ABSTRACT
The next article, “‘New Wars’ and Rumors of ‘New Wars,’” written with Errol Henderson, continues the theme of the previous article that the way in which we study war is important. As noted above, there has been a growing tendency to suggest “new” classes of wars that are presumably different from all wars we have known and studied. While it is clear that patterns of warfare shift across time and space, it is not clear that war itself has changed “fundamentally” and has thus become inexplicable in light of theoretical arguments in world politics as many “new war” theorists suggest. Our analysis demonstrates that many of the “new wars” are simply amalgamations of various inter-state, extra-state, and intra-state wars—i.e., the “old wars”—that have been lumped together into a single category. The result is a hodgepodge of armed conflicts whose different correlates derive from their diverse morphologies rather than their novelty as wars unlike any we have experienced previously.
The sermon presented here is a warning to future scholars: don’t be seduced by the next fad or the allegedly “new” event or condition. History does indeed repeat itself with reasonable accuracy.
