War in Tigray: Can Reading Clausewitz Help Us Understand ‘New’ Civil Wars in Africa?
Carl von Clausewitz joined the Prussian army as an infantryman in 1793 at the age of 13. His early experiences in soldiering would not only set the course of his own life but produce an intellectual legacy that would transcend the cultural, political, and technological contours of the Napoleonic wars and provide a blueprint for military strategy for centuries to come. Clausewitz hoped that his magnum opus On War (published in 1832) would not be forgotten after a year or two. Today, his work remains the conceptual starting point for any serious study on the theory of war and the forces that shape it.
Clausewitz’s definitive nature of war was invoked in a trinitarian concept of enmity, purpose and interaction. Clausewitz insisted that war always originates from a political condition, with his famous maxim that “War is a continuation of policy by other means” (Clausewitz, 1:25). Contemporary approaches to the study of warfare have challenged the continued relevance of Clausewitz’s conceptions for understanding modern, intra-state conflict. A ‘New War’ paradigm questions the primacy, or even the presence of political interests, and suggests that war is not always a means to an end (See Kaldor, 2012;23, Münkler, 2005:5-31, van Creveld, 1991:124).
Taking up the challenge, this paper examines the applicability of Clausewitz to the Tigray conflict, a brutal civil war that erupted in Ethiopia in November 2020, and which prima facie meets the differentiating characteristics of the New War paradigm. On War offers a range of analytical tools for understanding warfare, however within the limitations of this essay we will focus on the trinitarian perspective and specifically the counterclaim from ‘New War theorists’ that politics can be divorced from war. First, this paper will define a Clausewitzian analytical framework. Second, a short overview of the Tigray war will be provided demonstrating how it conforms to the New War narrative. Thirdly, shortcomings in the new war interpretation will be pointed out, revealing the main argument of this paper – that a closer reading, through a Clausewitzian lens, offers a more accurate understanding of the war. This paper concludes by revalidating Clausewitz’s propositions as relevant for designing political responses aimed at achieving peaceful resolutions.
Clausewitz’s Trinity and the Primacy of Policy
The most enduring premise in On War, is that “War is an instrument of politik”. Clausewitz emphasizes that “the conception of war is only part of a political intercourse, [war is] by no means an independent thing in itself” (8:6b). War is sculpted by political interests in terms of the stated purpose through which it arises – “taking up the sword in place of the pen” (Ibid.); the political object of its prosecution – which is to force an opponent to comply to our will (Ibid., 1:4); the intensity and method with which it unfolds – “the political object […] will be the standard for determining both the aim of the military force and the amount of effort made” (Ibid., 1:11); and the terms of concluding war – ranging from the overthrow of the enemy, or negotiations for peace (Ibid., 8:7). This eminently political understanding of war reveals Clausewitz’s “one single clear idea” – a steering concept for discerning the true nature of war from amongst the complexity of war’s various elements and relationships (Ibid., 8:1). A conflict devoid of political conception would simply be senseless violence.
Clausewitz placed political purpose, which provides the pure reason to which war is subject, in a “wondrous trinity” of three equal tendencies, creating a comprehensive theory of war. These comprise of the contrasting “blind natural force” of underlying enmity – “the passions which break forth in war must have a latent existence”, and the regulating variables of probabilities and chance in the actual combat, including the struggle, friction and pauses in fighting which limit war from reaching its absolute, devastating “ideal” (Ibid., 1:28). Some scholars have ordered these tendencies into a hierarchy of institutions that reflect Clausewitz’s state-centred examples: the populace at the base, the military, and the government controlling, but this explanation conflicts with Clausewitz’s true meaning (Herberg-Rothe, 2009:208). More accurately, Clausewitz described each tendency as “deep-rooted in their nature and variable in their degree” so that the interaction and integration of the three forces will shape the whole (1:28). Thus, the primacy of policy relates to its causative premise, rather than any dominant nature. Arguably, Clausewitz deliberately invoked the synthetic metaphor of the Christian mystery to convey a sense of three distinct parts which form an indivisible whole (Echevarria, 2007(1):70).
The trinitarian concept presents the objective tendencies of war, which can be seen to have a countervailing influence on each other. In book 2, chapter 4: Methodicism, Clausewitz introduces principles that would have been inspired by a Kantian system of objective and subjective laws, wherein objective laws are the logical truths applicable to every rational being, and subjective laws are valid only at an individual level (Reath, 2010:31-54, Schiepers, 2016:50). Applying this objective-subjective construct to conflict, Clausewitz presented the sine qua non of war, consisting of the objective trinitarian characteristics – enmity, fighting, and political purpose; conflated with subjective differences in the means and inclinations of conflicts – weaponry, techniques, terrains, none of which can be applied absolutely, but which can amplify or de-emphasize war’s objective conditions (Echevarria, 2007(1):22-25). Clausewitz elaborated on these differences:
“Half-civilised Tartars, the Republics of ancient times, the feudal lords, and commercial cities of the Middle Ages […] all carry on war in their own way, carry it on differently, with different means, for different aims” (8:3b).
Although Clausewitz insisted that all are “subject to the general conclusions to be deduced on the nature of war” (Ibid.), the analytical strength of the Kantian objective-subjective model allowed Clausewitz to explain why all wars are simultaneously the same, but different (Echevarria, 2007(2):99). A concept we will now examine in considering the Tigray conflict.
A ‘New War’ in Ethiopia?
From 1991-2018, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) dominated Ethiopia’s ruling coalition. The TPLF’s ethnocratic authoritarian regime federalized Ethiopia into ethnolinguistic jurisdictions, with Tigrayan identity heavily influencing access to opportunity, and concentrating control of the country’s resources with Tigrayan officials. In 2018, Abiy Ahmed, a member of Ethiopia’s Oromo ethnic group, came to power in a recalibration of government. Abiy’s democratic reforms targeted TPLF leaders and relegated the party to an estranged regional government whilst attempting to open up political space to bridge Ethiopia’s ethnic fault lines. A mandate for progressive accommodations could have been sought in the 2020 elections which were called off due to COVID-19. The TPLF defiantly proceeded with regional elections, rejecting the Ethiopian government’s legitimacy, and claiming self-rule. In November, TPLF insurgents ‘pre-emptively’ attacked a government military installation, provoking federal security forces to punish ordinary Tigrayan citizens, driving half-a-million people from their homes, and stoking ethnic tensions across Ethiopia’s ten semi-autonomous ethnic states, each armed with its own militia (Cheeseman and Woldemariam, 2020).
On War was written against the backdrop of conventional inter-state conflict in the early nineteenth century. Whereas the old wars of Clausewitz’s era have been imputed with qualities such as ‘justice-seeking, ideological, popular, and conclusive’, contemporary ‘new wars’ fought at the intra-state level have been stigmatized as criminal, predatory, ‘loot-seeking’ and marred by human rights abuses (Kaldor, 1999:66, Kalyvas, 2001:99-118). Reports of atrocities on all sides of the Ethiopian conflict, committed by armed civilians unfamiliar with the rules of war, seeking ethnic eradication through inter-communal violence rather than ‘subduing the will of the enemy’, challenge the Clausewitzian logic of a guiding political objective, or that battle/combat is the ‘real activity of warfare’ (Clausewitz, 4:1). Refugees’ testimonies describe ‘indiscriminate artillery fire on civilian areas, massive looting, machete-wielding ethnic militiamen, and summary executions’ (Brown and Devermont, 2021).
Kaldor claims that new wars centre on an axis of irresolvable ethnic divisions to perpetuate endless war as an enterprise for seizing control of rents and economic privileges (2010:278). Indeed, the sudden liberalization of Ethiopia enabled leaders to conjure collective ethnic grievances to sustain their claim to zero-sum economic control, making little effort to set out a political manifesto (Bieber and Goshu, 2020, Collier and Hoeffler, 1999). Abiy’s reforms included plans to privatise the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation and energy sector assets worth $7 billion, threatening the interests of TPLF officials who sit on the boards of these massive state-owned conglomerates, and who control $3.5 billion of foreign aid annually (Melesse, 2020). Whilst underlying hostility has been mobilised, it is debatable whether the war is an instrument for pursuing reasonable political interests with military strategies, or for simply pursuing greed (Keen, 2005:11). Framing the Tigray war as a ‘humanitarian disaster’ caused by extremist ethnic repression through criminal violence appears to detach war from political intercourse and the trinitarian concept, rendering Clausewitzian analysis obsolete. This supports the view that today’s civil wars present a new and terrifying phenomenon; ‘they are wars about nothing at all’ (Enzensberger, 1994:30).
Clausewitz’s Relevance
Clausewitz maintained that “war belongs necessarily to the feelings” (1:3). The Tigray war is just the latest pulsation of fierce centre-periphery disputes in the country that have existed since the foundation of Ethiopia as an empire state. The intensity of this underlying enmity does not disqualify the other tendencies. Clausewitz asserted that “in one kind of war the political element seems almost to disappear, whilst in another, it occupies a prominent place, we may still affirm that one is as political as the other” (1:26). The bloody reality of the Tigray war appears to be divorced from politics, dominated by militias pursuing ethnic and economic agendas, but On War describes how social organisations other than a state can carry out war. This inclusive concept means that policy may derive from the orientation and identity of a community, embedding political purpose in the goals of that community and uniting the group in an outcome, in this case, liberation (Herberg-Rothe, 2009:210-211). The “trustee” of political responsibility was immaterial to Clausewitz (8:6b), and polemics which attach policy only to the state, and fighting only to an army, reveal a myopic European/colonial understanding of politics and warfare. Internal wars which foreground ethnicity may not involve broader ideological or political considerations of interest to Western audiences, but this does not invalidate a political exchange:
“The way politics is perceived and experienced is not necessarily the same in Africa as in other parts of the world […] politics may not mean democratic state politics. Politics can involve a dominant role for one individual, a dictatorship and patrimonialism [which are] facets of political life in many African countries” (Duyvesteyn, 2005:8).
In Ethiopia, ethnic resentments have been aggravated by an emerging political entity adopting the procedures of democratic governance in opposition to the Marxist-Leninist system of personalised rule, prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa. Such a system underscored the TPLF regime, leading to an unworkable constitutional situation and a contest between opposing political visions, which happen to correlate with ethnic divisions. In such fault line wars, control of people, territory and economic resources has become a highly charged symbol of inviolable group rights (Huntington, 2002:252).
Political primacy should not be over-emphasized however, Clausewitz’s balanced theory places limits on the subordinating nature of politics during warfare. As it meets the dynamic forces of violence and chance, the political object ‘must accommodate itself to the nature of the means’ (1:23). The depravity of the means in Ethiopia resembles mindless barbarism, but contrapuntal to Kaldor’s assertion that new war actors ‘deliberately violate the war convention and growing body of human rights law’ (2010:277), in developing world conflicts cruelty, starvation and looting are legitimate expressions of violence for insurgent strategists where factions lack the sophisticated weaponry for a decisive blow. If the ability to protect citizens is a central feature of an enemy’s power, directing energies at that feature is a legitimate objective, which Clausewitz defined as a war’s “centre of gravity” (Freedman, 2013:91). Likewise, an emphasis on wresting control of resources is a rational political objective during a wartime economy, offering an alternative explanation to the ‘grievance-greed’ nexus. With deficient resources, the inevitable friction caused by such tactics and restraints leads to “low-intensity conflict”, which can be mistaken for “war for war’s sake” (Ellis, 2003:40-43). Looking beyond the subjective characteristics of the conflict, all of Clausewitz’s trinitarian forces remain intact: political purpose, armed force, and hostile emotions.
Conclusions
Non-trinitarian explanations which claim that a fundamentally new nature of war is observable in the Tigray conflict neglect complex political contexts and tend to calcify Clausewitz’s definitions. Attempts to update Clausewitz’s anachronisms can lead to equally problematic Western normative assumptions about politics and warfare which can have serious consequences for policy design:
“Facts and details regarding the true nature of conflicts and the forces igniting them are frequently lost in international efforts to broker peace deals that often crumble as soon as they have been signed” (Desalegn, 2020).
Criminalising all sides in a new war creates a ‘moral equivalency’ which avoids proper accountability and may lead the international community to push for superficial and fragile power-sharing bargains, which are often short-term and defective solutions. On War provides the contours within which war happens, an analytical framework that transcends the subjective nature of African conflict whilst also encompassing African political traditions, and cultural and economic causes. According to former U.S. National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, the lesson is:
“To be sceptical of concepts that divorce war from their enduring political nature […] strategies that simply target leaders or forces do not address the human and political drivers of violence” (2020:432).
Clausewitz declared, “war has its own grammar but not its own logic” (8:6b). New wars demonstrate a subjective nature, but war itself is driven by a higher, objective logic. It is within this logic that productive research and effective policy choices can be located.
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