The State,the Military and War

Abstract

Ekkehardt Krippendorff walks the high road of peace research. His book, State and War, is a contribution to the grand task of abolishing war as an institution. He argues that states and the military are twins, created for the same purpose: breeding war and violence against each other's and their own subject populations. This review presents Krippendorff's arguments and extends them, showing how the two ahistorical conclusions that would seem to emerge from such reasoning - namely the anarchist and the pacifist conclusions - can be avoided.