War in the Twenty-first Century: An Institution in Crisis

Abstract

Inclusion of war among the institutions of international society must at first seem shocking. Is not war symptomatic of the breakdown or failure of international society? If so, how can it be counted an institution? Surely it is obscenely euphemistic to refer to so destructive a process by a word so closely associated in everyday use with welfare and stability. Marriage, bankruptcy, and the BBC are institutions; but war?¹ The remainder of the first section of this chapter is therefore given over to an account of the kinds of things that have been understood by those, like Bull, who have thought war an institution. It attempts to sketch in merest outline naturalist, communitarian, functionalist and positivist approaches to war-as-institution as foils to an alternative pragmatist position, consistent with a possible reading of Bull, which provides the point of departure for the remainder of the argument.