War Amongst the People

Critical Assessments

,

• Publisher: Howgate Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781912440184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Recent conflicts have required the armed forces to engage in what has been termed 'war amongst the people'. Such conflicts increasingly require a type of soldier deployed to function as an 'armed social worker', as was seen most recently in operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this increased focus on societal relations has - and should - become the area of prime concern for contemporary armed forces, this poses a series of conceptual and practical questions regarding the 'people' concerned and the nature of the society amongst which war is conducted.

Scholars and practitioners come together in this volume to explore how armed forces can make sense of such complexity in conceptual terms and how military actors have practically interacted with local power structures and relations, with both positive and negative effects. It examines armed forces' engagement at the local level in a contemporary context and contextualises this within the broader political, strategic, tactical and legal implications this engagement has had at home and overseas.

PART ONE

CONCEPTUAL DEBATES AND CRITIQUES

1

RETHINKING WAR

Beatrice Heuser

Introduction

This volume is dedicated to the reconsideration of the concept of ‘war amongst the people’, but this chapter takes one step back and reconsiders ‘war’ itself. It tackles five questions about war, touching on several paradoxes on the way.

Humans love to categorise and to try to impose analytical order on the world. Moreover, there is a peculiar human – possibly European – predisposition to conceptualise the world in dualistic terms (while the East Asian Yin and Yang are not as mutually exclusive, it seems). The limits of this categorisation, namely the line drawn between what is black and what is white, tend to be, if not entirely random or arbitrary, then at least strongly culture-dependent. This binary obsession has affected the way most thinkers approached the questions to be tackled in this chapter, even though reality can rarely, if ever, be reduced to such simple patterns. Indeed, reality usually consists of clusters of phenomena, with each individual case distinctive, even if, in many ways, it resembles others. At best, such phenomena can be placed on a sliding scale, while dualistic approaches, whatever their advantages (for example, to get a legal grip on a situation) are blind to the nuances and variation.

What is War?

In their love of categories, European cultures have tried to delimitate war from other forms of violent conflict. The results are usually dependent on the times and circumstances in which these categories were defined and are highly unsatisfactory once applied more generally.

This can be seen from the beginning, with the origins of warfare. For primitive cultures existing to this day, warfare is born out of cattle rustling and raids on the grain stores of neighbouring tribes. The disgust felt by those on the receiving end of such raids gave birth to the notion that raiding is robbery, but that military action – warfare – intended to retrieve stolen property or abducted humans was legitimate – see, for example, the origins of the Trojan War. It was a first conceptual step to distinguish between illegitimate, criminal raids on the one hand and (usually larger) operations aiming to recover stolen goods and people for the restitution of a status quo ante on the other, with only the latter being considered ‘proper’ wars. Nevertheless, small wars that were difficult to distinguish from armed robbery continued to exist, in Europe and beyond – for instance, the bands of klephtoi of Greece under Ottoman rule, who were smugglers and bandits one day and Greek independence fighters another, or insurgents the world over, driven to reliance on criminal networks to get the arms or other supplies that their state-adversaries naturally seek to deny them.

A distinction has been made since the seventeenth century, if not earlier, between war on a larger scale and lesser forms of conflict. The latter came to be seen since Antiquity as private war as opposed to public war, or as a family feud on the one hand as opposed to a public war sanctioned by a higher authority on the other. The history of the European Middle Ages – and indeed of Early Modern times – revolves in good part around attempts to monopolise the use of force within states and thus to ban private war (although trends towards privatising elements of war in the more contemporary era are evident, as discussed later in this volume).

A third distinction has influenced academic thinking in this area: Plato distinguished between war among the Greek tribes and cities, which was called stasis, and war between Greeks and foreigners, primarily Persians, which alone he thought deserved the proper term for war: polemos. Adapting it to the construct of inter-state relations as the legitimate realm of violent conflict and the State as a zone of peace, this distinction has been applied to legitimate war versus insurgency, the idea of rebellion against authority, which implies an uprising against the established order of things. In European cultures, insurgencies were almost invariably criminalised, even though some cultures articulated a rationale for tyrannicide or for the fight for freedom (or national independence), thus seeking legitimation for their rejection of tyrannical regimes.¹ From the Romans to the Russians today, regimes in Europe have sought to portray and treat rebels as criminals, whether they be slaves or Gauls or Chechens, rather than as legitimate combatants and have treated them quite differently – with far greater brutality – when caught than they treated adversaries defined as legitimate. The legal distinctions between legitimate forms of war and illegitimate forms depend heavily on who defines what is legitimate i.e. on who has the power to define what is legitimate and what is not.

All three sets of binary categorisations are heavily dependent on the worldview of their day and age i.e. on historical context. All three, seen retrospectively, are somewhat arbitrary (if politically motivated) impositions of distinctions on a reality that presented cases of all shapes and sizes, along sliding scales on which no clear lines are drawn by nature. Definitions of war made in one context rarely fully apply to another, as so many circumstances change. There seems to be a convergence of opinion that many, perhaps all, cultures have a notion of something large-scale and violent that creates disorder and destruction in the extreme and in which (at least) two sides are pitted against each other, namely war. However, the specific form of war that people had and have in mind when defining is context-specific and depends very much on what they know and often what they have seen in their own lifetime. This context-specific definitional process is worth bearing in mind when assessing the longevity and relevance of concepts such as ‘war amongst the people’.

Primatologists or archaeologists will see evidence of ‘war’ when flanges of 40 apes give battle with another tribe of apes or when a mass grave of 30 skeletons is found that have met with a violent death. While at Thermopylae in 480 BC, when Leonidas and the 300 encountered the Persians – and assuming that they killed twice as many Persians as they numbered themselves – the total number of battlefield casualties would still not have qualified this epic historic battle as ‘war’, according to the reckoning of the Correlates of War project. That defines war as something with at least 1,000 battlefield deaths. Yet a battle with 1,000 deaths is closer, quantitatively, to the fatalities incurred in cattle rustling and gang warfare and is still closer to the death toll of the Battle of Thermopylae² than it is to the so-called battle of the Somme, which lasted for months and saw the death of over 400,000 men.³ The curators of the Correlates of War project have, in the meantime, identified many of its shortcomings and adjusted their data set.⁴ The problem remains that war comes in a myriad of forms (Clausewitz with his chameleon comes to mind). Arguably, there are clusters of wars that resemble each other more closely, but not merely two, and all attempts to categorise will do injustice to borderline cases. Few generalisations will easily apply to all of them. Clausewitz claimed that each age and civilisation has its particular form of war, but there is a need to go further and recognise that, within one age, within one civilisation, there can be several different forms.

On one end of this vast spectrum of war with its many permutations, there is war as conceived by Sun Tzu. It has something in common with some medieval warfare, perhaps even with some Early Modern wars. Yet, his advice to leave the enemy unsure as to where you want to give battle, or to withdraw quickly only to resurface elsewhere, makes no sense when the war is between two states with armies of tens or hundreds of thousands and the aim is to hold or reoccupy a well-defined piece of territory. Clausewitz, in turn, found it difficult to escape the paradigm of the Napoleonic Wars and to come to a more general view of war, although he tried to do so in the last years of his life. Some of what he wrote in On War is thus not useful or applicable to all wars, but applies to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum of wars from that covered by Sun Tzu.⁵

Paradox 1: Chaos vs Rules

A derivative of the European obsession with mutually exclusive binaries is the paradox. It stems from the realisation that such binary patterns are problematic. The essence of ‘war’ and ‘guerre’ is well captured by its etymological derivation from the Germanic word ‘Wirren’, meaning chaos, disorder or confusion. In binary terms, disorder and confusion are the opposite of order, rule-bound behaviour and the rule of law. It is at this point that the first paradox becomes clearer: much thinking and writing about war revolves around attempts to impose rules on what is the extreme of unruly behaviour. The rules invariably are restraints, in some form, or limitations on violence.

So, while war means confusion, disorder and chaos, many wars are fought according to rules and with constraints. Through explicit or implicit mutual agreement, perhaps through unilateral choice, perhaps following the laws of war, individual buildings, such as hospitals, or entire areas may be defined as constituting sanctuaries that must not be bombed or otherwise destroyed. Indeed, the laws of war – jus in bello – impose many rules and restrictions on the chaos that is unleashed. Beyond specifically defined rules of war, there are also customs of war, the breach of which is usually seen as particularly shocking and e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction
• Part One: Conceptual Debates and Critiques
• Part Two: Practical Challenges
• Part Three: Legal Debates
• Part Four: The UK Domestic Context of ‘War Amongst the People’
• Conclusion
• Index