History: War Photography

In 2003, Nobel Laureate Richard E. Smalley identified war as the sixth (of ten) biggest problems facing the society of mankind for the next fifty years. In the 1832 book "On War", by Prussian military general and theoretician Carl Von Clausewitz, the author refers to war as the "continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means." War is an interaction in which two or more opposing forces have a “struggle of wills”. The term is also used as a metaphor for non-military conflict, such as in the example of class war.
War has generally been considered to be a seemingly inescapable and integral aspect of human culture, its practice not linked to any single type of political organization or society. Rather, as discussed by John Keegan in his History Of Warfare, war is a universal phenomenon whose form and scope is defined by the society that wages it. The conduct of war extends along a continuum, from the almost universal primitive local tribal warfare that began well before recorded human history, to advanced nuclear warfare between global alliances, with the recently developed ultimate potential for human extinction. More recently, other experts Douglas P. Fry and Judith Hand have argued that war only emerges in certain types of societies or cultures, being rare or absent, for example, in nomadic foragers societies and becoming common when humans take up settled living, particularly at the Agricultural Revolution.
From late Old English (c.1050), wyrre, werre, from Old North French werre "war" (Fr. guerre), from Frankish werra, from Proto-Germanic werso (Compare with Old Saxon werran, Old high German werran, German verwirren "to confuse, perplex"). Cognates suggest the original sense was "to bring into confusion."