Abstract
War is one of the most studied subjects, yet a vast literature lacks good general and comprehensive studies of the phenomenon and its associated elements fully updated for the contemporary world. The two weighty tomes reviewed here promise, at face value at least, to help fill that void.
Comprising 46 short chapters authored by a strong list of academics, policy makers and military practitioners,The Oxford Handbook of War is divided into ten parts. Part I addresses the basic nature and characteristics of war and its causes, with opening chapters by eminent strategic thinkers Sir Lawrence Freedman and Hew Strachan. The following five sections address moral and legal aspects of war; theories of warfare; war's conduct at the political-strategic level; non-Western perspectives; and the military conduct of war, including, inter alia, chapters on the three major geographical domains, counter-insurgency and logistics. Part VII dissects the role of industrial, economic and technological factors and is followed by sections on civil–military factors; societal aspects; and finally, a section on the future of war. The editors provide a thoughtful and sound, if discomforting, conclusion on the unpredictability of war in a time of international systemic uncertainty.
The Ashgate Research Companion to War takes an altogether different approach. The subtitle gives an indication of the book's perhaps hopeful intent: to investigate the origins or causes of war and identify avenues for war prevention. In their introduction the editors introduce readers to the concept of ‘polemology’, a term coined by the rather obscure late French theoretician Gaston Bouthoul to describe the multidisciplinary historical approach to the study of war he developed in the post-Second World War period. The book explicitly sets out to introduce this French concept to the English-speaking world by gathering together a collection of essays on war from ‘different theoretical and cultural perspectives’ (p. 4). The book is divided into four parts. The first provides a wide range of historical and theoretical perspectives on the phenomenon of war and its causes. The second part consists of eight studies of especially war-prone periods, ranging from the wars of ancient Athens through to the interwar period in Europe and the origins of the Second World War. The third part includes essays on the Cold War and a disparate series of essays on contemporary aspects of warfare ranging from the employment of child soldiers through to cyber-warfare and the implications of climate change for violent conflict. The final part applies big picture ideas from political science theory on the patterns of major power war, including two chapters by the leading proponents of ‘long-cycle’ theory and a conclusion that attempts to apply the principles of ‘polemology’ to the contemporary world and identify ways to avoid future great power conflicts.
A highlight of the Ashgate volume is Azar Gat's short summary of his book-length study of the role of war across the entire history of human civilisation. Most of the historical chapters tend towards descriptive narrative, however, raising questions about their role within the overall collection. The history itself is dominated by political science, but with a definite bias to the abstract world of international relations theory rather than to the more practical, policy-relevant realm of strategic studies. The last part relays the unhelpful message that the theory of cyclical patterns of great power conflict suggests that such wars may, or may not, recur in the coming decades: a convoluted way of stating that the future is unknowable, and war unpredictable.
Both books have a strong Western cultural bias. Indeed, the Ashgate book is wholly Atlanticist in its authorship and, other than a single chapter on Islamic warfare, heavily Eurocentric. This is surprising given the stated ‘polemological’ aim to take into account different cultural perspectives, which in the book seems to amount primarily to publicising in the English language literature the perspectives of little-known French intellectuals: a narrow, if worthy, outcome. The Oxford collection in contrast makes a concerted effort to widen its focus, with the section on non-Western ways of war providing chapters on Russian, Chinese and Japanese perspectives. Another chapter surveys the emerging powers of Brazil, China and India. Most notably, the chapter on Japan is written by a retired Japanese admiral and that on China by leading People's Liberation Army strategist Major-General Peng Guang Qian, the latter quite a coup for the editors.
Ultimately, the value of The Ashgate Research Companion to War is primarily limited to disseminating the ideas of French thinkers to a wider, English-speaking audience. However, if a comprehensive study of war from different perspectives is the aim, then it is the Oxford Handbook of War that achieves the task successfully. It is a fine primer on many, albeit not all, contemporary aspects of war, which will appeal to students from both civilian and military worlds at all levels, while also providing a valuable reference tool for even the most seasoned of researchers.