War Has Changed Through the Ages

war has been one of the key institutions of the practice of international relations, and has always been a central focus of the study of international relations. In the post-cold struggle period many observers have suggested that the nature of war is undergoing fundamental changes, or even that in many parts of the world at least, it has function obsolete. With the advance of economic interdep remainderence through globalization, and the spread of democracy, roughly groups of states calculate to have puddleed security communities where war between them is no long a possibility.Elsewhere, however, war has continued to exist, and to take a number of polar forms. For some countries, such as the United States, the use of advanced engineering science to achieve dramatic victories against conventional armies has led to suggestions that a revolution in multitude affairs is under way. Other parts of the world, however, have been characterized by warfare in whichnon-state actors ha ve been prominent, the phalanx technology employed has been relatively unsophisticated, and atrocities have been commonplace. Such new wars, it is argued by many, are a unmediated result of the process of globalization.War has not disappeared as a form of mixer behaviour and shows no signs of doing so, though it is not necessarily an inevitable form of human behaviour and seems to have become ef ectively extinct in some parts of the world. Since the end of the cold war, the annual number of wars, the number of interlocking deaths, and the number of war-related massacres have all declined sharply compared with the cold war period. amongst 1989 and 1992 nearly one hundred wars came to an end, and in terms of battle deaths, the mid-nineties were the least violent decade since the end of the Second World War (University of British Columbia, Human Security Center 2005 17).Despite the overall decline in the incidence of war, however, in many regions it is very much present and is di splaying some novel features in comparison to those typical of the cold war period. In the contemporary world there are powerful pressures producing changes to national economies and societies. somewhat of these can be seen to rel ect the wallop of globalization, others are the result of the broader ef ects of post-modernity, precisely their cumulative ef ect has been to bring about signii cant political and cordial changes, which have in turn been rel ected in changed perceptions of the nature of threats coming from the immaterial environment. is in turn has inl uenced beliefs regarding the utility of force as an instrument of policy, and the forms and functions of war. In the past two centuries, the modern era of istory, war has traditionally been seen as a brutal form of politics, a way in which states desire to resolve certain issues in international relations, and an outcome of their willingness to amass military power for defensive measure and deterrence, and to projec t it in support of their foreign and defence policies. e two world wars of the twentieth century typii ed this nest to the instrumentality of war. In the post-cold war period, the kinds of threats that have driven the accumulation of military power in the developed world have not interpreted the form of traditional state-to-state military rivalry, just now have been a repartee to rather more amorphous and less predictable threats such as terrorism, insurgencies, and internal crises in other countries that seem to demand the projection of military force to resolve them.For some observers, the current era has seen a major(ip) evolution in the structure of international relations, with the dramatic political changes that followed the end of the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Changes in the international system of rules on this scale are not common in history, and when they get can be expected to have a major impact on the mechanisms by which the international sy stem is governed.At the same time, and partly as a result of the evolution of the international environment, changes are likewise occurring in the domestic attributes of many of the states that make up the international system. h ere has, for example, been a notable increase in the number of democratic political systems, but in the same period many other states have disintegrated into gracious wars and insurgency. he identity of the key players in international relations has also changed since the end of the cold war. h e world has become temporarily subject to the hegemonic control of a single state,