War Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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War – oftentimes defined as long-lasting conflict between political groups (especially states or nation-states) and carried out by armed forces -has never been at the center of sociological theorizing. This has something to do with the historical origins of sociology which regarded itself as the science of capitalist and industrial society, a type of society in which processes of capital accumulation and technological innovation might create enormous conflicts, but usually only those within a society, not between societies. Thus, war as an inter-societal process or a phenomenon between states was pushed at the margins of sociological reasoning.

Although in the works of the sociological classics like Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, or Georg Herbert Mead one will always find scattered though certainly interesting hints at the consequences of warfare for societal development, it was not until the rise of historical sociology in the late 1970s that war, and especially the consequences of war, really began to be theorized in a systematic and theoretically meaningful way beyond the very specialized field of military sociology. Starting with Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (1979), the debate focused very much on how European modernity was shaped by the impact of wars. Whereas Skocpol had argued that especially the French and the Russian Revolutions and their outcomes can only be understood by focusing on international contexts, and particularly on the crises of state administrations weakened by long-lasting or lost wars, others emphasized how the modern state and its monopoly of violence were the result of violent interstate conflicts: it was only by constant warfare that large state bureaucracies were built in Europe, bureaucracies for the purpose of extracting resources out of civil society in order to finance large standing armies. Even the rise of democracy and welfare states historically seemed to be closely connected with war since suffering populations could organize and successfully demand suffrage and social rights. And, last but not least, war was also linked to internal repression since the militarization of societies as a consequence of war sometimes led to ethnic cleansing or even genocide.

As historical-sociological research also made clear: War is not a homogeneous variable so that different kinds of war have very different effects. Even within the context of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at least four types of war are to be distinguished: (1) interstate wars between neighboring or competing nations; (2) colonial wars in which mostly European expeditionary forces usually defeated indigenous groups and populations in various parts of the world; (3) civil wars between established state apparatuses and rebels; and (4) wars of national liberation against mostly European colonial powers, a type of war that only came into being after 1945.

The common feature of all these types of war is that a more or less powerful state is at least on one side of the conflict. The phenomenon of state-failure and state breakdown in some world regions, however, structured macro-violence in a surprising way so that since the late 1980s some analysts have begun to talk about so-called ”new wars” (Kaldor 1999). These supposedly new conflicts usually take place in spaces where the state monopoly of violence has vanished so that various types of combatants – armed bandits, ethnic groups, parts of former state elites, etc. – are fighting for resources. These conflicts – so the argument goes – are not shaped by clearly defined ideological or political goals any longer as, for example, the wars of liberation in the period of decolonization especially after 1945.

Bibliography:

Kaldor, M. (1999) New & Old Wars. Organized Violence in aGlobalEra. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
Joas, H. & Knobl, W. (2008) Kriegsverdrangung. Ein Problem in der Geschichte der Sozialtheorie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M.
Skocpol, T. (1979) States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Wittrock, B. (2001) History, war and the transcendence of modernity. European Journal of Social Theory 4(1): 53—72.