ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that conflicts emerge from states’ behaviours internally and internationally. State systems, in their attempts to act as independent actors in the international system, are founded on systems of conflicts and wars that sustain them (Barash and Webel 2002: 192). The structures of the modern state are based on the capacity to organize violence through hierarchical state structures, organization of material resources directed towards the destruction of enemy countries that are seen as a threat to national security, threatening to inflict injury or actually inflicting injury to the enemy (Jeong 2005: 55; Tilly 1985, 2003). Bernard suggests that ‘all social life consists of interaction within and between social systems’ (Bernard 1977: 124). For Campbell security can become ‘absence of movement’ or death via stasis (Campbell 1998: 12), or for Deutsch a ‘violent stability and stagnation’ (Deutsch 1979: 5).
