ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, the gap between the ‘war as it is’ and the ‘war as it was supposed to be’ has been widening quickly. The insufficient and unsatisfactory utility of concepts of warfare which have emerged since the late 20th century has led to new enquiries into the changing character of military conflicts. Post-modern war is one of those propositions which combine a critique of the conventional doctrinal thinking with today’s unorthodox approach to the nature of warfare. The concept of post-modern warfare is proposed in this chapter in order to highlight the singularities of war and conflict in the complex global networked environment. It builds on post-modernist interpretations of warfare, blending and reshuffling in an unconventional way key features of the dominant concepts of 21st-century warfare. This chapter discusses post-modern warfare as a dimension of post-Cold War antagonisms and conflicts. Triggered by technological advancements and nurtured by the complexity and vagueness of the security environment, it has evolved through a three-stage process. These stages, corresponding to subsequent generations of post-modern warfare, will be examined according to drivers, dynamics, and potentialities of the use of coercion, manipulation and force to remake the ontological structuring of the global security arena.
