Description
Book SynopsisThis handbook provides a comprehensive, problem-driven and dynamic overview of the future of warfare.
The volatilities and uncertainties of the global security environment raise timely and important questions about the future of humanity's oldest occupation: war. This volume addresses these questions through a collection of cutting-edge contributions by leading scholars in the field. Its overall focus is prognostic rather than futuristic, highlighting discernible trends, key developments and themes without downplaying the lessons from the past. By making the past meet the present in order to envision the future, the handbook offers a diversified outlook on the future of warfare, which will be indispensable for researchers, students and military practitioners alike. The volume is divided into six thematic sections. Section I draws out general trends in the phenomenon of war and sketches the most significant developments, from the past to the present and into the future. Sectio
Trade Review
'The editors have assembled an impressive and diverse collection of experts to describe and analyze how state and non-state actors will likely wield violence in the future. Taking a comprehensive and cutting-edge perspective, the volume covers a broad range of topics from new concepts of warfare to novel technologies of coercion and violence. This important volume will become a must-read for those seeking to understand how technology and trends will shape future warfare.'
Nina Tannewald, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
'Any book that seeks to comprehensively survey not only the current landscape of military and security studies but also its volatile future sets for itself a daunting task, but this extraordinarily wide-ranging volume delivers the goods. Assembling an array of accomplished authors from a refreshingly broad range of national, geopolitical, and epistemological perspectives, The Routledge Handbook of the Future of Warfare is in equal parts informative and thought-provoking, offering a combination of sophisticated theory and insightful analysis of recent and contemporary events "on the ground." This book will be an indispensable resource for anyone looking to understand twenty-first century warfare in all its complexity, with particular appreciation of the paradoxical interplay between cutting-edge technology and elemental patterns of human conflict.'
Ward Thomas, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
'Thinking about the future of war is by definition a difficult task. The speed, the secrecy, the intangible nature of strategy and culture make it perhaps the most difficult intellectual challenge to encounter. This book meets this challenge brilliantly. It invites reflection, change of perception, innovative thinking, addresses old and new questions we have about what is to come when it comes to war. It brings together the greatest minds of our times, and fills an important gap in the landscape on all things future.'
Florence Gaub, Research Director, NATO Defence College in Rome
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Gazing into the Future Of Warfare Part I: Approaching Future Wars 1. Strategic Foresight and Future War: A Discussion of Methodologies 2. Predicting the Future of War in the 21st Century: A Future War Studies? 3. Thinking About the Future of War 4. Human Security in Future Military Operations 5. Great Powers and War in the Twenty-First Century: Blast from the Past 6. The Ecology of Violence 7. Militainment for Future Warfare Part II: The Systemic Variables of the Future of Warfare 8. How our Accelerating Interactions in Cyberspace Have Shifted Global Power and Made a Kinetic World War More Likely: The Riddle of Steel 9. State Fragility as a Major Challenge to the Existing World Order: "Too Fragile to Hold the World" 10. Lawfare in the 21st Century 11. Privatization of Warfare 12. Terrorism: The Never-Changing Chameleon 13. Deterritorialization and Violent Networks Part III: Concepts and Theories of Future Warfare 14. Understanding Western Perceptions of War and Insecurity: Unravelling Hybridity 15. Irregular and Unconventional Warfare 16. The Future of Proxy Wars 17. Remote Warfare: Drivers, Limits, Challenges 18. Vicarious War and the United States: Imperial Antecedents and Anticipations 19. Post-Modern Warfare Part IV: Structural Complexity 20. The Persistent Appeal of Chaoplexic Warfare: Towards an Autonomous S(War)M Machine? 21. Ethnic Conflict and Modern Warfare 22. Just War Thinking and Wars of Information: War, Not-War, and the Places Between 23. Gender in Future Warfare 24. Intelligence and Awareness 25. Criminality and Delinquency: The Impact on Regional and Global Security Part V: Technoscience 26. Cybernetics at War: Military Artificial Intelligence, Weapon Systems and the De-Skilled Moral Agent 27. Digitizing the Battlefield: Augmented and Virtual Reality Applications in Warfare 28. Quantum Warfare 29. Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems and their Potential Impact on the Future of Warfare 30. Military Neuroenhancement 31. High-Energy Laser-Directed Energy Weapons: Military Doctrine and Implications for Warfare 32. Space-Based Systems and Counterspace Warfare Part VI: Harbingers of Future Warfare 33. Prospects of Great Power Rivalry: Escaping the Tragedy? 34. Internationalized Civil War 35. Challenges to the Nuclear Order: Between Resilience and Contestation 36. Conflict in Cyberspace 37. Large-Scale Criminal Violence in the 21st Century 38. Staging the Conflicts to Come: Visions of the Future-Tracing Security Practices 39. Savage Wars and Conflict Dehumanization
