How do wars end? A strategic perspective

ABSTRACT

This article gives an overview of the literature on war termination both in the fields of behaviouralism social sciences and policy-oriented strategic studies. It identifies shortcomings and problems related to both lines of research. The main problem is the undifferentiated and indiscriminate use of the term ‘war’. The article proposes a categorisation of wars that could form the basis for more thorough research on the topic of war termination.

KEYWORDS:

• War termination
• categories of war
• Clausewitz

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Iklé 1991 (revised edition).

² Powell 1995, 519.

³ Fox 1970, Massoud 1996.

⁴ Klingberg 1966, Carroll 1969, Bennett and Stam 1996.

⁵ Wittmann 1979, Pillar 2014.

⁶ Licklider 1995, Mason and Fett 1996, Sambanis 2000, Wagner 2000, Sambanis 2001, Walter 2002, Sambanis 2004, Fearon and Laitin 2003, Chan 2003, Hegre 2004, Fearon 2004, Dixon 2009, Kreutz 2010.

⁷ Halperin 1970, Bueno de Mesquita, Siverson and Woller 1992, Stanley and Sawyer 2009, Stanley 2009a, Stanley 2009b.

⁸ Kissinger 1957, Halperin 1963.

⁹ Holbraad 1979, Stein 1980, Regan 1996.

¹⁰ Doyle and Sambanis 2000, Hegre, Ellingsen, Gates and Gleditsch 2001, Paris 2004, Paris Sisk 2009, Krause and Mallory 2010, for an overview of relevant literature see also Chetail and Jütersonke 2015.

¹¹ Handel 1978, 51.

¹² The author follows the definition given by the Correlation of Wars project, see Sarkees 2000. An alternative counting is being used by the Upsala Conflict Data Program, which includes every armed conflict with more than 25 fatalities per year (see Pettersson and Wallensteen 2015). For the author, 25 deaths per year is too small a number in order to classify a conflict as a war.

¹³ Slantchev 2003, Stanley and Sawyer 2009.

¹⁴ Ghobarah, Huth and Russet 2003.

¹⁵ Clausewitz 1989, 81–83.

¹⁶ Schmitt 1996, Foucault 2004, 15; see also Edwards 2012.

¹⁷ Foster and Brewer 1976, Reed 1992, Legier-Topp 2009.

¹⁸ Stam 1996, Goemans 2000, 11–13, Bennet and Stam 2004.

¹⁹ For such a distinction look at Münkler 2005 and Kaldor 2006; meanwhile the use of the concept ‘new wars’ has somewhat ceased and there are good reasons to doubt whether this concept has any major analytic value (see Jasiukenaite 2010). The debate over ‘New Wars’, yet, has at least provided for a growing sensitivity for the fact that there are many forms of wars, not just the ‘classical’ ones, see Kaldor 2013.

²⁰ As suggested by Tertrais 2012.

²¹ Sarkees 2000.

²² Osiander 2001, Krasner 1995, Teschke 2003.

²³ Williams 1970, 3; see also Poggi 1978, chapter 4.

²⁴ Brodie 1973, 244–252, Fuller 1961, pp. 15–25, Rotenberg 1977, 12; see also Townshend 2005, 50. However, many historians doubt whether the Seven Years War can be counted as a cabinet war, it showed many more similarities with the Napoleonic Wars, see for instance Szabo 2008.

²⁵ Kissinger 1995, 78–102, Albrecht-Carrié 1968, Chapman 1998, 69–81, Schroeder 1962.

²⁶ Hobson 1902.

²⁷ C.f. Langer 1951, Pakenham 1992, Wesseling 1996, Bell 2014.

²⁸ See for instance Förster, Mommsen and Robinson 1989.

²⁹ Gulik 1955, 3–93; Morgenthau 1963, 178–225.

³⁰ See Glover 1971, Glover 2001, Gates 2001, Esdaile 2003, Laquer 1975.

³¹ See for instance Jansen and Osterhammel 2017, Clayton 2013.

³² See for instance Smith (Tony) 1974 and 1978, Smith (Simon) 2013.

³³ For Italy see Riall 1994 and Beales and Biagini 2003, for Germany Pflanze 1979, Wawro 1996, Showalter 2004 and Wawro 2005.

³⁴ See Bell 2007.

³⁵ See for World War I Stevenson 2004 and Broadberry and Harrison 2005, for World War II see Weinberg 1994 and Harrison 1998.

³⁶ Kecskemeti 1958, Goemans 2000.

³⁷ See for the wars in Middle East Bailey 1990, Hammel 1992, Gawrich 2000, Pollack 2004; for the wars in South Asia see Brown 1972 and Ganguly 1986.

³⁸ For a critical assessment of the role of US and Soviet Union in the Middle East, see Quandt 2005 as well as Stein 1980; from the perspective of the then US Secretary of State for the 1973 Yom Kippur war see Kissinger 1982, 450–666, see also Holbraad 1979.

³⁹ Krause 2014.

⁴⁰ See Cordesman and Wagner 1996; Finlan 2003.

⁴¹ See for instance Freire 2003, Croissant 1996.

⁴² For East Asia see Emmers 2010.

⁴³ See Mazaar 2015.

⁴⁴ Kostanyan and Meister 2016.

⁴⁵ See Calvin 1984 for the Indo-Chinese War and Zhang 2005 for the Chinese-Vietnamese War.

⁴⁶ Such wars are often called ‘New Wars’, see Münkler 2005 and Kaldor 2006.

⁴⁷ See Kennedy 2007, Donner 2014.

⁴⁸ See Nicholson 2004, Tyerman 2007, Riley-Smith 2009, Asbridge 2012.

⁴⁹ Cordesman, Sullivan and Sullivan 2007.

⁵⁰ See further details in Krause 2012.

⁵¹ Schroeder (Robin) 2014.

⁵² Nagl 2005.

⁵³ See Windsor and Roberts 1969; Györkei, Kirov and Horvath 1999.

⁵⁴ Jomini 1864, 54.

⁵⁵ See Oren 2002; see also Bowen 2003.

⁵⁶ See Tol, Gunzinger, Krepinevich and Thomas 2010, 20; White 2012, 74; Friedberg 2014, 82.

⁵⁷ Brodie 1946, 76.

⁵⁸ Paul, Harknett and Wirtz 2000.

⁵⁹ Heginbotham et al. 2015, Kirchberger 2015, Shugart 2017.

⁶⁰ Kroenig 2018.

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Joachim Krause

Joachim Krause is Director of the Institute for Security Policy at the University of Kiel. He was professor for International Relations at the University of Kiel from 2001 to 2016; formerly he was Deputy Director of the Research Institute of the German Council on Foreign Affairs (DGAP) in Berlin. A graduate from Hamburg University, he received his PhD at the Free University Berlin and habilitated at Bonn University. He had teaching positions at Bonn University, Potsdam University, the University of the Armed Forces in Munich and at Johns Hopkins University, Bologna. He has worked as a consultant to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United Nations and has written or edited more than 20 books and more than 200 articles on international affairs and strategic studies.