Humanising Warfare, or Why Van Creveld May Be Missing the `Big Picture'

Making Sense of Masculinity and War

“…An interesting illustration of the role of gender in traditional Clausewitzian accounts of war is offered in a polemical article by van Creveld (2000), who frames war in post-Cold War advanced industrial societies in terms of a narrative of socalled feminization (see also Coker 2000;Elshtain 2000). In Van Creveld's analysis, feminization has a double meaning.…”

“…Essentially, for Kaldor, the response to new war should be the task of cosmopolitan law enforcement, in which transnational institutions enable lawful policing of political violence and the containment of its effects. Coker's (2001Coker's ( , 2002 work has a much broader historical range than Kaldor's (1999) and, in various texts, traces the development of war, in different cultural contexts, from prehistoric times to the twenty-first century. I will focus here on two arguments that Coker (2001Coker ( , 2002 makes about war within Western culture (he locates the origins of Western warfare in ancient Greece) in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.…”

“…Coker's (2001Coker's ( , 2002 work has a much broader historical range than Kaldor's (1999) and, in various texts, traces the development of war, in different cultural contexts, from prehistoric times to the twenty-first century. I will focus here on two arguments that Coker (2001Coker ( , 2002 makes about war within Western culture (he locates the origins of Western warfare in ancient Greece) in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These are his arguments about humane warfare (Coker 2000(Coker , 2001 and posthuman war (Coker 2002).…”

“…I will focus here on two arguments that Coker (2001Coker ( , 2002 makes about war within Western culture (he locates the origins of Western warfare in ancient Greece) in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These are his arguments about humane warfare (Coker 2000(Coker , 2001 and posthuman war (Coker 2002). Coker is insistent that the peculiarity of Western warfare has always been the bringing together of an instrumental and an existential element, so that war both serves certain purposes and is also a key way in which participants negotiate the meaning of their humanity (Coker 2002).…”

“…These are his arguments about humane warfare (Coker 2000(Coker , 2001 and posthuman war (Coker 2002). Coker is insistent that the peculiarity of Western warfare has always been the bringing together of an instrumental and an existential element, so that war both serves certain purposes and is also a key way in which participants negotiate the meaning of their humanity (Coker 2002). In modernity, the instrumental aspect of war comes to predominate increasingly, and this permits the, perhaps rather fleeting, humane warfare of the 1990s and drives the shift toward posthuman war at the current time.…”