Study guide: HGGSP

📋 Course Outline

1. Conflict and War Definitions
2. Interstate and Irregular Warfare
3. Peace Models and Resolution
4. Contemporary Conflict Patterns
5. Clausewitz and Political War
6. Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
7. Clausewitz Tested by Irregular War

📖 1. Conflict and War Definitions

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Conflict: A situation of rivalry concerning a territory that may be political, cultural, or of another nature.
• War: A violent confrontation in which at least two actors seek to settle a dispute through military force.

📝 Essential Points

• War is characterized as direct, massive, and institutionalized, and is limited in time and space.

• Human societies began settling in the Neolithic, around 10,000 BC, and warfare became systematic as societies sought to protect or gain territory.

💡 Memory Hook

Conflict is rivalry; war is its violent military form.

📖 2. Interstate and Irregular Warfare

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Interstate war: A military confrontation between different states.
• Asymmetric war: A conflict between forces of unequal strength that use different tactics, often a state actor against a non-state actor.
• Terrorism: The use of violence for political purposes outside the laws of war in order to create fear in a given country.

★ Must-know

📌 A classical interstate war is regular, conventional, and symmetrical: it occurs over a defined period, follows rules, and opposes states of comparable strength.

📌 Guerrilla warfare uses clandestinity, brief skirmishes, and harassment such as sabotage against an army, whereas terrorism uses violence outside the laws of war to create fear and targets civilians through acts such as attacks, assassinations, and hostage-taking.

Further detail

• Modern conflicts can involve dissident political groups, proxy groups acting on behalf of other states, and private military companies; examples given are the FLN, Hamas with Iran, Wagner in 2014, and Blackwater in 1997.

💡 Memory Hook

Regular armies face regular armies; guerrillas target armies, terrorists target civilians.

📖 3. Peace Models and Resolution

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Negative peace: The absence of war despite the persistence of tensions and conflict.
• Positive peace: The effort to establish durable, institutionalized cooperation among state actors and to address the origins of war.
• Collective security: Collective security seeks to ensure lasting peace by establishing solidarity among actors.
• Common security: The capacity of actors to work together to meet fundamental human needs.

★ Must-know

📌 A classical peace treaty is imposed on the defeated by the victors, a negotiated peace is arranged with the help of an external organization, and a white peace ends fighting without a victor, a defeated party, or compensation.

Further detail

• Negative peace can rest on a balance of power, as in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna, or on the hegemony of one power.

📌 Bertrand Badie describes positive peace as generalized social appeasement requiring a humanized approach that meets needs such as food, housing, and water, takes actor diversity into account, and is systemic.

💡 Memory Hook

Negative peace stops war; positive peace builds cooperation.

📖 4. Contemporary Conflict Patterns

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Hybrid war: A combination of conventional operations, asymmetric warfare, cyberwarfare, and tools such as disinformation.

📝 Essential Points

• The conflict counts cited are 65 armed conflicts in the Oslo peace-research institute’s 2020 figure and 130 conflicts in the UN’s 2025 figure.

• The Middle East and Asia are described as the “Arc of Crises,” whose conflicts have expanded, become more complex, and become interconnected.

• Africa contains the largest number of armed conflicts, with interstate and intrastate wars each accounting for 50% in the cited overview; Asia also has many kinds of conflict, while Europe and the Americas have fewer.

• Interstate wars have declined since 1980 but have not disappeared; the course identifies Russia’s 2022 attack as their reappearance in Europe.

• Intrastate wars have increased since 1990 and are described as especially deadly.

📖 5. Clausewitz and Political War

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• War as duel: Clausewitz, De la guerre, 1832 - An amplified duel in which two hostile wills seek to compel the adversary to execute their will through physical violence.

★ Must-know

• Carl von Clausewitz’s De la guerre, published posthumously in 1832, presents war as the continuation of politics by other means and as a means serving political ends.

• Clausewitz distinguishes the political, strategic, and social dimensions of war; tactics aim to win a battle, while strategy aims to win the war as a whole.

• For Clausewitz, political purposes determine the outbreak, conduct, and political outcome of war, and a war begins only for a political motive.

📌 Clausewitz’s absolute war is a theoretical escalation toward the military annihilation of the adversary, whereas real war is limited by politics, strategy, and friction, also called the “fog of war.”

Further detail

• Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) presents states as gladiators in an arena of continual suspicion and attributes wars to competition and rivalries between states.

• Clausewitz’s account of real war says that war is often proportionate to available means and should end in negotiated peace rather than the absolute victory of one side.

💡 Memory Hook

Political aims direct war; escalating resistance can drive violence toward extremes.

📖 6. Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Total war: The use of all a country’s resources, including social and military resources, to achieve victory.

★ Must-know

• Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars from 1792 to 1815 replaced aristocratic warfare with mass armies and the mobilization of populations.

Further detail

• The Seven Years’ War lasted from 1756 to 1763.

• The French levée en masse in 1793 sent all men of fighting age to defend the borders; the cited force rose from 150,000 men in 1792 to more than 700,000 in 1793.

• The course contrasts approximately 50,000 people in the Seven Years’ War with 200,000 in 1813 as evidence of growing military forces.

• From 1792 to 1815, France fought six European coalitions, and Europe experienced only a little more than a year of general peace during that period.

• The French revolutionary government declared war on Austria in 1792 amid revolutionary radicalization and aims to spread revolutionary principles, while other European powers sought to preserve the balance of power and prevent revolutionary contagion.

• The Peace of Amiens was signed in 1802 between France, England, Spain, and the Batavian Republic, and war with England resumed in 1803.

• Britain retained command of the seas, defeated the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, and resisted Napoleon’s Continental System, established in 1806 to weaken the British economy.

• Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 ended in disaster and retreat; Prussia and Austria drove French forces out of Germany in 1813, and Spain also rose against France.

• Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, returned for the Hundred Days, and was defeated at Waterloo in June 1815 before being exiled to Saint Helena.

• The Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 restored monarchies across Europe and sought to eliminate Napoleon’s political legacy.

💡 Memory Hook

Mass mobilization → expanding war → coalition defeat.

📖 7. Clausewitz Tested by Irregular War

★ Must-know

• Al-Qaeda is described as an Islamist terrorist organization founded in 1988 by Osama bin Laden.

Further detail

• Martin van Creveld is presented as an Israeli historian who argues that the emergence of terrorist actors changes the character of warfare toward irregular war.

• The course characterizes irregular wars as conflicts without fronts or borders, fought for an ideology such as Islamism.