Soft war
The ethics of unarmed conflict
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9918174 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Claire Finkelstein (University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 94 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 1167-1168 |
| Publication date | 2018-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Affairs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-5850 • E-ISSN: 1468-2346 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ia/iiy151 |
| OpenAlex | W2889613638 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
War used to have a characteristic look and feel: men in uniforms inflicting violence on other men in uniforms within a defined physical space, seeking to push back the opposing military in pursuit of territorial gain. On the sidelines were the civilians—typically women and children—who remained, by right, secure from conflict. This reflects the traditional conception of war as violence within boundaries: physical boundaries that demarcate the battlefield as the zone of combat, temporal boundaries that toll the beginning and end of hostilities, and participant boundaries that identify persons targetable in the conflict. What kept the violence within these physical, temporal and personal limits was a mutually agreed upon set of rules and a sense of fair play. These formed the basis for a conception of order within chaos, law within lawlessness. This traditional image of war is a far cry from the ill-defined locations, the ambiguous beginnings and never-ending states of siege, the nebulous status of the camouflaged, non-state actors, and the routine involvement of civilians, that characterize modern conflict. This evolution in the nature of war has been dramatic, and it seems to erode the constraint that has helped to contain the violence of war. Yet none of the recent changes in the nature of war have been as dramatic as the shift from kinetic to non-kinetic methods of conducting an attack on an enemy—what has variously gone by the name ‘hybrid’ or ‘grey zone’ conflict or, as in the present work, ‘soft war’
Adversary · Ancient history · Computer security · Criminology · Just war theory · Lawlessness · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Siege · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · History · Law · Torture, Ethics, and Law · War, Ethics, and Justification
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1.6 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |