Description

Dimensions of war

Understanding War as a Complex Adaptive System

With today's mutable identities and varions kinds of warfare, how do we further our understanding of war ? This book proposes an innovative and transversal perspective. Reviewing influential war theories from Machiavelli to the present, it analyzes how they simplify and reduce war in terms of time, space, interaction, purpose, aim, and/or evolution. Yet war is alive - it is a generative social phenomenon that is accordingly uncertain and self-modifying : a complex adaptive System. Examining the social, temporal, and spatial dimensions of war, this book exposes its unpredictability, complexity, change, and generativeness. War is a rather complex sequence of actions in constant motion, and its multi-dimensionality implies that the reasons for war change throughout war. Considering war as a complex adaptive system allows us to increase our overall comprehension of contemporary wars.