The Sociology of War

The sociology of war is a subfield of sociology that focuses on the macro-level patterns of war making, how societies engage in warfare, the meaning that war has in society, and the relationship between state structure and war making. A related subfield is military sociology, which focuses more explicitly on the organization and functioning of military forces and civil- military relations. These lines of scholarship are bound together by the basic premise that understanding war necessitates understanding those who fight it, and vice versa. The sociology of war overlaps with other fields that share an interest in government and politics, such as military history, political sociology, political science, and international relations. However, these fields tend to be concerned primarily with how wars begin and end, whereas the sociology of war tends to focus more explicitly on the cultural and social implications of war and how war and society act and react upon each other. With a few notable exceptions, the sociology of war remained mostly isolated within the field of comparative historical sociology until the 1980s, when two trends opened the door for an interdisciplinary sociology of war. The first was the dissipation of a war taboo, widespread in American academia and connected to the social resistance against the Vietnam War throughout the 1960s and 1970s. A renewed interest in the social implications of war also occurred as the end of the Cold War raised new questions about the role of the state in war making and the future of warfare. Renewed interdisciplinary interest in the origins of the modern nation-state led to a reexamination of the role that warfare played in the emergence and spread of the state system. In the decade after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2011 the sociology of war focused extensively on questions related to the role of nonstate combatant groups, the apparent increase in asymmetrical war in the post–Cold War era, and the meaning that such transformations in war making may carry for the societies that wage them. As the Global War on Terror nears the end of its second decade, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to understanding the interactions between state and society as the lines between peacetime and wartime become less distinguishable. Most recently, the sociology of war has exhibited a broadening in scope, with greater emphasis on examining how war is situated within larger patterns of social violence.