This essay explores the question of whether an end to warfare in the foreseeable future is probable. Unfortunately, human kind used war for such a variety of purposes (conflict resolution, as a form of political participation, to promote a "just cause," and so forth) that it is difficult to develop a solution that will end all warfare.
War or the threat of the use of force is the traditional approach to conflict resolution in the conduct of international relations. Although each national state tends to reserve a monopoly on violence for itself, through mutual diplomatic recognition of one another, national states also recognize the legitimacy of the wars they waged.
Francisco de Vitoria, in the Sixteenth Century, established the modern concept of international law with respect to war, which holds that war is licit as a last resort, when all other means of persuasion have failed. Thus, war becomes an extension of political participation, diplomacy. This concept goes on to hold that the cause which justifies war is the violation of a right, and that "an essential condition for the licitness of a war is that the evils resulting from it will not be greater than the good intended." A major problem with this premise is the perception from which the evaluation is made. The United States government, as an example, found no problems in justifying the activities of the Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua, while, at the same time, denouncing the guerrilla activity in neighboring El Salvador. Many other governments assessed the two situations differently from the American assessment. It largely depended upon whose ox was being gored.
War also is justified on other grounds. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in the early-Nineteenth Century, thought that war was the catalyst through which the purpose of mankind was brought to fruition. Thus, humanity, according to Hegel, had to either accept war or stagnate. It was Friedrich Nietzsche ...