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KALEVI, HOLSTI. The State, War and the State of War.

Pg. 205
War, the state, and the study of international politics

There are implications of weak states not only for those who must deal with the moral, political, and military
problems they create, but also for academic analysts of international politics. For more than 200 years, they have
employed a number of analytical and theoretical tools to examine the sources of war and the conditions of peace
and stability. These have included game theory, deterrence theory, analogies such as Rousseau’s “stag hunt”,
balance of power theory, and the sources and nature of alliances – in brief, those approaches generally placed under
the rubrics of realism and neo-realism.

The world from which these theoretical devices and approaches have derived is the European experience of war
since 1648 and the Cold War. They have also drawn heavily upon the experiences of the great powers, thus relegating
lesser states to the objects of great-power rivalry and cooperation rather than as self-directed actors with their own
interests and unique roles in international politics.

The problems of war and the great powers have not disappeared with the end of the Soviet-American rivalry. The
mountain of literature that examines the future security “architecture” of Europe attests to the vibrancy of
traditional security concerns. Ideas of some sort of a twenty-first-century Concert of Powers abound, while balance
of power thinking continues to inform the debate about whether or not to expand NATO to include former Warsaw
Pact members from Central Europe and how to deal with a rapidly growing China (cf. Huntington 1994). The wars of
ex-Yugoslavia have undermined the euphoria of 1989 which found expression of proclamations of a new, more
benign world order, in scenarios of peaceful transitions from socialism to free market democracy (Fukuyama 1989)
and in predictions of the obsolescence of major power wars (Mueller 1989). Both in some of the Soviet republics
and in many areas of the Third World, security dilemmas, the possibility of interstate wars, and local arms-racing
remain with us. So do interstate wars originating over water disputes and other resource shortages. There is also,
finally, the risk that internal wars will escalate through foreign interventions into interstate wars. Security studies as
a field concerned with the relations between states will not disappear.

Nevertheless, the major sources of war in the future will derive less from the character of relations between states
than what goes on within states. The historical, political, and psychological processes that drive communities to
demand their own state have not been altered or terminated by the end of the Cold War. On the contrary, as almost
every observer of Central Europe and the Balkans has noted, war and chauvinist nationalism have been the
consequences of the collapse of the socialist states (cf. Snyder 1993: 81). The domestic politics of some Third World
countries may have taken a turn toward democratization in the short run – particularly in South America – but
elsewhere politics have mostly remained as usual which means that the forces of secession will remain vibrant, some
states will fail, and governments will search, usually unsuccessfully, for more enduring base of legitimacy.

Realist and neo-realist approaches to the study of war offer little in the way of understanding these dynamics and
how they affect weak states. In the absence of actual or potential hegemons in many areas of the Third World, there
are few alliances and even fewer balances of power (Holsti 1992: 42-6). Nuclear deterrence is irrelevant in all areas
of the Third World, among the former Soviet republics, and in the Balkans; it remains a possibility only between India
and Pakistan and possibly later among Iran’s neighbors. Many of the other accoutrements of traditional European-
style power politics are notable either for their absence or for the scarcity. In brief, there is little remaining in the
traditional literatures of security studies specifically and international politics more generally that has analytical
value for understanding or explaining the persistence of war in weak and failed states. The comparative study of
states – how they are formed, how they develop legitimacy and strength, and how they persist or fail – seem better
avenues for future research on the problem of war. But since local and domestic wars also have external sources,
then the linkages between systemic characteristics and domestic politics need to be developed into prominent
analytical foci in future studies (cf. Buzan 1991: ch. 4).

Another significant change in the study of international politics is the shift from exclusive focus on the activities of
the great powers to a concern with what have traditionally been considered peripheral actors. The theoretical
paraphernalia of realist and neo-realist studies, in which virtually everything is explained by great-power behavior
or systemic characteristics such as global balances of power, is much less relevant in the marshes of national
debilitation wars. Despite the floundering of NATO in the Bosnian war, most of the great powers in future are going
to be concerned primarily with economic issues, that is, with the domain called today international political
economy. The problematique of war now moves to their peripheries. It is in the context of United States efforts to
sustain and resuscitate weak and failed states that the military capabilities of the great powers will be most relevant,
that is, in the great variety of peacekeeping activities that are the legacies of wars of the third kind.

For analysts of the United Nations, the fiftieth anniversary of the organization brought forth a wave of proposals for
Charter amendment. But attention has focused primarily on the problem of representation on the Security Council.
The more fundamental problem is whether and how an organization designed for one set of tasks should

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