- published: 10 Dec 2015
- views: 30010
A range war is a type of armed conflict, typically undeclared, which occurs within agrarian or stock-rearing societies. The subject of these conflicts were the control of "open range", or rangeland freely used for cattle grazing, which gave the conflict its name. Typically triggered by disputes over water rights or grazing rights for this land they would involve farmers and ranchers. Formal military involvement, other than to separate warring parties, is rare.
Range wars were known to occur in the American West. Famous range wars included the Lincoln County War, the Pleasant Valley War, the Mason County War and the Johnson County Range War, sometimes fought between local residents and gunmen hired by absentee landowners.
Range wars have been the subject of movies and stories. Some examples are:
While in previous centuries violence may have been involved, the term can also be used for non violent contention for scarce resources, perhaps between ranchers and environmentalists, or between ranchers and fans of wild horses.
Range may refer to:
War is an organized, armed, and often a prolonged conflict that is carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political communities, and therefore is defined as a form of political violence. The set of techniques used by a group to carry out war is known as warfare. An absence of war (and other violence) is usually called peace.
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 treatise On War, Prussian military general and theoretician Carl von Clausewitz defined war as follows: "War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will."
While some scholars see warfare as an inescapable and integral aspect of human culture, others argue that it is only inevitable under certain socio-cultural or ecological circumstances. Some scholars argue that the practice of war is 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. Another argument suggests that since there are human societies in which warfare does not exist, humans may not be naturally disposed for warfare, which emerges under particular circumstances. The ever changing technologies and potentials of war extend along a historical continuum. At the one end lies the endemic warfare of the Paleolithic[citation needed] with its stones and clubs, and the naturally limited loss of life associated with the use of such weapons. Found at the other end of this continuum is nuclear warfare, along with the recently developed possible outcome of its use, namely the potential risk of the complete extinction of the human species.