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'Imperialism was war'. Isabel V. Hull1
Warfare is a cosmopolitan experience, a shared bane of humanity. Yet somehow, in social and political inquiry, war as a concept is imagined primarily in provincial terms, those of the West and its major wars. Real war is interstate war between nation-states, fought between regular armed forces.2All other conflicts are relegated to derivative categories. They are Small Wars, insurgencies, emergencies, interventions, uprisings, police actions, or something other than war proper.3What would it mean to liberate the concept of war from such Eurocentric thinking? What can Small War teach us about war?
To decolonise, in my usage here, is to consider critically how Eurocentrism has informed the basic categories and vocabularies of social and political inquiry, across a range of disciplines.4Western histories and societies supply the substantive objects of inquiry in most studies and disciplines. Those histories and societies are conceived in specifically Eurocentric ways that sever them from their constitutive connectedness to other parts of the world, to the histories and societies of others.5In respect of the study of war, the sovereign nation-state, national armed forces, and Eurocentric periodisations of wars and warfare lie behind basic definitions and general approaches. Instead, we could proceed from alternate, postcolonial premises.
To do so requires reassessing the definition of war, its core meanings. Simply recovering the histories and experiences of war in the global South is insufficient for this task. After all, the non-European world already features prominently in existing war and conflict studies. The problem is not that the global South and its conflicts are ignored. It is that European histories of war provide the (provincial) basis for the putatively universal concepts and definitions with which we study war in both the global South and North. The concept of war requires rescuing from Eurocentric limitation. In this article, I mobilise the histories and sociologies of Small War to reconsider our underlying idea of what war is, and to outline a global and postcolonial war studies.
This involves critiquing the main building blocks of Eurocentric war studies, that is, war studies based on categories derived from Western experience. These are the war/peace binary; an international system of sovereign and national states; and the...