From State of Exception to Pervasive Volatility

The aim of this paper is to study changes in warfare, especially from a conceptual viewpoint. The paper has as its fulcrum the argument that contemporary practices of warfare have outdistanced many previous understandings, theories and definitions of war. Notions such as “counter insurgency”, “hybrid war”, “drone war”, “cyber war” and lately also ”information war”, have not only extended the conception of war but also implicated the problematic of the definition of the concept in the current political discourse and praxis. When wars are becoming asymmetric, irregular, less state-centered, less territorial and legally obscure, they start to resemble wars from previous eras, prior to the heyday of the state-centered international system. Traditional wars have been in clear decline since 1945 and most of the ongoing contemporary conflicts fall within the spreading inkblot between war and peace rather than resemble war in the traditional sense of the term. Even though the number of wars and conflicts is decreasing, pervasive volatility has been growing (see Chayes 2015, 3). As the boundary between war and peace is crumbling, also political theory related to it and concepts used in describing it should be re-evaluated.