War and Society

Miguel A. Centeno, Elaine Enriquez

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509508228
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Paix et développement mondial

War is a paradox. On the one hand, it destroys bodies and destroys communities. On the other hand, it is responsible for some of the strongest human bonds and has been the genesis of many of our most fundamental institutions. War and Society addresses these paradoxes while providing a sociological exploration of this enigmatic phenomenon which has played a central role in human history, wielded an incredible power over human lives, and commanded intellectual questioning for countless generations. The authors offer an analytical account of the origins of war, its historical development, and its consequences for individuals and societies, adopting a comparative approach throughout. It ends with an appraisal of the contemporary role of war, looking to the future of warfare and the fundamental changes in the nature of violent conflict which we are starting to witness. This short, readable and engaging book will be an ideal reading for upper-level students of political sociology, military sociology, and related subjects.

1
The Nature of War

What is war? It is foremost a social fact. War is a reflection and consequence of social structure, group norms, and relations. As such, war can be studied using the very same principles and methods that social science has used to understand other social phenomena, whether marriage or market exchanges. War may be a traumatic and gory social fact, but we cannot allow the horror of it to obscure the underlying principles behind it and its very real political and social consequences. Moreover, war is a critical force in shaping those very structures from which it stems, such as the state, as well as related institutions such as citizenship and class.

In the past one hundred years, the toll from armed conflict has been so high and the pain caused by it been so great that distinguished political and philosophical thinkers have made important arguments about its inherent insanity and the need for its prohibition.¹ There is no question that war is chaotic – the very roots of the word in several European languages denote confusion.² Yet, a central theme of this book is that to dismiss war as irrational, stupid, horrific, and evil is to accomplish very little. We write this in full awareness of the myriad costs of war – social, fiscal, and ethical. In the twentieth century, over 150 million people died as a result of war (Clodfelter 2008). To these we may add more hundreds of millions whose bodies were disfigured or whose homes were destroyed during war; a significant percentage of all those who lived in the past century saw their lives shattered by war.³ It should come as no surprise then that, beginning with the late nineteenth century, accelerating after the First World War, and culminating with the opposition to nuclear Armageddon after 1945, some of the wisest voices of the planet have called for an end to war.

War is a social fact, and we must appreciate that war is responsible for some of our highest achievements and deepest held values as a society. The organization required to conduct war is intimately tied to the organization of statecraft. The technologies of destruction have often come from and been translated into technologies of development and production. The highest awards in the military celebrate honor, courage, and selflessness – values we hold to be positive and life affirming. Further, despite the antibellic clamor of the past century, there is arguably a much longer literature extolling war as the righteous acts of the chosen.

It is also important to study war in a contemporary world dominated by market pricing as the basis of social relationships.⁴ The relative peace in the developed world of the past few decades has made market dynamics and behavior the central template for much of social science at individual and group levels. Yet war and conflict represent a form of social interaction considerably older than truck and barter. While economic and rational-actor models may help explain why groups fight (even as these models have explanatory limits), they become much less useful in explaining what happens in battle. Appreciating the power of hatred, aggression, discipline, and bonding as complements to optimization in human behavior is an important task for any sociological perspective.

Violence and Aggression

War is about violence. This is one reason why the use of the word “war” to describe a broad array of political campaigns and policy efforts is so often contentious. Efforts to stymie the flow of drugs, to end poverty, or to assure adequate energy supplies are not wars. Wars involve physical assaults on human beings. The instruments of war are weapons designed to damage, mutilate, and destroy the bodies of enemies. War is about inflicting as much pain as is necessary to other human beings until the point that they cease to exist or are willing to accept another’s absolute authority over them. In turn, war is also about enduring as much pain as opponents may hurl so as to outlast them in the path to victory.

While wars are necessarily violent, or at least involve the threat of violence, there are many forms of violent behavior we should distinguish from warfare. To begin, we need to discriminate between what we might call hostile or impulsive and instrumental forms of aggression (McEllistrem 2004). Aggression or violence that is hostile and impulsive is associated with anger and emotion. It is aggression or violence that is out of control and originates in rage or madness; it is violence as an end in itself. This form of aggression is closely linked with biochemical processes as well as with reactions to particular environmental stimuli. Thus, impulsive aggression is often associated with either some form of intoxication or some abnormal chemical state or with the immediate sensation of fear or danger. This form of violence is also associated with low levels of socialization. This is the violence of the socially marginal: football hooligans, drunken louts, or plain old thugs.

We do often see this type of violence in war, and certainly it is difficult to avoid it in the midst of battle, where the emotional states of combatants will be primed for aggressive behavior. Thus, war may be partly defined as the social and political space in which this kind of aggression is allowed and encouraged. The very same acts that might condemn a young man to jail when at home, might earn him a medal in battle. But war as a social fact is not about and cannot depend on the individual acting out of aggressive impulses. It is a product of coordinated efforts and motivations.

War is a function of what has been called “coalitionary aggression” (D. L. Smith 2007). That is, wars involve aggression not of some completely independent individuals but of groups of people united in some way to act in concert. In contemporary wars, the numbers involved can be in the tens of millions. Can we really say that the millions of men who fought for control over Flanders from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries were uniformly suited for and comfortable with violent behavior? What about the multitudes supporting them or waiting for their moment on the battlefield?

War involves a very different form of aggression: instrumental or premeditated. This is violence as a tool in the pursuit of some other end. If the first type of violence is associated with the classical conditioning of innate reflexes, this form is about operant conditioning driven by expectation of a desired re-enforcement (McEllistrem 2004). It is associated with the most socialized and most valued members of a society: those willing to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of their social unit.

What makes war sociologically fascinating is that it makes horrible brutality part of a rational course of action for huge numbers of people – people who would otherwise not act out in particularly lethal ways. Understood as a social phenomenon, war is about how human beings are made to do the impossible and bear the unbearable. The whole point of studying war sociologically is to find out how this happens.

War as Organized Violence

With this distinction in mind, we can come to better comprehend what Clausewitz ([1832] 1984) means when he refers to war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.… [A] true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means” (75, 87). This idea of war as a political instrument has been very productive in the academic world, and much has been written in political science and international relations about the ways political entities use and manage violence and conflict. Part of what makes war an excellent candidate for sociological study is the way in which it is an example of micro-level motivations and activity (soldiers, officers), meso-level coordination and strategies (group training, particular engagements and wars), and macro-level political coordination and intent.

The purpose of war as organized coercion is often latent – that is, underlying, but this is true of the logic of most social behavior, whether it be patterns of discrimination or courtship practices. Similar to the social organization of tribes, educational institutions, or business corporations, wars are too complex a form of behavior and coordination to be spontaneous. The sociological perspective helps us to see the latent organizational purposes and to uncover the ways that these three levels – the individual (micro), the intermediate (meso), and the large scale (macro) – combine to create outcomes that are greater than the simple aggregation of individual efforts.

If we are to distinguish between war and simple violence, another key difference is the numbers involved. To merit the name of a war or war-like conflict, the acts of violence to which we are referring must involve a significant number of people. In standard social scientific analysis, the threshold for deaths necessary to call a violent conflict a war is one thousand (Small and Singer 1982). This is a purely arbitrary number and reflects the technological capacity of contemporary wars. Certainly conflicts between ancient Greek poleis could be classified as war even if it is unlikely that more than a few hundred men might have perished during a particular struggle.

Also central to our notion of war is that these individuals not be randomly associated. Somehow they must belong to whatever organized political groups are in an armed struggle. War is a form of aggression between groups that can be institutionally distinguished from each other (Bull [1977] 2012, 178). In contemporary times, this means states or groups that aspire to statehood, but in prior centuries the units involved could be as small as cities or even (with some caution) tribal entities.

The organization of war also requires a significant degree of social cooperation on at least three meso- to macro-sociological levels – the intra-group interactions and organization, the inter-group or society level, and coordination and organization at the institutional level. These levels of organization create observable social facts that are far greater than the aggregate of the individuals they comprise, and, in fact, often outlast those specific people involved in their initial interactions, creating long-lasting social artifacts.

First, organization is required within the groups in conflict in order to assure that enough of their partisans not only show up to fight, but also come willing (or coerced) to do so. They must also arrive with the relevant materiel needed to make the battle possible. A second and more interesting form of cooperation is that which occurs between the warring parties. In many battles, negotiations have preceded the encounter in order to assure the participation of all groups at a particular moment and place. Even when this explicit cooperation does not take place, both sides share a significant number of expectations and norms that make the battle possible.⁵ On the broadest level, war also requires the cooperation of members of a global or even regional political system. American political scientist Quincy Wright emphasized that war involves the “sanctioned use of lethal weapons” and that it is a “form of conflict involving a high degree of legal equality” (1964, 7). A state of war requires that the combatants recognize each other as such. This does not necessarily imply mutual agreement to fight, but it does mean that the groups battling recognize their mutual existence as institutionalized bodies. At this third level of social cooperation, war as a classification of violence implies that the aggression observed and measured has a certain degree of political legitimacy. As Norbert Elias ([1939] 2000) argued, in our daily lives violence is taboo and punished, but we expect states to be constantly ready to inflict carnage on possible competitors.

A Paradox of War: Organization and Anarchy

War is a paradoxical form of violence in that it requires a great degree of cooperation and coordination prior to the actual outburst. Before war can occur, individuals must unite as a group in order to fight yet another. Consider, for example, one of the earliest literary testaments of war and one filled with the madness, rage, and carnage associated with it. The Iliad is full of combat and its descriptions of what happens to those who lose are quite explicit. Yet, before any blow is struck, before the rages of Achilles (first at Agamemnon, then at Hector), consider the social effort expended in building the ships, coordinating allies, organizing embarkations, and the order necessary to maintain a camp for nine years. The earliest part of the narrative has little to do with Troy and much more about the problems of hierarchy, exchange, authority, honor, and duty that beset all social groups.

War thus reflects what could be called our animal instincts in that it can turn us into beasts – insatiable but with buckets of blood. But it is also a very human creation requiring the resolution of collective action problems, the creation of rationales and beliefs, and the planning of complex actions. The question of what war is must address both aspects. This dual face of war is often portrayed as a contrast between the ideas of seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and eighteenth-century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For the former, war is inevitable in that the natural state of humans is aggression and this is only controlled through the development of hierarchical and authoritative institutions. In this way “society” – and in particular the social and political institution of the state (“Leviathan”) – is what makes us behave less like the beasts we might be and more like the civilized humans we can become. For Rousseau, however, our natural state is a peaceful one and it is the development of these very same institutions, such as private property, that produces aggression.

The debate has been going on for years, from elevated philosophical and scholarly salons, to arguments over beer and coffee in bars and dorm rooms. We want to suggest that the answer, if such a definitive word can be used, is to consider how both Hobbes and Rousseau are right and wrong. Rousseau is right in that war wo...