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A social theory of war: Clausewitz and war reconsidered

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DOI: 10.1080/09557571.2013.872600

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A social theory of war: Clausewitz and

war reconsidered
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Vivek Swaroop Sharma
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Published online: 19 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Vivek Swaroop Sharma (2014): A social theory of war: Clausewitz and war
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 Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2013.872600

A social theory of war: Clausewitz and war reconsidered

Vivek Swaroop Sharma

University of Copenhagen

Abstract This article presents a new theory of war that is grounded in the insights of
Clausewitz on the social nature of conflict. Clausewitz had argued that war is a political
process; he therefore distinguished between ‘war’—understood in political terms—and
warfare—understood as fighting. He then created a typology covering a spectrum of war
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ranging from total to limited, the political stakes of a conflict determining where it would
fall on the spectrum. I develop and modify this basic framework by arguing that the social
organization of the actors has a determining role in predicting the stakes of war. I then
show how this framework helps us understand some key problems in the political science
literature on war and conflict. I attempt to show two main things: (1) that there are
different types of wars (and that these differences are not necessarily related to the standing
of the actors, i.e. the presence or absence of sovereignty); and (2) that how war and warfare
are related is more complicated than previously understood and that this has implications
for the political science literature on order, conflict and violence.

Very few of the new manifestations in war can be ascribed to new inventions or
new departures in ideas. They result mainly from the transformation of society
and new social conditions. (Clausewitz 1989, 515)

War cannot be divorced from political life (Verkehr), and whenever this occurs in
our thinking about war the many links that connect the two elements are
destroyed and we are left with something pointless and devoid of sense
(Clausewitz 1989, 605).

Introduction
It is apt to be assumed that war suspends . . . [political] intercourse and replaces it
by a wholly different condition, ruled by no law but its own. We maintain, on the
contrary, that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition
of other means. We deliberately use the phrase ‘with the addition of other means’
because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend
political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In its essentials
that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs. (Clausewitz
1989, 605)
That Carl von Clausewitz is on the shortlist of great thinkers on war and conflict is
almost universally accepted. He is approvingly invoked by scholars from
divergent schools of thought and his most famous aphorism—war is the
continuation of politics/policy by other means—is a cliché readily accessible to

q 2014 Centre of International Studies

 2 Vivek Swaroop Sharma

most educated observers.1 And yet Clausewitz and On war surely must rank as
amongst the most referenced and least read thinkers on the subject of war and conflict.
As his devotees recognize, this gap between Clausewitz’s fame and the frequency
with which he is read is no accident and can be understood as a consequence of the
frustrating and incomplete nature of his thought and work. This is unfortunate, as
Clausewitz had indeed conceptualized something profound, and the end goal of his
work should be a reference point for all social science scholarship on war and violence.
The purpose of this article is to develop a theory of war grounded in key
conceptual insights developed by Clausewitz; specifically, his distinction between
war and warfare, his typology of war and his insistence on the fundamentally
social nature of conflict. I conclude by teasing out some of the implications of the
model for how war and warfare are understood by key political science literatures
on conflict and violence. My basic argument is that the conflation of the concepts
of ‘war’ and ‘warfare’ as well as a failure to pay close enough attention to levels-
of-analysis issues have created some fundamental problems in the social science
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approach to war and violence which can be resolved by the Clausewitzian social
theory of war offered in the second part of this article.
This article is divided into three sections. The first section examines some of
the key concepts developed by Clausewitz in On war in the context and setting in
which it was conceived and written. The second section lays out the model
derived from Clausewitz’s concepts and the third relates the model to a few
relevant political science texts relating to war and conflict. I specifically discuss the
literature on civil and international war, and the game theory of cooperation.
I conclude by suggesting a research agenda that would bring new perspectives
and greater explanatory power to current approaches to war and conflict.

Clausewitz and the French Revolution

As is well known, Clausewitz was above all a Prussian officer who first
experienced battle at the age of 12 and whose life was to be dominated by the
traumatic effect of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on Europe in
general and on Prussia in particular. Indeed, it would be appropriate to think
about Clausewitz’s life’s work from the perspective of a highly sensitive soldier
attempting to understand how the old order into which he was born was
catastrophically defeated by forces that were, by the standards of the eighteenth
century, inferior on all counts.

Eighteenth-century war and warfare

Before examining what precisely was so traumatic about the encounter between
the old order and the French Revolution, it is necessary to briefly outline what the
norms of war and warfare were in the century prior to the French Revolution.2

1
The exception is the distinguished historian of war John Keegan (1993), who offers a
systematic and brilliantly insightful critique of Clausewitz’s work and influence.
2
The discussion that follows on the French Revolution and its wars is based on a
reading of Schroeder (1994), Blanning (1983; 1986; 1996), Doyle (2002), Andress (2005) and
Gates (1997).
 A social theory of war 3

It has been long understood that by the standards of the wars of religion that
dominated European society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
patterns of conflict of the period that followed (whether a consequence of the
Peace of Westphalia or not) were ‘limited’ both in terms of the scope of objectives
being pursued by rulers and in terms of the lethality and social disruptiveness of
warfare (Showalter 1996; Lynn 1990; 1999; Browning 1995; Szabo 2008). The nature
of the wars of the eighteenth century was determined by the nature of the actors
that engaged in them. By the eighteenth century, with very few exceptions, nearly
all European polities were dynastic entities and this fact meant that conflicts
between polities were structured in particular ways, all of which served to
emphasize their limited quality. The first of these were the actual causes of
political conflict—competing claims of dynastic succession—which, unlike the
wars of religion or other social issues that had been at the forefront of international
politics in the previous era, were by definition about who the rightful claimant to a
title was and not about the fundamental organization of society. These conflicts,
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engaged in by parties who recognized the equality of their opponents, had deep
resonances of a legal proceeding whose judgement was left to a trial by battle. In
such a system of politics the lengths to which claims were pursued and the
manner in which were so pursued were conducted (and limited) by a concern for
the maintenance of the social order and stability. To that end (and keeping a
very firm eye fixed on the past), claimants pursued their goals with tools that fell
far short of mobilizing the totality of social forces in pursuit of individual
objectives.
The character of warfare—the actual fighting—followed from the political
character of eighteenth-century war. Old regime warfare was characterized by
infrequency of battle, with campaigning being mostly about manoeuvre. Indeed,
battle was avoided at all costs, and when it actually occurred it was fought
between professional forces with sophisticated logistical support systems. In this
kind of warfare battle casualties were relatively low; and, most importantly, these
military organisms were not designed to pursue defeated enemies (the phase of
battle in which the vast majority of casualties usually occur). The officer corps of
these armies was deeply aristocratic and it was this common ethos that helped
give conflict its restrained and gentlemanly flavour. It is worth emphasizing that
describing eighteenth-century warfare as limited is not to downplay the reality
and horror of its violence; it is instead to note that compared with the patterns of
conflict and violence observed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well
as that observed in subsequent periods the eighteenth century seems a paragon of
restrained conflict. While war was indeed frequent in the eighteenth century, it
rarely struck deep chords in ways that the wars of religion had.

War, warfare and the French Revolution

The armies and officers of the late eighteenth century had been trained to fight
particular kinds of opponents for particular kinds of ends in particular kinds of
ways. This was nowhere more the case than in the Prussia of Frederick the Great
and his lacklustre heirs, who had in the pursuit of their ambitions created a
militarized state that was an extension of the army. The Prussian army was almost
universally considered to be the state of the art and was emulated (to the extent
 4 Vivek Swaroop Sharma

that internal social organization permitted) by its friends and foes alike across
Europe. It was such a new model army produced by the French Revolution and
wielded brilliantly by Napoleon that delivered shattering blows to both the
Prussian army and the social system that underpinned it. It was both the cause of
this unexpected and counterintuitive development as well as the consequences of
coping in a new world order that provoked Clausewitz’s reflections that in later
years led to the conceptual breakthroughs of On war.
The initial response of European leaders to the outbreak of the Revolution in
1789 was one of relief. The general sense of European observers was that the
Revolution would make peace more likely given that one of the major actors of the
European system was being convulsed by deep internal forces that had rendered
it, by all conventional standards, utterly incapable of sustained effort in
international affairs. Even when war did break out in 1792, outside observers
refused to believe that a French army devastated by the loss of much of its officer
corps, engaged in terrible internal conflict against opponents of the Revolution
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ranging from Catholics to monarchists, and lacking even the most basic logistical
support system could stand up to the crack professional forces fielded by Austria
and Prussia. Conventional wisdom was wrong: despite setbacks on the battlefield
and internal convulsions on an unimaginable scale, the Revolutionary armies
proved to be extraordinary fighting machines more than capable of defeating the
best of the old regime forces. Why and how this had come to pass and what this
implied about the nature of war and politics is the problem that Clausewitz set out
to understand.

Clausewitz and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Clausewitz sought to understand, at its most basic level, why and how Prussia
was destroyed at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstädt in 1806. To Clausewitz, as
well as much of the Prussian leadership, these battles were correctly taken to be
historical judgements on the nature of Prussian society and its military
organization and not simply the contingent outcome of the battlefield. With this
starting point, Clausewitz quickly eliminated technology as a variable of any
particular importance to his framework. Given how much emphasis technology as
a variable has received in a range of literature (as well as in popular culture), this
may be somewhat surprising and counterintuitive and so is worth considering for
a moment. For Clausewitz technology was of little importance, for the simple fact
that the new model French army was not technologically much different from its
opponents or indeed the French army that had fought the War of the Spanish
Succession a century earlier.3 Rather than to technology as a cause of the
astounding performance of the French Revolutionary army Clausewitz looked to
military organization and recruitment and, critically, he would come to
understand these two dimensions of military organization to be inseparable

3
There had been changes in the technology of the French army over the course of the
eighteenth century, particularly after the French defeat in the Seven Years War. However,
these were not of a particularly revolutionary scale or scope and were restricted to certain
areas (primarily artillery and the introduction of the ‘division’ as an operational unit of the
French army).
 A social theory of war 5

from the totality of social organization. In other words, Clausewitz the soldier had
made the leap to understanding that an army is a reflection of the society that
produces it and that war is a social phenomenon that cannot be understood
without reference to the larger context of social organization. Changes in the
nature of society produced changes in the nature of war.
This insight had profound practical implications (as well as theoretical ones of
course) for a Prussia that was fighting for its survival (and it is worth emphasizing
that Clausewitz was personally involved in the actual reform of the Prussian
army). The French Revolution had unleashed forces that reshaped two key areas of
military organization, and while these changes did not in and of themselves
translate into victories for the forces of the French Revolution, they were necessary
conditions for the astonishing feats of arms performed by the Revolutionary
armies. The first and perhaps most critical changes were in the nature of military
recruitment. While in some sense a vague universal military obligation did exist in
old regime Europe this source of military potential was, and perhaps could only
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be, tapped under particular circumstances and came with costs that were
unappealing to rulers in the extreme. The most obvious case prior to the French
Revolution of an almost total mobilization of all sources of military potential was
during the religious wars (especially among the Protestants of France). The
experience with these kinds of organizations and the incredible difficulties of
command and control associated with them had been the underlying motivation
for the creation of permanent standing armies composed of professional soldiers
paid for and maintained by the state along with the complicated logistical support
systems that were designed to shield civilian populations from the horrors of
marauding bands of starving soldiers. War as well as warfare in the eighteenth
century, then, occupied a narrow social space of aristocratic officers and
professional soldiers relatively detached from the mass of the population, who,
while paying for these conflicts, were left relatively unscathed by them.4 This
meant that there were strict political and social limitations on the size of armies,
which were shattered by the French Revolution. With the declaration of the levée en
masse by the Committee for Public Safety on 23 August 1793 the French
government was able to come close to the total mobilization of its society. This
system of military recruitment would be imposed in the face of tremendous
resistance (violent and otherwise) of many significant sections of French society.
The size and scale of mobilization, therefore, were directly correlated with changes
in the political and social structure of France. When Napoleon threatened that he
could afford to lose 30,000 men a month he was not engaging in idle bluster.5
The second major change was in the realm of military supply. As noted earlier,
the armies of the eighteenth century had been organized to minimize the impact of
campaigning field forces on civilian populations. Because of the unwillingness to
risk battle this meant that the character of eighteenth century warfare was one of

4
Like all generalizations this one should be qualified: sieges were arenas where
civilians were direct victims of conflict but even here the eighteenth century had rules that
minimized the horrors experienced. Prussia was, of course, very different in the extent to
which society was mobilized for war and the extent to which its subjects were involved in
the army. For the purposes of this discussion Prussia is the exception that proves the rule.
5
It is worth emphasizing that no old regime leader would have ever made such a
statement.
 6 Vivek Swaroop Sharma

constant manoeuvre constrained by a cumbersome logistical support system.

The quickest way to defeat an enemy army was to force it away from its lines of
supply. This system of fighting was expensive and required the institutional
infrastructure to purchase and transport all that an army—one that was larger
than most towns in Europe at the time—would require for a campaign. It had only
been worth the investment because of the political and social consequences of the
patterns of warfare of the previous period. The French Revolution transformed
the mobility of its armies by, in effect, forcing them to live off the land. Living off
the land has tremendous military advantages in terms of mobility; it also has a
particular logic of movement which differs from those generated by military
systems based on supply lines.6 Armies that require supply from the land, as
Sherman understood in the American Civil War, must continuously move or else
they will starve; this pursuit of fresh provinces from which to replenish supplies
also involves the civilian population in the most immediate sense. When the
purpose of war is to break the resistance of enemy societies as opposed to what it
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had been in the eighteenth century then resupplying armies from civilian
populations with all of the attendant horrors was not simply a practical choice but
a political one (as it was in the American Civil War as well). In other words,
inherent in the movement of French armies were (to varying degrees) political
objectives that included the transformation of the social order, and this meant that
the resupply of the French army would be one of the army’s tools for achieving its
objectives. The newfound mobility of the French army was a function therefore of
a shift in the nature and purpose of war and not simply a convenient solution to
the problem of supply; most importantly, this shift in the nature and purpose of
war had to be understood as ‘a function of new social conditions’ (Clausewitz
1989, 515). It is worth emphasizing that no Bourbon king of France could have ever
unleashed the social forces that enabled the kind of mobilization that France
underwent between 1789 and 1815,7 even if he had wanted to (Doyle 2002).
Therefore, warfare in the period 1792– 1815 was on an grand scale. The pattern
of war and warfare experienced by Clausewitz’s generation was deeply shocking
to the defenders of the old order on a number of counts. To begin with there was
the sheer frequency of battle and, even more devastating, the relentless pursuit of
defeated enemies. The purpose of eighteenth century warfare had been
manoeuvre to attain a favourable bargaining position; it was never worth
attempting to destroy the enemy army if for no other reason than the fact that an
army was a costly investment that could not simply be risked unless certain
conditions prevailed. The French Revolution turned this logic on its head; the
purpose of warfare now became the destruction of enemy field armies and to gain

6
The last period in European history that had seen armies living off the land had been the
Thirty Years War. During that war the necessity of quartering on fresh provinces meant that the
movement of armies was largely unrelated to the strategic objectives of the conflict(s). The mere
requirement of fresh provinces to plunder ensured that military and political objectives were
unable to move in tandem; it also ensured that the civilian populations of the contested zones
suffered horrendously. Where the political and military logic of quartering moved in tandem
was when the target population was of a different religion.
7
As famously described by Goethe at the Battle of Valmy in 1792 on witnessing the first
defeat of the Prussian army at the hands of the volunteer French Revolutionary forces
(which later grew to an incredible size through the levée en masse of the early Republic)—as
the beginning of a ‘new epoch’ in history.
 A social theory of war 7

control over the institutional infrastructure relating to the mobilization of military

and economic potential. This meant frequent battles and lots of killing; but,
perhaps even more importantly, the consequences of French victory implied
assaults on basic institutions that made resistance imperative if the old order were
to survive. As a direct consequence of the French Revolution war had become total
in every sense of the term. On the whole, it took most European leaders some time
to understand the logic of their predicament. While some acute observers, most
especially Edmund Burke, recognized from the very beginning that the French
Revolution was an assault on the old order in the most fundamental sense, most
people in the initial phases did not.8 The sheer difficulties of resisting a new kind
of enemy plus the ingrained habits of limited war made coming to terms with the
reality of the kind of threat that the French Revolution posed to the old order
difficult and accounts for the repeated efforts of Austria, Prussia and Russia (to
say nothing of the lesser players) to unsuccessfully try to live within a European
order that included a triumphant Revolutionary (or Napoleonic) France.
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This was the precise problem that was to intimately confront Clausewitz in his
part in the reform of Prussia’s army and society: no old order ruler could or would
want to unleash forces capable of fielding armies on a scale that the French
Revolutionary governments were able to. Whatever role the masses of Spain
played in the defeat of Napoleon, old world aristocrats could only observe them
with horror and fear and they therefore sought solutions to their practical military
problems that only with extreme reflectance borrowed from the French model.
In a sense, it could not but be any other way; because the military organization of
the old order was based on the social domination of an aristocracy determined to
maintain its social power no military reform could be undertaken in isolation from
its social ramifications. Indeed, almost any kind of peace was preferable to
fighting Revolutionary armies that compelled reforms that overthrew the old
order; it was only the immensity of the stakes that compelled Austria, Prussia and
Russia to repeatedly fight against their collective better judgement.

The Clausewitzian conceptual framework

The version of On war that we possess was undergoing substantial revisions at the
time of Clausewitz’s death in 1831 and so we are confronted with the problem of
possessing a flawed manuscript undergoing revisions in a particular direction.
His recent biographer, Hugh Smith, relying on personal letters and notes, makes a
persuasive case that Clausewitz was moving more emphatically in the direction of
emphasizing the distinction between war and warfare and towards a much more
explicit theoretical account of the social foundations of war (2004). However, the
book that we actually possess is less than clear on all of this, and much of the book
is taken up by his concerns with warfare (and is the source of many famous
concepts still current in military thinking like ‘friction’ and ‘the fog of war’). It is
for this reason that so many different types of scholars look to Clausewitz for

8
Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France as early as 1790 (one year
after the Revolution began and two years before the outbreak of formal hostilities and at a
time when the majority of considered opinion believed that the Revolution would actually
promote peace).
 8 Vivek Swaroop Sharma

concepts. The following sketch of Clausewitz’s ideas is consistent with how ‘the
war and society’ literature understands Clausewitz’s work. It is, in any case, his
most theoretically important contribution from the perspective of the social
sciences, as it addresses some basic conceptual problems in the study of war
relating to its social nature.

War versus warfare

Clausewitz famously defined war as the continuation of politics (or policy) by
other means. By this he meant that war is a political activity in which violence and
coercion are being employed as a (but by no means the only) tool to achieve
particular objectives. Needless to say, by this definition the concept of war blends
into other conceptual domains within politics, particularly those relating to
domination, but nonetheless it is important to note the firm affirmation that
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violence must be understood as causally distinct from the politics of conflict.

Warfare can be understood as fighting; as such, it has a logic that while connected
to war is separate from it. This is clearest when it is remembered that winning
battles and winning wars are two different things and that it is possible to win all
of the battles and still lose the war. This is because how violence translates into
political outcomes is far from obvious. If we define war in terms of fighting (or
casualties) we are assuming that which requires explanation. Part of the problem
of explaining war is precisely how violence and fighting leads to particular
political ends, for, as Clausewitz noted, violence has no logical end unless
understood in its political context. This is a surprising and often counterintuitive
insight that Clausewitz would begin to take in very interesting directions, as we
will see in greater detail below.

The types of war

The Clausewitzian model begins with three basic concepts: limited, total and
absolute war. These are understood to exist on a spectrum ranging from limited to
total with absolute at the far end of the total side of the spectrum (Clausewitz 1989,
81). The concept of absolute war is a heuristic devise used to capture a state of
affairs of pure violence detached from political purpose. Clausewitz could simply
not imagine a world in which extermination would be an end in and of itself. In
modern terms absolute war can be understood as genocide; that is, it is the one
place in the Clausewitzian model where the purpose of war and the purpose of
warfare are the same—that is, pure violence and killing as an end in and of itself.
Clausewitz then tries to explain why it is that war is not always like its purest state,
and here he arrived at perhaps the most famous answer on the subject: politics (or
policy). Clausewitz argued that in absolute war violence has no logical limit, that
the key to understanding restraint on actual violence in conflict is politics and that
this political source of restraint can be understood in terms of the stakes of conflict
(or the political purpose of war).
What differentiates the types of wars, according to Clausewitz, are the stakes,
and these in turn are rooted in the types of societies. What moved Clausewitz’s
world within his lifetime from limited to total war was the transformation of
France by the Revolution. The Revolution turned France into a different kind of
 A social theory of war 9

actor whose military capabilities were on a massive scale and which waged war
for the explicit purpose of destroying the old order in Europe. This implied that
the ways and targets of violence changed as a sole and logical consequence of a
change in regime (after all, the technology was literally the same). In war, as the
saying goes, it is incredibly important to kill the ‘right’ people. The social nature of
the violence experienced within France had the same causes as the violence being
inflicted on occupied Europe—the elimination and replacement of one order by
another.9 For the opponents of the French Revolution this made defeat a question
of survival in ways that had never been the case in the era of limited dynastic
wars. With much to lose, the resistance to the French Revolution and Napoleon
was correspondingly stiff and involved entire populations (in so far as this was
politically viable). While Clausewitz did not explicitly make this obvious, this
model of the types of wars understood in social and political terms makes a
powerful prediction that I will explore in greater detail in the next section.
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The social foundations of war

This part of the article uses the building blocks provided by Clausewitz to lay out
a model of war with predictive power. As should appear clear by now,
Clausewitz’s logic predicts that the greater the stakes, the more total the warfare.
Note that this says nothing about why individual leaders elect war as a policy
option; it simply assumes that they do. Below I will fit the social theory of war into
a levels-of-analysis framework and provide a micro-foundational story for the
theory which shows why this is a less important question than it may, at first
glance, appear.

‘Limited’ and ‘total’ war reconsidered

The categories of ‘limited’ and ‘total’ are really predictions about the levels of
violence (including its type, scope, target, extent and duration) and degree of social
mobilization that a political conflict will produce. Since Clausewitz’s thought
suggests a conceptual distinction between war and warfare, it is necessary to define
war in political terms rather than in terms more useful for measuring warfare. For
these reasons I define the ends of Clausewitz’s spectrum of war in terms of the
political stakes involved. These can be usefully distinguished between those where
‘who rules’ (or simply ‘rulership’) is at stake and those in which the ‘rules’ are at
stake.
Wars that are about ‘who rules’ include successional issues (one of the most
frequent sources of conflicts at all levels of society), which have no implications for
the wider structure of society—in other words, of the type witnessed in Europe
during and prior to the eighteenth century, or, in the modern world, coups of

9
As I will discuss below, this discussion does not challenge the scholarship of scholars
like Stathis Kalyvas, who emphasizes the ‘personal’ or micro-level nature of the violence in
civil wars as opposed to the Clausewitzian theory being presented here and grounded at a
more macro-political level. Using a level-of-analysis framework Kalyvas’s work can be an
adequate framework for understanding the micro dynamics of civil war while
simultaneously the Clausewitzian framework presented here can be valid for the macro-
level.
 10 Vivek Swaroop Sharma

various kinds which replace one military dictator with another but otherwise have
no implications for the broader nature of social organization. These wars are
governed by a logic best understood in terms of the nature of ranking within social
groups and have a logic similar to that observed in all kinds of empirical contexts
ranging from primates to of course high politics. When all that it is at stake is the
relative rank of actors under stable rules then the warfare and violence generated
tend to be limited by rules regulating the establishment of rank and status. These
kinds of conflicts are accompanied by great ritual fanfare and governed by
conventions centred on honour. These sorts of conflicts will only generate high
levels of violence and mobilization if a change in the ranking system has deeper
social implications. These conflicts will, therefore, cluster towards the limited end
of the warfare spectrum.
Wars about rules, on the other hand, are about more than whether one person
or another is the ruler or the relative rank of actors. In these kinds of conflicts the
stakes are much higher, involving some aspect of the institutional structure of
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society. Why this should be the case has to do with the nature of institutions and
lies at the heart of Clausewitz’s logic even if he did not articulate it in quite these
terms. One way to understand institutions is as legitimate power configurations
within society. What this implies is that changing them involves resistance for the
simple reason that individuals have vested interests in them and will protect them
through non-violent and, if the stakes are high enough, violent means (see Scott
1987; 1992). When all that is changing in a conflict is who is at the top, there is little
need to engage in large-scale violence and mobilization (and presumably the
presence of both of these variables is positively to be avoided given the
desirability of a smooth transition of power). This suggests that changing
institutional configurations will only occur as is required for the establishment of
new forms of authority (‘new’ being understood on a spectrum defined by the
degree to which reformed institutional configurations fit with pre-existing
structures); the more change required, the more total the stakes and hence the
more total the warfare. Note again that this argument says nothing about why
individuals choose to go to war. For the purpose of this theory individuals could
be motivated by true belief in the superiority of one social system over another or
simply engage in war for more narrowly selfish reasons;10 in either case, the
outcome is the same. What matters for this theory is the need to change social
structures in order to accomplish whatever goal the actors may have. The more
institutions that are threatened with change the greater the mobilization and the
greater the violence.

The nature of the actors

Clausewitz’s logic inevitably pushes us in the direction of asking how the nature
of the actors engaged in conflict determines the observed patterns of warfare. It is

10
For example, it is difficult to reach a final conclusion on what motivated Augusto
Pinochet to seize power: whether he was motivated by personal contempt for
contemporary ‘leftist’ social institutions or whether he wanted to transform said
institutions through the application of neoliberal economic reforms in sincere hope of
saving the economy. But the institutions nonetheless changed dramatically. See Muñoz
(2008).
 A social theory of war 11

important to note that the primary distinction in political science between civil
and international spheres (which translate into the distinct subdisciplines of
comparative politics and international relations [IR]) does not enter into the
picture here; indeed, the distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘international’ war is
largely irrelevant. The theory predicts that regardless of the legal standing of the
actors (for example, the presence or absence of sovereignty) all conflicts will
cluster into types (defined in terms of degree of social mobilization and the
observed patterns of violence) depending upon the stakes of the conflict. This
approach has the power of providing a unified framework for the understanding
of war across time and place and without regard to the distinction of ‘civil’ or
‘international’. The implication of the theory is that more important than whether
a conflict is civil or international is the degree to which key social institutions are
impacted upon, and furthermore that it is the response of social groups to threats
that explains the degree of mobilization and the levels of violence.
This is not to suggest that the identity of the actors is irrelevant. If war is a
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political process it is also by definition about social interactions and can, therefore,
be described as a social relationship. In social relationships the range and types of
interactions matter and are related to the degree to which the actors are similar or
dissimilar. For example, in most times and places the probability is that kinship
will only be established among groups meeting certain criteria (whether religious,
ethnic, social rank or something else of that ilk). Being able to establish kinship ties
allows groups to engage in particular forms of cooperation that are not possible
with groups that are outside the defined boundaries of kinship. This does not
mean that cooperation with groups outside the boundaries of kinship is
impossible; only that the forms it can take will be generally less dense and of
shorter duration. Similarly, conflict between societies that are similarly organized,
while frequent (simply the density of interaction predicts that), will be of
particular kinds that are a function of proximity. Conflicts over succession (by far
the most frequent form in most societies, the most spectacular exception to this
rule being democracies) can only occur between two actors (usually literally)
related to one another in very close ways. These are very much like family
disputes over property, which while seemingly intense and important to the
participants are unlikely to lead to a redefinition of the very meaning of property
(at most a change in the rules by which property is transmitted—an important but
not earth-shattering modification in property rights).
Actors engaged in limited conflict must generally be closely related to one
another by some basic criterion (whether it be democracy, aristocracy, religion or
nationalism and the like). There are exceptions to this rule, but by and large it
seems to hold.11 This implies that limited warfare is a phenomenon to be
observed only under circumstances where by some criterion the actors recognize
one another as equals. The establishment of the relative rank and status of actors
is the stuff both of the realm of high politics as well as of primatology (see
Sapolsky 2006); what concerns us here is that the mutual recognition of equality
is by definition a rule-bounded relationship that implies acceptance of the terms

11
For example, the limited wars fought between various Italian city-states and various
Islamic powers of the Levant. These conflicts, which were interspersed with Crusades, were
always about trading rights and access and in these cases wars has the semblance of a
lawsuit, restraint governing the exercise of violence for obvious reasons.
 12 Vivek Swaroop Sharma

of how the game is played. This along with updated information and accurate
expectations of punishment for defection means that conflict is necessarily policy
oriented, with strong overtones of the lawsuit in these cases. Moving up and
down the ranking system often involves violence, but in ways that are
predictable and occur in the context of rules that limit the extent of violence and
mobilization. In short, conflict will be pursued up to the point of resolution by
the criteria of accepted rules or to the limits of endurance under the prevailing
social and political structures but falling far short of total mobilization or
structural changes of any great magnitude.12 This kind of political game can be
observed the world over from ancient Greece to nineteenth-century Europe. It
almost always occurs within stable political communities of closely related types
of groups.
If limited warfare is a condition of similarity then total warfare is a function of
difference. Why this should be the case has, again, to do with the nature of
institutions, aspects of which have already been discussed. Institutions, as defined
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above, can be understood as legitimate configurations of power. Furthermore,

institutions do not exist in isolation from one another, but instead exist in an
entangling web with other institutions in society. Changing or overthrowing
particular power configurations can vary in magnitude and the degree of
collateral impact on other nodal points of power and authority within a society.
When challenges to it are sufficiently threatening the stakes are raised, as are the
levels of mobilization and its consequent expression in resistance and violence.
This is precisely what happened in the wars of religion. Opting out of the Catholic
Church was by definition political treason for a very good reason: the entire
authority structure of Latin Europe was intertwined with the Church and an
attack on it was bound to be resisted on a grand scale because of its implications
for all kinds of authority within society. Clausewitz regrettably was uninterested
in the history of Europe prior to the eighteenth century. Had he pondered the
European conflicts of the Reformation he would have come closer to
understanding the full implications of his work.
The same logic at work in ‘internal’ conflicts over rules applies even more
emphatically to those involving outsiders. Conflicts with outsiders can be
classified into two basic types based on the relative degree of domination
involved. The first kind involves those encompassing areas with low implications
understood in terms of social institutions. The best example of this that comes to
mind is certain categories of trading disputes. Further down the scale of
domination the stakes rise because the categories of institutions being altered
become rapidly more and more central to the social order. These range from
relatively informal imperial arrangements that preserve political autonomy and
aspects of internal affairs, to outright dominion and social transformation.
Examples of these kinds of conflicts abound in our contemporary world and
require no further elaboration. In these conflicts resistance is much greater,
resolutions to disputes much harder and by and large violence and social

12
This was the experience of old regime war. All wars ended when the actors were
financially exhausted and could not continue without profound changes in social structures
that would have challenged the basis of aristocratic power. Needless to say, given what they
were fighting about, it was never worth pushing things that far.
 A social theory of war 13

mobilization/displacement levels are high.13 In the contemporary world it is these

categories of conflicts that have raised, yet again, the problem of translating
military power into political outcomes.

Levels of analysis and war

As mentioned above, Clausewitz, as befitted the Prussian officer that he was,
never asked the question of why leaders go to war, and the social theory of war
presented above does not have much to say about it either. The model above
simply predicts that the higher the stakes of political conflict are (understood in
social institutional terms), the more total the warfare (measured in terms of the
degree of mobilization and attending social dislocation as well as the type and
degree of violence). Furthermore, at the heart of the social model is an
institutional account of why the degree of similarity in the actors can account for
where the stakes are likely to be in a conflict and therefore predict the levels of
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warfare. Higher levels of institutional change required to achieve a goal will lead
to more intense levels of warfare and violence. The burden of the argument at
this stage is to show why this is true irrespective of the actual motives of
individual leaders.
At this point a levels-of-analysis framework is useful. Political scientists have
gained great analytical leverage by dividing the problem of politics into three
levels of analysis: individual, unit and system. As is the case in other disciplines
like physics or economics where the level of analysis is institutionalized in the
boundaries of subdisciplines, this is only partially true in political science.
In economics the distinction between micro and macro levels is fundamental to
the structure of the discipline and it is widely accepted that the logics of the laws
that operate at one level do not translate easily to another. Similarly in physics,
quantum mechanics provides a coherent account of the very micro-level
behaviour of particles. However, once the level of analysis is lifted to higher
levels of aggregation the laws of quantum mechanics rapidly break down and
another set of the laws of physics is required (for example, to explain planetary
motion). Similarly, the account provided above operates at the macro level; that is,
it is an explanation of how groups interact within systems of groups and why the
degree of their similarity has explanatory power measured in observable terms
(violence, dislocation and mobilization). This naturally raises the question of what
is happening at the level of the individual and the relationship of what is
happening at this level to higher levels of aggregation.
Why individual motivations are irrelevant for the predictive power of the
model has to do with the nature of political domination. Domination, while a
theoretical concept, has tremendous empirical resonance and is easy to identify
when it is encountered. The exercise of authority is not, of course, an abstraction
and must, therefore, be translated into action through institutions of specific
configurations and fit with other institutions and nodal points of power within the

13
It is important to state that in the modern world particular categories of intervening
variables exist that seek to restrain the exercise of violence. These institutions, such as the
UN, can help move the levels of warfare towards the limited side of the spectrum.
However, as the US is rediscovering in Iraq, simply reducing the levels of violence cannot
address the political problems that made the actors resort to violence in the first instance.
 14 Vivek Swaroop Sharma

society. The greater the mismatch between the institutions through which
dominion is expressed and other institutions within society the higher the level of
friction (which can be understood in terms of transaction costs) encountered in the
expression of domination. What happens when one society dominates another
ranges from the symbiotic and the harmonious to the outright takeover and
transformation of social organization. From an individual-level perspective the
expression of domination can occur for any number of reasons and indeed for
many reasons simultaneously, some of which the actors themselves only dimly
understand. But in order for an actor to exercise authority in a radically different
institutional environment they will have to make alterations in the basic
institutional structures of the targeted society.
What this suggests is that the questions of why leaders choose to go to war and
how they establish their authority are distinct questions that occur at different
levels of analysis. An individual could go to war for any number of reasons but if
his or her ultimate objective is the establishment of some kind of domination then
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it will have to occur through particular kinds of institutions (depending, of course,

upon the desired level of domination, the distance between existing and desired
institutional configurations, and the prevailing local conditions). The establish-
ment of new institutions and the reform of existing ones will need to be carried out
in particular directions irrespective of individual motivation.

The social theory of war

The social theory of war builds upon aspects of Clausewitz’s work to produce a
different perspective on war. The theory begins by distinguishing between war
and warfare. It then moves to a typology of war based upon the political stakes of
conflict. The stakes, understood on a continuum defined on the ends by rulership
and rules, determines where on a continuum of limited and total warfare a conflict
is likely to fall. It further states that the stakes of war are a function of the internal
structures of the actors and how they relate, in terms of social organization, to one
another. The theory is grounded in an institutional understanding of politics and
society. With these few simple moving parts the social theory of war makes
testable predictions about the levels of warfare (measured in terms of the degree of
mobilization and attending social dislocation as well as the type and degree of
violence). Furthermore, these predictions hold irrespective of individual-level
motivations. In future work I will formalize the model and test it against empirical
data. For the purposes of this article it is sufficient to conclude by considering
some of the implications of the social theory of war for the political science
literature on war and conflict.

Implications
The social theory of war provides a very different conceptual landscape from the
one current in political science and in the public domain. The theory presented
above puts a different lens on existing literature within the discipline of political
science as well as other literature relating to problems of domination (especially
relating to post-colonial studies and globalization). I will develop the social theory
of war to address literature marginal to the concerns of political scientists
 A social theory of war 15

elsewhere. Here I will restrict myself to two major concerns within political
science: (1) the sophisticated civil wars literature and (2) the IR literature on war.

Concepts and measurement

The conflation of war and warfare leads to measurement and conceptual
problems. If war and warfare are distinct, then what is being measured in
standard accounts that rely on battlefield casualties is not war but warfare. This is
problematic in several ways. The levels of violence may or may not indicate
progress towards the resolution of a conflict. Because warfare is distinct from war,
progress in the resolution of a war may have little to do with actual levels of
killings and wounding. Many different variables can independently affect
observed levels of casualties. Most importantly the relationship of battle to
political outcomes is far from obvious. War is a political process in which certain
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things are at stake; how these contests are resolved is only partially and
problematically linked to the exercise of violence. It is reductionist to define war in
terms of casualties; the alternative is to develop different categories of indices and
attempt to operationalize them. I have suggested a few in the second section of
this article—variables relating to levels of mobilization and social displacement as
well as to casualties; these should take into account who is being killed as well as
simply numbers in order to map the direction of violence. This would need to be
done with a clear understanding of how these variables relate to one another
theoretically as well as to the questions being asked. Conceptually the failure to
distinguish between war and warfare has generated problems relating to how
violence relates or does not relate to conflict.

Levels of analysis and IR

The second issue relates to the kinds of questions that are being asked; in other
words, the levels-of-analysis problem in political science. Despite the fact that the
levels-of-analysis framework is very familiar in political science, it has not been
applied with due sensitivity and caution to the problem of war. Several kinds of
questions dominate the field of IR, most relating to the immediate causes. This
places the emphasis of the problem of war at the level of individual decision-
makers, which, using different methodologies (especially involving formal
models and proofs), seeks to explain how it is that rational individuals go to war;
answers usually hinge on issues of information, coordination, decision-making
and the like. These approaches have yielded insights of great importance (one of
which I address more specifically below—the insights from game theory on
cooperation), but they gain their analytical rigour at the expense of social variables
critical to understanding conflict, as outlined above. To explain why an individual
would rationally choose to go to war is to ignore war as a political process and to
treat it as an event whose resolution is of little consequence and merely a function
of an individual’s preferences and the resources at their command.
Addressing James Fearon’s (1995) deductive tour de force from the perspective
of the social theory of war, there are two main points: (a) Fearon, as the above
discussion implies, places the problem of war at the level of the individual
decision-maker. This is problematic for the reasons raised above. That is, war is
 16 Vivek Swaroop Sharma

social process and relationships and not simply an event that can be
reduced to individual-level factors. (b) Following from this first point are the
explanations that Fearon finds persuasive. The account provided in the social
theory of war uses the logic of institutions to show why there is resistance to
domination and how to predict where it comes from. In Fearon’s terms the social
theory of war says that in cases of domination bargains will be difficult to arrive at
because of issue indivisibility. This is because of the nature of authority and how it
is exercised in society. The other two explanations that Fearon finds most
persuasive, bluffing and commitment problems, are more apt to be characteristics
of stable systems of similar polities engaged in limited-stakes conflict.14 The
limitations of strictly individual-level analysis of conflict and cooperation have
been recognized by some political scientists. In the Logic of political survival and ‘An
institutionalist explanation of the democratic peace’ Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and
collaborators (2003; 1999) provide sophisticated accounts of politics by operating
at higher levels of aggregation. They begin with the insight that leaders must have
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supporters and therefore the dynamics of how leaders maintain support is

fundamental to the problem of politics. Using this powerful insight they use the
concept of the ‘selectorate’ (S)—the group of people within society who play a role
in the selection of leaders. Within this group is a smaller subgroup of people
comprising the ‘winning coalition’ (W)—those people whose support a leader
requires in order to stay in power. The ratio of W to S differs from polity to polity
depending upon the institutional structures; that is, in democracies W is large
relative to that in autocracies and de Mesquita et al reason that this fact explains
why democracies are better at keeping leaders accountable (and therefore likely to
reward their W with ‘public’ rather than ‘private’ goods). The implication of this is
that autocratic rulers are less encumbered by the risks of engaging in war and are,
therefore, more likely to engage in them. Similarly, democratic leaders have to
perform well in carrying out their responsibilities or else face removal. In both
cases, what is carrying explanatory weight is how institutions constrain individual
leaders in their decision-making process. This approach, while a great
improvement over purely individual-level explanations because of its sensitivity
to the institutional settings of decision-making, shares with individual-level
explanations a concern for how and why leaders choose to go to war. As such,
while it goes a considerable distance, and provides strong predictive power, it is
unable to address questions about the types of war and warfare or the relation
between violence and coercion and political authority. What the social theory of
war offers is an account of the processes unleashed once different kinds of
groups comes into conflict regardless of what the individual-level motivations are.
This discussion leads directly to the next point, the paradox of victory.

‘Victory’ and ‘defeat’

Because war is a political process, the issue of winning or losing is one that is a lot
less conceptually secure than it may at first glance appear. That violence has some

14
Incidentally, Fearon mirrors James Scott in that concepts of public and hidden
transcript among subjected actors provide a theoretical substantialization of bluffing and
commitment problems (see Scott 1992).
 A social theory of war 17

relationship to political outcomes cannot be doubted. What is less certain is

exactly how the exercise of violence relates to political outcomes. Particular
conflicts make this point clearer than others (for example, Vietnam or present-day
Iraq), but nonetheless it is clear that a great deal of work in political science
assumes that resources and technology translate into real authority on the ground
(see, for example, Waltz 1989; Morgenthau 1961). This is particularly evident in the
realist and neo-realist traditions. It is also manifested in the public domain by
accounts excessively dependent on raw coercive power and superior technology
carrying explanatory weight.

Balance of power
The concept of ‘balance of power’, while much maligned in recent years, has had a
long life in IR because of its elegant simplicity and apparent explanatory power.
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What the balance of power attempts to capture is the relationship of like units in
regular interaction based upon the material resource bases and, by extension,
military potential of the units. The fundamental logic underlying the concept of
balance of power relates to shifts in the relative rank and status of actors, a
powerful insight that is fundamental to understanding any kind of society
(including primates and other social animals like wolves). Depending upon the
school of thought in question, defined in terms of the ‘polarity’ of the system (for
example uni-, bi- or multipolar), different kinds of predictions can be arrived at
about how the stability (defined in terms of the frequency of war) of a system of
actors, in which relative resources are constantly shifting and the actors seek to
correlate actual rank and status with their perceived levels of strength, can be
attained. This logic also explains why systems of actors can be maintained in the
face of natural pressures of monopoly of authority.
As is to be expected, there was indeed a great deal of conflict over relative
rank and status in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, as is the case in
other places and time periods. There are also a lot of conflicts, particularly in
the period 1789 –1848, which were not simply about the relative rank and status
of actors under stable rules. One of the major problems with balance-of-power
theories from the perspective of the social theory of war is that they assume,
without demonstrating it, that all wars are fundamentally of the same type (the
boundary line of the claim being sovereignty). In other words, the balance of
power does in fact capture an important logic in IR but only under certain
conditions (which Hans Morgenthau, interestingly enough, recognized). Those
conditions, outlined above, are a function of systems of polities that are
organized along common lines in some key ways. The conflicts that occur under
these circumstances (when not about some aspect of the ‘rules’) are limited and
about relative rank and status. Examples of these kinds of systems of polities
can be found from ancient Greece (prior to the Peloponnesian War) to
nineteenth-century Europe. The concept of balance of power is, therefore, useful
for capturing an aspect of the interaction of units within an international
system, but only under certain circumstances. It should be clear that the social
theory of war delivers a useful definition of ‘an international system’, one of the
deepest and longest-running debates within IR. An ‘international system’ is a
system of regularly interacting groups closely related to one another in their
 18 Vivek Swaroop Sharma

internal structure. The definition, of course, is consistent with the institutionalist

understanding of international politics within IR.

‘Civil’ versus ‘international’ war

The fundamental division of labour in the political science study of war is between
those who study civil conflicts and those who study international ones. There are
very few scholars who work on both sides of the fence and those who do generally
bring insights from one domain to problems in another. The use of sovereignty as
the effective boundary between the two domains in which different conditions
apply is not a simple convenience but is instead pregnant with theoretical
implications. When coupled with a definition of war that reduces the
phenomenon to particular forms of violence, this leads to an overemphasis on
the state and its coercive potential as a fundamental variable in determining the
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typology of conflict current in the discipline. A much simpler account of war

defined in political terms reopens the social dimension of conflict and emphasizes
the interaction of groups, be they tribes, city-states, nation-states or any other form
of group. Wars about rulership are an almost universal occurrence and as a
category have more analytical power than placing them into a framework of the
sovereign state. That successional war can, under particular institutional
configurations, occur between sovereign states as well as being an internal
dispute only serves to emphasize the point. Similarly, while the current literature
on civil conflicts reports that those containing an ethnic dimension have higher
casualties than other forms of civil conflict, this finding should be understood as a
dimension of a wider phenomenon of what happens in other kinds of wars about
rules. The social dimensions of war also open up perspectives on how identity
issues can play a first-order role at one level of analysis while being irrelevant at
another. Stathis Kalyvas’s analyses fit in nicely here. His work shows that causes
of war and the patterns of violence are analytically distinct; in the context of the
social theory of war the logic of violence and the logic of political motivations
operate at different levels of analysis (Kalyvas 2005; 2006). What Kalyvas shows is
that under certain conditions individuals caught up in a contested zone will
harness violence towards personal-level objectives. However, to say that
individuals will seek advantages under conditions of warfare is to say very little
about war as a political process, for, as Clausewitz emphasizes, the logics of war
and warfare, while connected, are distinct. It follows that a micro-foundational
approach has its limits and that more macro-level perspectives are needed to
understand the phenomenon of war. The questions of war and warfare are, of
course, connected, but not in obvious ways, and this is an area of research that
should be undertaken in political science.

Game theory and the emergence of cooperation

One of the most powerful insights into problems of cooperation has been
generated by repeated-iteration games (see, for example, Jervis 1978; Fearon 1998).
Despite tremendous variation in them their intuition is powerful and, with
qualifications, can explain how limited forms of cooperation do emerge in the
context of societies engaged in conflict over rules. The logic underlying repeated
 A social theory of war 19

games is that, while the incentives to defect are likely to be high in a single-
iteration game, the fact that two actors are engaged in a relationship with long
time horizons which includes expectations of repeated interactions will make the
emergence of cooperation more likely, all other social variables notwithstanding.
Why this should be the case has to do with how game theory understands
enforcement. Game theorists reason that enforcement must come in the form of
punishment for defection; furthermore, this enforcement comes from other parties
engaged in the relationship and not from some higher authority. What this simple
and elegant assumption predicts, then, is that—ceteris paribus—two parties
engaged in conflict will over time develop forms of cooperation regardless of their
differences in social organization, because of factors inherent in long-term
relationships (that is, the ability to punish). At first glance this prediction may
appear to be problematic for the social theory of war; however, the insights of
game theory relating to cooperation can be integrated into the framework being
presented here. When two very different groups are engaged in conflict with long
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time horizons the logic of cooperative games correctly suggests that the type of
warfare will shift away from a maximum point (reached early in the relationship)
towards more limited forms of cooperation. However, this logic will push the type
of warfare only so far because structural factors will prevent the type of warfare
from moving to a fully limited type. This may be best appreciated in the context of
the development of prisoner exchanges during the wars of religion in Europe and
the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries (see Maalouf 1984). In both
cases, the initial encounters between the groups was, as is to be expected, violent
in the extreme with low levels of restraint in the treatment of prisoners, civilians
and the like. Over time, however, in both cases, slowly, and as a direct
consequence of the logic of retaliation by the other side, systems of prisoner
exchange and ransoming came into existence—often over the objection of
hardliners, as was the case in the sixteenth-century Netherlands, where Philip II of
Spain discarded all conventions of warfare only to be forced to scale back and
exercise some degree of restraint (Tyerman 2006). Systems of ransoming and
prisoner exchange also developed, slowly, in Syria and Palestine during the
Crusades. In both cases the exercise of restraint towards enemies understood in
religious terms was controversial and problematic. The key point here is that
forms of cooperation that will develop under these circumstances are limited in
type and restricted in scope. The normal ‘internal tools’ of cooperation (above all
marriage and kinship ties in this time period) can never be used in these cases
because of structural barriers that can only be overcome by the transformation of
one of the actors along the lines of the other. This suggests that the predictive
power of game-theoretical models would be enhanced by incorporating social
variables and disaggregating cooperation into types of varying densities and
intensities.

Conclusion
This article has attempted to present a new theory of war: the ‘social theory of
war’. It takes as its starting point the insights into the nature and types of war
developed by Clausewitz and builds a theory with predictive power that unifies a
substantial range of the work on war and conflict within political science. As has
 20 Vivek Swaroop Sharma

been argued here the theory is simple with few movable parts and explains
aspects of conflict across time and space as well as the analytical categories used
by most political scientists. With these few movable parts a new perspective on
traditional problems in the field can be obtained.

Notes on contributor
Vivek Swaroop Sharma is Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Copenhagen. He was previously assistant professor of political
science at Yale University and founding co-director of the Program on Religion
and Politics at Yale. His work focuses on religion, order, conflict and violence with
a historical sociological bent. He is the author of two forthcoming books: War,
authority and state: European state formation reconsidered and Religion, authority and
violence, along with a number of forthcoming articles in political science and
sociology journals. Email: clioinarms@gmail.com
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