Is war inevitable?

More from Professor Colin Gray:

War is a part of the human condition, it is not a problem that can be solved. However, it is a condition some of the worst features of which can be alleviated by law, custom, norms and plain self-interest. Another Bloody Century (page 379)

I am a little more optimistic. I think that if war's negative impacts can be satisfactorily defined, then targeted for reduction and sufficient incentives can be put in place, then wars can be reduced in number and scale. As Gray explains elsewhere (page 385), "Warfare is social and cultural, as well as political and strategic, behaviour. As such it must reflect the characteristics of the communities that wage it." These characteristics are deep-seated and pervasive, which means that solution need to be long term in nature. Diverse, adaptive and focused approaches will be required. Gray's pessimism is justifiable if we confine ourselves to thinking about government-implemented measures. But a Conflict Reduction Bond regime could work, in ways that we cannot necessarily foresee. The main difficulty, it seems to me, is in defining exactly what we want to achieve: terrible though war is, some types of 'peace' are even worse.