Overview

Over the last decade (and indeed ever since the Cold War), the rise of insurgents and non-state actors in war, and their readiness to use terror and other irregular methods of fighting, have led commentators to speak of 'new wars'. They have assumed that the 'old wars' were waged solely between states, and were accordingly fought between comparable and 'symmetrical' armed forces. Much of this commentary has lacked context or sophistication. It has been bounded by norms and theories more than the messiness of reality. Fed by the impact of the 9/11 attacks, it has privileged some wars and certain trends over others. Most obviously it has been historically unaware. But it has also failed to consider many of the other dimensions which help us to define what war is - legal, ethical, religious, and social. The Changing Character of War, the fruit of a five-year interdisciplinary programme at Oxford of the same name, draws together all these themes, in order to distinguish between what is really changing about war and what only seems to be changing. Self-evidently, as the product of its own times, the character of each war is always changing. But if war's character is in flux, its underlying nature contains its own internal consistency. Each war is an adversarial business, capable of generating its own dynamic, and therefore of spiralling in directions that are never totally predictable. War is both utilitarian, the tool of policy, and dysfunctional. This book brings together scholars with world-wide reputations, drawn from a clutch of different disciplines, but united by a common intellectual goal: that of understanding a problem of extraordinary importance for our times. This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

Full Product Details

Author:   Hew Strachan (Chichele Professor of the History of War and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; Director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War) ,  Sibylle Scheipers (Lecturer in International Relations, University of St Andrews and Senior Research Associate, Changing Character of War Programme, Oxford University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.80cm , Height: 3.30cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.874kg
ISBN:  

9780199688005

ISBN 10:   0199688001
Pages:   576
Publication Date:   12 September 2013
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers: Introduction: The Changing Character of War PART I: The Need for a Historical Perspective: What has Changed? 1: Azar Gat: The Changing Character of War 2: David Parrott: Had a Distinct Template for a 'Western Way of War' Been Established Before 1800? 3: Michael Broers: Changes in War: The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars 4: Gil-li Vardi: The Change from Within 5: Gerard J. DeGroot: 'Killing is Easy': The Atomic Bomb and the Temptation of Terror 6: Mats Berdal: The 'New Wars' Thesis Revisited 7: Audrey Kurth Cronin: What is Really Changing? Change and Continuity in Global Terrorism PART II: The Purpose of War: Why go to War? 8: David J.B. Trim: Humanitarian intervention 9: Thomas Hippler: Democracy and War in the Strategic Thought of Giulio Douhet 10: Alia Brahimi: Religion in the War on Terror 11: Stathis N. Kalyvas: The Changing Character of Civil Wars, 1800-2009 12: William Reno: Crime versus War PART III: The Changing Identities of Combatants: Who Fights? 13: Pascal Vennesson: War Without the People 14: Sarah Percy: The Changing Character of Private Force 15: Bruce Hoffman: Who Fights?-A Comparative Demographic Depiction of Terrorists and Insurgents in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries 16: Kimberly Marten: Warlords 17: Anne Deighton: The European Union, Multilateralism, and the Use of Force 18: Peter W. Singer: Robots at War: The New Battlefield PART IV: The Changing Identities of Non-combatants 19: Adam Roberts: The Civilian in Modern War 20: Uwe Steinhoff: Killing Civilians 21: Sibylle Scheipers: The Status and Protections of Prisoners of War and Detainees 22: Guy S. Goodwin-Gill: The Challenge of the Child Soldier PART V: The Ideas Which Enable us to Understand War 23: Antulio J Echevarria II: American Strategic Culture: Problems and Prospects 24: David Rodin: Morality and Law in War 25: Henry Shue: Target-selection Norms, Torture Norms, and Growing US Permissiveness 26: Patricia Owens: he Return of Realism? War and Changing Concepts of the Political 27: Hew Strachan: Strategy in the Twenty-first Century Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton: Conclusion: Absent War Studies? War, Knowledge, and Critique

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Author Information

Hew Strachan is Chichele Professor of the History of War and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; Director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War. He has been Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 1975-78, and 1979 to date (Life Fellow since 1992); Senior Lecturer, Dept of War Studies, RMA Sandhurst 1978-79; Professor of Modern History, University of Glasgow, 1992-2001, and founding Director of the Scottish Centre for War Studies. Member of the Chief of the Defence Staff's Strategic Advisory Panel 2010; Trustee Imperial War Museum 2010; Member of the Defence Academy Advisory Board; Commissioner, Commonwealth War Graves Commission; and Fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh. Sibylle Scheipers is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews. She is Director of Studies for the Oxford Changing Character of War programme. Previously she held a postdoctoral fellowship at Chatham House, London.

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