Reviewing the Relationship of War and Peace in International Politics: Can We Imagine a World Without War?

Abstract

The history of human civilization is the history of wars. Peace was primarily perceived as a pause between those wars. From the concept of the absence of war, peace has transformed to a far more inclusive concept that includes the absence of various types of non-military threats to human well-being. Peace has not only changed its own theoretical foundations but also the practical understanding of international politics. The concept of peace was inextricably linked to war. Hence, the authors attached importance to the expansion and deepening of the concept of war in international relations, which could also be waged by non-military means in non-physical space. The evolution of war from state and military to forms involving non-state actors, non-military threats and new arenas of warfare, i.e., cyberspace, were presented as significant subject of analysis. Relationship between war and peace was investigated in the entire historical scope, looking at it through the prism of an eclectic theoretical-methodological approach. The results found lack of the possibilities for a world without wars and reach a pessimistic conclusion that war in new forms will continue to be a feature of international politics, while peace will primarily be perceived as a period of absence of war.