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541 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1995)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0541 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE: SMALL WARS CONSIDERED I can recall nothing in history more worthy of sorrow and pity than the scenes which are passing before our eyes. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Small wars have killed more people in the last fifty years than died in World War II. They have destroyed great empires, stymied superpowers, and shaped continents of new states. They have created a large and almost permanent class of refugees, people without homes, dependent upon international kind- ness. Despite their prevalence, duration, viciousness, and destructiveness, they have eluded efforts to frame any enduring formula to understand, prevent, end, or moderate them. Instead, they have grown in frequency and violence. Nor have policymakers or academics been particularly successful in defining just what a small war is even while trying to deal with the problems that numerous small wars have created. There have been almost as many terms to describe the phenomenon as there have been small wars. Ranging from such poetic descriptions as war of the flea to such prosaic ones as low-intensity conflict, various attempts have been made to define what is involved and to develop ways and means of dealing with the problems that small wars have created. The constant search for the appropriate euphemism has not improved understanding, nor have the various policies done much to cope with small wars. In many cases, the response, especially by major powers, has been to act as if small wars were, rather than a recurring reality, a temporary aberration that needs no sustained effort at understanding once an immediate problem eases. Thus the effort to think coherently about how to deal with small wars as a matter of policy or how to analyze them conceptually has not proceeded very far. Furthermore, despite the background of unending fighting, loss of life, and indications that small wars will continue in many parts of the world, there is an impression in many quarters, perhaps influenced by the end of the Cold War, that war as an instrument of policy or as a likely phenomenon in international affairs has become obsolete and far less likely in a post-Cold War environment. The tendency in contemporary thinking on small wars has been to give scant attention to coming to terms with what small wars mean for the future of the international system or how one must go about dealing with situations that are not necessarily amenable to the types of solutions that have characterized interstate relations and conflict resolution hereto- fore. This approach had more to recommend itself in the period of the Cold War. It is less understandable now. Part of the problem lies in trying to conceptualize or define small wars and just how they fit into the knowable patterns of interstate relations. Defining a small war shares the problem involved in defining any abstrac- 8

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