War and Globalization: Understanding the Linkages

Major wars between great powers like the two World Wars and the Cold War during the twentieth century, participated to the second globalization process. But dealing with the relations between globalization and war must not be reduced to warfare as an independent variable. For more than two decades, International Relations (IR) scholars have focused on the transformation of war as a result from globalization. The dynamic shrinking of distance on a large scale caused some effects on warfare, on war but also on models and tools in order to understand these dimensions of strategy. What are the effects of globalization on the transformation of war debate? To what extent some new approaches aim at producing an epistemic revolution? This chapter introduces the classic debate between realisms and liberalisms concerning these links between globalization of war. This debate does not change the epistemic beliefs that lead the academic field in IR contrary to the new wars debate initiated by post-clausewitzian approaches that aims at dissolving the modern distinctions: war and peace, combatant and non-combatant, politics and crime. The chapter ends with a third perspective that describes the impacts of globalization—defined as the development of interdependencies at different levels—on the capacity interaction. In this last perspective, globalization is both a context and an opportunity for actors in order to make war …. but also peace. By coming back to Political theory, analysis of war today shows the emergence of a ‘global state of war’.