After Clausewitz: War in the Third Millennium

Despite the profound transformations of war since the last century, with two world wars and after 1989 the “new wars” (M. Kaldor, New and Old Wars. Organized Violence in the Global Era, Polity Press 1999), political and philosophical reflection has continued to consider Carl von Clausewitz's definition of war as a duel and as the continuation of politics (C. von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 1832) by other means to be valid. An example of the universal validity claim of Clausewitz's paradigm is Raymond Aron's thesis, according to which the Cold War, which began between the US and the USSR after 1945, represented the purest form of duel, and the strategy of deterrence - that is, the threat of using nuclear weapons - is the means by which politics continues to maintain firm control over the use of force (R. Aron, Penser la guerre, Gallimard 1976). More recently, analysing the conflicts of recent decades - from the “Arab Spring” to Ukraine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and throughout the Arab region, not to mention the conflicts affecting the African and Asian continents - the Clausewitzian paradigm has begun to be questioned: war has taken on another form and other purposes (F. Gros, Pourquoi la guerre?, Éditions Albin Michel 2023)A. Colombo, Il suicidio della pace. Il fallimento dell'ordine internazionale liberale (1989-2024), Bollati Boringhieri). The presentation will focus on the following questions: What is the new nature of war? How does it relate to domestic and international politics? Can we still speak of the order-creating function of war - how different theories of political realism in international relations think -, or does it merely contribute to the current global disorder?