Tracing Ideational Change and Continuity in Concepts and Labels of War and Warfare in the North-Atlantic Area Since the End of the Cold War

冷战的结束促成了英美战略研究领域的转变：它将该领域从超级大国的竞争中解放出来，使其能够（重新）发现（核）大国战争以外的战争作为研究对象。这改变了实践者对战争的看法和学者对战争的研究，并引发了关于战争性质和性质变化的争论，一直持续到今天。冷战期间指导战争和战略研究的许多概念似乎已经变得无关紧要，因此必须创造新的概念来捕捉冷战后武装冲突的特征。这导致了战争和战略概念的真正扩散，导致一些评论家谈到“战略概念产业”，并抱怨战略研究领域的流行语，时尚和时尚。事实上，该领域的特点是一段时间内大量使用的概念，然后被另一个时髦的概念边缘化。“混合战争”和“网络战争”是最新的时尚;早期的例子包括“新战争”，“非对称战争/票价”和“反叛乱”。我研究的目的是了解冷战后的战争概念如何变得时髦和不时髦。对我来说，“时尚性”不仅与使用它的人数有关，还与这些概念被应用于越来越多的案例研究从而剥夺其意义的过程有关。通过追踪从流行到衰落或边缘化的过程，我想了解这种现象背后的原因和机制。通过追踪概念的兴衰、它们之间的变化和连续性的程度以及它们所基于的更广泛的（通常是隐含的）假设，我还旨在确定战略研究领域产生对战争的理解的更广泛的范式和模式。

The end of the Cold War has precipitated a shift in the Anglo-American field of Strategic Studies: it lifted the field from the superpower competition, allowing it to (re)discover wars other than (nuclear) great power wars as an object of inquiry. This has changed the ways practitioners think about war and scholars conduct research on war, and triggered a debate on the changing character and nature of war, which continues until today. Many concepts that had guided the study of war and strategy during the Cold War seem to have become irrelevant, so new concepts had to be created to capture the character of post-Cold War armed conflicts. This has caused a true proliferation of concepts of war and strategy that led some commentators speak of a 'strategic concepts industry' and complain about buzzwords, fads and fashions in the field of Strategic Studies. Indeed, the field is characterised by waves of concepts that are intensively used for some time, and then get marginalised by another fashionable concept. 'Hybrid war' and 'cyber war' are the latest of these fashion; earlier examples include 'new wars', 'asymmetric war/fare' and 'counterinsurgency'. The aim of my research is to understand how post-Cold War concepts of war become fashionable and unfashionable. 'Fashionability', for me, is not only about the number of people who use it, but also about the process through which these concepts are applied to ever-more case studies and thereby stripped of their meaning. Through process tracing periods of rise to fashionability and decline or marginalization, I want to understand the causes and mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. By tracing the rise and fall of concepts, the degree of change and continuity between them, and the broader (often implicit) assumptions they are based upon, I also aim to identify broader paradigms and patterns within which the field of Strategic Studies generates understandings about war.