An Introduction to International Relations

Introduction

The discipline of International Relations (IR) owes its origins to the study of war and peace. But do the wars of the early twenty-first century differ so fundamentally from their predecessors that they need to be considered in quite different ways? This chapter provides a barometer on the character of warfare and its implications for contemporary international relations. It begins with warfare's diverse ends and means before considering five leading issues: the role of violence in warfare; the extent to which that violence is organised; the political nature of war; the interactive nature of warfare; and the scope and scale of war. The overall argument presented here is that while war today may look rather different from wars of earlier periods, much of its essential nature remains intact. This should make us sceptical about claims that the role of war in international relations has somehow been revolutionised.

The diversity of warfare

IR students need little reminder that they are traversing a discipline with hotly contested leading concepts. But we might be excused for supposing that the meaning and character of something as concrete as war would be an open and shut case. As this author has indicated elsewhere (Ayson 2006: 10–24), the field that looks at the place of war in international politics – strategic studies – often avoids debates about meaning and terminology, let alone theory.

But war can mean quite different things to different people in different parts of the world. Aside from such unhelpful notions as the ‘War on Terror’ and the ‘war on drugs’ (which are about as meaningful as the idea of a ‘war on war’ itself), our subject admits to a quite remarkable variety. It includes large-scale and nearly total war between states (and groups of nation-states) as seen in the twentieth century's two World Wars. It includes interstate war fought in more limited fashion for more limited goals (as in the war between Britain and Argentina over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands in the early 1980s). Also included are the messy internal wars including the American Civil War in the 1860s, China's long war which Mao's communist forces, eventually won in the late 1940s, and, much more recently, the violence between multiple factions in Syria's brutal civil war, which began in 2011.