War is what you get when there are no limits to what you will consider doing or what your opponent will consider doing to impose one’s will on the other. When there are no limits to what you will consider doing, the only things that constrain what you actually do are those that are determined by cold military rationality.
I have studied civil wars for some time now, and I’ve been pretty lazy in using the word “conflict” to describe these phenomena. But clearly we should distinguish between conflict and violence, with violence being a necessary aspect of the process whereby a conflict results in a war.
Watching the uprisings in the Middle East over the past month has brought these distinctions into sharp relief. In Egypt, things got violent for a time. But very quickly the sides moved to resolve things without escalation. What’s the source of the contrast between what happened here and the cases that I have been spending my time studying?
Mandela famously wrote in his autobiography that the nature of the struggle is defined by the oppressor. Looking at Egypt, I feel that this can only be partly true. Certainly the protesters faced uncertainty in how far the incumbent regime would be willing to go to counter the uprising. They nonetheless chose not to escalate, but rather to defend themselves and attack only at the level at which they were being attacked. Perhaps this was dictated by the limited means that were at their disposal. But even if this constraint were not binding (e.g., if the protesters had access to guns), I can see that a choice by the protesters to limit their use of violence would be crucial in determining how things would play out. Thus, when faced by initial escalation by “the oppressor” those involved in the uprising do indeed have a choice.
So what we need in our theorizing about the origins of war are theories about how masses of people get to the point where they no longer accept any limits on what they are willing to do to have their way.
