War and the Institutional Differentiation of Modern Society

Many features of recent wars can be understood along the lines of a theory of society and institutional differentiation. Armed conflicts and armed forces partake in the trend toward the more pronounced structural differentiation and functional specification observable in various institutional domains, here most relevantly in the domain of politics. Notwithstanding the delimited structural location of wars, war personnel can be recruited from an entire populace according to the universalistic principles of modern society; but soldiers and other combatants will often hold roles in further institutional contexts as well, which gives rise to typical problems of the multiple inclusion and mutual (in)compatibility of roles. Irregular combatants can be seen to pursue an autonomous, non-governmental, "grassroots" inclusion in war. Last but not least, the issues of civilian casualties and the wide-spread public aversion to war can be interpreted according to the double theorem of inclusion and institutional differentiation.