No abstract

The cessation of military confrontations rarely coincides with the end of war. Legal and political matters continue after the last shot has been fired, civilians driven from their homes try to rebuild their houses and their lives, veterans need to adapt to their new role in civil society, and the struggle to define the history and the significance of past events only begins. In recent years, in particular, the changes in the character of contemporary warfare have created uncertainties across different disciplines about how to identify and conceptualise the end of war. It is therefore an opportune moment to examine how wars end from a multidisciplinary perspective that combines enquiries into the politics of war, the laws of war and the military and intellectual history of war. This approach enables both an understanding of how 'the end' as a concept informs the understanding of war in international relations, in international law and in history and a reconsideration of the nature of scientific method in the field of war studies as such.

Strategy and organization theory enjoy a reawakening interest in historical analysis. In this essay we suggest that this engagement should include strategy's linkage to the history of military strategy. We develop our argument through an exegesis of Carl von Clausewitz' treatise On War. We claim that Clausewitz' theorization of strategy advances the ongoing scholarly conversation on the practice of strategy in three specific ways. First, he defines a distinctive locus for the notion of strategy as the bridge between policy and tactics; in so doing he addresses what has been criticized as strategy's conceptual drift. Second, with Clausewitz we can pose the question of strategy's effectiveness in a critical, reflexive way. This opens up a way to answer the "so-what" question that has hampered strategy as practice research. Third, as an educator in military affairs of the Crown Prince, Clausewitz invites reflection on strategy's pedagogy. Following Clausewitz, strategy may not want to concern itself with distilling the next practice from past history; but immerse strategy students in great detail in history in order to develop their critical faculties.

In the twenty-first century, warfare has increasingly become pervaded by fictions. Using carefully crafted virtual worlds to train, prepare, and process military engagements, the US military has co-opted and militarized a field that one does not usually associate with war—the field of aesthetics. This essay considers Harun Farocki's installation Serious Games as an index into the emergence of a newfangled military aesthetic regime. Charting the institutional collaborations between the military and the creative industries in the twenty-first century, the essay examines what happens to the notion of “experience” with the emergence of immersive virtual reality technologies. Revisiting central thinkers in philosophical aesthetics as well as a key moment in the history of war and technology, namely, the invention of the modern war game around 1800, the essay outlines the recent merger of war and aesthetics and draws out some of the consequences for our understanding of contemporary warfare.

No abstract