ABSTRACT
One can dispute the fragments of Heraclitus that “war is the father of all things.” One can attack the gender bias of such a statement raising the question “and who is the mother?” And one can even develop a theory of spontaneous generation; but one cannot deny the fact that major wars are often at the origins of, or originate from, profound transformations in the nature of state and societal interaction. One also cannot deny that major—and even some so-called “minor”—conflicts can possess significant and long term socio-historical, if not globally systemic, ramifications.
