tribes into kingdoms or federations, the warriors became
specialized, weapons and tactics became more efficient, economic and political motives for
war began to develop, and casualties increased in magnitude.
Civilized war. Primitive peoples usually achieved the distinction of civilization by
developing a written language, systematic agriculture or herding, and a hierarchic political
organization controlling a defined territory. Economic and political classes developed,
commercial centers arose, and population increased. War became an institution conducted by
a specialized class for purposes of plunder, territorial acquisition, trade, or the expansion of
religion or ideology. Mobility in war was assisted by use of the horse or chariot, armies were

disciplined, cities were fortified, and siege engines were developed. The characteristics of
war differed among different civilizations and at different stages in the same civilization. The
ancient civilizations of Babylonia, Greece, Rome, and Japan appear to have been more
warlike than those of ancient Egypt, China, and India (ibid., p. 572).
A civilization usually began with many city-states, each with a ruler conscious of the religion,
political organization, economic needs, and ambitions of his state. Each state struggled to
maintain and forward its interests against the pressure of others and, for that purpose,
attempted to increase its power and resources, often under the pressure of an increasing
population. The interest of the state was usually identified with the interest of the ruling
group or individual in maintaining or augmenting position, wealth, and glory.
In each civilization war increased in efficiency and destructiveness with the invention of new
weapons and tactics. The heroic age merged into a time of troubles as small states were
conquered by the large, as public administration became more efficient, and as the tactics of
dash-and-maneuver were succeeded by tactics of mass charge of trained phalanxes or legions,
and by the use of siege engines against walled cities. Alliances and power balancing came to
be recognized, tending toward a bipolarization of power and frequently resulting in universal
conquest of a civilization, as happened under Ahmose i and Thutmose i in Egypt,
Hammurabi, and, more than a millennium later, Tiglath-pileser in Mesopotamia, Alexander in
the Middle East, Asoka in India, Chin in China, and Julius Caesar in the Mediterranean and
Gaul. Such a universal state was eventually weakened by overcentralization, corruption,
and decay, permitting the external barbarians and the internal proletariat to destroy it and to
begin a new civilization centering on a new ideology or religion.
The great wars that usually preceded universal conquest were frequently accompanied by
unsuccessful efforts at confederation and disarmament. This course of change, in which war
contributed first to the integration of a civilization and later to its destruction, can be studied
in the histories of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, China, and India, and there is some evidence
of similar changes in the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico and Peru. The historic record
is, however, best known in the classic civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, the Christian
civilization of medieval Europe, and the Muslim civilization of the Middle East and north
Africa.

Eight great wars in the two millenniums of Western civilization originated in efforts at largescale conquest.
Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., utilizing the Macedonian phalanx and siege
engines, conquered and to some extent Hellenized a short-lived empire extending from the
Indus to Egypt and from Iran to Greece.
Rome, utilizing the legions of disciplined infantry and cavalry in Greece, the Middle East,
Carthage, Spain, and Gaul, established in three centuries of warfare an empire that
maintained the Pax Romana among 150 million people during the century of the Antonine
Caesars.
Attila, with an army of Huns and Germans on horseback, overran much of the Roman Empire
but was defeated at the Battle of Chalons in 451 A.0. Subsequent invasions by Germanic
tribes, as well as the influence of Christianity, the deterioration of agriculture, and the
increasing dependence for frontier defense upon barbarian mercenaries, seriously weakened
the Western empire until it was taken over by barbarian rulers in 476.
Muhammad and his successors after 622, using horsemen and religious enthusiasm, extended
the empire of Islam into Arabia, Iran, India, eastern Anatolia, Egypt, north Africa, and Spain,
but this expansion was checked in France by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732.
Charlemagnes feudal army of knights on horseback and militia established in the eighth
century a short-lived empire in France, Germany, and Italy, followed by the decentralized
Holy Roman Empire.
Norsemen in Viking ships invaded northern Europe, Italy, Iceland, Greenland, and America
from the ninth to the eleventh centuries and established permanent governments in
Normandy, England, and Iceland.
With papal inspiration, western European princes crusaded against Islam, and incidentally
against the Byzantine Empire, in the Middle East and Spain from 1095 to 1270. They
established a short-lived kingdom in Palestine and strengthened the internal solidarity of
Christendom, contributing to the Pax Ecclesiae of the thirteenth century.

England attempted to conquer France in the Hundred Years War from 1337 to 1453 with
feudal armies, longbowmen, and naval transport, contributing to the development of national
consciousness in both of these countries, particularly in France, which had rallied behind the
standard of Joan of Arc and eventually drove out the English, who then turned to civil war
(the War of the Roses).
These eight major wars generally had ideological, economic, psychological, political, and
juridical causes. The ideological element was most prominent in the expansion of Islam, the
conquests of Charlemagne, and the Crusades, but it also figured in Alexanders devotion to
Hellenism and in the rising nationalistic ideologies of England and France during the
Hundred Years War.
Economic factors, too, were present, especially in the plundering raids of the Huns and the
Vikings. But such considerations also influenced the Roman conquerors, who were in search
of new sources of food as population increased and agriculture deteriorated in Italy, and the
Islamic warriors and Christian crusaders, who hoped for economic gains through distant
conquests.
The political urge to expand empire and to win glory, security, and peace was undoubtedly a
motivation in the conquests by Alexander, Caesar, the Huns, the caliphs, Charlemagne, the
Normans, the crusaders, and the English Plantagenets and Lancastrians.
Juridical grounds were found to justify most of these wars. Alexander claimed to be acting on
the authority of the Greek cities that had conferred hegemony upon him to defend them
against Persia; Roman generals acted under the authority of the Fetial College, an ancient
Roman institution purporting to apply international law; Islam operated under the legal as
well as spiritual authority of the Koran; while Charlemagne and the crusaders acted under the
authority of the pope and the medieval theory of a just war. England tried to make a legal
case for its invasion of France under feudal law and hereditary claims. The Huns and the
Norsemen had little concern for legal justifications, although William the Conqueror made
claims to England on the basis of feudal law.
Modern war. Modern history was ushered in by the use of gunpowder in war, the use of the
printing press in nationalist propaganda, and the discoveries by Europeans of the orbits of the

planets and the civilizations of America, Asia, and Africa, which destroyed the medieval
conception of the universe and of the world. Modern history continued with the exploration
and exploitation of the discovered territories, establishing permanent contacts among all the
civilizations. The Renaissance acquainted Europe with the ideas of the ancients and
developed ideas of humanism; the Reformation destroyed the unity of Christendom; and there
was general acceptance of the concept of the sovereign territorial state, as set forth by
Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes, emphasizing military power as the basis of political
authority.
This period began with the wars of Turkish expansion against the Byzantine Empire, which
ended in 1453 with the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, marking the first use of
gunpowder in siege artillery. Further wars of Turkish expansion in Europe followed,
culminating in the failure of the Turks to take Vienna in 1683 and the signing of the treaty of
Karlowitz in 1699.
After the Spanish conquest of the Moors and the unification of the peninsula under Ferdinand
and Isabella, wars of Spanish expansion continued under Charles v and Phillip n from 1521 to
the destruction of the armada in 1588.
The wars of religion that began in most of the western European countries after the
Reformation of 1520 culminated in the Thirty Years War, terminated in 1648 by the Peace of
Westphalia, which recognized the dominance of the secular state over the church.
The wars against Louis xiv, who was seeking to dominate Europe, ended with the Treaty of
Utrecht of 1713, which recognized the principle of the balance of power utilized during these
wars by William in of England.
The Seven Years War, fought in Europe, North America, India, and on the high seas, was the
first genuinely world-wide war. It was ended in Europe by the Peace of Hubertusburg of
1763, augmenting the power of Prussia under Frederick the Great; outside Europe it was
ended by the Peace of Paris, establishing British dominance in North America and India
through the diplomacy of Lord Chatham, the elder Pitt.

The American Revolution, which eventually involved France, Spain, and the Netherlands, as
well as the American colonies, against Britain, was ended by the Peace of Paris in 1783,
establishing the independence of the United States as the first non-European member of the
community of nations.
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars began with the expansive tendencies of the
French revolutionary ideas (liberty, equality, and fraternity). In 1815 the Treaty of Vienna
restored the ancien regime in France and in the states it had conqueredbut only after the
ideas of the revolution had been widely spread throughout Europe.
The Crimean War, begun in 1854, involved most of the great powers and was ended by the
Peace of Paris in 1856, checking Russian expansion in Turkey and the Balkans.
The wars of Italian and German unification, organized by Cavour and Bismarck, were ended
by the Peace of Frankfurt between France and Germany and by the Italian occupation of
Rome in 1871, which contributed to the acceptance of the principle of nationalities that had
been expounded by Giuseppe Mazzini.
The American Civil War, bloodier than any European war between the battles of Waterloo
and the Marne, ended by the suppression of the Southern rebellion in 1865.
The Taiping Rebellion in China was the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century. It lasted
from 1850 to 1864, caused 20 million deaths, and ended with the restoration of the Manchu
emperor after United States and British generals had given him assistance.
The Lpez War of Paraguay was the second bloodiest war of the nineteenth century. It lasted
from 1865 to 1870 and was ended by the defeat of the Paraguayan dictator Lpez by the
combined armies of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, after destruction of a large majority of
the Paraguayan population.
The Russo-Turkish War began in 1878 and appeared to be terminated by the Treaty of San
Stefano, but this was modified by the Treaty of Berlin under which the great powers deprived
Russia of the fruits of its victory.

The Spanish-American War liberated Cuba and led to the conquest of the Philippines,
terminated Spanish colonialism (except in Africa), extended the American domain to the
eastern hemisphere, thus weakening the basis for the Monroe Doctrine, and achieved great
power status for the United States. Suppression of the Philippine insurrection cost more lives
than the war against Spain, which was rapidly terminated by the overwhelming superiority of
the U.S. Navy.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 was ended by the Treaty of Portsmouth, which
checked Russian advance in Manchuria and gained for Japan the status of a great power.
The civil wars in Mexico, 1910 to 1920; Russia, 1917 to 1920; China, 1927 to 1936; and
Spain, 1936 to 1939, arose from ideological differences, induced foreign interventions, and
caused many casualties, reminiscent of the ideological hostilities following the Reformation
of 1520 and the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The policy of
considering ideological conflicts as falling within the domestic jurisdiction of territorial states
was recognized in the treaties of Westphalia and Vienna, was assumed by modern
international law, and has been reasserted since the 1950s in policies of nonintervention in
civil strife and peaceful coexistence of states with differing ideologies, as well as in the
United Nations Charter.
World War I, 1914-1918, cost nine million military and thirty million civilian lives. Russia
was defeated by Germany, and soon after the Soviet government was established; but the war
was finally ended by the defeat of Germany and its allies, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and
Turkey. The Treaty of Versailles and treaties with each of Germanys allies established the
League of Nations, modified European boundaries in accord with the principle of selfdetermination of peoples, and placed German and Turkish colonies under the mandate system
supervised by the League of Nations. The obligations imposed on Germany were considered
so severe that after the refusal of the United States to participate in the League and to
maintain the treaty, they facilitated the rise of Hitler in Germany and contributed to World
War II.
World War n, 1939 to 1945, cost seventeen million military and 34 million civilian lives. It
was initiated by the Axis powersGermany, Italy, and Japanand was ended by their

unconditional surrender after the deaths of Hitler and Mussolini and after the destruction of
the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. The Allied powers occupied
the defeated states until peace was made by treaty with the lesser Axis powersBulgaria,
Hungary, Italy, Rumania, and Finlandin 1946, with Japan in 1952, and de facto with
Germany by agreements of the Western states with West Germany in 1952 and by the Soviet
Union with East Germany in 1954.
The two Germanys were respectively admitted to the NATO and Warsaw alliances in 1955.
Each of the wars mentioned above cost over 100, 000 lives. They were the largest in a list of
278 during the period from 1484 to 1945 (Wright [1942] 1965, 636 ff.). Richardson, in his
Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1960a), also lists as of this magnitude the Russo-Turkish War,
1828-1829, the Muslim rebellions in China, 1861-1878 and 1928, the Cuban Ten Years War,
1868-1878, the Colombian Civil War, 1899-1902, the Maji-Maji rebellion against Germany
in east Africa, 1905, the Dutch war against the Achin in Sumatra, 1873-1908, and the Chaco
War between Bolivia and Paraguay, 1930-1935, but the evidence of casualties in these wars
seems to be even less certain than in the major wars listed.
Of the 278 wars listed by Wright, 187 were fought mainly in Europe, and 91 were fought
outside Europe; 135 were balance-of-power wars to maintain national sovereignty against
imperial encroachments; 78 were civil wars for a revolutionary ideology, for national selfdetermination, or for national unity; and 65 were wars between peoples of different
civilizations, either for the defense of European civilization against the Turks or the Barbary
states or for colonial expansion of European states in America, Asia, and Africa.
The same factors can be found in the causation of the wars of modern history as can be found
in those of the earlier period; however, from the mid-seventeenth to the twentieth century,
ideology was less important while political imperialism and nationalism were more
important. Religion as well as power balancing figured in the Turkish and Spanish wars of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Thirty Years War began as a war of religion but ended
as a political war. Ideological factors were significant in the American and French
revolutionary wars of the eighteenth century and in the two world wars of the twentieth
century but were overshadowed by interest in nationalism and the balance of power. The

imperial ambitions of Spain and, a century later, of Louis xiv were combated by British
leadership in organizing alliances in the interest of national sovereignty; and in the same way,
British intervention checked the imperial expansion of France in the French revolutionary and
Napoleonic period and of Russia at the time of the Crimean War. The European powers
intervened to check Russian expansion after its victory over Turkey in 1878. Japan similarly
checked Russian expansion in its war of 1904. The Western powers sought to check the
imperial expansion of Germany in World War i and of Germany, Italy, and Japan in World
War n. The balance-of-power principle was, therefore, a major factor in these wars.
The Seven Years War satisfied Prussian nationalism in Europe. It also ended the rivalry of
Great Britain and France for overseas empire with the victory of the former, with its superior
sea power; but the balance of power was restored by the American Revolution. The wars of
Italian and German unification and the American Civil War were fought primarily for
nationalism, self-determination, and unity as were, in some degree, the Taiping Rebellion and
the Lopez War, where the factors of ideology and imperialism also played a part. Ideology
and nationalism figured prominently in the Mexican, Russian, Chinese, and Spanish
revolutions of the twentieth century.
Legal claims or justifications were less important in the modern period than in the medieval
period, when the idea of just war was prominent. In the modern period war was generally
regarded as a prerogative of sovereignty, and reason of state was considered sufficient
justification. However, in war propaganda it was generally considered desirable to cite
justifications such as necessary defense; maintenance of the balance of power; correction of
historic, strategic, national, or economic boundaries; independence from colonial oppression;
nationality; a civilizing mission, or the white mans burden. After World War i the
Covenant principles that distinguished the aggressor from the victim were usually applied by
the League of Nations if efforts to nip hostilities in the bud by a cease-fire order failed. Such
efforts were not successful in stopping Japanese aggression in Manchuria, China, and the
Pacific; Italian aggression in Ethiopia, Spain, and Yugoslavia; German aggression in Spain,
the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Scandinavia; or Russian aggression in
Finland.

Recent war. Recent military history began with the use of atomic weapons at the end of
World War Ii and continued with the development of jet planes, intercontinental ballistic
missiles, and space satellites. These inventions have had a more revolutionary influence on
war than did the invention of the phalanx and the legion in ancient history or of gunpowder,
artillery, and small arms in modern history.
Thirty hostile incidents resulting in more than five hundred deaths each occurred from 1946
to 1965, but none involved the use of atomic weapons. The most serious were the IndiaPakistan hostilities over partition, 1947-1948, and the Korean hostilities in which UN forces
tried to suppress North Korean aggression, 1950-1953, each of which resulted in more than
half a million deaths. Hostilities in Indochina, 1947-1954, Colombia, 1948-1964, China,
1949, Algeria, 1954-1960, and the Congo, 1960-1962, resulted in more than 100, 000 deaths
each. The nuclear powers have shown a strong desire to prevent the escalation of hostilities to
nuclear war. Half of these hostilities were domestic, and in most of those that were
international or threatened to become so intervention by the United Nations or other
international bodies brought about a cease-fire.
Communist activity was involved in twelve of these incidents, other revolutionary activity in
four, colonial self-determination in twelve, and legal or political claims concerning territory
or jurisdiction were advanced by the initiator of the hostilities in nine cases. Only three of the
incidents were in Europe (Greece, Hungary, Cyprus), four were in Latin America (Bolivia,
Paraguay, Colombia, Cuba), six were in Africa (Madagascar, Algeria, Egypt, Congo, Angola,
Burundi), and of seventeen that were in Asia, three were in west Asia (Syria, Palestine,
Yemen), five in south and central Asia (India and Pakistan, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Tibet, IndiaChina frontier), five in southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaya, Indochina, Vietnam, Laos), and
four in east Asia (Taiwan, China, Korea, Quemoy and Matsu).
Fifty-eight states or political groups were primary participants in one or more of these
incidents and 14 other states contributed contingents to the UN forces.
The cold war between the Soviet Union and a dozen allies, on the one hand, and the United
States and a score of allies, on the other, began in 1946 and continued for over a decade
through propaganda, subversion, infiltration, guerrilla activities, and border hostilities. Of the

resulting conflicts, the Greek, Korean, Hungarian, and Vietnamese hostilities were the most
serious. The cold war, however, showed signs of abatement with the death of Stalin in 1953,
followed by the break between Communist China and the Soviet Union and by the
independent policy of France. Some regarded the cold war as ended after the signing of the
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which apparently manifested the determination of the
principal nuclear powers to cooperate in preventing nuclear war and preserving peaceful
coexistence. At the same time, the United States and the Soviet Union struggled to make
converts and win allies by example, persuasion, economic aid, and other non-military forms
of intervention. The resignation of Khrushchev, the Chinese explosion of an atomic device in
October 1964, and the large-scale hostilities in Vietnam since 1965 will doubtless have
further effects on the cold war. In the most recent period of the history of war, and indeed
since the beginning of the twentieth century, both governments and people have increasingly
believed that war is an evil that is susceptible of effective control by human efforts and have
made such efforts with increasing vigor as the dangers of total war have increased.

The analysis of war

War has been written about since man learned to write, and the variety of attitudes toward it
have been reflected in the varied points of view of writers. Political, economic, technological,
legal, psychological, and sociological points of view may be distinguished.
Politics and war. The political value of war in building empires is extolled in the rock
inscriptions of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Rome; more objective histories of the
achievements and failures attributable to war can be found in the Homeric and Indian epics,
the Bible, and the works of historians from Herodotus through Thucydides and Polybius, to
such modern writers as Oman (1885), Delbruck (1900-1936), Nickerson (1933), Mon-tross
(1944), Nef (1950), and Fuller (1961). Analytic appraisals of the political value of war can be
studied in recent writings by Dulles (1950), Kissinger (1957), Aron (1958), Huntington
(1962), and King-Hall (1962).
The analysts noted in the section on technology and war (below) have often based their
technological analyses on controlling political assumptions and have reached diverse

conclusions. Some urge strict observance of the United Nations Charter prohibitions on force
or threats, primary attention in policy making to the stability of the world as a whole as the
only road to the security of any nation, and policies of tolerance, accommodation, and
peaceful coexistence, which are expected to create conditions favorable to general and
complete disarmament and the obsolescence of war. Members of this school of thought
believe, as did the architects of the League of Nations Covenant and the United Nations
Charter, that war has become obsolete as an instrument of policy or as a support for
diplomacy.
Others believe that the coexistence of countries governed by communism and those governed
by free democracy is impossible; these writers advocate elimination of governments that
support the doctrines that they oppose by the use of propaganda, infiltration, subversion,
intervention, the organization of alliances, threats of violence, the building of superior
military force, or even war. They believe that war continues to be the major instrument of
national policy, that superior capability in threatening or using it is necessary for the national
interest, and that victory is possible and losses can be made tolerable.
A third group of analysts appears to accept both of these positions. They insist that nuclear
war would be intolerable; that legal, moral, or rational deterrence cannot be reliable; that such
war can be prevented only by mutual nuclear deterrence; that, to this end, nuclear capability
must be confined to the present nuclear powers; and that these powers must possess such a
supply of nuclear-headed missiles in hardened, mobile, or submarine bases that they will have
an invulnerable second-strike capability, thus making a first strike suicidal and therefore
incredible. Most members of this group agree, however, that threats of force, even of nuclear
force, are necessary instruments of policy to be used in crises such as that over Berlin or
Cuba and that in the national interest states must not only possess such weapons but must
make potential enemies believe that they might be used in such crises. For this purpose they
advocate a counterforce strategy designed to eliminate the enemys retaliatory capacity. They
hope to achieve this by such a superior capability in nuclear weapons, such a pinpointing of
the nuclear launching sites of the potential enemy by espionage or observation in the air or in
outer space, and such a program of civilian fall-out shelters that a first strike would convince
the enemy that retaliation on cities with his reduced capacity would not be effective and that

he would have to surrender. This opinion, it has been suggested by the first group, is based on
the assumption that threats of nuclear attack can be made incredible and credible at the same
time and overlooks the danger that a counter-force strategy may so alarm the potential enemy
that, in spite of its probable suicidal effect, he will launch a pre-emptive attack to gain the
advantage of a first strike.
A fourth group agrees with the first about the need to avoid nuclear war but also agrees with
the second about the necessity of armed force as a support for diplomacy and seeks to avoid
the dilemma of the third group by making a distinction between nuclear war and conventional
war. This fourth school hopes to assure nuclear deterrence not only by limiting the nuclear
club by the test-ban treaty and a treaty preventing nuclear proliferation and by developing an
invulnerable second-strike capability in all the nuclear powers but also by making a nonuclear-first-strike agreement and refraining from civilian defense policies likely to suggest a
counterforce first-strike strategy. With this policy they anticipate that the cities of each
nuclear power will be a hostage against a first nuclear strike and a guarantee of the no-firststrike agreement. At the same time this school would increase conventional armed forces and
means for their transport, maintain alliances, and develop policies of flexible or graduated
deterrence, so that vulnerable frontiers can be defended from conventional attack and
governments vulnerable to infiltration or subversion can be protected against guerrillas and
infiltrators. This school of thought, however, often approaches the position of the third group
by advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons as a possible step in graduated deterrence,
thus breaking down the distinction that in principle they insist upon between nuclear and
conventional war.
Economics and war. A majority of capitalistic economists have considered competitive free
trade a guarantee of peace, while Marxians have regarded the capitalistic economic system as
the major cause of war in modern times. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden,
Cordell Hull, and others have argued that free economic competition in the domestic field
stimulates production and distributes the product to all, whether capitalists, workers,
managers, or entrepreneurs, in proportion to their contribution to the productive process, thus
assuring economic justice and domestic tranquillity. In the international field, such writers
have argued that free trade would assure a geographic division of labor, maximizing the

production of all states and creating a world economy in which each state is dependent on
international trade, thus constituting a hostage against war because war is certain to disrupt
the natural and economically advantageous movements of commodities, investments, labor,
and management.
Free-enterprise economists have also argued that the rising prosperity of all under their
system and the increased influence of the economic mind over the military mind would divert
opinion and policy from military preparation and political expansion and would assure both
the motives and the means for family planning, thus keeping economic production ahead of
population growth. On the other hand, they have argued that governmental intervention in the
economy by protective tariffs, quotas, or other measures to promote national industries for
which, the country is not well adapted or to develop industries augmenting military
capability, retard the rate of economic progress. Actual governmental operation of the
economy, as urged by the socialists, would, they insist, subordinate the economic motive of
supplying consumer demands to the political motive of increasing the power of the state. It
would tend to create self-contained economies in which political boundaries constituted
economic barriers perpetuating or augmenting differential levels of living among the different
countries, particularly as the poorer countries, without the knowledge or means of population
control, would develop according to the Malthusian law and get continually poorer. From
such arguments Herbert Spencer divided countries into the industrial, with free economies
favoring peace, and the military, with government-controlled economies preparing for war.
Marxs successors in the international field elaborated his views, using the argument that as
the exploitation of labor proceeded, the domestic market would decline and the capitalists
would of necessity embark upon imperial expansion to find new markets, new sources of raw
material, and new labor to exploit. Lenin, in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism,expressed the opinion that such expansionist policies arose more from the greed
than from the necessities of the capitalistic entrepreneurs; but whatever the motive,
communists argued that capitalistic expansionism led first to imperial war to conquer
underdeveloped peoples and then to wars among the capitalist nations themselves arising
from rivalry over colonies or commercial privileges.

Turning from these theoretical arguments, scholars like Lewis Richardson have examined the
actual causes of war and have found that economic factors have been of relatively little
importance. From a statistical analysis of wars between 1820 and 1949, Richardson found
that economic causes figured directly in less than 29 per cent and have been more important
in small than in large wars. He listed the economic factors that have influenced the outbreak
of hostilities in this order: taxation of colonial and minority peoples; economic assistance to
an enemy; restriction on movements of capital, trade, and migration; and dissatisfaction of
soldiers. On the other hand, claims of investors from capitalist countries in undeveloped
countries have usually been settled by diplomacy or arbitration and have not led to hostilities
unless linked with existing political or ideological conflicts; and differentials in wealth of
nations or classes have been of very little influence (Richardson 1960a, pp. xi, 207-210).
Economic factors have had some indirect influence; they have sometimes been significant in
hostilities immediately induced by ideological enthusiasm or political ambition.
Population pressure, which produces progressive impoverishment, has had little influence in
producing war unless accompanied by increased knowledge of economic differentials and by
inciting propaganda. In recent times, such propaganda has induced the revolution of rising
expectations and the north-south problem, thus dividing the world between the
economically developed and largely industrialized areas of Europe, North America, Japan,
Australia, and New Zealand and the economically underdeveloped and mostly agricultural
countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It appears, however, that the revolutionary urge
in the latter countries has been primarily for political independence, racial equality, and the
elimination of all forms of colonialism. The demand for economic progress has not often
induced hostilities unless linked with a revolutionary ideology.
States have used force to acquire economic resources not primarily to elevate the level of
living of their populations but to acquire raw materials for war manufactures, or to obtain a
population from which soldiers may be recruited, or to annex productive areas, thereby
rendering the state less dependent on international trade and less vulnerable to blockade.
Similarly, states have in the past more often sought international influence than increased
economic prosperity and have directed the development of their domestic economies purely
to increase their power positions. The priority of political over economic motives is indicated

by the contradictory propaganda of Mussolini before World War ndemanding colonies as

an outlet to overpopulation but at the same time stimulating population growth in Italy by
giving bounties to large families.
Warscivil, imperial, and internationalhave been fought by states with tribal, agrarian,
feudal, capitalistic, and communistic economies, but there is both historical and statistical
evidence that states with a capitalistic economy have been the least belligerent, although
because of their superior technology, their wars have been the most destructive (Wright
[1942] 1965, p. 1165). Recognizing the value of competitive free-enterprise economies for
increasing production, for stimulating invention, and for preserving individual freedom, and
recognizing the value of state action for initiating large-scale enterprises of social but not
business value and for preventing depressions and exploitations, especially of the
underprivileged, most states, both developed and developing, have in recent times tended to
maintain mixed economies with complementary public and private sectors. A convergence
of communist and capitalist economies has also been observed.
Civil strife has sometimes induced international war (as did the Protestant Reformation and
the American, French, and Russian revolutions) and military interventions (as by the United
States in Vietnam); but ideological and political factors were more important than conflict of
economic classes in the causation of such civil strife. On the other hand, international war has
often led to revolution and civil strife among participants suffering from its economic
ravages, especially if influenced by its political propaganda. This was true of the Napoleonic
Wars in Spain and central Europe, of World War i in Russia, and of World War n in eastern
Europe and China.
In sum, studies of both the direct and indirect influence of economic factors on the causation
of war indicate that they have been much less important than political ambitions, ideological
convictions, technological change, legal claims, irrational psychological complexes,
ignorance, and unwillingness to maintain conditions of peace in a changing world.
Economists who are not committed to dogmatic theory have usually looked upon war as the
most uneconomic enterprise in which man can engage. They have found that the economic
gains from victory seldom compensate for the costs of war and the losses of trade (ibid., p.

1367, in reference to the work of Norman Angell, Lionel Robbins, et al.) and that the
continuing costs of colonial administration and defense usually exceed the economic value of
colonies, if the nation as a whole is considered. Adam Smith, writing in 1776, thought it
would be to the economic advantage of the British people to get rid of their colonies, and
more recent economists have generalized this opinion, although recognizing that arms
makers, investors, and colonial administrators have sometimes profited from war and
imperialism (ibid., pp. 1134, 1173 ff., citing Grover Clark, M. M. Knight, et al.). War, they
suggest, springs from irrational illusions or unreasonable fears rather than from economic
calculations, and they point out that the economically minded have increasingly opposed
wars and imperialistic adventures as military technology has increased the destructiveness of
war (ibid., p. 1179, citing Eugene Staley, Jacob Viner, Lionel Robbins, et al.). Few, if any, see
any possible economic advantage in a nuclear war. Non-Marxian economists, therefore,
regarding their discipline as a guide to rational action to achieve economic ends, usually
consider war outside their field.
Wars have not arisen, as is sometimes said, from the struggle among peoples for the limited
resources provided by nature. Even animals of the same species maintain their existence more
by cooperation than by lethal struggle. Among men, with their greater capacity to relate
means to ends, competition for economic resources, if not influenced by political loyalties
and ambitions, ideological commitments, or psychological illusions, has led to cooperation in
larger groups and larger areas.
Technology and war. The technology, tactics, and strategy of war have been discussed by
both soldiers and historians interested in how to win a war, as for example in the Roman
classics of Caesar and Vegetius, the Renaissance and eighteenth-century works of
Machiavelli and Vauban, the post-Napoleonic treatises by Clausewitz (1832-1834) and
Jomini, the nineteenth-century works of Admiral Mahan, and the more recent writings of
Marshal Foch (1903), General Bernhardi, and General Taylor (1960). Recent contributors to
the technological approach have been less concerned with how to win a war than with how to
eliminate stalemate or limit war. Some, like Russell (1959), Speier (1929-1951), and Millis
(Millis & Real 1963), have written in the tradition of Erasmus, who found war contrary to
human nature, and in the tradition of Bloch (1898), who thought the military technology of

the late nineteenth century made war intolerable and who influenced Tsar Nicholas n to call
the first Hague Peace Conference. Among writers impressed by the dangers of modern
military technology but favoring control rather than elimination of war are Brodie (1959),
Bull (1961), Kahn (1960), Kissinger (1957), Lid-dell-Hart (1946), Morgenstern (1959),
Osgood (1957), and Schelling (Schelling & Halperin 1961). These writers believe that
deterrence or limitation is technologically possible by the establishment of a stable balance of
military power in the nuclear age, but, as suggested in the previous section, their proposals
vary according to their appraisals of the political value of war. A balance of military power
has in the past always depended on moderate stability in military technology and on
occasional wars to make the threat of war (which is the essence of its functioning) credible,
but since modern weapons systems change rapidly and since one nuclear war might end
civilization, these conditions are hardly applicable to the nuclear age and have resulted in the
great confusion already noted about the relation between war and international politics,
between nuclear and conventional weapons, and between the credibility and incredibility of
threats.
Mathematicians have analyzed the variables that make arms races, a characteristic of balanceof-power politics, tend to war or to stability. Richardson (1960a, pp. 12 ff., 282; Wright
[1942] 1965, p. 1482) concluded that the factors of increasing costs and continuing
grievances in the process of reciprocal arms-building were not usually sufficient to prevent
the arms race from heading toward war, thus making the participants less and less secure the
more they arm. He recognized that his equations would not predict the actual course of an
arms race if statesmen paused to think instead of pursuing customary action and reaction
patterns. Others, such as Joynt (1964, pp. 23 ff.), operating on the same assumptions
concerning patterns of government decision making, have pointed out that if consideration is
given to such factors as disparity in industrial capacity and in resources available, the
possibility of alternative weapons systems, and the relation between the cost and
destructiveness of weapons systems, an arms race may move toward a high degree of
stability.
All such studies, seeking prediction from the technological point of view, are criticized by
students who believe the problem is not technological but psychological. The assumption that

statesmen do not pause to think eliminates the complex of motives, rational and irrational,
and the images of the total situation, accurate and distorted, that actually control the decisions
of men and governments. To reduce all this to physical entities neglects the essence of the
problem.
Law and war. At the opposite extreme from the technologists are the writers who seek to
appraise and control war by standards of law, ethics, and religion. Such efforts were made by
Hebrew, Greek, and Roman writers, and particularly by medieval theologians and jurists who
elaborated a complicated theory of just war for the guidance of statesmen.
St. Augustine, Isidore of Seville, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Johannes Legnano insisted that a
war to be just must have just causes (defense against attack, punishment of crime, or
reparation for injury), that its motive must be to establish justice, that its consequences must
be such as to contribute more to vindicating justice than to committing injustices, and that, in
any case, it must be initiated only by proper authority and conducted only by proper means.
Among the classical international lawyers the naturalists (Victoria, Suarez, Pufen-dorf)
accepted this theory, but the positivists" (Ayala, Gentili) and the eclectics (Grotius, Vattel)
did so with the qualification that in practice war was considered a prerogative of sovereign
states and that positive law was not concerned with its initiation but only with its conduct.
Nineteenth-century international jurists also generally took this position as have some recent
writers (Stone 1954), although many recognize that international war has been outlawed and
that hostilities are permissible only in individual or collective self-defense against armed
attack or under authorization or permission of the United Nations or other proper
international authority (Jessup 1956; Wright 1961; Brownlie 1963). Thus, like the medieval
jurists, modern scholars have considered both the conditions justifying resort to war (jus ad
bellum) and the methods by which it may properly be waged (jus in bello), but with different
conclusions. This voluminous literature has been examined in histories of international law
by such writers as T. E. Holland, Luigi Sturzo, Alfred Vanderpol, Robert Regout, John
Eppstein, Angelo Sereni, Thomas A. Walker, William Ballis, and Arthur Nussbaum.
Studies from the legal point of view are based on the assumption that man is a rational
animal, an assumption that has been denied not only by the mechanists like Machiavelli,
Hobbes, and the modern advocates of deterrence, who believe that men and governments will

blindly pursue greed, ambition, and custom unless faced by superior force, but also by
psychologists who emphasize the influence of subconscious, unconscious, and other irrational
factors in human behavior.
Psychology and war. An increasing number of writers have considered war as a
psychological rather than a technological problem, and contributions have been made to the
field by students of opinion (Gabriel Almond, Karl Deutsch, Bernard Berelson), of conflict
and tension (Georg Simmel, Hadley Cantril, Otto Klineberg, Frederick Dunn, Kenneth
Boulding), of political psychology (Harold Lasswell, David Riesman, Charles Osgood,
Anatol Rapoport, Ranyard West), and by psychoanalysts (Franz Alexander, Erich Fromm,
Robert Waelder).
These writers have emphasized the influence of psychological complexes, such as
ambivalence, displacement, scapegoating, frustration, identification, and projection, in
creating aggressiveness and the role of false images and stereotypes in developing fears and
anxieties. These psychic syndromes, observed in individual behavior, may figure in the
decision-making process of states. Although seeming to emerge from objective, rational
consideration of detailed intelligence reports and analytical studies, decisions are greatly
influenced by the decision makers unconscious and irrational patterns. Indeed, such patterns
may be even more influential in public opinion, which greatly influences decision makers,
especially in times of high tension, than they are in the behavior of an individual. The growth
of aggressive tendencies in governments, the development of international feuds, the
emergence of crisis periods, and the conviction of the inevitability of war leading to selffulfilling prophecies, as well as miscalculation in the adaptation of means to ends, may be
attributable to such psychic complexes among leaders and peoples.
Writers aware of the psychological roots of behavior emphasize the role of research and
education in promoting understanding of the problem of war and in creating conditions in
which peaceful solutions may be possible. Just as psychoanalysts believe that awareness of
conditions leading to neurotic behavior may effect a cure, so these scholars suggest that states
operating on the basis of a schizophrenic culture, false images of the world and of other
states, excessive identification with rigid ideologies, or an aggressive disposition derived

from a history of frustration and humiliation may be cured by becoming aware of their
illusions.
Sociology and war. Proposals to eliminate, control, or limit war through organization of the
entire community, including all potential belligerents, were put forward in the Middle Ages
by Dante, who urged universal empire, by Pope Boniface vm, who urged universal
acceptance of Christianity under authority of the church, and by Pierre Du-bois, who urged
the establishment of a continuing conference of princes to maintain peace among themselves
and to recover the Holy Land. In later times such organization to end war has been developed
by King George of Podebrad, Emeric Cruce, William Penn, Jeremy Bentham, and Immanuel
Kant; by practical statesmen during the Napoleonic period; in the debates at the Hague
conferences; and in the formation and operation of the League of Nations and the United
Nations.
Such proposals and organizations are based upon a sociological analysis of the causes of war
and the conditions of peace. In recent times social and political scientists have made
numerous studies of international relations, international organization, international conflict,
international arbitration, disarmament, the causes of war, and the conditions of peace from
the sociological point of view. The works of Inis Claude, Amitai Etzioni, Seymour Melman,
Leland Goodrich, Arthur Holcombe, Frederick Schuman, Grenville Clark, Louis Sohn, John
Strachey, Coral Bell, and Lincoln Bloomfield are representative. These writers, differing from
the Neo-Darwinian sociologists, do not believe war inevitable; they believe that governments,
like men, are influenced by a great variety of factors including conscience, custom, and
reason as well as compulsion. Decision in a particular situation is arrived at through
processes of information gathering, analysis, evaluation, and consultationall influenced by
the decision makers images, assumptions, and prejudices. Sociological studies attempt to
merge the analysis of the causes and conditions productive of war with the proposal of
measures by which these conditions may be modified and conditions of peace established.
They usually realize that the deterministic assumptions underlying predictive formulations
are inconsistent with the voluntaristic assumptions underlying constructive decision making.
The two may be merged, however, by comparison of the probable consequences of various
alternative proposals permitting evaluation and rational choice.

The significance of war

Consideration of the changing popular and legal conceptions of war, of the history of its
technology, causes, and functions from primitive times to the present, and of appraisals by
ancient and modern writers of its political rationality and possible control indicate that war
has been a phenomenon of very varied significance in human experience. It has varied in
frequency, destructiveness, function, and interpretation.
Europe was in comparative peace during the Pax Romana of the Antonine Caesars, the Pax
Ecclesiae of the Middle Ages, and the Pax Britan-nica of the nineteenth century, but before
each of these periods there was almost continuous war: before the first period, the imperial
expansions of Macedonia and Rome; before the second, the barbarian, Muslim, and Viking
attacks on the decaying Roman Empire; and before the third, the religious, dynastic, and
nationalistic wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In modern European history the
seventeenth and twentieth centuries have been the most bloodythe nineteenth, the least
bloody. However, this was not true in the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
There has been a similar variability among states. Sweden has been at peace ior a century and
a half but was among the most warlike of states in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. The great powers have been at war much more frequently than the smaller powers.
In the first third of the twentieth century the great powers averaged more than one military
campaign a year while the Scandinavian countries participated in only one campaign in the
entire period, and other lesser powers engaged in not more than one campaign every three
years (Wright [1942] 1965, pp. 220 ff., 628).
The destructiveness of war has varied tremendously with changes in technology from the
spear and the arrow to the airborne or missile-borne nuclear bomb. The proportion of
population directly engaged in war has varied from less than 5 per cent in the armies of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to almost the entire adult population engaged either at
the front or in transportation and productive services for war during World War Ii. The
efficiency of medical services has greatly decreased the ravages of disease in armies and of
war-borne disease in civilian populations. Through much of history flea-borne typhus was
more dangerous to armies than the enemy. Tactics have varied tremendously from the sudden

brief raids of primitive people to the infrequent battles and sieges of disciplined armies in
historic war and the continuous wars of attrition in recent times.
All these changes have greatly affected the impact of war on population. Among the more
warlike primitive people direct losses from war have been estimated at from 6 to 11 per cent
of all deaths, and in modern Europe such losses appear to have accounted for 2 to 3 per cent
of all deaths. However, if deaths from war-borne diseases and civilian attacks were included,
the figure would be much larger, probably some 10 per cent of all deaths in the first half of
the twentieth century (ibid., pp. 212, 242, 569).
War has at times functioned politically to integrate tribes into feudal principalities and to
integrate kingdoms into empires, but it has also served to disintegrate kingdoms and states
into feuding cities, and empires into hostile nations. It has at times stimulated science,
invention, and the arts, and at other times it has destroyed civilizations and initiated dark ages
in which science and values deteriorated. In general, however, the advance of a civilization in
science, technology, social services, democratic values, and the administration of justice has
created conditions in which war is more likely to deteriorate the quality of life than to
improve it.
As a result of these varied impacts of war, its appraisal has varied greatly among different
peoples and at different periods of history. The founders of the great religions, particularly of
Christianity, appraised war negatively. Pacifism has been common among adherents of
Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Christianity. Negative appraisals and pacifistic
movements have been common after great and destructive wars, as illustrated by the plays of
Euripides and Aristophanes, by the philosophies of the Stoics, the medieval scholastics, and
the humanists of the Renaissance, and by the peace societies organized after the Napoleonic
Wars and the two world wars. There have, however, been militarists, imperialists, extreme
nationalists, and Neo-Darwinians who have appraised war as the dynamic force of progress.
International lawyers appraised war as a possible instrument of justice in the Middle Ages, as
a prerogative of sovereignty in the Renaissance, as a fact that the law could not appraise but
might ameliorate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and increasingly, in the twentieth
century, as a crime. At most times most people have regarded war as a human problem like
famine, pestilence, and crime with varying degrees of skepticism or optimism as to its

control, thus differing from primitive peoples, who have regarded all of these phenomena as
visitations of supernatural power beyond human control.

The control of war

A review of the various studies of war suggests that the problem of war cannot be solved by
developing the art of war but only by developing the art of peace. War has been natural in
the sense that it has been the probable consequence of the proximity of self-determining
systems of action, each of which guides its behavior by internally generated interests and
motivations, with little understanding or concern for the probable reactions of others. Peace
on the other hand is artificial because its maintenance depends on a general desire to
maintain it, on a correct image of the world as one whole, and on the guidance of political
decisions and actions by sound psychological, sociological, political, economic, and
technological knowledge of the probable reaction of each of the systems of action able to
precipitate hostilities.
Only by the application of such knowledge in continually changing conditions can the
naturalhubris of the sovereign state be enlightened by the themis of reason, reconciling liberty
and independence with stability and peace through continuous concern by all for international
justice. No gadget of organization or ideology will solve the problem. Continuous research is
necessary to increase understanding of international relations in the rapidly changing,
interdependent, and universally vulnerable world of nations with different values, traditions,
institutions, and political and economic structures. No less important is continuous education,
in order to spread this understanding among peoples and statesmen, inducing them to accept
the image of the world inherent in such understanding. Furthermore, there must be
continuous activity in order to develop international law, the structure and operation of
international organizations, and the foreign-policy-making processes of states, so that a world
of peacefully coexisting states may gradually emerge. Continuous activity on the scientific,
legal, educational, and political fronts, stimulated by widespread understanding that nuclear
war would be intolerable, may create a stable, progressive, and reasonably satisfactory world
in which, while conflict may be expected, war in the ordinary, as well as the legal, sense will
have become obsolete.

Quincy Wright

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Cantril, Hadley (editor) 1950 Tensions That Cause War. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
Clausewitz, Karl Von (1832-1834) 1943 On War. New York: Modern Library.
First published in German.
Da vie, Maurice R. 1929 The Evolution of War: A Study of I ts Rle in Early Societies. New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
Delbruck, Hans 1900-1936 Geschichte der Kriegs kunst. 7 vols. Berlin: Stilke.
Dulles,> John Foster (1950)1957 War or Peace. New York: Macmillan.
Dunn, Frederick 1950 War and the Minds of Men. New York: Harper.

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Fuller, J. F. C. 1961 The Conduct of War, 1789-1961: A Study of the Impact of the French,
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Press.
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Millis, Walter; and Real, James 1963 The Abolition of War. New York: Macmillan.
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Morgenstern, Oskar 1959 The Question of National Defense. New York: Random House. A
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II. PRIMITIVE WARFARE

War among nonliterate peoples ranges from the hit-and-run raids and ambuscades of warriors
from autonomous local communities of primitive horti-culturalists or hunters and gatherers to
the military campaigns carried out by the armies of such state-organized societies as the old
African kingdoms and the Inca empire of the New World. The different modes of organized
armed conflict encountered among nonliterate peoples have been studied by social scientists
engaged in a variety of enterprises, but the present article is confined for the most part to a
discussion of the functioning of war among nonliterate peoples.
In the study of war, functional analysis, understood as the analysis of the regulation of some
particular variable by other variables (Brown 1963, pp. 110-112; Leeds 1963), is applicable if
war can be viewed as either a regulated or a regulating variable. It has been viewed as a
regulated variable in a number of anthropological studies. Military deterrence resulting from

the achievement of a balance of power among territorial segments of nonstate-organized

African societies has been emphasized by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940). Other scholars
have seen war between potentially hostile primitive communities as being limited by the
formation of intercommunity ties of one kind or another, for example, the ties resulting from
intermarriage, commerce, conquest, or fictions of common descent. Colson (1953) and
Gluckman (1963), in their studies of African societies, have called particular attention to the
pacifying effect of a division of the loyalties of individuals between territorial and kinship
groups; that is, rather than joining coresidents in fighting against kinsmen or joining kinsmen
in fighting against coresidents, individuals with divided loyalties tend to work for peaceful
settlements of conflicts. Summary discussions of the role of intercommunity ties in regulating
warfare may be found in works by Davie (1929, chapter 15), LeVine (1961), and Poirier
(1961).
However, that there can easily be a severing of intercommunity ties and a renewal of
hostilities in at least some primitive societies is indicated in some detailed studies of war
among particular nonliterate peoples, including the Maori of New Zealand (Vayda 1960) and
the Huli of New Guinea (Glasse 1959). There is a need for further investigation of the
conditions under which particular kinds of intercommunity ties either are or are not effective
in limiting warfare.
When war is considered not as a regulated but rather as a regulating variable, we may
examine a number of possible functions of war, that is, its regulation of a number of different
variables or kinds of variables.
Regulation of psychological variables. The role of warfare in keeping such psychological
variables as anxiety, tension, and aggressiveness under control has been emphasized by a
number of writers who have viewed primitive wars as being flight-from-grief devices
(Turney-High 1949), as enabling a people to give expression to anger caused by a
disturbance of the internal harmony (Wedgwood 1930, p. 33), and as serving to divert intrasocietal hostility onto substitute objects (Coser 1956, cited in Murphy 1957, p. 1032). Related
to the emphasis on the regulation of psychological variables is the view of some
anthropologists that games and other ritualized rivalrous contests may be functional

alternatives to war, since they may also provide release from emotions and tensions (Berndt
1957, p. 50; Murdock 1956; Scotch 1961; Stern 1950, pp. 96 ff.).
Writers concerned with relating primitive war to psychological variables usually support their
generalizations with some reference to data on particular nonliterate peoples and their
fighting. For example, Whiting (1944, p. 142) noted the case of a New Guinea tribesman who
organized a raid because his wife had made his belly hot with anger by taunting him. This
is presented by Whiting as an illustration of how aggression generated within the tribe may be
displaced to an out-group. On the whole, however, it may be said that there has been no
notable success thus far in correlating any reliable measures or indexes of tensions and other
emotional states with the occurrence or non-occurrence of war at particular times among
particular nonliterate peoples. It may be concluded, therefore, that the psychological
functions of primitive war (that is, its regulation of psychological variables)and, for that
matter, its functional equivalence to gameshave not been proved. Some anthropologists,
committed to the school of interpretation called culturology, have argued that these
functions do not need to be considered, because, in their view, the fact that war is a struggle
between societies and not between individuals makes the psychological states of individuals
irrelevant to the question of whether or not war will take place (Newcomb 1950; I960; White
1949, pp. 129-134). Other anthropologists (for example, Vayda 1961; Leeds 1963), while not
denying that war may have psychological functions, have argued against regarding these as
the only, or necessarily the primary, functions of primitive hostilities. Certain functions that
may be more sociopolitical than psychological in character may, for example, be important.
Regulation of the exercise of authority. In their studies of African kingdoms, a number of
British social anthropologists have emphasized the functions of civil or intrasocietal war in
checking abuses of political power and have viewed rebellions as defenses of the kingship
against the king (Beattie 1959; Gluckman 1963; Worsley 1961). Rebellions have been found
to have similar functions in nonliterate societies in other parts of the world, including some
Polynesian societies that were organized into chiefdoms rather than into states or kingdoms.
Here the chiefs had duties in allocating goods, resources, and labor; rebellions apparently
could arise when the chiefs made the allocations according to whim or for their own benefit

rather than for that of their people. A number of instances of such rebellions are cited by
Sahlins (1963).
Regulation of relations with other groups. The regulatory functions that primitive war may
have in the relations between politically independent groups are discernible in much of what
has been called fighting for revenge, for example, such as has been reported from
numerous primitive societies of swidden or shifting (slash-and-burn) agriculturalists in
various parts of the world (see the references in Vayda 1960, p. 2) and even from some of the
simplest societies of hunters and gatherers (Hobhouse 1956). These societies lack a central
government with penal jurisdiction over the separate local groups. In such circumstances, the
punishment for offenses by members of one group against members of anotherand,
presumably, the deterrence of more such offensesmay be effected by fighting and killing
undertaken by the offended group to avenge the insult, theft, nonpayment of bride price,
abduction, rape, poaching, trespass, wounding, killing, or other offense committed. Certainly
such retaliatory fighting may satisfy an aggrieved peoples need for revenge, but it would be a
mistake to emphasize this function to the exclusion of the role that the fighting may play in
maintaining the integrity of groups and their possessions.
Regulation of the distribution of goods and resources. In cases where territorial expansion
and the subjugation and economic exploitation of conquered people were the results of
warfare waged by such state-organized societies as those of ancient Peru and Mexico (Bram
1941; Wolf 1959), the effects of warfare on the distribution of goods and resources are not
difficult to specify. In the warfare of societies that lack state organization, such effects are
often less apparent and have in fact been declared, by such scholars as Wright (1942, pp. 7374) and Steward and Shimkin ([1961] 1962, p. 79), to be either uncharacteristic or of little
importance. These generalizations can hardly be applied, however, to African and Asian
pastoralists whose warfare includes stock-raiding activities, which apparently serve to keep
within a viable range the number of animals held by each local group (Leeds & Vayda 1965).
Even among primitive agricultural people less dependent on so mobile a form of wealth as
cattle, camels, or other animals, warriors sometimes take booty (Davie 1929; Vayda 1960),
but just how important this is in getting such goods as tools and food distributed between
groups is hard to say in the absence of quantitative data on the booty taken.

With respect to the regulation of the territorial holdings of groups by means of warfare, it
may be noted that there are some regions of primitive culture and stateless societies where the
displacement of defeated groups from their land and the occupation of their former territories
by their enemies are frequent aftermaths of fighting. A case in point is highland New Guinea
(Berndt 1964). At the same time, it is true that the war expeditions or campaigns of many
primitive people without state organization often end with no transfers of land. It is this fact
that may have led some students to neglect the role of primitive war in the regulation of
territorial holdings. However, it is important to note that even in those places where fighting
often ends with territories and boundaries remaining intact, it does not always end that way.
In such places, the strength of a group successful in defending itself year after year against its
enemies may eventually, as a result of economic reverses, disease, or the attrition of recurrent
warfare, decline to a point where its capacity for further defense is seriously impaired and
where it then must yield territories to a group better able to defend and exploit them. A
process very much like this operated among Maori tribes and sub-tribes (Vayda 1960, p. 110),
and there are suggestions of it also from various other primitive swiddening groups
(including some who have become famous for their head-hunting) in Oceania and the South
American tropical forest (Fernandes 1952, pp. 60-63; Freeman 1955, pp. 25-26; Selig-man
1910, p. 196).
Regulation of demographic variables. In some societies the functions discussed so far are
performed by warfare without much bloodshed or loss of life. A terrifying war dance or the
taking of one or two heads can decide a contest and drive an enemy away or deter him, at
least temporarily, from aggression. This kind of ritualism makes some of the warfare of
primitive human societies comparable not only to such ceremonialized aspects of the threat
behavior of modern states as war games and May Day parades but also to the threat behavior
of infrahuman animals, which, at times, fulfills the same functions as actual fighting but does
so without a maladaptive loss of life (see Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1963; Suttles 1961; Tinbergen 1953;
Wynne-Edwards 1962, pp. 129-131).
On the other hand, it seems that the warriors of some primitive societies try in their battles to
kill as many of the enemy as they can. From New Guinea, for example, there are reports of
the extermination of entire groups in warfare. It has been suggested that these more

sanguinary modes of primitive war result in some cases from population increase, which
exacerbates competition for resources, and that heavy battle mortality under these
circumstances prevents population increase from proceeding so far as to lead to an overexploitation and more or less permanent deterioration of resources (see Allan 1949, pp. 25-26;
Carneiro 1961, pp. 60-61). In other words, under these circumstances heavy battle mortality
can be advantageous in the long run for the populations concerned. In order to define these
relationships more precisely, more detailed studies of the demography and ecology of
primitive societies must be made. Moreover, the role of psychological variables in mediating
the relationships also must be studied. Is it the case, for example, that a diminishing per
capita food supply and an increasing intragroup competition for resources generate intense
domestic frustrations and other in-group tensions, which must then be released in bloody
battle with an enemy group? It may be noted incidentally that the very fact that such
questions can be posed points to the necessity for studying the psychological functions of war
in conjunction with other possible functions, such as the demographic ones being considered
here.
Population pressure may be reduced as much through land conquests as through battle
mortality in cases where a population whose own land is being filled to its carrying capacity
has neighbors with unexploited or underexploited land. Although land transfers as a result of
primitive warfare have already been discussed, it is pertinent here to note that for some
warlike tribes of primitive agriculturalists in Africa, Oceania, and South America there is
evidence of population increase as well as of territorial expansion (Bohannan 1954; Vayda
1961). Sometimes when such increase is a long-term trend, warfare contributes not only to
relieving local population pressure but also to maintaining an over-all rate of increase by
providing conquered territories into which the population can expand.
In much of the primitive world, demographic problems may arise because autonomous local
groups are small enough to be subject to considerable fluctuations in size, sex ratio, and age
distribution that are a result of chance variations in natality and mortality. In some cases, the
taking of war captives is a means of compensating for the effect of such chance variations;
the capture of women, in particular, and of children and men, to a somewhat lesser degree, is
described in the war narratives of numerous tribes (Davie 1929, pp. 89-102). There is

variation from society to society in the treatment of captives and the degree of their
incorporation into the captors social groups, but it should be noted that slavery involving the
systematic exploitation of captured or conquered people is rare in the primitive world, where
neither food production nor political mechanisms are sufficiently developed for the support
and control of an economically productive slave class (Hobhouse et al. [1915] 1930, chapter
4; Nieboer 1900). Prior to the advent of civilized slave traders, the warriors of primitive
societies without state organization appear to have taken only small numbers of captives.
While these could be used for correcting local demographic imbalances, they did not tax
locally available food supplies.
Multiple functions. The foregoing has not been an exhaustive listing of the possible
functions of primitive war, and it must be emphasized that rigorous empirical validation of
the listed functions has thus far been deficient. It does seem to be indicated, however, that
primitive war, much as any war, has numerous functions. This must be borne in mind in
assessing recommendations for limiting or eradicating warfare with respect to only certain
functions, for example, trade as a substitute with respect to economic functions or games as a
substitute with respect to tension release. Greater success in achieving peace can be expected
when substitutes are provided for fulfilling not just one or the other function but rather the
gamut of functions that war apparently has.