A salient issue from last week’s lectures was the varying attempts by scholars, in the past and present, to identify and define wars. Whether a ‘war’ is present in a given situation is a subjective condition as there are differing, legal and substantive, definitions that have been posited by said scholars who aim to point to a war’s presence or absence. For example, the substantive definition highlights the number of deaths – over 1000 battle-related fatalities – as a method to distinguish ‘wars’ from  ‘conflicts’ However, it was the incredible, almost arbitrary, subjectivity of this measurement that brought my attention to another, equally important, question. If we assume that state vs. state or group vs. group or state vs. group hostile acts can lead to a state-of-war, what kind of event or action constitutes an attack, particularly one that requires a response? In other words, is there really any specific set of conditions for Casus belli –“An act or event that provokes or is used to justify war” – in the modern world?

The legal definition of war has often been treated as a method to signal a state’s intention to pursue a stance of belligerence towards another. The first, genuine, ‘act of war’ was historically considered to be the announcement of hostilities or a declaration of war as expressed in Article I of The Hague Convention (III) Convention Relative to the Opening of Hostilities, 1907. In contemporary terms,the United Nations’ charter goes some way to specify the key ingredient of an attack that necessitates a response. The charter states that members reserve the right to “individual or collective self-defense” in the case of an “armed attack” (Article 51). Therefore, the key feature of an attack is that it must be ‘armed’ if it is to require a response. But does an attack need to be armed to cause similar conditions of destruction and loss of life? Don’t other forms of assault, which also aim to damage infrastructure and cause hardship, upon a state or a society constitute an attack and demand a response?

A frequently used method of projecting non-armed yet destructive force upon another state or group is sanctions. Sanctions are designed to disrupt your opponent’s economy and cause hardship upon a state’s population in order for that populace to place pressure upon their elites to alter the state’s policy to one that favors the state or group that initiated sanctions. For example, UN and the United States’ sanctions targeting Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990 were aimed at coercing average Iraqis to demand policy change from Saddam Hussein’s regime. But rather than cause the regime to affect policy change, the exacting weight of these sanctions fell upon the Iraqi population. So do sanctions constitute acts of war since damage and harm were caused? While the substantive definition of war clearly states that ‘battle-related deaths’ separate wars from conflicts, I would counter, for the sake of argument, that sanctions can create a ‘state of war’ within a targeted country as they make no distinction between civilian and combatant. Rather than using guns and tanks to force an opposing society to acquiesce, sanctions generate a battle-scape where hunger and deprivation are harnessed to exact a population’s submission and undermine a regime’s integrity. Imperial Japan, for example, viewed American sanctions in 1941 as so damaging to its economy, the integrity of its regime, and the wellbeing of its society that it believed itself to be in a virtual state-of-war prior to Pearl Harbor. Iraq, equally, could have perceived sanctions against its economy, regime, and population as an act of war. Furthermore, if we were to extrapolate and expand the substantive definition of a war to include all fatalities and use its simple numerical parameters then sanctions could be regarded as a massive attack upon a society since hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result of UN and US actions. Essentially, non-armed actions, such as the use of sanctions, could be interpreted as a hostile attack that requires a response since it negatively impacts a state’s economy, targets its regime, and harms its population.

In this blog I have attempted to demonstrate that there is more than one way to measure what constitutes an attack upon a state or society. Keeping in line with the traditional parameters of what makes a ‘war’, other approaches to projecting force can be viewed as ‘acts of war,’ which constitute a response. In this post, I have tried to show that war and ‘acts of war’ can be highly subjective and are up for interpretation, demonstrating the importance of language and definition in dealing with issues on an international scale.