A Perspective on War

 Transition from cold war to now – from world wars to crime wars – latin America crime wars
 But is it actually different?
 The stereotypical view
 The male perspective on war
 War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than at peace times.
 Many writers seem unaware of the fact that human race since the dawn of time, from the
lowest stages of civilization has been trying to avoid or mitigate violence. Mankind may be
understood in respect to war-like nature and conflict driven interests, however the only man has
ever been concerned with is to survive and live on. Self-preservation may thus dictate either war
or peace according to the times.
 In terms of property – relate to john locke
 Plunder for wealth or in name of religion
 Expansionary interests
 understand fundamentally conflict, violence, and war. psychological roots of conflict and the
philosophical framework. As such, it is a self-contained, psycho-philosophical analysis, focusing
on the nature of a field perspective; perception; expectations and behavior; motivations;
intentionality; the self, will, and freedom; and, finally, intentional humanism as the ethical basis
for this understanding.
 perception is an active balancing between our reaching out to transform reality within our
perspective and the powers of reality to manifest themselves. We are no passive victims of
external powers; rather than being a dart board for stimuli, we are their active combatant.
Conflict begins in the very act of our perception.
 Future wars
 Taking an evolutionary approach to history, Ian Morris argues
that humanity has benefited from centuries of warfare. Only
through warfare has humanity been able to come together in larger
societies and thus to enjoy security and riches. It is largely thanks to the
wars of the past that our modern lives are 20 times safer than those of
our stone age ancestors. by "war" Morris means conquest or nation-
building. with a strongly evolutionary approach. He favours
geographical explanations, discounts the role of ideas and downplays
the "western intellectual tradition".
 War has been history's greatest paradox, but this searching study of fifteen thousand
years of violence suggests that the next half century is going to be the most dangerous of
all time. If we can survive it, the age-old dream of ending war may yet come to pass. But,
Morris argues, only if we understand what war has been good for can we know where it
will take us next.

 How about the future? Will the “long peace” endure and expand? Or will
the wheel of fortune turn back as it did after 200 A.D?
 At the end of World War II there were only about sixty states in the
world. Now there are three times as many. The splintering process does
not appear to be over yet. Some of the new states gained their
independence by peaceful means. But many did so by using armed
violence or, at the very least, threatening to do so. That, incidentally, is
something even the saintly Mahatma Gandhi did on occasion.
 A few of the new states went on to build highly successful modern
societies with relatively low levels of violence. Good examples are Malta,
Israel — which, its problems with the Palestinians apart, has a very low
murder rate — and, above all, Singapore. Many others did not do so and
became known as “failed” states. In them, as events in such places as
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Sudan, the Congo, and others show,
politically-organized lethal violence, AKA war, remains as widespread as
it has ever been. The fate of many others, including the Central Asian
Republics and large parts of Africa, seems to hang in the balance. A
political scientist who tells the people of these countries that theirs is the
most peaceful period in history will just make them smile.
 the most significant military development of our times seems to be the
decline, much of it due to nuclear proliferation and deterrence, of large-
scale conventional interstate war. In its place we see the rise of “non-
trinitarian” war. Those who wage non-trinitarian war are the barbarians
of old; fanatical and organized in ever-shifting groups that operate in a
decentralized way.
 The evolutionary psychological perspective on wars suggests that the ultimate cause of all
intergroup conflict is the relative availability of reproductive women.