Sociological Considerations on Organized Violence

At the end of the Cold War, a lively public and academic debate arose on the nature of contemporary armed conflicts, their transformations, and their supposed novelty compared to previous wars. Numerous definitions were coined to mark these changes: ethnic, predatory, criminal, postmodern, hybrid, asymmetric, etc. By analysing a long-term model based on the historical dynamics of organised violence developed by the sociologist Malešević, we seek to show that the exponential growth of bureaucratic and ideological apparatuses within modern societies are at the root of the steady increase in organised violence, and consequently that the phenomenon of war, as the case of the Russian-Ukrainian war demonstrates, has not undergone such radical transformations as to justify any paradigm shift.