Evolution of Warfare-Plunder and Ideology Wars

The Evolution of Warfare

In the past wars were basically of two types: war of plunder and war of ideology. The war of plunder was majorly organized as theft. The most popular example of such wars is the war of imperial expansion. This model of war entailed imperial powers acquiring territories which would boost their wealth that would, in turn, increase their power to acquire more colonies and financial affluence to become superpowers in their era. The second type is the war of ideology and values. The common examples of these wars are religious wars. The two kinds wars regularly overlapped. Some of the imperial powers spread Christianity and at the same time claimed to civilize their territories. This is a Student Sample ORDER YOUR PAPER NOW

Over the years, and more specifically in the past century, the focal point of wars has shifted from plunder to values (Layne, 2012). There are two reasons for these changes. Firstly, plunder has proved no success and indeed infective in augmenting wealth. Adam Smith puts it across that the wealth of a state lie is measured by considering the fraction of the skilled personnel and the value they add to that work (Layne, 2012).  Precisely, wealth is not in any way related to natural resources or number of slaves or cheap labor. Norman Angell in his book “The Great Illusion” argued that the war of plunder made no economical sense (Layne, 2012).

Secondly, warfare adopted a new dimension owing to the fact that people want to govern themselves. Some specialists cautioned that before waging war for imperial expansion, the government should scrutinize whether they will succeed in accumulation wealth (Manan, 2017). In the struggle of recognizing that the modern conflicts are value-based, the nature of the conflicts has been overlooked. Warfare has been defined as a clash between moral relativism and moral clarity. All evil is based on the supposition that all values are relative (Manan, 2017). In this case, people tend to have an innate conviction that their moral values are more superior.

The notion of “a democratic peace” is based on the supposition that democracies can hardly go to war with one another due to public roles (Manan, 2017). It favors a republican constitution as a foundation of formation of perpetual peace which is the consent of citizens. In my opinion, this is not realistic in the modern states. The world is in a constant situation of disorder where the states only focus on survival and building themselves. Cooperation is difficult to uphold especially in a competitive state.

With the changing trends in warfare, the means of solving them also ought to change. States have to adopt a value-based techniques or the proposed moral theories in delivering orders. Again, a conventional code of conduct should be put in place to act as a guiding tool on the right and the wrong. If all humans are exposed to universal morals, there is less likelihood of conflicts arising from value debates. This is a Student Sample ORDER YOUR PAPER NOW

References

Layne, C. (2012). Kant or Can’t: A Democratic Peace. International Security, 20(4), 5-44.

Manan, M. (2017). The Democratic Peace Theory and Its Problems. Jakarta: A l Azhar Indonesia,.