Abstract

Throughout the past decade, philosophers have grappled with the idea that armed conflict in contemporary times has ushered in a new, transformative era of warfare, maintaining that the new phase introduces crucial differences that undermine existing frameworks for the ethical analysis of war. I argue that such differences are strikingly different from one in which older wars of the modern period took place. In this paper, I maintain that emergent properties of new wars frequently include the rise of intrastate identity-based conflicts, asymmetric warfare involving states and nonstate actors, high civilian to combatant death ratios, growing disregard for the laws of armed conflict, and increased use of irregular war strategies and tactics, which may or may not include the use of new technologies. In my defense of the new war hypothesis, I discuss two additional features. First, the blurring of distinctions across multiple categories that formerly characterized old wars, and second, the perpetual/ongoing nature of new wars.