The Changing Character of War

Over the last decade (and indeed ever since the Cold War), the rise of insurgents and non-state actors in war, and their readiness to use terror and other irregular methods of fighting, have led commentators to speak of 'new wars'. They have assumed that the 'old wars' were waged solely between states, and were accordingly fought between comparable and 'symmetrical' armed forces. Much of this commentary has lacked context or sophistication. It has been bounded by norms and theories more than the messiness of reality. Fed by the impact of the 9/11 attacks, it has privileged some wars and certain trends over others. Most obviously it has been historically unaware. But it has also failed to consider many of the other dimensions which help us to define what war is - legal, ethical, religious, and social. The Changing Character of War, the fruit of a five-year interdisciplinary programme at Oxford of the same name, draws together all these themes, in order to distinguish between what is really changing about war and what only seems to be changing. Self-evidently, as the product of its own times, the character of each war is always changing. But if war's character is in flux, its underlying nature contains its own internal consistency. Each war is an adversarial business, capable of generating its own dynamic, and therefore of spiralling in directions that are never totally predictable. War is both utilitarian, the tool of policy, and dysfunctional. This book brings together scholars with world-wide reputations, drawn from a clutch of different disciplines, but united by a common intellectual goal: that of understanding a problem of extraordinary importance for our times.

This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

Hew Strachan, Chichele Professor of the History of War and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; Director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War,Sibylle Scheipers, Lecturer in International Relations, University of St Andrews and Senior Research Associate, Changing Character of War Programme, Oxford University

Hew Strachan is Chichele Professor of the History of War and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; Director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War. He has been Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 1975-78, and 1979 to date (Life Fellow since 1992); Senior Lecturer, Dept of War Studies, RMA Sandhurst 1978-79; Professor of Modern History, University of Glasgow, 1992-2001, and founding Director of the Scottish Centre for War Studies. Member of the Chief of the Defence Staff's Strategic Advisory Panel 2010; Trustee Imperial War Museum 2010; Member of the Defence Academy Advisory Board; Commissioner, Commonwealth War Graves Commission; and Fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh.


Sibylle Scheipers is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews. She is Director of Studies for the Oxford Changing Character of War programme. Previously she held a postdoctoral fellowship at Chatham House, London.