• DOI:10.1080/09557571.2013.872600
• Corpus ID: 144039698

A social theory of war: Clausewitz and war reconsidered

@article{Sharma2015AST,
  title={A social theory of war: Clausewitz and war reconsidered},
  author={Vivek Swaroop Sharma},
  journal={Cambridge Review of International Affairs},
  year={2015},
  volume={28},
  pages={327 - 347}
}

• V. Sharma
• Published 3 July 2015
• Political Science
• Cambridge Review of International Affairs

This article presents a new theory of war that is grounded in the insights of Clausewitz on the social nature of conflict. Clausewitz had argued that war is a political process; he therefore distinguished between ‘war’—understood in political terms—and warfare—understood as fighting. He then created a typology covering a spectrum of war ranging from total to limited, the political stakes of a conflict determining where it would fall on the spectrum. I develop and modify this basic framework by arguing that the social organization of the actors has a determining role in predicting the stakes of war. I then show how this framework helps us understand some key problems in the political science literature on war and conflict. I attempt to show two main things: (1) that there are different types of wars (and that these differences are not necessarily related to the standing of the actors, i.e. the presence or absence of sovereignty); and (2) that how war and warfare are related is more complicated than previously understood and that this has implications for the political science literature on order, conflict and violence.