The Lesson Of War By Historians Will And Ariel Durant

Introduction

Is there a background to assume that humanity will avoid big military conflicts in a future? Tide of history shows that humanity was always in strife and conflicts ap-peared for various reasons: territory, resources, ideology, international power, etc. Historians Will and Ariel Durant in their book, The Lessons of History has stated: ‘In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war’ (2010, p. 81). That gives us nearly 13 years of war for every year without a conflict!

So the question is: The ‘Age of War’: will it end or endure? My argument is that, the ‘Age of War’ will never end and conflicts will only endure. Conflicts are changing in their nature (dynamics, conflict actors, complexity, scale, etc.) but they still will pre-vail. To support my argument, we will initially look at the types of the conflicts, their causes and intensity in the past sixty years and will explore in more details one of the dominant reasons for conflicts – fighting for natural resources.

Before answering this question we should understand what is a war or a conflict? There are a lot of different definitions, but there is no clear agreement which one is the right one. Most can agree that this understanding has changed with the

With regard to high intensity conflicts, their number increased almost constantly until 1992, when an all-time high was reached with 51 high-intensity conflicts shortly after the decline of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia. Afterwards, its number dropped sharply, but then rose again until it reached 45 in 2003. Searching for the reasons why conflicts occur, HIIK named top three being system/ideology (148 conflicts), national power (94 conflicts) and resources (90 con-flicts). And rising new challenges for humanity – climate change and demographical problems, suggest that number of conflicts for the resources will