ABSTRACT
A sociological analysis of war or peace will address questions of justice and structural violence. This chapter states that the wars are highly organized forms of social conflict that are qualitatively different from ordinary forms of violence. It discusses the long peace during the Cold War, and tells that the peace was the product of the two structural conditions of bipolarity and nuclear armament. War politics defines peace in negative terms, while peace politics regards it in positive terms. Contrary to realism, democratic peace theory seeks the root cause of war or peace in the internal political structure of societies. In the midst of World War I, Marxist theory has inspired many sociological theories of war and peace. Finally, a human rights paradigm will transcend the nationalistic heritage of nineteenth-century sociology, appropriate the discourse of globalization in all sociological studies, and, consequently, address issues of war and peace as central questions of sociological theory.
