The main concepts I develop are degeneration of warfare / dialectics of war / historical pacifism / mediated violence / post-military society. See also my new project, Slaughter: From War to Genocide I argue that war in the global era is a 'degenerate' form of total war, in which counterrevolution and genocide have become more prominent, and it raises disturbing questions about Western warfare. See
My work in the 1980s argued that in the twentieth century, the 'mode of warfare' came to dominate society, so that the contradictions of war became central contradictions of modern society. It is a critical position in both social theory and historiography. See
I argued in the final chapter of Dialectics of War (1988) that the viability of war as a 'continuation of politics by other means' is increasingly outmoded, not only because nuclear war would be self-defeating, but because the progressive role of 'armed struggle' is largely played out. This theme has been continued in my work on the degenerate and genocidal character of the wars of the 1990s. I visited The new politics of war in chapter 6 of Global Society and International Relations (1994), which is republished on this site. I emphasize the contradictory and rapidly changing roles of mass media in war, notably in my studies of the Gulf War and the Kurdish refugee crisis. See
I argue that society, especially in the West, has moved beyond classical total-war militarism. See
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