Reconceptualizing War: The First 10 Pages

Below is an excerpt (the first multi-page one) 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 introduction chapter. 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

An Introduction to Reconceptualizing War

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Abstract:? This introductory chapter explains the purpose and scope of this book. There are many books on war and conflict, yet few if any assume the meta-theoretical aim of this project. This unique research contributes to the advancement of collective understanding on the most destructive and violent of all human activity by reconceptualizing war through sociological and philosophical constructs beyond individualized ‘war frames’ that limit other efforts to explain conflict. Each of the chapters for this book are briefly outlined, so that the reader understands the sequential flow of thoughts and linkages of various otherwise dissimilar concepts for this reconceptualization of war. Each chapter is outlined so that readers grasp the organizational logic for using philosophy and sociology. They are used to produce a framework that synthesizes what conflict is to our entire species in such a way that dissenting, incommensurate, or paradoxical perspectives on war are not eliminated by singular, dominant belief systems. Social paradigm theory, complexity science, and philosophy are the core ingredients for crafting this project in such a way that discussions rise above specific battles, conflicts, ideologies, and cultures. The physical and the social world are thus integrated, so that the objective and subjective, the competing and often existentially defining beliefs of various powerful worldviews used by millions of humans are reflected upon and incorporated. This becomes a meta-theoretical approach to conflict, where framing how and why humanity engages in conflict is pursued through a multiparadigmatic orientation.

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Keywords:? sociology, complexity, war, security affairs, philosophy, defense, international relations

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

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For many people, war is a self-evident and dangerous phenomenon that requires no further acknowledgement than whatever readily available thoughts are generated by the question of ‘what is war?’[1] Often the question itself seems absurd, as if the concept has long been settled.? Simple answers are readily available, yet those war theorists deliberating this subject know that the simplest answers are often wrong, or at least insufficient and wanting. This is a difficult, if not impossible subject to effectively bound and examine in that when humans wage war or engage in conflict with one another, the impacts are systemic, disruptive, and far-reaching. For those that remain snuggled in their dominant social paradigms, such concerns are waved off. They already have all the answers, and their paradigmatic rendering of war need no further inquiry. Those readers will not find this book valuable, although they may find other books deemed appropriate within their war paradigm quite useful. To paraphrase physicist Max Planck, “the military profession advances one funeral at a time”, and those unable to contemplate the limitations of their ontological and epistemological assumptions often become the institutional obstructionists for the next generation.[2]

While there are few areas of collective agreement and shared appreciation on war and conflict, one of the things many people might agree with is that when our species organizes violence and destruction for some desired change, it is not a simple or easy endeavor to undertake. It is difficult, destructive, horrifying, and rarely provides solutions without creating subsequent emergent challenges. War rarely turns out the way actors intend it to when beginning some conflict. With as complex and chaotic war is for execution, it is arguably infinitely more difficult to conceptualize the meaning, logic, language, and belief system(s) for war that are sufficient to all participants and observers. Worst of all, once we are confident that we understand enough about conflict to assume a certain level of awareness and confidence on the subject, we often become cemented into these beliefs, becoming increasingly resistant to novel or alternative information that challenges our foundations of knowledge.

Those cognizant of this tendency concerning conflict often adhere to the maxim that the more we learn, the more we realize how little we know. This mindset is essential for commencing this journey into what we as a species know about conflict, and how little we actually know about it from any perspective beyond our preferred frame for war. Do we really understand war in some comprehensive, systemic way that avoids the pitfalls of bias, cultural and social preferences, and convenient delusions concerning whether we are rationalizing logically or illogically? Are such things even avoidable, or are we instead fixed to certain shared worldviews that themselves are locked in battle with competing belief systems? Can we think differently about what war currently is understood to be? Is there novelty in exploring some synthesis of the otherwise incompatible, tribalized, self-contained war framings that humanity maintains? If individual theories are grounded in certain belief systems, could we somehow rise above them, and achieve some higher cognitive vantage point? Might some meta-theoretical approach offer a new, or if not new, a significantly different manner to reconceptualize war? Is this different way sufficient to offer civilization alternatives in framing, confronting, deterring, or engaging in conflict?

Many deep thinkers, philosophers, leaders, historians, and scientists have through the ages and across diverse societies sought to unify some conceptualization on war itself. Indeed, some of the oldest recorded texts in our earliest civilizations attempt to address war, violence, destruction, and conflict. The emotional, physical, and existential consequences for human conflict over our entire existence as a civilization has been one of perpetual paradox. Conflict produces extensive suffering, death, misery, pain, and destruction. It is the most ugly and hateful of things our species is capable of. War is also considered revolutionary, unifying, emancipating, able to impose some order of justice, and is the ultimate vehicle of social change. Wars of conquest, expansion, religious decree, or political want are found across all societies, on all continents, throughout all recorded histories in some form or another. Conflict now bleeds into the virtual world humans have created where cyberwarfare occurs in coding and through vast amounts of data. Although declared war has yet to manifest in the outer space above our planet’s atmosphere, the very space race to get us to the lunar surface was entirely integrated with the presence of war, whether cold or hot. Whereas for the last forty centuries, human minds alone contemplated war, we are entering a new age of artificial intelligence where our digital creations might think differently about conflict and the organization of violence. We are at the edge of becoming a truly multi-planetary species, and also one undergoing many changes in how we engage in virtual reality in ways all other animals are incapable of. These are just a few of the big transformations on our immediate horizon. We are at certain crossroads, yet do we even understand the map? The explanations of war over multiple millennia are as varied as the actual conflicts themselves, with many theorizations on conflict set within certain cultures, geographies, belief systems, ideologies, and available technological ability to manipulate reality.

We therefore have witnessed many historical attempts to conceptualize war. These span millennium, from ancient philosophers through the Napoleonic Era and into this century. Given the vastness of military texts and authors addressing conflict across many different fields and disciplines, an attempt to summarize all major conceptualizations of war would be a massive and possibly futile undertaking. Description of various conflicts or multiple theories on war will simply lead to more description, but not necessarily any novel explanation that moves beyond the original explanatory limits of the individual content. This book is instead an attempt to reconceptualize war and human conflict through synthesis where explanation is sought through a philosophical inquiry on what do we mean when we attempt to define war. This reconceptualization of war uses philosophy and sociology as the points of entry to deeply consider not just the methods, terminology, models, and specific theories on how humans organize violence and engage in conflict with one another, but to consider the social facts underpinning all of these things that otherwise remain invisible and self-evident. We need to consider how our species generates and sustains war paradigms, which are often the social constructs in the shadows of our minds as various combatants engage in conflict in the physical world. We ultimately battle in the physical realm, but only first commencing within our social reality where we differ on what we know conflict and war to be.

Across the vast literary landscape on war, conflict, and security affairs, nearly all academic endeavors begin at a singular paradigmatic level. Indeed, most every major book on the topic of war is decidedly single-paradigmatic.[3] We pontificate on what we believe, and our intellectual expeditions commence from the specific cognitive ‘continent’ we share and sustain within our preferred group. Authors write from their chosen social paradigm, and write to an assumed audience that shares this same paradigm, without unnecessary discussion on what their shared belief system is, or how it might be in tension with alternative views.? Perspectives outside this collective are deemed inferior, false, delusionary, or illogical. Consequently, by bounding all discourse within this frame, they pass along to their next generation some basic constellation of beliefs, values, theories, mental models, and metaphoric devices that produce a paradigmatic language. Beliefs are codified in doctrine, set theories, decision-making methods, and shared metaphors without much illumination of the social paradigm orchestrating this all. These social paradigms are themselves best considered ‘behind the scenes’, otherwise self-evident in the methodologies, institutionalized behaviors, organizational outcomes, and activities linked to ideas as employed by that paradigm’s practitioners. This makes any reflective examination or critique of one’s paradigm or the paradigm used by others a difficult challenge that can only commence in philosophical abstraction. We must lift off the mask to gather what lies underneath.

Social paradigm theory is a recent development of the late twentieth century, building upon Thomas Kuhn’s groundbreaking work on scientific paradigms in the 1960s. Kuhn argued that scientific progress does not progressively evolve in some linear, sequential manner toward greater truth and understanding of reality. Instead, science advances in fits and bursts, where one dominant scientific paradigm is utilized by scientists who generally attend to routine work that reinforces the deep beliefs of how the world works according to that paradigm. Only the mavericks and heretics exploring the edges of that paradigm and challenging it will usher in what Kuhn coined as “a paradigm shift.”[4] This unfolds as the dominant scientific paradigm grows increasingly fragile, where routine scientific endeavors become frustrated and fragmented without breaking away from the core scientific beliefs and theories associated with that paradigm. Navigation across neighboring regions for armies could work in a flat-earth paradigm, but attempts to travel across vast oceans required a round-earth paradigm shift. A paradigm shift occurs where a new scientific paradigm emerges through the unorthodox, non-routine work of those aforementioned mavericks and heretics, and those institutional defenders of the dominant scientific paradigm will resist them as the shift occurs. Flat earth believers fight back, often refusing to agree to the bold new paradigm replacing the familiar yet obsolete. Once the new scientific paradigm replaces the old one, scientists then go about the routine endeavors within the new paradigm, until conditions cause the entire cycle to repeat.

Scientific paradigms address the philosophy of science, not civilization, society, or war. Kuhn’s work focused on the philosophy of science itself, which does not automatically lend itself to assumptions that war can be treated as some form or extension of science, although in this research at least one social paradigm does attempt to make that claim. War contains scientific phenomena, is directly influenced by scientific methods, and can be studied through various scientific approaches, but war is itself not a science and does not follow some Kuhnian framework of scientific paradigm shifting. Scientific paradigm shifts that do occur, such as how civilization migrated from a Newtonian-oriented scientific paradigm to that of the theory of general relativity, quantum theory, and complexity science in the early twentieth century, all directly impact how conflicts and organized violence manifest between societies. However, military expectations that Kuhn’s philosophy of science is somehow equivalent to a philosophical treatment of war violate Kuhn’s own thesis and reflect institutionalized preference for select social facts over others on defining war itself.[5] We are largely unaware of how social paradigms govern us, organize our thoughts and actions, and create for us limited and highly specific ways of interpreting complex reality through incomplete and fragmented perspectives. We lack an ability to synthesize paradoxical war perspectives in each attempt our group of similar-thinking people makes to explain conflict and war.

To explore how war itself is part of some social paradigm sustained by certain people but not necessarily others, we must consider how social paradigms differ from scientific ones. Sociologists in the 1970s seized upon Kuhn’s original thesis and began reconceptualizing how sociologically, human beings might construct different paradigms that subsequently orchestrate all institutionalized behaviors, beliefs, values, theories, models, and metaphors that define one group of people from others. While sociology as a discipline since the 1970s developed a social paradigm theory through the pioneering work of Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan, their work has been largely ignored by mainstream military and war theorists.[6] Social paradigm theorists for the last half-century have expanded their work across multiple fields and disciplines, yet within international relations, security affairs, and military institutional education, virtually no thought on social paradigms and war has materialized. Policy makers, strategists, defense communities, and associated academia tend to consolidate around a rigid, traditional set of ideas on what war is and how it is conducted, built upon a foundation that solidified well before paradigm theory came into existence.

There are several other pillars for how a philosophical, meta-theoretical, and subsequently multiparadigmatic study of conflict is orchestrated in this research. There are few philosophers that have specifically examined the sociology of conflict, particularly in ways where they offer certain frameworks that consider multiple and paradoxical positions. Of those that pursue such an abstract and controversial approach to war, they quickly run afoul of the institutional defenders of certain war paradigms, where questioning the veracity and validity of cherished war theories, practices, rituals, and beliefs amounts to heresy. Some sociologists argue that within the sociological field, there really isn’t any real field of study on conflict and war.[7] Many efforts within sociology also appear to fall short of escape velocity of a particular social paradigm, although Sini?a Male?evi? and Christopher Paparone are two sociologists promoting what is argued in this book as a multiparadigmatic approach. War is a decidedly human affair, and thus first and foremost a social one.[8] How this social construction of reality becomes political, ideological, or survival oriented (based in evolutionary drivers) is unavoidably captured in some social colorization. Aside from these minority of researchers on conflict,[9] many others tend to fall back into a singular paradigm operation, losing necessary perspective only accessible at the meta-theoretical level. This is intellectually demanding terrain.

Yet any multiparadigmatic inquiry must navigate this terrain or risk falling back into the single-paradigm trap that captures most all other theorists and strategists contemplating war. One particular philosopher of conflict studies, Anatol Rapoport, better known for his mathematical work on game theory, spent a lifetime impacted by war while also driven to study it deeply. Rapoport, along with his family, fled the horrors of the First World War, served in the Second World War, and throughout the Cold War, became increasingly preoccupied with the existential risks of the Nuclear Age. Rapoport pursued peace studies and game theory to critique and research the ever-technologically expansive conflicts that continued to plague civilization or threaten its doom. For this, he would critically examine and challenge how the western world understood war, how Marxist and communist societies saw war differently, and whether concepts of peace or conflict resolution could be developed to prevent our own self-extermination. He would explore the primary war theorists of western society, such as Carl von Clausewitz, yet in doing so in what best is described as a paradigmatic critique, Rapoport found himself exiled from military academia. Challenging cherished theorists is forbidden within the single-war paradigmatic world of fragmented views and competing belief systems. This book risks a similar fate, albeit from far more than just the defenders of nineteenth century Prussian military writers.

Rapoport, like other critical thinkers and mavericks that challenged the institution, would be declared a heretic and his work marginalized, at least within the military academic community.[10] Indeed, being considered a ‘peace philosopher’ itself is more of a scarlet letter for any serious professional studying conflict and war, as those within security affairs tend to find such positions demeaning, if not disqualifying. Rapoport’s later activism as a Vietnam War protester and by 1970, a self-declared American in exile, would ensure his research would not be taken seriously in any war college or defense think tank beyond the 1980s. Rapoport moved to Toronto and stated he would “live in a country that was not committed to a messianic role”, a key concept of his war philosophies we will explore in this book. Despite, or perhaps because of Rapoport’s unusual combination of talents spanning mathematics, complexity science, sociology, game theory, conflict, and peace studies, he would philosophize in ways that others could not or would not. This book attempts to produce a renaissance of Rapoportian thinking on conflict by combining his ideas with social paradigm theory into what becomes a meta-theoretical, multiparadigmatic approach to conflict.?

There are many different theorists, belief systems, and sociological frameworks presented in this research. The challenges in presenting this constellation of ideas and theories are vast. In mainstream western military organizations and their affiliated educational programs, only one dominant social paradigm is utilized, almost entirely unwittingly as the community does not contemplate war and conflict in any other way than what is left unchallenged and largely unexamined. Doctrine codifies the selected theories, and institutionalized behaviors and norms do the rest. Venture too far off the institutional path and one is cast out as an exile, particularly if core institutional beliefs are threatened. This is not just how modern, industrialized, hierarchical bureaucracies such as western armies, governments, or companies function. All people use a social paradigm, all people interpret conflict, organized violence, and war using some paradigm, and all people are otherwise conditioned to ignore the inner workings of their paradigm so that it continues to function undisturbed. We know how to wage war, we know when we are waging it, but we tend to avoid exploring ‘why-centric’ threads that carry us deeper into our institutionalized beliefs on what the world is, and how it functions.

This book adapts social paradigm theory presented by sociologists Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan, and a meta-philosophical approach originally developed by Rapoport to provide the first significant academic study of conflict through multiple war paradigms. This is presented in a comprehensive, cumulative manner that explains not just dominant western paradigms, but those alternative paradigms utilized by many other actors, societies, and groups. Conflict should not be conceptualized into the compartmentalized, isolated, and incommensurate manner that all previous debates and studies on war have been. We race toward becoming tribal, with various factions talking past one another or preaching to our own echo chambers, often institutionalized through our doctrines, training, and educational programs. We then explain how the next conflicts should unfold as our war paradigm explains, modify select wordings and text when they do not, and reinterpret past conflicts to buttress these same institutionalized arguments. To paraphrase sociologist Karl Weick: “we think we remember the past to imagine our future, but we actually imagine our past so we can then remember how the future is supposed to go.”[11]

The extension of this particular single-paradigm obedience is that when certain people engaging in war continue to utilize a single-paradigm approach, they are artificially limited to the confines of that paradigm’s limits. For those that assume a multiparadigmatic, they can extend beyond each paradigmatic limit and develop new forms of interplay and experimentation between and beyond these conceptual frames.[12] They should, in most cases, unavoidably gain greater systemic understanding beyond what is possible in any single gaze… assuming they then have the freedom and ability to innovate beyond whatever institutional restrictions might otherwise impede them. The multiparadigmatic thinkers gain expansive cognitive maneuver room for their organization to innovate in ways inaccessible to a single-paradigmatic actor, provided they use this new-found synthesis with the necessary critical and creative energies. Breaking out of single-paradigmatic understanding of complex warfare is the first step in ushering in a new social reality where conflict is appreciated in a multiparadigmatic, meta-theoretical mode of inquiry, innovation, and reflective critique.

The statement “where you stand depends on where you sit” was coined ‘Miles’ Law’ and provides a useful metaphoric device for this deep study of humanity, conflict, and how social reality is designed and enforced in a variety of different ways across civilization.[13] Each chapter in this book carries readers further down the rabbit hole, building upon the social paradigm construct as the chapters progress. The first chapter explains how Burrell and Morgan’s social paradigm theory establishes four major paradigmatic spaces that are arranged into a quadrant model. Each paradigm is positioned specifically in relation to all others, and the core beliefs and assumptions about reality correspond to how certain theories, models, and methods fit within one social paradigm, but are categorically rejected by the others. The four social paradigms are functionalism, interpretivism, radical structuralism, and radical humanism. These are all explained in the first chapter and form the organizing logic for the rest of this book. Subsequent chapters provide deep study of each particular paradigm and how it relates to a certain configuration of what war is, and what war is not. Each war paradigm requires explanation through primary theorists, case studies of groups that engage in destruction and organized violence against other people using a war paradigm, and how antagonists reliant upon dissimilar war paradigms will be in conflict physically in these wars, but also philosophically. We wage war against one another on the battlefields, yet above these physical locations, there is another war of competing beliefs and assumptions on what social and physical realities are, and are not.

Traditional military historians and western security specialists nearly all write from what is called the functionalist paradigm, drawing from traditional military theorists such as Clausewitz, Jomini, Mahan, Douhet, Fuller, Boyd, and many others introduced in detail in future chapters. Meanwhile, classical Marxists write on war from within what is termed the radical structuralist paradigm, advocating Marx, Engels, and the Socialist war theories of Lenin, Mao, Giap, Minh, and Guevara among others. Radical Humanists, splintering from classical Marxists after the first World War, would establish a war paradigm utilizing critical theory and Social Marxism. Interpretivists form yet another more recent war paradigm, contemplating a dynamic and subjective social reality where a plethora of different belief systems and unique contexts require a customized, tailored mode of understanding conflict and organized violence. The major theorists, thought leaders, and military innovators are explained within each war paradigm so that readers build a systemic comprehension using this multiparadigmatic approach to conflict. This should equip readers to expand the existing framework, craft new configurations, rearrange it, challenge assumptions made by this author, develop others beyond what was done here, and consider novel perspectives thus far unimagined and otherwise impossible to consider from within any singular social paradigm.

For readers willing to take this journey, we will explore multiple disciplines, blending philosophy with sociology, complexity science with metaphysics, Marxism with Westphalian democratic and capitalist-based constructs. We must consider ancient Greek with ancient Chinese logics, positivism, and critical theory, organized in clear arguments and robust chapters with extensive citations that provide primary sources for additional inquiry. We will explore radical ideological ideas from across multiple religions, cultures, and regions. Readers will consider various forms of terrorism, anarchism, fascism, capitalism, communism, and more. If modernity engages in some sort of organized violence over an idea, that concept should be covered in some way in the coming pages.[14] We seek to challenge how humanity understands conflict, and propose a multi-worldview arrangement and organization of how conflict is realized.? By doing this, oppositional groups may still be in conflict physically, yet they may alsoacknowledge the conceptual tensions and conflicts that exist in abstraction, accessible only through social reality and thus ‘above’ any particular battlefield or conflict zone.

??????????? Throughout this book, the terms ‘war’, ‘conflict’, and ‘organized violence’ are used as insufficient references to the overarching topic of how our species is destructive against itself, others, and the entire ecosystem in ways that are unlike other violent phenomenon such as predation, parasitic relationships, extinction of certain species at the benefit or enhanced survivability of others, and non-human destructive activities. The modern sense of ‘war’ is a politically centered activity of sovereign states, conceptualized as entities representative and composed of individual citizens. Yet this is a recent and not necessarily a universally accepted term, coinciding with the European Age of Enlightenment and the start of scientific rationalism about how the world works. For millennia previously, war carried multiple supernatural, mythical, ideological, societal, cultural, and political components that varied in what war meant, how warfare occurred, and what roles and responsibilities various actors had in such conflicts. The broader term ‘conflict’ is at times a better representation of how our species moves from agreement to disagreement, and then attempt to solve or resolve said disagreement in ways that extend certain advantages or order to one side at the expense of the opponent. Humans subsequently organize violent acts that result in the destruction of tangible things, lives, and also ideas, beliefs, values, and meaning.

??????????? Given that this is a philosophical study of conflict across all of civilization, the philosophies of key thinkers are essential in explaining how and why various war theories developed. Immanuel Kant is introduced in the third chapter where we examine his significant impact on how the European Enlightenment unfolded and the direct consequences for war theory development.? Kant would embrace Newtonian physics in explaining how knowledge could be understood, developed, and what ‘truth’ meant in scientifically rationalized frameworks that could be shared universally. Philosophical concepts from David Hume fold into the shaping of the Enlightenment also, yet this naturalist, Newtonian-styled approach to knowledge would then be challenged by German Idealism, another essential philosophical ingredient to how various modern war paradigms developed over the last few centuries. War, in a Kantian sense, can be rationalized through a priori cognition of everything comprising organized violence, in that all human actions can be understood with sufficient inquiry into examinations of how social norms and processes are the root forces guiding and regulating how our species understands the world. German Idealism countered with this by positing that nature and culture could not be exchanged, and the autonomy of the human spirit could not be rationalized using natural scientific methods or constructs.[15] Burrell and Morgan establish these essential philosophical frameworks and tensions in their social paradigm theory, the basis of the next chapter.

Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, and other prominent thinkers are introduced in subsequent chapters as their theories about knowledge, nature, and how reality functions would shape subsequent war paradigms and which war theories would become grounded in certain paradigmatic constellations but not others. Clausewitz, Jomini, Vauban, and other prominent functionalist war theorists would draw from certain philosophical influences, while Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao would draw inspiration from others. Later in the twentieth century and in the disruption and disillusionment of the Interwar Period, new schools of Marxist thinking would flourish due to intellectual frustration with how socialism appeared to manifest in ways unanticipated by its founders. Postmodern philosophy and critical theory in turn would greatly impact various war paradigms throughout the last century, along with scientific paradigm shifts from the Newtonian ordered world of the Napoleonic Era to that of quantum theory, relativity, and complexity science. All of these expansions in knowledge about the world, ourselves, and how our social construction of reality forms atop an already dynamic and complex physical reality would in turn change our war paradigms. From Max Weber to Jean Baudrillard, we will explore wildly different ways of thinking about society and conflict. Readers should take multiple pathways of philosophical, scientific, and sociological thought that lead to quite different ways of making sense of conflict and how one might organize violence to enact desired change.

??????????? There have been countless wars of religion, wars of science, and arguably all wars involve conflict of ideas, beliefs, values, and meaning. War differs from other forms of violence, which we will consider in the next two chapters where a philosophical and sociological foundation on what war is (and is not) is established paradigmatically. Historically, most conceptualizations of war are couched in one specific belief system or worldview. Our war paradigm defines how we explain what war is, and how those that adhere to our paradigm must go about engaging in conflict and organizing violence for particular goals and desires. The greatest obstacle to reconceptualizing war in such a way that it interprets myriad belief systems on conflict is that social paradigms, by their definition, insist on the exclusive and total obedience of the user. Within this social prison of sorts, war cannot be understood outside the cognitive limits of that paradigm. Additionally, the philosophical and sociological organization of the paradigm are not supposed to be validated or verified by users; they are invisible and assumed to function for all of humanity whether individual people are willing or unwilling to accept the paradigm. Thus, a paradigmatic framework that integrates how paradigms differ and whether they overlap or interplay in other unexpected ways is necessary. Learning one’s own war paradigm and synthesizing it with alternative ones offers us a novel way to reconceptualize war, especially in contemporary contexts where myriad actors offer diverse beliefs, values, and ideas.

??????????? There is also a concern on whether synthesizing otherwise incommensurate war paradigms is anything beyond assembling a compilation of existing war ideas. If a book seeking to holistically frame and unify these existing independent ways that groups of humans understand war presents such content within a social paradigm framework that can then be used for multiparadigmatic inquiry, then does this itself merely become a reflection of how we understand war? Or is this synthesis a new way to conceptualize conflict? In other words, those proponents of the Clausewitzian, Jominian, Westphalian or even a Darwinian inspired ‘sociobiological’ framing of war understand conflict through that particular social frame where any deviation from such thinking must be considered incorrect. Marxists, operating from an entirely dissimilar position, view conflict through some economic or social constellation that directly refutes the Westphalian, Darwinian one. Many groups use different social frames in dissimilar and independent ways and categorically reject all other views. Each ‘knows’ what war is, and how it works, and can ‘prove’ that their way is better through some paradigmatically compliant mode of rationalization. We end up screaming past one another about our ideas of war as we wage actual conflict amongst the same groups. Should a new meta-theoretical constellation be mapped to include all of these dissimilar, paradoxical, even incommensurate war frames, does this constitute some new conceptualization of war for humanity? This indeed is a difficult question to answer, and there is fair criticism to argue that even a new combination using philosophy and sociology to organize a synthesis of the history of ideas about war is itself not a true reconceptualization of war.[16]

The title of this book assumes that any singular paradigmatic frame of war that ignores or marginalizes all others is insufficient and less explanatory than one that does. We no longer can use a singular war paradigm and assume it reigns supreme.? Instead, we must form constellations of different, even paradoxical war paradigms so that we might innovate beyond those confines. Beyond providing an increased depth of explanation for war, the multiparadigmatic approach presented in this research encourages all groups using their preferred war paradigm to augment it by adapting the multiparadigmatic approach. This does not mean discarding their frame, but expanding it to encompass others, and through synthesis unlock new inspiration and creativity. Sadly, this could lead to some groups reconceptualizing war in ways that increase destruction and suffering through organized violence. Or this may open new, unrealized pathways to greater deterrence and alternatives to conflict. Neither of these are accessible using any single war paradigm currently. To reconceptualize war is to utilize this research, adapt a meta-theoretical framework, and conceptualize through a multiparadigmatic constellation of differing belief systems. Currently, no research on conflict and war offers this. By that benchmark, we seek to reconceptualize war and change the way all groups currently understand conflict within their own exclusive, curated war paradigms...

End of first ten pages. There are over 540 more in the book, so I hope you continue to track this release date if these first ten are interesting. Please tag and repost to others that might enjoy this work. Follow me on X at @bzweibelson also for other updates.

End notes (if you are reading this, you are my sort of reader!!!!!!!)

[1] Sini?a Male?evi?, The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 51–52.

[2] Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Joshua Graff Zivin, “Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?,” American Economic Review 109, no. 8 (August 2019): 2889–2920. Azoulay et. al explores Planck’s focus on the natural sciences in a manner befitting of Thomas Kuhn’s scientific paradigm theory. It once more is reconceptualized using social paradigm theory, as explained in the introduction and first chapter.

[3] Authors rarely mention what social paradigm or belief system they are employing, as the operation of such a frame is self-evident and does not require validation. Readers are assumed to preemptively agree with the author within the same social paradigm without need for committing such thoughts to paper.

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

[5] This bias for attempting to make war into a scientifically rationalized, objective construct is examined in the third chapter in the functionalist war paradigm, and also in the fifth with Scientific Socialism.

[6] A handful of recent military researchers such as Christopher Paparone, Aaron Jackson, Phillippe Beaulieu-Brossard, Ofra Graicer, Grant Martin, Paul Mitchell, Shimon Naveh, and select others have in the last few decades proposed new ideas using social paradigms, yet this effort remains nascent and a minority voice. Their contributions are explored in subsequent chapters. All have experienced hostility, marginalization, and institutionally directed negative counselling for producing disruptive and unorthodox work for their organizations. Rapoport would be an early and significant critical theorist on conflict and war, decades ahead of this second wave.

[7] Male?evi?, The Sociology of War and Violence, 50–51.

[8] Male?evi?, 5.

[9] Other sociologists and philosophers of conflict operating in this orientation are explored in subsequent chapters, particularly the eighth on interpretivism.

[10] Christopher Paparone, The Sociology of Military Science: Prospects for Postinstitutional Military Design (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2013); Christopher Paparone, “Critical Military Epistemology: Designing Reflexivity into Military Curricula,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 17, no. 4 (2017): 123–38. Paparone, an early military reformer using sociology and social paradigm theory, was negatively counselled and received what he perceived as highly derogatory criticism by U.S. Army War College leadership when he worked there in their professorship program as a student and later a professor (2000-2003). Paparone recalls these trials and tribulations in both his published work and in correspondence with this author.

[11] Karl Weick, “The Role of Imagination in the Organizing of Knowledge,” European Journal of Information Systems 15 (2006): 448.

[12] Interplay is used for paradigmatic synthesis, in that actors combining two or more war paradigms will, in combining them in practice, can generate new and emergent concepts on conflict that could not be conceptualized using one or the other paradigm in exclusion.

[13] Rufus Miles Jr., “The Origin and Meaning of Mile’s Law,” Public Administration Review 38, no. 5 (October 1978): 399–403.

[14] This should not be confused with historical analysis of war, where just the descriptions of every recorded battle of conflict in history would exceed this work. Instead, the forms, strategies, purpose, beliefs, and goal-forming behaviors of various dissimilar and incommensurate groups that wage war are captured.

[15] Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan, Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis: Elements of the Sociology of Corporate Life (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1979), 69.

[16] Arguably, to reconceptualize war into some profoundly unique and different yet superior way would be the Kuhnian scientific paradigm shift that social paradigm theory largely disavows. If war is not equivalent to a science, there cannot be any reconceptualization that appears as some paradigmatic shift. Rather, a reconceptualization may be the abandonment of single paradigmatic toward the multiparadigmatic. In the conclusion chapter, we will briefly touch on an artificial war paradigm, hypothetically produced by some general artificial intelligence in the future.