"Ideologies and Territories are the foundation of wars around the world"

The dramatic turn of events in Syria’s 13-year civil war has consumed the world’s attention for the past few weeks. A lightning rebel offensive ousted the country’s long-ruling dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and created the opportunity to end the country’s lengthy internal conflict. With hostilities still unfolding in parts of the country, lasting peace is far from certain, but the possibility of it alone is welcome news.

Given the drama in Syria, it was easy to overlook positive developments in another long-running war. On Dec. 4, the Ethiopian government reached a ceasefire with the Oromo Liberation Army, or OLA. Conflict between the government and various rebel groups in the Oromia region has been ongoing since the early 1970s, with the fighting between the Ethiopian government and the OLA having persisted after the Oromo Liberation Front, or OLF, splintered off following a peace deal in 2018. The conflict in Oromia was in addition to Ethiopia’s war against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which lasted from 2020 to 2022, and ongoing fighting in the Amhara region.

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Sadly, there might be another reason that the ceasefire in Ethiopia attracted little attention, a reason with ominous implications for Syria and the other conflicts raging around the world: It didn’t last, as the terms of the agreement have already been violated. Moreover, the ceasefire only addressed one aspect of one of the conflicts afflicting Ethiopia and inflicting a devastating toll on its people.

The continuation of Ethiopia’s interconnected internal conflicts is concerning in and of itself. But there are also worries that Ethiopia and its northern neighbor Eritrea, which itself seceded in 1991 from Ethiopia following a long and bloody civil war, are on the verge of conflict again. The two nations fought a devastating border war in the late 1990s followed by a frozen conflict until a peace settlement was reach in 2018. That settlement earned Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, but relations have deteriorated since then. Indeed, relations are tense between Addis Ababa and its other neighbors, Somalia—largely over efforts by Ethiopia, a landlocked country, to gain coastal access—and Egypt, due to disputes over Ethiopia’s massive dam project on the Nile River. Any one of these potential conflicts could destabilize the entire Horn of Africa.

The intractability of conflict in and around Ethiopia points to a broader concern, one worth reflecting upon as we close out another record year of global conflict: war’s persistence. According to the data collected by scholars of conflict, there has not been a single year in the past 200-plus years that did not witness a war somewhere on Earth. To be clear, wars don’t happen everywhere. Indeed, most places most of the time are free of war. In his recent book, “Why We Fight,” Chris Blattman notes that war is still the exception to daily life for many, adding that “even the bitterest of enemies prefer to loath one another in peace.” But war is always occurring somewhere on Earth. And for those living amid war, it is a devastating experience filled with the harshest cruelties that humans can inflict on each other.

Why war persists has long been seen as the fundamental problem facing humanity. Entire academic disciplines—including my own, international relations—are centered on understanding the persistence and causes of war. Recently Richard Overy, a historian of World War II, engaged in a comprehensive review of what is known about the causes of war across various academic disciplines. His conclusion was that, while the potential causes of war are many, the core feature of war is that it will never be eradicated.

What is clear is that the use of violence appears to be fundamentally related to a hard truth: Humans live on a planet that is finite in land and space.

That assessment stands in contrast to the view—perhaps most famously argued by Steven Pinker in his bestseller, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”—that violence of all types is diminishing, with war being no exception. But that seems hard to accept, both in light of specific instances of intractable conflict as well as the record number of conflicts globally in recent years. Even if the number of wars was in decline, which it wasn’t, war itself is far from over.

Why does war persist? Why is it that even if Ethiopia ends up enjoying peace sometime soon, another war is likely to take its place somewhere else? As Overy detailed in his book, there are many possible reasons.

Some scholars, such as the esteemed political scientist of the mid-20th century, Hans Morgenthau, placed the blame on human nature. As Morgenthau famously wrote in his classic, “Politics Among Nations,” “Men do not fight because they have arms. They have arms because they deem it necessary to fight.” Others traced the cause of war to the absence of a world government: States seek to defend themselves and even attack others out of fear. Alternatively, the lack of a world government means some states can greedily exploit others because there is no “global police” to call to stop them.

Others claim war persists because humans have only recently come to adopt democracy—which arguably impedes violence—as a form of government. While 2024 might have been a record year for conflict, it was also a record year for elections. With democracy on the rise, the hope is that if it can eventually succeed in countries that have resisted it, perpetual peace will be possible.

Still others consider the cause of war to be men’s dominance of international diplomacy: While war and violence are threats to all humans in the international system, they are specifically due to men having long held outsized influence in domestic political systems.

All of these explanations capture mechanisms that can lead to war in some instances, but not others. Unfortunately, it is unclear under what precise circumstances those factors—be they human nature, anarchy, lack of democracy or toxic masculinity—will trigger a war, and whether they operate alone or in combination. More work is needed to uncover and predict the onset of violence in specific instances.

What is clear is that the use of violence appears to be fundamentally related to a hard truth: Humans live on a planet that is finite in land and space, and historically the most effective means of controlling that space or moving others off of it is with the threat and, if necessary, the use of violence. This isn’t to say that all wars are due to the need to hold and control territory. But focusing on competition over territory—and over the competing meanings attached to that territory—can go a long way toward explaining the persistence of war.

War is persistent because the earth is finite. Indeed, the centrality of land in the persistence of conflict appears evident in the ongoing conflicts in Ethiopia. From the border dispute with Eritrea to the various internal conflicts in the country, all are centered on the need to control land.

And the fragility of the recent ceasefire agreement in Ethiopia underscores concerns over a similarly fragile ceasefire in Lebanon, as well as over the inability to reach a ceasefire for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and the risk of a return to civil war in Syria. As 2024 comes to a close, the problem of war’s persistence will sadly remain with us.

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