CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

that invincibility dubious (as demonstrated most cruelly in Mogadishu in 1993) and
made technological advantage, except in the increasingly rare incidents of symmetric
state-on-state conflict, far less relevant than expected. Furthermore, as Gray notes, the
most technologically advanced weaponry is only effective in the hands of well trained
troops, adequately imbued with the will to fight 21 (which connects with the discussion
in Chapter 2, Section 2.3.3 , on the importance at the individual level of moral
justification for conflict, and its moral conduct.)
Münkler suggests there has been a gradual change in which states have given up (or had
wrested from them) their de-facto monopoly of war to para-state and private actors
including a new breed of military entrepreneurs. Many new wars can be seen to have
economic foundations. Ethnic-cultural tensions and religious factors are invariably
present but more often than not are themselves a resource for the warlords than a
genuine causus bellum. 22 Three principal characteristics can be identified in new wars:
de-statization, that is the proliferation and increasing importance of non-state-actors;
asymmetry, in particular the attempt to focus violence on the weak and vulnerable, as a
matter of deliberate policy, rather than against the enemy’s military forces; and thirdly
the ‘automization of forms of violence that used to be part of a single military system.’ 23
That is the use of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, once tactical options, as strategic ends
in their own right.
The statization of war, roughly speaking from the 30 Years War onwards, resulted in
the establishing of boundaries and demarcations that its modern de-statization is seeing
eroded. As states’ territorial boundaries were formally established, so it became
possible to delineate between peace and war (marked by the crossing of one state’s
borders by the forces of another); and also between friend and enemy. Second order
distinctions were then possible: between combatant and non-combatant; between
allowable acts of violence in war and other, criminal, acts of violence; and between acts
of violence and war on the one hand and acts of trade and commerce on the other. Now,
as states’ monopoly on warfare decreases, these distinctions again become blurred.
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