War is a human practice that has been advancing parallel with the overall advancement of human society. As our economic and technological capabilities grow, our ability to wage war increases theoretically. However, as human society advances, the more complex it becomes and even a simple action of warfare has multiple unintended consequences that cannot be foreseen. As society advances and refines itself, war’s place in society is changing faster than we can change war itself.

            War in the modern era is highly mechanized with formal regulations that are sometimes recognized. War has been on the downfall ever since the end of the Cold War but conflict has been on the rise since the early 1990s. Both war and conflict have an outmoded structure of top-down decision making. Combined with the dynamic of economics and war being tied ever closer together as time goes on, this spells a recipe for disaster for civilians who have no influence in the decision-making of warring parties.

Civilians make up most casualties in war. The cessation of trench warfare and the invention of warplanes and other sophisticated devices that target buildings and large urban centers ensure this. The international system of laws and regulations attempts to minimize civilian casualties. However the structure of the international system is essentially anarchy, because every state must be sovereign unto itself, there is no practical or forceful way to regulate warfare or to minimize civilian casualties.

Top-down decision-making of warring parties and the ability to harness unprecedented amounts of force for warfare stunt the amount of civilized exchange in warfare. Individuals anywhere should be autonomous without fear of losing their lives. If individuals are threatened by political and economic forces beyond their control they cannot freely contribute to society. In other words, warfare as it has been and as we know it today discourages individuals from gathering freely and forming solid foundations for the future of their society. The autonomy of the individual is tied with the autonomy of the individual’s intellect and therefore the autonomy of society.

Honest intellectual exchange is the means by which the foundations for a stable society are laid and is kept alive in the modern age. Indeed, intellectual exchange is really what the word civilized refers to as opposed to barbarism. Society/civilization, as a collection of human individuals, has to be more than just a function of pure force, political or economic. Society must have a vision, a direction to work towards in order to be a stable growing entity. Civilization, as the balancing of forces for overall stabilization, is a necessary product of our human identities and intellect; warfare, as the overuse of force for destructive purposes, is the perversion of our human identities and intellect.

As human beings we cannot deny what we are. Warfare is detrimental to human development because it heavily devalues human life and it values the exchange of pure mechanical force over open human intellectual discourse. The integrity of the individual must be valued over political and economic power-plays. If we are to perfect our society, we must be willing to reconcile our actions and our foundational values in a way that preserves our human dignity.