How do wars end? A multidisciplinary enquiry

ABSTRACT

The cessation of military confrontations rarely coincides with the end of war. Legal and political matters continue after the last shot has been fired, civilians driven from their homes try to rebuild their houses and their lives, veterans need to adapt to their new role in civil society, and the struggle to define the history and the significance of past events only begins. In recent years, in particular, the changes in the character of contemporary warfare have created uncertainties across different disciplines about how to identify and conceptualise the end of war. It is therefore an opportune moment to examine how wars end from a multidisciplinary perspective that combines enquiries into the politics of war, the laws of war and the military and intellectual history of war. This approach enables both an understanding of how ‘the end’ as a concept informs the understanding of war in international relations, in international law and in history and a reconsideration of the nature of scientific method in the field of war studies as such.

KEYWORDS:

• War
• laws of war
• Just War Theory
• Second World War

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the organisers and all the participants in the Center for War Studies’ 2016 signature conference How Do Wars End? at the University of Southern Denmark. We are particularly grateful to Joseph A. Maiolo and Thomas G. Mahken for their interest in publishing a special issue that adopts a somewhat unusual approach to the study of war termination.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See e.g. Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History, New York: Penguin, 2017; Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (eds.), The Changing Character of War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

² See the debate following the publication by Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity, 1999. See e.g. Mats Berdal and David M. Malone, ‘Introduction’, in Mats Berdal and David M. Malone (eds.), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner (1–15), 2000; Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security. London: Zed, 2001; Edward Newman, ‘The “New Wars” Debate: A Historical Perspective Is Needed.’ Security Dialogue, vol. 35, no. 2, 2004, pp. 173–189.

³ See e.g. Christopher Coker, The Future of War: The Re-Enchantment of War in the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004 and Future War, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015; M. L. Cummings, ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Warfare,’ London: Chatham House, 2017, available at https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/publications/research/2017-01-26-artificial-intelligence-future-warfare-cummings-final.pdf, accessed 23 October 2018; John Kaag and Sarah Kreps, Drone Warfare, Cambridge: Polity, 2014; Frank Sauer and Niklas Schörnig, ‘Killer Drones: The “Silver Bullet” of Democratic Warfare?’, Security Dialogue, 43(4), 2012, 363–380; Joshi Shashank, ‘Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War,’ International Affairs, Volume 94, Issue 5, 2018, 1176–1177; P. W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, New York: Penguin, 2010.

⁴ See e.g. Resat Bayer, ‘Peace Transitions and Democracy’, Journal of Peace Research 47(5), 2010, 535–546; Eric M. Blanchard, ‘Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory’, Signs 28(4), 2003, 1289–1312; Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998; Berry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Berenice A. Carroll, ‘Peace Research – Cult of Power’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 16(4), 1972, 585–616; Catia Confortini, ‘Galtung, Violence, and Gender: The Case for a Peace Studies/Feminism Alliance’, Peace & Change 31(3), 2006, 333–367; David Fabbro, ‘Peaceful Societies: An Introduction’, Journal of Peace Research 15(1), 1978, 67–83; Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6(3), 1969, 167–191; Nils Petter Gleditsch, Jonas Nordkvelle and Håvard Strand, ‘Peace Research – Just the Study of War?’, Journal of Peace Research, 51(2), 2014, 145–158; Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, London: UCL Press, 1997; Jeff Huysmans, ‘Security? What Do You Mean?’, European Journal of International Relations, 4: 1998, 226–255.

⁵ See only Carsten Stahn and Jann K. Kleffner (eds.), Jus Post Bellum: Towards a Law of Transition from Conflict to Peace, Den Haag: TMC Asser, 2008, and Carsten Stahn, Jennifer S. Easterday and Jens Iverson (eds.), Jus Post Bellum: Mapping the Normative Foundations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

⁶ Sten Rynning, ‘War Studies – En Introduktion’, Oekonomi og Politik Vol 90(1), pp. 3–10, 2017 (translated by the authors).

⁷ Steve Fuller, ‘The Military-Industrial Route to Interdisciplinarity,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. Oxford University Press, 2017, 01-26.

⁸ David Alvargonzález, ‘Multidisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity, Transdisciplinarity, and the Sciences,’ International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 25:4, 2011, 387–403.

⁹ Robert Frodeman, ‘Interdisciplinarity,’ Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, vol. 1, 2013, 495–497.

¹⁰ See e.g. I. Hacking, Representing and Intervening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

¹¹ See e.g. J. Dupre, The Disorder of Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993; D. Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Post-Modern. London: Routledge, 1995.

¹² B. C. K. Choi and A. W. P. Pak, Multidisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in Health Research, Services, Education and Policy: 1. Definitions, Objectives, and Evidence of Effectiveness. Clinical and Investigative Medicine 29, 2006, 351–364.

¹³ See e.g. Edgar Morin, ‘Interdisciplinarité et transdisciplinarité,’ Transversales Science Culture 29, 1994, 4–8.

¹⁴ D. Sarewitz, ‘Against Holism,’ in P. Galison and D. J. Stump (eds.), The Disunity of Science. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p.73; emphasis in original.

¹⁵ See e.g. Lee Sigelman, ‘Are Two (or Three or Four … or Nine) Heads Better than One? Collaboration, Multidisciplinarity, and Publishability,’ PS: Political Science & Politics, 42(3), 2009, 507–512.

¹⁶ Remi Clignet and Allen Fertziger, ‘Independent Inventions in the Social Sciences: A Plea for Multidisciplinarity’, Science Communication, 11(2), 1989, 170–180.

¹⁷ Frodeman, ‘Interdisciplinarity.’

¹⁸ Wolfgang Krohn, ‘Interdisciplinary Cases and Disciplinary Knowledge,’ in R. Frodeman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (pp. 31–38). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2010.

¹⁹ Robert Frodeman, ‘The Future of Interdisciplinarity: An Introduction to the 2nd Edition,’ in Robert Frodeman, Julie Thompson Klein, and Roberto C. S. Pacheco (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, Second Edition, On-Line Edition. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2017.

²⁰ Julie Thomson Klein, ‘Typologies of Interdisciplinarity: The Boundary Work of Definition,’ in Robert Frodeman, Julie Thompson Klein and Roberto C. S. Pacheco (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, Second Edition, On-Line Edition. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2017.

²¹ Carl Mitcham and Nan Wang, ‘Interdisciplinarity in Ethics,’ in Robert Frodeman, Julie Thompson Klein and Roberto C. S. Pacheco (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, Second Edition, On-Line Edition. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2017.

²² See Mark Danner. Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chiara De Franco

Chiara de Franco (PhD European University Institute) is Associate Professor in International Relations and Deputy Head of the Centre for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. Previously, she has been Research Fellow in War Studies at King’s College London and coordinator of the Task Force for the EU Prevention of Mass Atrocities. Her research interests straddle the fields of Conflict and Mass Atrocities Prevention, EU Common Foreign and Security Policy and International Relations Theories. She has published books, journal articles and policy papers on the EU and the Responsibility to Protect, the EU and Conflict Prevention, European Military Doctrines and the International Media’s role in Conflict. She is currently the PI of a project funded by the Danish Research Council on the international practices of civilian protection and her new monograph on conflict warning and persuasion in foreign policy (co-authored with Christoph Meyer and Florian Otto) is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Anders Engberg-Pedersen

Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and a PhD in Neuere Deutsche Literatur from Humboldt Universität. His work focuses on warfare and the history of knowledge, aesthetic representations of war and cartography. He is the author of Empire of Chance. The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (Harvard University Press, 2015), editor of Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genres (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of Visualizing War: Emotions, Technologies, Communities (Routledge, 2018). He is currently the PI of two collective research projects sponsored by the Carlsberg Foundation and the Velux Foundations on the aesthetics of late modern war.

Martin Mennecke

Martin Mennecke, Dr. jur., LL.M., is Associate Professor of International Law in the Department of Law at the University of Southern Denmark. He leads the department’s research unit on Enforcement of the International Law in the Arctic. His other research interests include the International Criminal Court and transitional justice, atrocity prevention and responsibility to protect as well as the regulation of the use of force under international law. Since 2005, he acts as academic adviser to the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on international law issues and regularly participates in official meetings at the European Union, the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and other multilateral venues.