Debating the Next War (World Politics Review Special Reports)

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Nevertheless, recent conflicts — especially in Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan — do seem to confirm the contention that forcible displacement is a central methodology of new wars. In Iraq, for example, some 4 million people were displaced at the height of the war in —; roughly half were refugees and half were internally displaced. Indeed, it can be argued that one reason for lower levels of deaths in war is that it is easier to spread fear and panic using new communications, so that more people leave their homes than formerly.

At the same time, there does seem to be a trend towards increasing displacement per conflict. Using the American Refugee Council data, Myron Weiner calculated that the number of refugees and internally displaced persons per conflict increased from , per conflict in to 1,, in was, of course, a peak year for conflict. Figure 1 is broader, showing the rise in annual numbers of internally displaced persons in countries experiencing not only armed conflict, but what the UCDP describe as substate conflict and one-sided violence.

Rise in annual numbers of internally displaced persons in countries experiencing armed conflict, substate conflict, and one-sided violence. One conclusion from this discussion is the need to refine the displacement data, which could well offer a better indicator of human insecurity than some of the other numbers that are used. The reasons that are normally put forward for claiming that new wars are post-Clausewitzean have to do with the Trinitarian conception of war, the primacy of politics and the role of reason. Both John Keegan and Martin Van Creveld have suggested that the Trinitarian concept of war, with its tripartite distinction of the state, the army and the people, is no longer relevant.

International relations

Along with these arguments, critics have also questioned the rationality of war. These arguments are rather trivial and, depending on how Clausewitz is interpreted, they can all be refuted. Clausewitz argues that war is what unites the trinity. Obviously, the distinction between the state, the military, and the people is blurred in most new wars. New wars are fought by networks of state and non-state actors and often it is difficult to distinguish between combatants and civilians. So, if we think of the trinity in terms of the institutions of the state, the army and the people, then it cannot apply.

But if we think of the trinity as a concept for explaining how disparate social and ethical tendencies are united in war, then it is clearly very relevant. A second issue is the primacy of politics. Among translators of Clausewitz, there is a debate about whether the German word politik should be translated as policy or politics. It can be argued that it applies to both if we roughly define policy as external, in terms of relations with other states, and politics as the domestic process of mediating different interests and views.

New Wars are also fought for political ends and, indeed, war itself can be viewed as a form of politics. It is what provides a license for these varying tendencies. Moreover, these political narratives are often constructed through war.

Just as Clausewitz described how patriotism is kindled through war, so these identities are forged through fear and hatred, through the polarisation of us and them. In other words, war itself is a form of political mobilisation, a way of bringing together, of fusing the disparate elements that are organised for war. Understood in this way, war is an instrument of politics rather than policy. It is about domestic politics even if it is a politics that crosses borders rather than the external policy of states. If, for Clausewitz, the aim of war is external policy and political mobilisation, this means, in new wars, it is the other way round.

So if new wars are an instrument of politics, what is the role of reason? But is rationality the same as reason? The enlightenment version of reason was different from instrumental rationality. As used by Hegel, who was a contemporary in Berlin of Clausewitz, it had something to do with the way the state was identified with universal values, the agency that was responsible for the public as opposed to the private interest. The state brought together diverse groups and classes for the purpose of progress — democracy and economic development. Clausewitz puts considerable emphasis on the role of the cabinet in formulating policy and argues that the Commander-in-Chief should be a member of the cabinet.

Of course, members of the cabinet had their own private motivations, as do generals glory, enrichment, jealousy, etc , but it is incumbent on them to come to some agreement, to provide the public face of the war and to direct the war, and this has to be based on arguments that are universally acceptable universal, here, referring to those who are citizens of the state.

The political narratives of new wars are based on particularist interests; they are exclusive rather than universalist. They deliberately violate the rules and norms of war. They are rational in the sense of being instrumental. But they are not reasonable. Reason has something to do with universally accepted norms that underpin national and international law. However there is another argument about why new wars are post-Clausewitzean.

This has to do with the fundamental tenets of Clausewitzean thought — his notion of ideal war. This is derived from his definition of war. If we would conceive as a unit the countless number of duels which make up a war, we shall do so best by supposing to ourselves two wrestlers. Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: Violence, he says, is the means. He then goes on to explain why this must lead to the extreme use of violence. However plausible this may appear, still it is an error, which must be extirpated; for in such dangerous things as war, the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst.

As the use of physical power to the utmost extent by no means excludes the co-operation of intelligence, it follows that he who uses forces unsparingly, without reference to the bloodshed involved, must obtain a superiority if his adversary uses less vigour in its application. For Clausewitz, combat is the decisive moment of war. I have therefore reformulated the definition of war. A contest of wills implies that the enemy must be crushed and therefore war tends to extremes.

A mutual enterprise implies that both sides need the other in order to carry on the enterprise of war and therefore war tends to be long and inconclusive. The warring parties are interested in the enterprise of war rather than winning or losing, for both political and economic reasons. The inner tendency of such wars is not war without limits, but war without end.

Wars, defined in this way, create shared self-perpetuating interest in war to reproduce political identity and to further economic interests. As in the Clausewitzean schema, real wars are likely to be different from the ideal description of war. The hostility that is kindled by war among the population may provoke disorganised violence or there may be real policy aims that can be achieved.

There may be outside intervention aimed at suppressing the mutual enterprise or the wars may produce unexpectedly an animosity to violence among the population, undermining the premise of political mobilisation on which such wars are based. This redefinition of war constitutes a different interpretation of war, a theory of war, whose test is how well it offers a guide to practice. Since it is an ideal type, examples can be used to support the theory, but it is, in principle, unprovable.

The question is whether it is useful. Understood in this way, each act of terrorism calls forth a military response, which, in turns, produces a more extreme counterreaction. The problem is that there can be no decisive blow. The terrorists cannot be destroyed by military means because they cannot be distinguished from the population. Nor can the terrorists destroy the military forces of the United States.

Understood in Clausewitzean terms, the proposed course of action is total defeat of the terrorists by military means. Understood in post-Clausewitzean terms, the proposed course of action is very different; it has to do with both with the application of law and the mobilisation of public opinion not on one side or the other, but against the mutual enterprise.

The contrast between new and old wars, put forward here, is thus a contrast between ideal types of war rather than a contrast between actual historical experiences. Of course, the wars of the twentieth century, at least in Europe, were close to the old war ideal and the wars of the twenty first century are closer to my depiction of new wars.

Contemporary wars may not actually conform to this description any more than earlier wars conformed to the old war description. Perhaps another way to describe the difference is between realist interpretations of war as conflicts between groups, usually states, that act on behalf of the group as a whole and interpretations of war in which the behaviour of political leaders is viewed as the expression of a complex set of political and perhaps bureaucratic struggles pursuing their particular interest or the interests of their faction or factions, rather than those of the whole.

It can be argued that in the Westphalian era of sovereign nation-states, a realist interpretation had more relevance than it does today. But it is not inconsistent with that earlier description; it merely involves a higher level of abstraction. The debate about new wars has helped to refine and reformulate the argument.

Between the two world wars

The debate about Clausewitz has facilitated a more conceptual interpretation of new wars, while the debate about data has led to the identification of new sources of evidence that have helped to substantiate the main proposition. The one thing the critics tend to agree is that the new war thesis has been important in opening up new scholarly analysis and new policy perspectives, which, as I have stressed, was the point of the argument Newman ; Henderson and Singer The debate has taken this further.

It has contributed to the burgeoning field of conflict studies. And it has had an influence on the intensive policy debates that are taking place especially within the military, ministries of defence and international organisations — the debates about counter-insurgency in the Pentagon, for example, or about human security in the European Union and indeed about non-traditional approaches to security in general.

What is still lacking in the debate is the demand for a cosmopolitan political response. In the end, policing, the rule of law, justice mechanisms and institution-building depend on the spread of norms at local, national and global levels. And norms are constructed both through scholarship and public debate. I have not addressed this argument in this essay, but it is a concern in much of my work on human security.

Angstrom, J Introduction. Clausewitz and his Critics Revisited. Global economic change and the study of civil war. Chojnacki, S Anything new or more of the same? Wars and military intervention in the international system — Correlates of War Project. De Graaff, B The wars in former Yugoslavia in the s: Bringing the state back in. Duffield, M Global governance and the new wars: The merging of development and security.

Echevarria, A Clausewitz and contemporary war. Naval War College Review Summer Hables Gray, C Post-modern war: The new politics of conflict. International Interactions 28, 2: Hoffman, F Conflict in the 21 st century; The rise of hybrid wars. Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

Holsti, K J The state, war and the state of war. Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. World Politics 54, October: Kalyvas, S N The logic of violence in civil wars. Kaldor, M New and old wars: Organised violence in a global era. Kaldor, M and Vashhee, B, eds. Keen, D Useful enemies: When waging war is more important than winning them. A new dataset of battle deaths.

European Journal of Population Leitenberg, M Deaths in war and conflicts in the 20 th century. Malesovic, S The sociology of war and violence. Mellow, P A Review article: In search of new wars: The debate about the transformation of war. European Journal of International Relations , Melunder, E, Oberg, M and www. European Journal of International Relations, Mueller, J The remnants of war. Mundy, J Deconstructing civil wars: Beyond the new wars debate.

A historical perspective is needed. Security Dialogue 35, 2: ORB International Available at www. Roberts, A Lives and statistics: Snow, D Uncivil wars: International security and the new internal conflicts. A book that shook the world. Van Creveld, M The transformation of war.

Von Clausewitz, C [German edition: World Bank World Development Report Conflict, Security and development. Introduction Global systems of the 20 th century were designed to address inter-state tensions and civil wars. World Bank The idea that twenty-first century organised violence is different from the wars of the twentieth century has been widely debated in both the scholarly and the policy literature.

The logic of new wars New Wars are the wars of the era of globalisation. Old wars were fought by the regular armed forces of states. New wars are fought by varying combinations of networks of state and non-state actors — regular armed forces, private security contractors, mercenaries, jihadists, warlords, paramilitaries, etc. Old wars were fought for geo-political interests or for ideology democracy or socialism. New wars are fought in the name of identity ethnic, religious or tribal. Identity politics has a different logic from geo-politics or ideology. The aim is to gain access to the state for particular groups that may be both local and transnational rather than to carry out particular policies or programmes in the broader public interest.

The rise of identity politics is associated with new communications technologies, with migration both from country to town and across the world, and the erosion of more inclusive often state-based political ideologies like socialism or post-colonial nationalism. Perhaps most importantly, identity politics is constructed through war. In old wars, battle was the decisive encounter. The method of waging war consisted of capturing territory through military means. In new wars, battles are rare and territory is captured through political means, through control of the population.

A typical technique is population displacement — the forcible removal of those with a different identity or different opinions. As I discuss in the following sections, it is this point that is most often missed by the critics of the new wars thesis. Of course this is true.

Many of the features of new wars can be found in earlier wars. Of course the dominance of the East-West conflict obscured other types of conflict. But this is precisely the point. Dominant understandings of these conflicts that underpin policy are of two kinds. This term refers to a stylised form of war rather than to all earlier wars.

In such wars, the solution is either negotiation or victory by one side and outside intervention takes the form of either traditional peace-keeping — in which the peace-keepers are supposed to guarantee a negotiated agreement and the ruling principles are consent, neutrality and impartiality — or traditional war-fighting on one side or the other, as in Korea or the Gulf War. On the other hand, where policy-makers recognise the shortcomings of the stereotypical understanding, there is a tendency to treat these wars as anarchy, barbarism, ancient rivalries, where the best policy response is containment, i.

As Jacob Mundy puts it, in one of the more thoughtful contributions to the debate:. Even so, it can be argued that there are some genuinely new elements of contemporary conflicts. Indeed, it would be odd if there were not. The main new elements have to do with globalisation and technology. First of all, the increase in the destructiveness and accuracy of all forms of military technology has made symmetrical war — war between similarly armed opponents — increasingly destructive and therefore difficult to win. The first Gulf war between Iraq and Iran was perhaps the most recent example of symmetrical war — a war, much like the First World War, that lasted for years and killed millions of young men, for almost no political result.

Hence, tactics in the new wars necessarily have to deal with this reality. Secondly, new forms of communications information technology, television and radio, cheap air travel have had a range of implications. Even though most contemporary conflicts are very local, global connections are much more extensive, including criminal networks, Diaspora links, as well as the presence of international agencies, NGOs, and journalists.

The ability to mobilise around both exclusivist causes and human rights causes has been speeded up by new communications. Communications are also increasingly a tool of war, making it easier, for example, to spread fear and panic than in earlier periods — hence, spectacular acts of terrorism. This does not mean, as Berdal suggests, that the argument implies that all contemporary wars involve global connections or that those connections are necessarily regressive. Rather, it is an element in theorising the logic of new wars. Thirdly, even though it may be the case that, as globalisation theorists argue, globalisation has not led to the demise of the state but rather its transformation, it is important to delineate the different ways in which states are changing.

Perhaps the most important aspect of state transformation is the changing role of the state in relation to organised violence. On the one hand, the monopoly of violence is eroded from above, as some states are increasingly embedded in a set of international rules and institutions. On the other hand, the monopoly of violence is eroded from below as other states become weaker under the impact of globalisation. It is a model that entails a specific political, economic and military logic.

Many of the critics miss the point about the logic of new wars. For example, both Berdal and Malesovic make the point that identity politics are also about ideas — the idea of Greater Croatia, for example, says Berdal. In a trivial sense, that is true just as ideological conflicts can also be reduced to identity — a communist or a fascist identity as opposed to an ethnic or tribal identity, for example. But the point of making this distinction is to illuminate different political logics, the way in which identity politics is associated with different practices, different methods of warfare and different ways of relating to authority.

Identity politics is about the right to power in the name of a specific group; ideological politics is about winning power in order to carry out a particular ideological programme. Typically, in new war contexts, for example, access to the state is about access to resources rather than about changing state behaviour; in such situations, competition for power tends to be based on identity rather than on programmatic debate, even if the latter is more of an ideal than a reality. This helps to explain military tactics — population displacement as a method of exerting political control — or the persistence of new wars, as fear is a necessary long-term ingredient of identity politics.

The point is that the distinction that I make between identity politics and ideology democracy or socialism and geo-political interest implies a different set of political practices and a different methodology of war. Indeed, similar terms — like hybrid warfare, multivariant warfare, or complex warfighting — are explicitly about being a mixture. The problem with existing categorisations of conflict, however, is that they do not easily fit contemporary reality, a point that will be elaborated in the data section, and consequently the policy prescriptions that emerge out of them are confused and distorted.

A typical example of this type of criticism is the article by Sven Chojnacki. Chojnacki then goes on to establish his own categories based on actors — inter-state, extra-state, intra-state, and sub-state — which entirely misses the point of new wars, in which the actors are both state and non-state, internal and external. Some critics concede that something like new wars exists. Particularly after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some scholars and policy makers warn of assuming that future wars will look like Iraq and Afghanistan. It is to be hoped that future wars will not be like Iraq and Afghanistan because these wars have been exacerbated by outside military interventions.

But nor are future wars likely to look like the wars of the twentieth century.

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Of course, a return to old wars cannot be ruled out. It is possible to imagine continued competitive arming by states, growing interstate tensions, and a tendency to forget the suffering of previous generations. The reconstruction of militarised states through external wars might come to be viewed as a way of re-establishing the monopoly of violence at national levels. As John Keegan puts it: According to Mueller There is a lot of sense in this line of argument. New wars can be described as mixtures of war organised violence for political ends , crime organised violence for private ends and human rights violations violence against civilians.

Moreover, much contemporary violence — like the drugs wars in Mexico or gang warfare in major cities — appears to have a similar logic to new wars, but has to be classified as criminal. The same sort of argument has been used in relation to terrorism. On the other hand, the political element does have to be taken seriously; it is part of the solution. Articulating a cosmopolitan politics as an alternative to exclusivist identity is the only way to establish legitimate institutions that can provide the kind of effective governance and security that Mueller is proposing as a solution.

War does imply organised violence in the service of political ends. This is the way it legitimises criminal activity. Suicide bombers in their farewell videos describe themselves as soldiers not as murderers. Even if it is the case, and it often is, that those who frame the violence in ethnic, religious or ideological terms are purely instrumental, these political narratives are internalised through the process of engaging in or suffering from violence. Indeed, this is the point of the violence; it is only possible to win elections or to mobilise political support through the politics of fear.

Overcoming fear and hostility does not necessarily come about through compromise, even if that is possible, because compromise can entrench exclusivist positions; rather it requires a different kind of politics, the construction of a shared discourse that has to underpin any legal response. Most data sets assume a threshold below which violence cannot be counted as war — say a thousand battle deaths per year, as in the Correlates of War database Correlates of War Project.

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Actually, conflict is endemic in all societies and necessary for change and adaptation. Democracy is a peaceful mechanism for managing conflict. This knowledge has since been augmented by research on Iraq and Afghanistan, but there were two quantitative claims that I used to back up the arguments that battles are becoming rare and most violence is directed against civilians.

One concerned the dramatic increase in the ratio of civilian to military casualties and the other concerned the rise in the numbers of displaced people per conflict. The debate about data covers three broad areas: For violence to be counted as a war, there has to be a state involved at least on one side and there have to be a certain number of battle deaths. Moreover, they all distinguish between intra-state and inter-state war, and some have added sub-state or non-state categories.

So, none of these numbers are really able to capture the nature of new wars. In particular, the emphasis on battle deaths has the counter-intuitive effect of leaving out major episodes of violence. As Milton Leitenberg puts it: Nevertheless, the findings from the three databases do have some relevance to the new wars thesis. They all tend to concur in the following conclusions:.

There is also a decline in the numbers killed in battles, which is consistent with the argument about the decline of battle. The UCDP has made the most effort to adjust to the new realities and has added data on episodes of one-sided violence and on non-state violent conflicts. Both of these numbers seem to be increasing and this again is consistent with the argument that new wars could be treated as cases of mutual one-sided violence and that low-level, low intensity persistent conflicts may be more typical nowadays.

Those who have criticised the new wars argument using this sort of data have tended to set up straw men to attack. Thus it is argued that new wars are civil wars and the decline in civil wars suggests that new wars are not increasing. But new wars are not the same as civil wars and no one has claimed that new wars are increasing or decreasing; the argument was always about the changing character of war. Bizarrely, critics have also suggested that the decline of battle severity is a critique of new wars when on the contrary it confirms the new wars argument Melunder, Oberg and Hall The problem with calculations about the ratio of civilian to military casualties is three fold.

First, figures on civilian casualties are notoriously inaccurate. There are a variety of methods for calculating these numbers: The results vary widely. Thus, casualties in the Bosnia war vary from , the number given by the Bosnian Information Ministry and widely used by international agencies at the time , of which 60, were military, to 40, in the World Disasters Report Roberts Similarly, civilian casualties in the Iraq war have been the subject of huge debate; the numbers vary widely, from around , civilian casualties from violence as of a estimate by Iraq Body Count , which relies on media reports and official documents to over a million based on an opinion survey in , which asked Iraqis in all 18 governorates whether any member of their family had been killed ORB International.

Secondly, it is very difficult to distinguish combatants from civilians. The only figures for which there are accurate statistics are military casualties because these are formally recorded by their governments. Hence, we know that, as of September , there were some military casualties in Iraq, of which were American, and some military casualties in Afghanistan, of which some were American Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. But, since many combatants in new wars are police, militia, private contractors, mercenaries, para-militaries or criminals of various kinds, the figures for other military and civilian casualties are very difficult to identify.

A good example are the figures produced by the Sarajevo Research and Documentation Centre. However, the number for soldiers included all men of military age. Since we know that it was mainly men of military age that were killed in ethnic cleansing operations and the majority of displaced people were women — and we also know that participation in the violence was very low, about 6. It would presuppose that nearly all the men and boys killed in Srebrenica were soldiers, for example.

Thirdly it is very difficult to distinguish whether civilians were killed as a side effect of battle, as a result of deliberate violence political or criminal , or as a result of the indirect effects of war — privation and disease. The Human Security Report suggests that deaths as an indirect effect of war have declined in contemporary wars. This is because wars are often highly localised and low-level and general improvements in healthcare or in immunisation continue during the wars. The main method of calculating these indirect effects is through calculating the excess deaths that took place over and above what might have been expected from previous trends.

The HSR argues that their estimate was based on an estimated infant mortality rate prior to the conflict that was too low, that their surveys were biased in favour of areas with a small population and a high death toll and that the true figure is probably much lower. So what can be said about the data on casualties? First of all, the data suggests an overall decline in all war-related deaths.

One of the misapplied criticisms that have been made of the new wars thesis is that new wars scholars claim that atrocities in new wars are worse than in previous wars. The only claim that the new wars thesis makes is most violence in new wars consists of violence against civilians rather than combat — it would be mad to claim that violence against civilians is worse than the modernist state-based atrocities like the holocaust or the Soviet purges.

Secondly, there has been a dramatic decline in battle deaths. Thirdly, casualties among regular soldiers are a very small proportion of total deaths in wars, both because there are fewer regular soldiers taking part in wars and because of the decline in battle. Finally, what is shocking about this whole debate is the fact that we have good and accurate statistics for the deaths of men in state-based uniforms, but information about the vast majority of victims is totally inadequate. No one disputes that the overall total displaced population has increased.

Indeed according to UNHCR, the figures for forcibly displaced people in were at their highest in fifteen years at But critics suggest that these numbers should be qualified in two respects. First, data collection has greatly improved, especially in relation to internally displaced persons. Secondly, refugee and IDP data tends to be cumulative, since many people do not return to their homes. Nevertheless, recent conflicts — especially in Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan — do seem to confirm the contention that forcible displacement is a central methodology of new wars.

In Iraq, for example, some 4 million people were displaced at the height of the war in —; roughly half were refugees and half were internally displaced. Indeed, it can be argued that one reason for lower levels of deaths in war is that it is easier to spread fear and panic using new communications, so that more people leave their homes than formerly. At the same time, there does seem to be a trend towards increasing displacement per conflict.

Using the American Refugee Council data, Myron Weiner calculated that the number of refugees and internally displaced persons per conflict increased from , per conflict in to 1,, in was, of course, a peak year for conflict. Figure 1 is broader, showing the rise in annual numbers of internally displaced persons in countries experiencing not only armed conflict, but what the UCDP describe as substate conflict and one-sided violence. Rise in annual numbers of internally displaced persons in countries experiencing armed conflict, substate conflict, and one-sided violence. One conclusion from this discussion is the need to refine the displacement data, which could well offer a better indicator of human insecurity than some of the other numbers that are used.

The reasons that are normally put forward for claiming that new wars are post-Clausewitzean have to do with the Trinitarian conception of war, the primacy of politics and the role of reason. Both John Keegan and Martin Van Creveld have suggested that the Trinitarian concept of war, with its tripartite distinction of the state, the army and the people, is no longer relevant. Along with these arguments, critics have also questioned the rationality of war. These arguments are rather trivial and, depending on how Clausewitz is interpreted, they can all be refuted.

Clausewitz argues that war is what unites the trinity. Obviously, the distinction between the state, the military, and the people is blurred in most new wars. New wars are fought by networks of state and non-state actors and often it is difficult to distinguish between combatants and civilians. So, if we think of the trinity in terms of the institutions of the state, the army and the people, then it cannot apply.

But if we think of the trinity as a concept for explaining how disparate social and ethical tendencies are united in war, then it is clearly very relevant. A second issue is the primacy of politics. Among translators of Clausewitz, there is a debate about whether the German word politik should be translated as policy or politics. It can be argued that it applies to both if we roughly define policy as external, in terms of relations with other states, and politics as the domestic process of mediating different interests and views.

New Wars are also fought for political ends and, indeed, war itself can be viewed as a form of politics. It is what provides a license for these varying tendencies. Moreover, these political narratives are often constructed through war. Just as Clausewitz described how patriotism is kindled through war, so these identities are forged through fear and hatred, through the polarisation of us and them. In other words, war itself is a form of political mobilisation, a way of bringing together, of fusing the disparate elements that are organised for war. Understood in this way, war is an instrument of politics rather than policy.

It is about domestic politics even if it is a politics that crosses borders rather than the external policy of states. If, for Clausewitz, the aim of war is external policy and political mobilisation, this means, in new wars, it is the other way round. So if new wars are an instrument of politics, what is the role of reason?

But is rationality the same as reason? The enlightenment version of reason was different from instrumental rationality. As used by Hegel, who was a contemporary in Berlin of Clausewitz, it had something to do with the way the state was identified with universal values, the agency that was responsible for the public as opposed to the private interest. The state brought together diverse groups and classes for the purpose of progress — democracy and economic development. Clausewitz puts considerable emphasis on the role of the cabinet in formulating policy and argues that the Commander-in-Chief should be a member of the cabinet.

Of course, members of the cabinet had their own private motivations, as do generals glory, enrichment, jealousy, etc , but it is incumbent on them to come to some agreement, to provide the public face of the war and to direct the war, and this has to be based on arguments that are universally acceptable universal, here, referring to those who are citizens of the state.

The political narratives of new wars are based on particularist interests; they are exclusive rather than universalist. They deliberately violate the rules and norms of war. They are rational in the sense of being instrumental.

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