War is a form of social conflict between two or more collective political actors, involving the organized use of physical violence, with the central aim of coercing one political actor to comply with the will of another. In broader terms, war is a complex and highly contingent set of events and processes requiring the mobilization of power, human beings, resources, and technologies of production and communication, which dramatically interrupts routine social life and generates a new social dynamic. When political disputes over territory, resources, sovereignty, or ideology cannot be settled by negotiations, threat, hegemony, or compromise, they often lead to violent attempts to establish political will--that is, in warfare. At the most general level, war is a socially recognized violent intergroup conflict that profoundly transforms social life. Anthropological research corroborates that, with the possible exceptions of a few tribal groupings such as the Semai of Malaysia, Andaman Islanders of India, Copper Eskimos of north Canada, and Mbutis of Congo, all known societies have been involved in warfare.

Although war is a near-universal process, a consensus exists among most sociologists and anthropologists that this has little to do with the biological or psychological makeup of human beings and a great deal to do with their social and political relations. Although some primates seem capable of engaging in organized and protracted lethal conflicts, they lack collective intentionality, systematic use of weapons, sophisticated linguistic coordination, and the ritualism that characterizes human warfare. In this respect war is a distinctly human activity. Such a view was already familiar to classical philosophers of warfare such as Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz, for whom war was a predominantly political instrument, by which distinctly human-made, political goals could be pursued. These early studies focused on strategic and logistical matters--the ability of leaders to be successful on the battlefield and the practical arts of combat--without questioning the logic or necessity of war. In contrast, contemporary social science examines war as a particular social and sociological problem, attempting to explain its social origins, political functions, and historical transformations. Above all, this research focuses on the intrinsic relationships between war, state, and modernity.

With modern history of warfare so tightly bound up with the development of the state, it is no accident that some researchers argue that small tribal societies were unable to fight real wars, as this allegedly requires large-scale organization and pitched battles with more than 1,000 fatal casualties. Furthermore, influenced by Rousseau's myth of the noble peaceful savage, traditional views tended to agree that primitive warfare was sporadic, mostly ritualistic, rarely lethal, and limited to small groups of tribesmen. However, recent research challenges such perceptions, demonstrating not only that primitive warfare was extremely frequent but also that it was highly violent and particularly homicidal, entailing the recruitment of proportionally more combatants than most mobilized modern states such as Germany in World War II or France in World War I. What distinguishes primitive war from its modern counterpart is the birth of the state and its gradual monopolization of violence, which radically transformed the nature and scale of warfare.

As the availability of food set limits on military expansion--both the size of the armed population and the maintenance of substantial army--war in antiquity was dependent on periodic pillages and hence was often no more than organized robbery. In this context, a small technological discovery, such as the invention of war chariots, or an organizational innovation, such as the emergence of an orderly and loyal cavalry, as in the case of the nomadic tribes led by Genghis Khan, provided an overwhelming advantage in conquering large swaths of land. Notwithstanding military inventions such as crossbows and heavy armored cavalry, medieval warfare remained technologically static, essentially continuous since the time of ancient Greece or Rome. However, the newly found strength of ideology compensated for the lack of technology, as common religious beliefs became a potent source of group mobilization for Christian and Muslim warlords. Whereas Islam provided unity and social discipline for Arabian tribes, the Roman Church granted spiritual legitimacy to the European warrior caste to fight the crusades. However, in both cases war remained the preserve of a wealthy, hereditary nobility and involved lifelong specialist training. The radical transformation of warfare began with the gunpowder revolution in the 16th century, which gave a clear advantage to the armed infantry over cavalry, as improved cannons and newly invented muskets easily overpowered pikes, swords, and crossbows.

More importantly, these military changes significantly increased the cost of war, which in turn led to the centralization of power by giving birth to the modern sovereign territorial state. The gradual development of fiscal systems of effective taxation and the growth and professionalization of state bureaucracy, together with the 1648 Westphalian principle of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other states, brought the military under the control of a centralized authority. In Charles Tilly's famous phrase, this was the period when states made war and war made states. The 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries saw the state thoroughly transformed from being the sole property of royal dynasties with little popular support to acquiring a semi-divine status for the great majority of its inhabitants. It was nationalism that proved the most potent glue of state legitimacy, and it was nationalism that mobilized large armies of conscripts to confront the remnants of aristocratic militias. Though the armies of Napoleon and Frederick the Great had almost identical armaments, it was the nationalist zeal of France's revolutionary army that proved to be the tipping point that ultimately won the war between them that ended with the Treaty of Basel in 1795.

References:

1) Giddens, Anthony. 1985. The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

2) Hirst, Paul. 2001. War and Power in the 21st Century. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

3) Mann, Michael. 1993. The Sources of Social Power. Vol. 2. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

4) Shaw, Martin. 2005. The New Western Way of War. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

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