By Robert Crowcroft

Today, many people seem to think that war and violence are of declining importance in the international system. In British politics, we see scepticism about the relevance of force manifested in the debate on the Strategic Defence Review. The view that military power is of doubtful utility underpins the arguments of most of the people who oppose the replacement of the UK's nuclear deterrent. And it has reared its head time and again in the claim that violent conflicts – from Iraq to Georgia and the Palestinian territories – are somehow a backwards aberration. War is seen as being particularly irrelevant for Western states, apart from the odd bit of peacekeeping. When inspected closely, however, there is no reason at all to think that war is declining, or that the usage of violence has less utility than it did in the past. Instead, those who make this claim turn out to simply be the usual peacenik sorts who should never be listened to; explain away all evidence that contradicts their views – like the inconvenient fact of the major spread of disorder and violence in the last two decades; and deserve no sympathy whatsoever.

This argument that 'war' is now a thing of the past for us in the West is connected to something else in public discourse: the rise of 'security' as the key paradigm rather than 'war', 'strategy', or even 'defence'. This assumption is held to by public commentators and academics alike. Universities offer courses in 'security studies' or 'peace studies', to match their degrees in 'development studies'. These degrees invariably subject students to courses in which 'gender' and even 'health' are identified as being major forces in international politics.

Thankfully my own university pays little attention to this nonsense, so when I recently picked up one of the major textbooks in the field, Security Studies by Paul Williams, I was surprised to be introduced to the claim that even simple exercises like war-planning – one of the core duties of the state, after all – have wicked and beastly 'gendered associations'. I will not bore readers with more of this, except to say that this consists of the usual gibberish that is now ascendant in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and makes ordinary people wonder why on earth the universities are even kept open. As a rule, those scholars obsessed with 'gender' – incidentally, nearly always female and feminist – deserve ridicule, and when they pontificate on war one wonders what Machiavelli and Clausewitz would make of their valuable 'contribution'.

But I digress. What matters is that this is a human rights-centric vision of the world in which international politics should now be about being virtuous and providing 'security' – a spectacularly nebulous concept – to our fellow human beings. The problem is that this is a vision of what a precious few Western states are willing to do – and even then, only on occasion. It is not a realistic framework for general policy action by those countries, let alone the other nations of the world. Banging on about it has only tied the hands of Western statesmen in confronting the unpleasant realities of the world, and delegitimised action in defence of national interests.

Dr Robert Crowcroft, Research Associate, UK Defence Forum

The last two years have seen the return of piracy, usually off the coast of Africa, to the minds of the public as a significant international issue. Indeed piracy is now a genuine problem for the nations and corporations that rely on oceanic trade. While only a small number of vessels will ever be hijacked or seized by pirates, bear in mind that 95% of global trade is carried by sea. This means that there is plenty of scope for piracy, whether in the waters off Africa, in South Asia, or Latin America. At the moment, Somali pirates are holding about twenty EU-registered vessels for ransom. The American government has singled out Somali pirates as the biggest pirate problem, responsible for around half of all incidents worldwide in 2010.

And the ongoing multinational effort to police the lawless seas off the Horn of Africa is expensive – unsustainably so.

Moreover, the blunt truth is that there are higher priority operations that naval forces could be attending to. Between five and ten US warships are typically tasked with dealing with the issue at any one time, and there are other nations involved as well. India, for instance, last week asked African nations to do more to tackle piracy. Maintaining forces at sea on long-term operations is a costly business.