Introduction

Any dramatic historical change is bound to challenge the existing sociological comprehension of reality. Ultimately this can lead to the articulation of new analytical models and new conceptual apparatuses devised to come to terms with these unprecedented changes. Social transformations of any magnitude necessitate new interpretative horizons and new explanatory paradigms. However, macro-level sociologists rarely encounter such unique, earth-shattering, historical moments of rupture. As most longue durée research clearly shows, the trajectories of human development are usually shaped by, and measured in, centuries and millennia rather than decades and years. Hence, it is hard to assess whether the times we live in constitute such a rare and historically transformative episode. Although the collapse of communism, the end of a bipolar world, economic globalisation and the spectacular rise of religiously framed violence are obviously good candidates, there is no certainty that twenty-fourth-century historical sociology will judge them as momentous events and processes in the way we are prone to do. Not only do we tend towards chronocentrism (Fowles 1974), and what Peel (1989) calls ‘blocking presentism’, that is, an overemphasis on present events and our own depiction of the past, but we are not immune to a presentist interpretation of the future either. This chapter attempts to critically engage with recent developments in the study of war and violence and in particular with an emerging research paradigm that claims fundamental historical novelty – the theory of new wars.