Main content

New Wars

Melvyn Bragg discusses the history of modern warfare and examines whether today鈥檚 brutal and complex conflicts are truly different from anything the world has seen before.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of modern warfare. In the early nineteenth century the Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz seemed to define war for all time when he called it 鈥渁n act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will鈥 and 鈥渘othing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means鈥. But after the nuclear bomb, the Cold War and the brutal and perplexing recent wars in Africa and Eastern Europe does his definition still hold true? Or are we in a new era when the idea of a continuation of peacetime politics and the notion of a national will is increasingly irrelevant? Are the technologically billion dollar new wars, coupled with the wars on the ground which are more like crimes, revolutions or more organised violence than war, a way of following Clausewitz鈥檚 notion of war as a continuation of politics by other means or do they constitute something completely different?With Sir Michael Howard, Emeritus Professor of Modern History, Oxford University; Dr Mary Kaldor, Director of the Programme on Global Civil Society, London School of Economics; General Sir Michael Rose, former Commander of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia and author of Fighting for Peace: Lessons from Bosnia.

Available now

42 minutes

Last on

Thu 13 Apr 2000 21:30

Broadcasts

  • Thu 13 Apr 2000 09:02
  • Thu 13 Apr 2000 21:30

Featured in...

In Our Time podcasts

Download programmes from the huge In Our Time archive.

The In Our Time Listeners' Top 10

If you鈥檙e new to In Our Time, this is a good place to start.

Arts and Ideas podcast

Download the best of Radio 3's Free Thinking programme.

Podcast