War is conflict involving the use of armss and physical force between nations, countries, or other large-scale armed groups. Warfare is the conduct of war.
Typically, warfare is mortal and lives of combatants are deliberately taken by enemy forces and the continued existence of a losing group as an entity is in doubt. In view of this, rules for the conduct of war are unenforceable during active conflict. A person faced with death, or an organisation faced with extinction, both have little incentive to obey rules that contribute to that result. If they can survive by breaking the rules they are likely to do so, and some would argue justifably.
Sometimes a distinction is made between a conflict and the formal declaration of a state of war. Given this distinction the term "war" is sometimes considered restricted to those conflicts where one or both belligerants have made a formal declaration.
Wars have been fought to control natural resources, for religious or cultural reasons, over political balances of power, legitimacy of particular laws, to settle economic and territorial disputes, and many other issues. The roots of any war
are very complex - there is usually more than one issue involved.
Attempts at codifying International law have been made to reduce the mutually destructive results of war. The signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the development of the United Nations System have succeeded in discouraging the description of any specific instance of warfare, by its participants, as a war. This process has been aided by such terminologies as
Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his classic text, On War: "Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln" ("War is merely a continuation of politics by other means") and "War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will."
When one country sends armed forces to another allegedly to restore order or prevent genocide or other crimes against humanity, or to support a legally recognized government against insurgency, that country sometimes refers to it as a police action. This usage is not always recognized as valid, however, particularly by those who do not accept the connotations of the term.
A war where the forces in conflict belong to the same country or empire or other political entity is known as a civil war.
War is contrasted with peace, which is usually defined as the absence of war.
A number of treaties regulate warfare, collectively referred to as the Laws of war. The most pervasive of those are the Geneva conventions, the earliest of which began to take effect in the mid 1800s.
The statistical analysis of war was pioneered by Lewis Fry Richardson following World War I. More recent databases of wars and armed conflict have been assembled by the Correlates of War Project [1], Peter Brecke [2] and the Uppsala Department of Peace and Conflict Research. Other projects, for example, the Global Social Change Research Project, have described trends in war and conflict, and shown how those trends relate to other political or social trends.
"War should be the only study of a prince. He should see peace only as a breathing time which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes an ability to execute, military plans."
