In addition to the devastation of lives, societies, and the economy of developing countries, the transfer of battlefields from the North to the South reinforced the interventionist narrative of white saviorism. Due to the impossibility of conducting regular wars involving nuclear powers, proxy wars adopted irregular practices. The first sign of adaptation was that conflict moved from Europe to the peripheries, illustrated by the emergence of proxy wars. After the advent of nuclear weapons, it has become inconceivable to maintain the war between great powers as a recurring practice. The breakthrough with classical war can be found in the Second World War (1939–1945). The “novelty” of the 20th century is not the irregularity, but the extent of its use. However, irregular conflicts are not a contemporary novelty and were already described in classical works, such as Carl Schmitt’s partisan theory (idem, 2014). Mistakenly, many people place the emergency of asymmetrical conflicts in the post-Cold War order. This “Westphalian regularity” (Tenembaum, 2014) has been contrasted to irregular wars – also called asymmetrical – in which at least one of the parties is a non-state group. As normative production is also a field in dispute and is commonly concentrated in the hands of those in power, the international humanitarian law and the rules of war legitimacy also derive from a Western and liberal conception of addressees of rights.Īs a result, regular wars are those that develop under established rules: between national Armed Forces, with an immediate distinction between combatants and civilians, in obedience to international law, and with a recognizable demarcation of the battlefield. In contemporary terms, this means that war must conform to jus in bellum (the law in waging war) and jus ad bellum (the right to declare war) to be morally accepted.
CONFLICT OF NATIONS MODERN WAR CHEATS CODE
It had, therefore, a religious and philosophical root: armed conflicts needed to be morally accepted and fall within a certain moral code of conduct (Valença, 2016). Initially proposed in the pre-Christian era, the modern theory of just war was strongly influenced by St.
In this sense, it was the wars of decolonization that introduced a new grammar, a restored lexicon of international conflicts (Badie, 2014).Īnother example of the influence of Western thought on the war theory is the debate on possible moral justifications for the conflict. War is a friction of masses, marked by militarization and the logic of a zero-sum game: my victory generates a defeat in the same proportion to my enemy. Because war is related to the conduct of government objectives, it is the continuation of politics by other means – just one of several ways to resolve differences (Clausewitz, 1982). According to the Prussian military, war is a clash between great powers and an attribute of the State. An example is the classic definition of war, the foundation of International Relations studies, written by Carl von Clausewitz. The universalization of the particularity created a Eurocentrism still prevalent in security studies (Badie, 2014). Thus, war on European and Western parameters is not a universal phenomenon, but a specific experience. Because it was a war between European empires, in a circumscribed historical context, the myth of the origin of the modern international system is connected to an idea of war that corresponds to a particular manifestation of the phenomenon. In the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia, which consolidated the end of the dispute, the observance of the right to religious freedom and nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states gave rise to the concept of sovereignty – which was central to the structuring of the nation-state system. In International Relations, the nation-state system was itself the result of a conflict, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Still, the agreement is exclusively about the simultaneously creative and destructive role of war, and not about its origins, mechanisms, or effects. Historically, being a result of the encounter between different people, war has been an international institution and has helped to consolidate practices and expectations. However, in International Relations, there is something that comes close to maximum convergence: the statement that war has played a central role in the formation, expansion, and maintenance of the international order. In its subfields, it is also impossible to state precisely that a certain subject or concept is accepted by everyone. In the humanities, stating that something is consensual is in itself a contradiction to the idea of dynamism and subjectivity that this field presents as one of its main characteristics.