on interntaional conflict

International conflict, namely, inter-state war, skirmish, and crisis, has been a big question in IR.

War has been a concurrent phenomena in human life. In every period of history, from tribes to states, people mobilize and organize soldiers to defend their territory or invade others'. Conflict is performed by trained professional military, which has hierarchical command system. The battle is usually decided when one party suffers heavy casualty and cannot continue fighting. The victorious party gains what it wants and sometimes demand the loser to relinquish territory and material resources.

Up until this point, I have indicated several important characters of conflict. Conflict is an organized violence, being waged for certain interests, being performed by the specialists in violence. The end of conflict will change the status quo or return to the status quo before conflict emerges.

It is seemly impossible to discuss every aspect of conflict in one blog article. Even if I do, the reader will fall asleep during the discussion. So, let's talk about an interesting question about war. Is war a particular phenomena to human?

In modern period where we have enjoyed 60 years of absence of major war. Using violence to settle down dispute gradually becomes undesirable and immoral. This is often called "the norm of against the use of force". It is an established fact that people nowadays are more willing to settle their difference in peaceful ways. And state death becomes a rare phenomena in post-Cold War era. Literally there were no states being annihilated as a result of military occupation. We don't see cases similar to pre-WWII Poland.

Yet wars still take place in 21st century. States open war for sphere of influence, like Russia's invasion in Georgia; they fight for territory, like Cambodia and Thailand over the borderland around Preah Vihear temple. States still maintain massive military force to patrol and protect its border. Annual military exercise are performed to counter possible enemy attacks.

These activities are purposefully organized an performed. Have we seen something like this in animal world? The answer is no. Animals rarely perform conflict behavior so organized as human does. You see lions hunt their preys, jackals coordinate their attacks, but those violence is performed to feed themselves. They do not create a division of labor in their society, designate certain members as warriors, and send them to the frontier to fight with other groups in order to capture territory, food, and water sources.

There is one exception that we can observe organized violence performed by animals. Apes are perhaps the closest to human. A group of apes usually live in a certain amount of territory. They mainly live in the center of that piece of circular territory. The leader is usually the strongest ape who will regularly organize a patrol team to patrol their borders. If they find outsiders trespassing their territory, they will initiate attack and expel them. The patrol team is an hierarchical system. The leader chooses several experienced male apes and several younger rookies. The rookies are expected to get training during the fight and eventually become a strong warrior.

Doesn't sound very civilized, isn't it? It is disappointed that after thousand of years of evolution human still act like apes fighting for consolidate state border. It seems organized violence is a human nature. But wait, the insight we draw from apes is that their behavior helps better understand why people fight. It is indeed a special behavior. It is not out of human's evil nature. It is a social response to the environment. The behavior is developed because it is needed to maintain or establish social order. Massive mobilization, disciplined military, complex command system, war is raised for particular purpose, be it national interest, natural resource, borderline change, or survival of regime. Madness does not contribute to warfare, at least not most of the time. The onset of war depends not on individual, it depends on broader social and systemic effect.

In other words, war is not irrational or immoral. On the contrary, one has to see war as part of societal function in human life. Organized violence as well as peaceful talks are the ways human race to settle down disputes in human society. If we starts from there, we might be able to talk about war from a objective position. Why a war is fought? What are the participating parties want? Why they do not satisfy with status quo? Why the war ends? How does the losing party admit its defeat? What price does loser pay? When we ask these questions, we essentially try to understand why people resort their difference to violence and how it pays off.

Violence itself is not fun. It is full of grievance and sadness. But understand the cause of violence is essential to understand how human society works. Thousands of scholars are drawn into this field to think about the causes of war. And right now, we have many explanations on why states initiate war and few explanations on why they end the war.

In the future, I will present several articles on inter-state war. I try to convey some important idea in IR on how war breaks out. At the same time, I will bring the reader to explore intra-state war-- the civil war, which is a bit different from inter-state war.