The New War Thesis and Clausewitz: A Reconciliation
| Author | Benjamin R. Banta |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12722 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
The New War Thesis and Clausewitz: A
Reconciliation
Benjamin R. Banta
Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Abstract
Mary Kaldor’s work constitutes an exceptionally sustained, cohesive, and also broadly aimed argument for often radical –and
generally cosmopolitan –changes to state’s approaches to security. Informing the project’s various proposals is a theoretical
foundation derived from earlier work on ‘new war’. This ‘new war thesis’holds that the nature of war has changed from
involving a Clausewitzian logic of extremes to one of ‘persistence and spread’. This thesis is presented as an ideal type that
should inform scholarship and policy. The essay finds fault with the way this foundation is constructed, in particular its rejec-
tion of Clausewitz. Rather than reject the new war thesis, though, the essay shows that a reconciliation between it and the
Clausewitzian theory of war is not only possible, but results in more cogent arguments for the policy proposals Kaldor con-
tends are the real test of the theoretical underpinning of her project.
Policy Implications
•Human security advocates should not justify their views on the use of military force by contending that war is fundamen-
tally transformed. War is still a contest centrally involving the search for victory over an enemy force, even though what
victory must look like and the strategies necessary to obtain it have changed.
•Civilian protection should be the primary objective for most uses of military force, not simply because of the danger that
too much offensive warfighting will result in too many civilian casualties, but also because most ‘new war’forces are so
weak and disorganized that there is no immediate need to seek their physical destruction.
•Rather than a relatively selfless and risky allocation of resources, training large portions of modern military forces to be
adept at human security’s quasi-policing and civilian protection imperatives is the best way for states to maintain their
own power and security over the long-term.
What this essay calls the new war thesis (NWT) is at the core
of Mary Kaldor’s (2007, p. 2) decades-spanning project for a
‘new approach to security’. The thesis, which contends war
now has an internal logic of persistence and spread, is not
only crucial to a host of policy prescriptions aimed at a gen-
erally cosmopolitan –or ‘human security’, as Kaldor prefers
–reorientation to state’s security approaches, but is central
to Kaldor’s responses to various criticisms of her project. She
pointed to the NWT in response to empirically based cri-
tiques, essentially claiming that too often critics were miss-
ing its ideal-typical forest for the empirical trees (Kaldor,
2013a; see Masullo and Bajo, 2014 for a summary of these
criticisms). And in response to theoretical criticism (Fleming,
2009; Schuurman, 2010), Kaldor doubled down by refining
and making more explicit the NWT.
Despite the importance of the NWT to Kaldor’s project, a
relatively recent essay in this journal proposed moving the
‘new war’debate forward by ‘focusing exclusively on the
empirical dimension of it’(Masullo and Bajo, 2014, p. 416). I
sense that, like myself, undergirding that proposal is a
recognition that at the same time that academic and policy
fervor over the new war idea has dwindled, events in the
world seem to continually –and depressingly –confirm
much of what Kaldor was alerting us to with the seminal
New & Old Wars,first published in 1999. Kaldor (2018, pp. x–
xi) seems to share this sentiment, noting in her most recent
work that the ‘tragedy’she warned us about ‘is already hap-
pening’, all while ways ‘of doing security are changing but
not in the direction of human security’. With this essay I too
hope to encourage more work in the new war milieu, but I
think it unwise to so easily elide theoretical foundations.
Theory of course necessarily precedes observation (Dunne,
et al., 2013), and so flawed or unnecessarily strident theoret-
ical contentions can have a quite negative effect at the ana-
lytic and policy levels. The main contention of this essay is
that the NWT suffers from precisely those problems. Rather
than abandoning it, though, I argue it can be improved by
moving away from the strong claim that persistence and
spread is the internal logic of war. Instead, we should theo-
rize persistence and spread as strong tendencies generated
in relation to the traditional conception, developed in the
19th century by Carl von Clausewitz (1984), of war’s logic of
extremes. Reconciling that logic with the NWT, I argue, in
fact produces a more cogent foundation that, most impor-
tantly, better serves what I take to be a policy project that is
as vital as ever.
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Global Policy (2019) 10:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12722 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 4 . November 2019 477
Research Article
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