264 CHAPTER EigHT ■ War and Strife
750,000 men, women, and children were murdered in just four months. Had the inter-
national community named this vio lence properly as a genocide, the pressure to inter-
vene militarily to halt it might have been greater, since in a genocide the side being
murdered would have no chance of winning. However, the vio lence was instead char-
acterized as a renewal of civil war, raising the legitimate question of whether inter-
national intervention should occur in Rwanda’s internal affairs. So what began as a
genocide— the or ga nized mass murder of defenseless civilians sharing a par tic u lar char-
acteristic—by government- supported extremists soon escalated to a civil war in which
a former combatant, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, remobilized, rearmed, and attacked
the government, systematically destroying the forces of the extremists and halting the
genocide by forcing the government and its surviving genocidaires to flee.
categorizing Wars
International relations scholars have developed many classification schemes to catego-
rize wars. At the broadest level, we distinguish between wars that take place between
sovereign states (interstate war) and wars that take place within states (intrastate war).
Beyond this distinction, we tend to divide wars into total and limited (based on their
aims and the proportion of resources dedicated to achieving these aims), and fi nally,
the character of war fought, such as conventional or unconventional.
i tern State and intraState War
Since the advent of the state system in the years following the conclusion of the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–48), the state as a form of po liti cal association has proven ideal at
organ izing and directing the resources necessary for waging war. As Charles Tilly
famously put it, “War made the state and the state made war.”^2
As a result, wars between states have captured the lion’s share of attention from
international relations theorists and scholars of war. Theorists are interested for two
reasons. First, by definition, states have recognizable leaders and locations. When we
say “France,” we understand we are speaking about a government that controls a
specific territory that others recognize as France. Therefore, states make good sub-
jects for analy sis and comparison. Second, states have formal militaries— some tiny
and not much more than police forces; others vast and capable of projecting force
across the surface of the globe and even into outer space. These militaries, and the
state’s capacity to marshal resources in support of them, make states very formidable
adversaries. Thus, interstate wars are often characterized by relatively rapid loss of
life and destruction of property. At the end of World War II, the world’s states faced
the prospect that a future interstate war might not only destroy them as such, but
also, in a nuclear exchange, might destroy all human life.