Frames of war. On some problematic areas of the notion of war

Abstract

The Russian invasion of Ukraine drew the attention of social scientists to the issue of war – an area neglected in sociology in the second half of the 20th century, but which has received growing interest since the 1990s. War is a special subject of social research that poses many specific problems. The author presents selected issues illustrating the difficulties in defining the physical and social boundaries of war, related, among others, to the emergence in the 1990s of a new terminology conceptualising armed conflicts in terms of crisis. The historical nature of the phenomenon of war causes its understanding to change, reflecting the changing realities of organised armed struggle as the variability of moral norms and standards of public discourse. There is a belief among researchers that defining war as opposed to peace is inadequate to the reality of contemporary armed conflicts. In many respects, the traditional Clausewitzian understanding of war is no longer helpful in understanding contemporary conflicts. The concept of new wars, created in the last decade of the 20th century, was an attempt to look at this issue in a new way. Focusing on their social and non-military dimensions it indicates new, although non-obvious areas of research for the sociology of war.