Realities of War: global development, growing destructiveness and the coming of a new Dark Age?

Abstract

This contribution traces the connection between theories about the utility of violence as a tool of development and practical efforts to craft policies based on such beliefs. The basic finding is that the use of force in the name of societal development (eg the Bush Doctrine of waging war to effect ‘regime change’) has proven problematic. Indeed, viewed from the perspective of the past two centuries, such uses of force have often turned out to be profoundly ‘anti-developmental’. In particular, there are some troubling shifts in conflict, apparent since the late 19th century, but which have accelerated in recent decades. First, major warfare has migrated from the developed to the developing world. Second, there is a clearly observable growth trend towards ‘big kill’ wars in which at least one million people die (often in small nation-states where significant percentages of the population are killed). More, and more deadly, wars are thus occurring amid those least able to cope with conflict, providing stark rebuttal to recent studies that argue war is generally on the wane. To the contrary, the ‘barriers to entry’ for waging highly destructive wars have fallen sharply, and it is this trend that poses the greatest threat to political, social and economic progress since the last Dark Age.