My thought about the trailer that Mike posted keeps coming back into my skull as I've returned to this thread a couple of times.

The thought is: are the authors seeking to define "war" in legal terms or military terms; or are they creating some awful hybrid of legal and military mishmash ? Not having the book, I can't really say; but the trailer seems to point in the latter direction.

The terms "intra-state war [or inter-state war], civil war, and insurgency" are certainly terms used in I Law and LOAC to define certain situations, as to which different legal rules apply. I'll spare you the legal stuff for now.

What I fail to see is how legal terms can be transferred with any ulitility to the military realm without creating confusion. The concept of "small, medium, and big wars" (realizing that those terms are segments of a "violence" spectrum; and also realizing that a concomitant political struggle exists alongside the military struggle) seems a more useful construct. It also does not mix legal apples and military oranges - small, medium, and big wars are all armed conflicts legally, no more and no less.

Regards

Mike