Chapter 1: The First Ten Pages; 'Reconceptualizing War'

Below is an excerpt from my upcoming book, 'Reconceptualizing War', coming out in April 2025 through Helion & Company Ltd. While the final edits and typeset work will continue, here are the first ten pages out of my first chapter. The introduction chapter's first ten pages was posted in a LinkedIn article last week, located here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/reconceptualizing-war-first-10-pages-ben-zweibelson-phd-hpxxc/?trackingId=ZGukGtCpT%2Ba9gWslmJiTdA%3D%3D

I will post the first ten pages of all ten chapters this way, each week, for the next nine weeks.

Follow me for more updates and other promos, sneak peaks, and more. If you are on X, please connect at @bzweibelson and also tag and repost this to others that might find this sort of work interesting on either platform. Thanks! -Ben

Chapter Title: Four Social Paradigms for Conceptualizing War

?Abstract: ?Across the entirety of human existence, our species demonstrates multiple war theories and competing belief systems on what war is and how it can or cannot be exercised. Often, this occurs with various groups engaging in war without serious consideration beyond their own socially constructed frame for waging war. In manifestation of such social complexity, humans are able to paradoxically concur collectively that they are in war with another, but within operation of their social paradigm as they wage war, they can only entertain what reality is through that particular paradigm exclusively.? This means that not only are particular adversaries or enemies in a specific war rendered into one’s social paradigm interpretation of reality, but all wars, everywhere, always.? This in turn generates significant confusion and misunderstanding of what war is for our species.? We require a systemic appreciation of war that accounts for vastly different beliefs and ideas, while also able to articulate why this is, and how they interact. The social paradigm theories of Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan are presented here as an essential framework for establishing how and why to conceptualize war beyond our self-imposed sociological and institutional limitations. ?This sets the first of several philosophical treatments to understand how the human species engages in organized violence in a multi-paradigmatic approach.

Keywords:? social paradigm, belief systems, war philosophy, sociology, complexity, strategy?????

Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9760-3726

??????????? What is war? More important than any answer to that, why do we believe it as such? The vast majority of military writings tend to try to answer this difficult question through either historical or tactical approaches. ?Many efforts work by focusing on specific battles, selecting major figures, or proposing a theoretical base that is framed within a single worldview on what reality is. This in turn establishes an important starting condition for readers in that most of the abstract concepts on meaning and belief about conflict are taken as matter of fact. Even strategic works and those that address war itself as philosophical efforts rarely if ever examine their particular worldview, or attempt to clearly define why they hold to such beliefs, values, and models to generate their theories on war. We think about conflict, but fail to think about our thinking of conflict. To do this requires a philosophical treatment of how humanity engages in conflict, organized violence, and attempt to explain what war is. There are different value systems operational across the world that are, as Max Weber described: “caught up in an insoluble struggle with one another.”[1]Such abstract constructs are powerful, socially rich, and intoxicating, where individuals often are fixated on definitions and techniques subordinated to these abstractions, but are also frequently ignorant to the broader structures at work.

These conflicting definitions also, by merely existing, indicate what war is not, according to the philosophical frameworks established and maintained by various groups and societies. By declaring certain things correct, these belief systems imply those other things not compatible with the approved concept are incorrect, irrelevant, illogical, or obsolete. We seek to explain war so that when waging it, whether in defense or for offensive ambitions, we assume that our framing of war should enable us to manipulate it better. Tactical wins should in turn create necessary conditions for strategic victories, regardless of what our goals are or how we go about accomplishing those wins. Tactics are certainly important within any particular conflict, yet a poor understanding of conflict at the philosophical level means that even when one might be exceptionally successful in winning many battles or campaigns, victory in the conflict itself may be frustrated, unrealized, or unobtainable in any satisfying way if our explanation of conflict does not match up with our experiences waging it. Taking a philosophical approach might be off-putting for those wishing to simplify concepts rapidly and move to solve problems, but this is an essential first step to avoid falling into the aforementioned tactical traps. The philosopher is “professionally obligated to take nothing for granted, and to obtain maximal clarity as to the ultimate status of what the man in the street believes to be “reality” and “knowledge.””[2] That is the purpose of this book, and why we must emphasize philosophy first. By doing so, we will explore existing frameworks on defining war that appear incomplete, fragmented, or otherwise insufficient.

War is passionate, and ultimately the most dangerous and devastating activity capable of humanity, regardless of historical context. We might wage war against one another and collectively concur that organized violence (war) is transpiring, but we fail to comprehend how and why each group is waging said violence. ?We tend to fail to realize how our different social frames overlap, feature tensions, or how we might think differently about conflict pursuing a systemic incorporation of these different perspectives. Frames are social constructions of beliefs, perceptions, and appreciations between both as groups of humans engage in the physical world while understanding things through these social constellations of ideas, beliefs, and metaphors. Our frames determine what we believe is factual, relevant, and compelling, and what is not.[3] Frames shape how actors realize how reality is unfolding, and framing becomes a social phenomenon where users construct reality according to deeply held, often implicit beliefs that also define the frame itself.[4] ?Perhaps the greatest difficulty aside from resolving differences with war itself is in how different populations of humans clash on physical battlefields is that we often talk past one another conceptually above these battlefields concerning our beliefs about conflict.? In other words, neither perspective realizes the limitations of the preferred social frame to that of an alternative of competing frame.[5] We not only fling death and destruction at one another; we shout ideas and beliefs concerning warfare and what war is past one another assuming our particular frame extends to all opponents. We fail to realize the cognitive limits of what, how, and why we exercise organized violence in particular ways. We also close our minds to antagonistic or paradoxical positions to our own, declaring them false.

This becomes the paramount barrier to how we might reconceptualize war. We tend to discount anything beyond the institutionally imposed limits of our social frame, often forcing our singular perspective universally.[6] Physical war and destruction occur in our shared physical reality, yet we first commence war in our various social realities where disagreement and destruction occurs in the intellectual arena.[7] We appear to insist our understanding of reality and therefore any conflict and even war itself should be sufficiently explained within our framework of socialized beliefs, theories, models, and methods that constitute our paradigm. By paradigm, I refer to what Thomas Kuhn first established with a study of science at the philosophical level, where a paradigm consists of those shared beliefs, assumptions, and values that guide a community of theorists and practitioners.[8]?

When we pursue paradigmatic discourse, we are moving to a philosophical level of abstraction above theories themselves. They address what is “the sum total of “what everybody knows” about a social world, an assemblage of maxims, morals, proverbial nuggets of wisdom, values and beliefs, myths, and so forth, the theoretical integration of which requires considerable intellectual fortitude in itself [to comprehend and define].”[9] For war paradigms that radically challenge the dominant belief systems on conflict, those users actively pursue alternative frames, frequently with a political/social activism underpinning critiques where the targeted paradigm is false, and their preferred alternative war paradigm is the ‘truth’ about conflict and reality. Yet to access both the meaning of various paradigms independently, the tensions between incommensurate views, and how one might form a multiparadigmatic synthesis that transcends these inter-paradigmatic arguments, we require a completely new way for reconceptualizing war.

Discussing social paradigms takes us to a necessary level of abstraction above which theories, models, and methods are produced by the paradigmatic frameworks shared by certain groups, but not others. This immediately prevents any particular war theory set within one social paradigm from preemptively assuming any superiority or proximity to the truth, as such theories have not been developed through any multiparadigmatic approach. Mentioned in the previous chapter, we will not consider paradigmatic synthesis vulnerable to the charge of analytic eclecticism.[10]The concern held by international relations theorists (which do not generally address social paradigm theory and instead impose a singular paradigm upon all political science) is that theory incommensurability produces unsolvable paradoxes between competing political theories. International relations theorists that are Marxist will operate from what they see as an incommensurate camp to that of a realist (non-Marxist) political scientist. These issues, while significant in how political science is understood across a constellation of theoretical schools, are not equivalent with this meta-theoretical (hence, philosophical) approach using social paradigms. Although the topic of social paradigm incommensurability continues to be debated within various sociological camps, we will take certain ontological positions so that multiple paradigm engagement is viable for researchers able to recognize and transcend paradigmatic boundaries.[11] Our application of these theories toward conflict and war will also provide new and otherwise underappreciated, underexamined conclusions on why humanity persists with organized violence for myriad beliefs, identities, purposes, and goals.

War and conflict have rarely been seriously considered and studied at the paradigmatic level, with select exceptions done by maverick sociologists presented in this book. Instead, most theorists and war philosophers work from intellectual territory well within a particular social paradigm, and subsequently their study and findings on what war is and is not becomes nested within this larger meta-theoretical framework that drives them toward certain conclusions and rationalizations, and simultaneously away from others. Many highly regarded theorists assume the position of ‘paradigmatic gatekeeper’, declaring certain concepts or movements correct, and those deviating from these paths as misguided or wrong. This research focuses entirely on the paradigmatic level, seeking paradigmatic study of individual war paradigms operationalized in human civilization, and later in this work, toward a multiparadigmatic synthesis where all war paradigms are included. Paradigmatic analysis as a generic approach to any discipline or field is well established since the 1970s, yet aside from select military theorists, very little has been done toward the study of war, military organizations or their methodologies.[12] ?

For most of the sociological field, there is no apparent or comprehensive field of study for war as there is in security studies, international relations theory, and military history.[13] Troublingly, Sini?a Male?evi? remarks that these other deeply structured studies of war lack any sociology, meaning that they provide highly detailed descriptions of individual battles, analysis of conflicts, epic portrayals of actors and events, but wildly simplistic and ‘commonsense’ based explanations of why and how conflict unfolds as it does.[14] Mainstream sociologists sidestep war as a field of specific study and instead make it a subordinate or marginalized aspect of social struggle for power, control, or other rationalization. Military scholars discount sociology and assume their individual perspective of war, an extension of their preferred sociological-based war paradigm, is universal and applied to everything and everyone. They rush past explaining the sociological and philosophical aspects of conflict and instead admire the details of the painting without realizing the picture frame, or wall behind it, or even the museum housing many other paintings.? A minority of military sociologists and designers represent the only attempts at pursuing some multiparadigmatic framing of conflict, yet their impacts upon broader communities of practice remain limited and niche.[15] This book attempts to expand their work and convey the multiparadigmatic approach to conflict to mainstream audiences.

Most paradigmatic research holds to organizational theory, management, sociology, and general philosophy. Few venture towards how and why humanity organizes violence as it does, or why war and conflict comes in such dynamic, horrific, and cognitively diverse forms. Instead, virtually all writings on warfare and war itself addresses methodologies, models, select theories, all operating underneath an invisible operating system that is marginalized due to how war theories assume their premises as self-evidentiary facts on their own. This becomes an institutionalized “body of transmitted recipe knowledge, that is, knowledge that supplies the institutionally appropriate rules of conduct” concerning how warfare ought to be waged, and what war itself can only mean.[16] Competing frames for understanding social reality are “grounded in different problem-setting stories” where the belief systems and values influence the theories, models, and methods employed by certain groups, but not others. Further, the very language, metaphoric devices, and underpinning logics and assumptions are orchestrated by how these frames differ from competing frames.[17]

Methods, as Mary Jo Hatch and Dvora Yanow explain, refer to “tools for generating (gathering) and analyzing data.? Such tools are built upon methodological foundations, even when these links are not made explicit.”[18] We frequently fetish over adherence to processes that are entirely methodological, yet unwittingly operate according to deeper ontological and epistemological structures embedded in the social frames we use to engage with reality.[19]Philosophically, different societies conceptualize war in competing or perhaps incommensurate ways,[20] with these frameworks often centered toward violent actions that show linkages to how we socially construct different interpretations of what reality is and why we exist.[21] Incommensurability is how blind spots arise in how our species makes sense of reality. Gareth Morgan remarks: “Ways of seeing become ways of not seeing.”[22]? Competing frames produce mutually incompatible ways of seeing the same reality, where the stories, metaphors, models, and theories in one frame are entirely unlike those in the other frame.[23] Karl Mannheim echoes this in his description of ideologies where “ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain facts which would undermine their sense of domination.”[24] An ideology is “a relatively coherent set of beliefs that bind people together and explain their worlds in terms of cause-and-effect relations.”[25]The tools we use to navigate through the world constrain us from navigating in any other fashion. We use them for war, and they also are at war with one another regardless of if we realize it or not. Arguably, we may not even be able to choose to wage war without deferring to their overarching need to attempt domination over rival paradigms.

Historically, there have been a diversity of war beliefs and ideas on violence, with all of them in abstraction being pulled in various directions as if by some illusive or strange attractor.[26] Indeed, war itself might be better, if not broadly at least, defined as the organization of violence by groups of humans that collectively identify and differentiate between some social construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’,[27] where warfare occurs until ‘they’ or ‘we’ capitulate, lose interest, or otherwise have the difference extinguished so that the conflict ceases to be organized and violent. Paradoxically, our species is also unique in how we perpetually attempt to codify some universal order to not just our select groups, tribes, or states, but collectively across all of humanity, whether we consider religions, law, politics, or war. We seek ways to counteract catastrophes, chaos, and uncertainty in how the world unfolds by tightening our compliance and convergence toward what our singular war paradigm provides us. ?

Often there are ritualized, deep-seeded beliefs afoot in how and why we fight, and when these differ from those we engage in war with, there exists a second level of social disjunction occurring above the physical violence.? Our species enjoys various forms of civilization purely due to our unique ability to collectively organize, within shared beliefs that exist only in our collective imagination.[28] We sustain and develop these manifestations of our human condition, including organized violence and conflict between different groups, societies, and against those we consider our own ‘kind.’ Mannheim, in laying the groundwork for social paradigm theory in the 1930s, would provocatively declare: “Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him… Every individual is therefore in a two-fold sense predetermined by the fact of growing up in a society.”[29] What we assume war is comes not directly from us thinking about it ourselves, but as a collective extension of the particular social community we emerge from and belong to.

We fight enemies with our friends, and cease fighting once the friends agree and our enemies do so too. ?We launch bullets and bombs, fling arrows or cross swords, kill and main one another with part of war manifesting in the tangible world. Yet we wage war conceptually with far more lurking exclusively in our cognitive and social frameworks.? We engage in designing and curating the idea of organized violence, although we frequently do this in dissimilar, often incommensurate ways. ?Friends and enemies at times shift, as do the motives, purposes, and goals in war. ?We believe war might accomplish all sorts of goals, from the gain of territory or state prestige to the triggering of a divine, global apocalypse, and everything in between. We start conflicts, seek to deter the commencement of other conflicts, pursue limited and at times unlimited goals within a conflict, resolve conflicts, and once a conflict ends, we still hold reasons to wage future wars due to poor satisfaction or emergent tensions that morph from the previous war. Organized violence can be justified in divine frameworks, through political economic theories of social transformation, or rationalized across a host of different political, technological, economic, and cultural lines of reason. Put so vaguely, what we think is happening in organized violence often has subjective and objective aspects, contextual and universal, centered in specific social constructions that differ from other socializations.

Such an abstraction may fail to be of value unless we require a particular starting point to consider. Can war exist beyond or outside the human condition, or is the design and maintenance of such a construct entirely exercised by us being socially capable beings? Consequently, do such social constructions manifest the real effects of war in reality that our physical forms exist in? Is war something that exceeds human existence, and if so, should such a question even matter? In terms of some concepts being more useful for humans than others, might the clearest and most practical definition of war be held above all others, offering us something that demonstrates deeper understanding of reality? Could war be all of these things at once, paradoxically and yet systemically cohesive in such a way that current war beliefs are insufficient to realize or articulate?

Or might war concepts morph with different frames, suggesting a plastic and shifting sort of reality, forcing us to seek only the broadest abstractions on what war is and is not?? Could ‘organized violence by humans against fellow humans over ideas’ be the crudest, if not ultimate abstraction to start from? Is war a natural state of the universe, along with the physics governing matter and the chemistry controlling our bodies and environments? Or is war entirely a social construction designed and maintained by our species, nested in how we form societies and collectively curate all sorts of abstractions along with art, religion, ethics, and economies? Do individuals tend to sustain the same cognitive frames that their larger institutions create and enforce? Beyond this, are practitioners wittingly or unwittingly obligated to use these frames as they go about their lives?[30] These are deep, perplexing questions about something our species excels at exercising, yet paradoxically something we are unable or even unwilling to contemplate beyond particular and familiar frameworks.

This chapter presents a theory of ‘war paradigm’ synthesis to provide a necessary starting point from which we might consider holistically how humanity creates, implements, and perpetuates a host of different war belief systems and shared appreciation on how to wage war.[31]? We shall attempt the philosophical consideration of how and why humans conceptualize war differently, despite frequently engaging in the same sorts of physical exchanges of organized violence such as battles, bombings, sabotage, assassinations, logistics, technological innovation and more. The work of sociologists and organizational theorists, building upon Thomas Kuhn’s original philosophical rendering of science exercising through scientific paradigms, would extend Kuhnian ideas on how science would change and transform to that of how humans design a social construction of reality atop an already complex natural world. Kuhn posited that scientific paradigms went about ‘ordinary’ science until a transformative ‘paradigm shift’ occurred, destroying the legacy paradigm and ushering in an entirely new, superior one.[32] For example, “mass’, for Newton and ‘mass’ for Einstein mean very different things, and so do ‘structure’ for a Parsonian and ‘structure’ for a Marxist.”[33] Scientific paradigm shifts offer some clear quantifiable or qualitative measure for the replacement of an obsolete paradigm with a new, improved one.? This does not extend into how social paradigms are understood, although all paradigms do guide the members in doing what a shared belief system desires them to accept and utilize, whether in science as Kuhn focused upon, or beyond scientific endeavors.[34] Kuhn would be inspired to develop his theory of scientific paradigms in part based on the sociological work of Karl Mannheim, converting Mannheim’s focus on sociology and politics to that of how scientific knowledge changes, often quite radically, over time and through sociological debate.[35]

Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm remained unaltered in this development from a scientific to a social configuration; a paradigm “offers coherent assumptions regarding how the world should be studied.”[36] These are the conceptual worlds where we can think differently about the same phenomena in reality, often in positions that are incommensurate with others operating beyond the paradigm limits that one actor subscribes to while denying alternatives.[37] Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan would, in the late 1970s, challenge existing organizational theory and sociology writ large, “sensitizing theorists to the notion of [social] paradigms- the assumptions, practices, and agreements among a scholarly community- and legitimizing less mainstream alternatives.”[38] The modern military profession, extending into the overarching disciplines of security affairs, political science, international relations, and adjoining fields such as peace studies and philosophy are also a scholarly community that utilize particular theories while discarding, discrediting, or disavowing others.? War is, if we acknowledge mainstream perspectives that remain dominant in contemporary societies, is orchestrated within political, social, cultural, and economic frameworks and thus any study of war is considered a scientific, or perhaps a pseudo-scientific enterprise to understand and explain war amongst our species.

?We do fight over ideas, and arguably war is a nuanced sort of organized fighting that differs from other sorts of violence.? We fight for sport, in predator-prey and even parasitic relationships, and many acts of violence occur for reasons that fall outside our notions of society, politics, and culture.[39] Is war bounded by us into something collective and highly social, oriented toward particular sociological desires, goals, and beliefs that are not otherwise explained through non-war violence? Is war first and foremost a collective social act of organized violence based on ideas that relate to some shared notion of ‘us’ against ‘not us?’ Is it done within our species, and often in pursuit of differing or paradoxical ideas[40] that are absent or rejected by the adversaries? We agree to disagree violently, and until we agree to agree, we will continue to agree to violently disagree.

Again, such vagueness on war seems insufficient if only that it fails to enable familiar logics found in preferred theories on warfare, operated within different societies as part of their collective belief systems.? Is there some level of unity and cohesiveness that holds together all human beliefs on war that might be abstract and also valuable for deeper appreciation of complex reality? Do we disagree in organized violence within a larger framework of socially constructed reality so that we might disagree violently, while also disagreeing about what those ideas on violence even are? Is war something that manifests in the human condition, but ultimately is governed by universal processes and a stable ordering of reality that transcends our abilities to choose whether or not we desire war as part of how we coexist, compete, and cooperate? Or is organized violence seeded so deeply into who we are that it cannot ever be removed? These are weighty questions and have been considered throughout our recorded history.

Conflict and disagreement certainly extend well past such a definition of war, as war is yet one of a multitude of social constructions that our species designs, maintains, and exercises as part of what historically presents as a general pattern of humanity. Karl Weick, in discussing the role of imagination in the organizing of social knowledge, declares: “knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.”[41] Everything we ‘know’ had to be conjured up in some imaginative act of creativity and discovery, yet once assimilated within our social collective, these imaginative acts become calcified into otherwise unquestioned, static ‘facts’ about the world. There is no longer a need to seek verification or be introspective of such things, as we might plow forward and concentrate on those troublesome things that still require us to be imaginative, curious, and outward facing. Yuval Harari uses the term ‘imagined order’ for this with:

We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.[42]

We make art, generate politics to govern societies, engage in commerce, pursue scientific exploration and many other practices that are exclusive to intelligent beings able to manipulate their environment, and more significantly, imagine in their minds that which does not even exist in physical reality. We also rape, rob, attack, torture, beat, murder, and otherwise use different forms of violence to accomplish a wide range of non-war activities within our societies.? Yet war is arguably the most dangerous and disruptive of humanity’s social manifestations, and carries in it the seeds of our own extermination due to our special ability to channel our curiosity, creativity, and ability to manipulate reality so that ever-more devastating technology is created for war.?

Still, all societies engage in some form of organized violence, and every generation also maintains some social construction of what war is, and is not.? We are not entirely shaped by our external environments nor exclusively by the tangible, physical reality our bodies exist within. We are shaped collectively by the conscious and unconscious concerns within the membership of our organizations, cultures, and societies.? The external world and the individual internal reality for each of us appears to manifest some form of conflict along with the ability to action such violence.?All of these forces shape the societal configurations we experience and rely upon to explain why reality is as it seems.[43] This includes how we frame conflict. Another significant difference between the scientific paradigm shifts that Kuhn explained and the social paradigm shifts considered in sociology and in postmodern philosophy is that scientific revolutions are peaceful affairs.[44] The crises and conflicts between groups subscribing to various different social paradigms are anything but peaceful, which is the focus of this book.

Shifting in science is difficult, in that when a minority idea held by a small group of innovative and curious thinkers begin to challenge the mainstream scientific institution, resistance is fierce. Jean-Francois Lyotard, writing from a postmodern perspective, explains this with: “The stronger the “move”, the more likely it is to be denied the minimum consensus, precisely because it changes the rules of the game upon which consensus has been based.”[45]This book will focus debate concerning conflict and how humanity conceptualizes war through social paradigms instead of scientific ones, although scientific paradigm shifts in the Kuhnian fashion are also ongoing and highly influential on social shifts that involve conflict and organized violence between disagreeing groups. Parallels can be made between how institutions resist new ideas and changes in social reality with that of the scientific, technological, and tangible developments associated with human development and the progression of civilization. Such progress need not correlate with any particular value set or belief system, as myriad social paradigms operate across civilization and reliance on a single paradigm or one group’s values would be unable to provide any systemic or total comprehension of complex reality. There are many languages in the world too, yet no individual language can act as the overarching ‘meta-language’ capable of explaining all others adequately.

??????????? The world has grown more complex, in that this species of animal has extraordinary cognitive and social abilities to manipulate the reality it exists in, far beyond other fellow creatures and living things.[46] Humans first unlocked the natural powers of agriculture, domestication of animals, the power of wind and water, and also by exploiting raw materials of the planet to form novel creations that previously did not exist in nature.? War in antiquities featured humans using muscle power including beasts, complimented by natural power such as sailing ships able to traverse vast distances. As societies entered into modernity, war would industrialize, shifting the work in war from muscle and natural power over to machines and chemistry unlocked by cunning humans. War in the industrialized era would rapidly expand beyond earlier definitions and expectations, requiring significant new theorization, practice, and reflection.

Today, war is entering even greater complexity with the Information Age overlapping with a Nuclear Age, and that of the Space Age, with likely a Digital or Virtual Age of augmented or virtual reality too. A Second Quantum Age in war is likely upon us too, along with a potential shift of our species from a single-planetary one to a multi-planetary reality of increasing sophistication and transformation. Yet while the technological and kinetic developments tend to get much of the attention, threaded throughout all of human history is the social construction of reality so that war is something able to be comprehended and exercised in some fashion that reinforces one social frame over all others. Should we not be seduced by over-fixating on advanced technology which can easily mislead us on how modern war is changing?[47] Or, might we declare a fixed, stable continuum for war that might once and forever clarify universal principles and governing mechanisms for all past and future conflict in some scientific, analytically rationalized manner?

That is the first ten (and a half) pages from Chapter 1. There are another 60 plus pages in that chapter, and this book will roughly be around 550-600 pages when published in hardcover around 01 APR 2025. Stay tuned for more chapter excerpts, share and link for interested parties, and follow me on social media for more. Endnotes below will likely be footnotes in the final book version.

[1] Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures: “Science as a Vocation” & “Politics as a Vocation,” ed. David Owen and Tracy Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2004), 22.

[2] Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, First Anchor Books Edition, 1967 (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), 2.

[3] Donald Sch?n and Martin Rein, “Policy Controversies as Frame Conflicts,” in Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies (Basic Books, 1994), 23.

[4] Sarah Kaplan, “Framing Contests: Strategy Making Under Uncertainty,” Organization Science 19, no. 5 (October 2008): 729–30; Chris Doran, “Jumping Frames: Reflexivity and Recursion in the Sociology of Science,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (August 1989): 515–31; Christopher Paparone, “Designing Meaning in the Reflective Practice of National Security: Frame Awareness and Frame Innovation,” in Design Thinking: Applications for the Australian Defence Force, ed. Aaron Jackson and Fiona Mackrell, editor’s manuscript pre-publication version, Joint Studies Paper Series 3 (Canberra, Australia: Defence Publishing Service, 2019), 1–18.

[5] Christopher Paparone, The Sociology of Military Science: Prospects for Postinstitutional Military Design (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2013), 28–41; Gary Weaver and Dennis Gioia, “Paradigms Lost: Incommensurability vs Structurationist Inquiry,” Organization Studies 15, no. 4 (1994): 565–90; Majken Schultz and Mary Jo Hatch, “Living with Multiple Paradigms: The Case of Paradigm Interplay in Organizational Culture Studies,” Academy of Management Review 21, no. 2 (1996): 529–57.

[6] Ben Zweibelson, Beyond the Pale: Designing Military Decision-Making Anew (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 2023), https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/AUPress/Books/B_181_Zweibelson_Beyond_the_Pale.3.pdf. The title ‘Beyond the Pale’ is a metaphoric device explaining social paradigm incommensurability and institutional resistance to new concepts that violate existing ontological and epistemological beliefs.

[7] Louis Wirth, “Preface,” in Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, by Karl Mannheim (Eastford, Connecticut: Martino Fine Books, 2015), xiii.

[8] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

[9] Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, 65.

[10] Peter Layton, Grand Strategy, paperback (Monee, Illinois: self-published, 2018), 69–71.

[11] Marianne Lewis and Mihaela Kelemen, “Multiparadigm Inquiry: Exploring Organizational Pluralism and Paradox,” Human Relations 55, no. 2 (2002): 251–75; Weaver and Gioia, “Paradigms Lost: Incommensurability vs Structurationist Inquiry”; Schultz and Hatch, “Living with Multiple Paradigms: The Case of Paradigm Interplay in Organizational Culture Studies.” These sociological arguments will be introduced and applied throughout this research. This does not imply such arguments on paradigm incommensurability and multiparadigmatic interplay are ‘settled’ at this time.

[12] Shirley-Ann Hazlett, Rodney McAdam, and Seamus Gallagher, “Theory Building in Knowledge Management: In Search of Paradigms,” Journal of Management Inquiry 14, no. 1 (March 2005): 32.

[13] Sini?a Male?evi?, The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 50.

[14] Male?evi?, 50–51.

[15] Paparone, The Sociology of Military Science: Prospects for Postinstitutional Military Design; Shimon Naveh, Systemic Operational Design: Designing Campaigns and Operations to Disrupt Rival Systems (Draft Unpublished), Version 3.0, unpublished draft (Fort Monroe, Virginia: Concept Development & Experimentation Directorate, Future Warfare Studies Division, US Army Training and Doctrine Command, 2005); Ben Zweibelson, Understanding the Military Design Movement: War, Change and Innovation, first (New York: Routledge, 2023). This research will explain how Christopher Paparone’s study of social paradigm theory and war reflects the earliest attempt at explaining these concepts. Shimon Naveh, as a pioneering leader of the military design movement, would pursue similar mixed-disciplinary, multiparadigmatic approaches for his ‘systemic operational design’ methodology first implemented in the Israeli Defense Forces in the late 1990s.

[16] Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, 65.

[17] Donald Sch?n and Martin Rein, Frame Reflection: Towards the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 29–30.

[18] Mary Jo Hatch and Dvora Yanow, “Methodology by Metaphor: Ways of Seeing in Painting and Research,” Organization Studies 29, no. 1 (2008): 24.

[19] Sch?n and Rein, “Policy Controversies as Frame Conflicts,” 35.

[20] Schultz and Hatch, “Living with Multiple Paradigms: The Case of Paradigm Interplay in Organizational Culture Studies,” 532; Weaver and Gioia, “Paradigms Lost: Incommensurability vs Structurationist Inquiry,” 567. Essentially, each paradigm insists all others explain reality using the logics, models, and methods unique to itself or otherwise is rejected as nonsense. This generates paradigm incommensurability by forcing actors to discount anything that does not first obey the structures of the parent paradigm.

[21] Sch?n and Rein, Frame Reflection, 23–25.

[22] Gareth Morgan, “Exploring Plato’s Cave: Organizations as Psychic Prisons,” in Images of Organizations (San Francisco, California: Sage Publications, 2006), 217; Haridimos Tsoukas, “Refining Common Sense: Types of Knowledge in Management Studies,” Journal of Management Studies 31, no. 6 (November 1994): 300–301.

[23] Sch?n and Rein, “Policy Controversies as Frame Conflicts,” 29.

[24] Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (Eastford, Connecticut: Martino Fine Books, 2015), 36.

[25] Karl Weick, “Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations,” Journal of Management Studies 25, no. 4 (July 1988): 315.

[26] This term ‘strange attractor’ is applied as an acknowledgement of Chaos Theory and will be developed further in other chapters for war theory applications.

[27] Yuval Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Reprint edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 2018), 171–72.

[28] Harari, 27.

[29] Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, 3.

[30] Sch?n and Rein, Frame Reflection, 32–36.

[31] Burrell and Morgan offer a deep theory on social paradigms, which imply that war, if studied in such a manner, would be defined within their overarching framework for social reality. However, this research focuses on conflict and war within their social paradigmatic construct, and thus the term ‘war paradigm’ is applied to this research area.

[32] Hazlett, McAdam, and Gallagher, “Theory Building in Knowledge Management: In Search of Paradigms,” 33–35.

[33] Weaver and Gioia, “Paradigms Lost: Incommensurability vs Structurationist Inquiry,” 569. They go on to state that “Newton’s theory and Einstein’s theory, then, have nothing in common, and the former is neither reducible nor comparable to the latter.”

[34] Hazlett, McAdam, and Gallagher, “Theory Building in Knowledge Management: In Search of Paradigms,” 33.

[35] Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, 146. Mannheim comes close to declaring scientific paradigms in this section, potentially one of the passages that would inspire Kuhn.

[36] Lewis and Kelemen, “Multiparadigm Inquiry: Exploring Organizational Pluralism and Paradox,” 252.

[37] Male?evi?, The Sociology of War and Violence, 314.

[38] Marianne Lewis and Andrew Grimes, “Metatriangulation: Building Theory From Multiple Paradigms,” Academy of Management Review24, no. 4 (1999): 672.

[39] Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games, and Debates (Michigan: Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1974).

[40] Colin Clarke-Hill, Huaning Li, and Barry Davies, “The Paradox of Co-Operation and Competition in Strategic Alliances: Towards a Multi-Paradigm Approach,” Management Research News 26, no. 1 (2003): 3. The authors provide deep explanation of paradox in how humans make sense of reality. It is “the simultaneous presence of contradictory, even mutually exclusive elements… [that] can never be resolved, only endlessly rearranged.”

[41] Karl Weick, “The Role of Imagination in the Organizing of Knowledge,” European Journal of Information Systems 15 (2006): 446.

[42] Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 110.

[43] Morgan, “Exploring Plato’s Cave: Organizations as Psychic Prisons,” 226.

[44] Anatol Rapoport, The Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transactions Publishers, 1995), 100.

[45] Jean-Francois Lyotard, “From the Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” in Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, ed. David Ingram and Julia Simon, First Edition (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1992), 331.

[46] Some military historians might disagree and claim that wars of antiquities were just as complex as modern conflict.? The specific context of those earlier wars within those distinct settings of time and space would be complex if not compared to future contexts, and thus for those participants within those events, the historians have a fair point.? When compared to contemporary conflicts where humanity can engage in war through space, cyberspace, nuclear destruction, and myriad other modes of destruction at scales, speeds, and sophistication far beyond earlier contexts, modern war appears vastly more complex than prior conflicts.

[47] Sini?a Male?evi?, “The Organization of Military Violence in the 21st Century,” Organization 24, no. 4 (2017): 456–62.