Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Targeting the ontology of war

Research

Associated organisational units

Electronic data

  • AN and DO, Targeting the ontology of war, final version before typeset (version 2)

    Accepted author manuscript, 224 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

  • Nordin and Oberg, targeting the Ontology of war, published

    Rights statement: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/openaccess.htm). This is the Gold open access version of the article.

    Final published version, 395 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Links

Text available via DOI:

Keywords

View graph of relations

Targeting the ontology of war: from Clausewitz to Baudrillard

Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>15/01/2015
<mark>Journal</mark>Millennium : Journal of International Studies
Issue number2
Volume43
Number of pages28
Pages (from-to)392-419
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date3/11/14
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Against a surprising level of agreement between Clausewitz, contemporary military doctrines and critical war studies on an ontology of war as fighting, we suggest that the study of contemporary warfare needs to focus more on war as processing. Through Jean Baudrillard we argue that at least some of what is referred to as ‘war’ is no longer characterised by encounters through fighting. We exemplify our argument by how the repetitive battle-rhythm of military targeting strives for perfect war. What remains is not war as an object in itself, but a reified ‘war’ that obscures the disappearance of that very object. The debate on war contributes to the reification of such a war, as an imperative telling us: ‘we have a concept, you must learn to think through it’.

Bibliographic note

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/openaccess.htm).