ABSTRACT
The discussion of what causes and motivates war and what can end it (as with peace, see Chapter 3) is a, maybe the , central obsession of students of IR and IH alike. It is also riddled with paradox. We are constantly told by some that it has changed its nature; especially since the Industrial Revolution, change accelerated by technology, even to the point of it being ‘postmodern’ (Nef, 1968 ; Gray, 1998 ), an evolution of global political systems and theories (Mitrany, 1943 /1966) or even by a change in human nature. Religion is seen by some as making for very different views about why war should be fought ad bellum as well as how it should be conducted in bello (Popovski, Reichberg and Turner, 2009 ; Towle, 2009 ). There is much debate about whether wars can ever ‘end’ and huge discussions about the respective weight to be
given to different factors in the causes and outcomes of war (Blainey, 1988 , is a good place to start). There are others (like Liddell Hart, 1932 /1944, above) who aver that it has not changed much, if at all (Gray, 2005 ). This chapter will explore these themes by looking at a number of wars and the way they have been interpreted. As with the other chapters in this volume, we will of necessity be very selective, even subjective, in which wars are examined, but all of them will be used to ask a number of basic questions of interest to the IR scholar and international historian alike. The key ones include:
What weight can we give to the importance of the ‘great man’ (or rarely • ‘woman’) as opposed to the structures in which these individuals operated in the success of failure of their efforts? What can war be said to be like to experience, and what are the consequences • of these experiences, individual and collective? Do wars ‘end’, in both the literal sense that the fi ghting stops but also in • the sense that they leave ‘unfi nished business’ that leads to new wars and resentments that rankle to poison relations between states and peoples?
