ISBN: 978-1-032-11365-4, Routledge, December 2023, 254 pages, $48.79 (Paperback)
Reviewed by: Muhammad Waqas Haider, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
Mark Lacy’s Theorising Future Conflict: War Out to 2049 opens with a memorable image. In 2015, Lacy visited Sandhurst to deliver a lecture on the future of warfare. As he walked the grounds of an institution that had trained British Army officers since 1741, he found himself wondering what Sandhurst would look like in 2049—the year in which the Blade Runner sequel is set and the year by which the U.S. Department of Defense has projected China’s emergence as a world-shaping military power (p. 1). The book that grew out of that visit is a quietly significant contribution to the literature on the changing character of war. Lacy borrows his book’s subtitle, somewhat impishly, from Douglas Adams: “Trying to predict the future is a mug’s game. But increasingly it’s a game we all have to play because the world is changing so fast” (Adams, cited at p. 4). The result is one of the more theoretically literate, intellectually generous, and genuinely useful books to appear in this crowded field in recent years.
Lacy is well placed to make the argument. A senior lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, he has spent two decades writing across the borderlands of international relations theory, critical security studies, and the sociology of technology. His earlier books, Security and Climate Change (2005) and Security, Technology and Global Politics: Thinking with Virilio (2014), already mapped much of the conceptual terrain on which the present volume builds. He is also the lead editor of the Routledge series in which the book appears, Routledge Studies in Conflict, Security and Technology, which has become an important venue for emerging work on the politics of military and security technologies.
Across ten chapters arranged in two parts, Lacy organizes the analysis around three tendencies that he proposes as a heuristic for the wars of the next quarter-century: the impure, the granular, and the machinic. The impure names the messy hybridization of state and nonstate, civilian and military, and kinetic and informational forms of conflict that resist the clean distinctions of twentieth-century strategic thought. As Lacy frames it, “impure war involves terrorist networks finding destructive and creative ways to exploit the vulnerabilities of everyday life and critical infrastructure,” but also the state response that follows: “a new age of micro-targeting, information and cyberwar, drone strikes, new tactics in a war against a network” (pp. 10–11). The granular captures the increasingly fine-grained nature of contemporary surveillance, targeting, and political mobilization, in which data resolution rather than mass becomes the strategic currency. The machinic addresses the entry of autonomous, semiautonomous, and algorithmic systems into the conduct of war and the new forms of agency these systems create. Across the book’s chapters, these three tendencies are mobilized in turn to examine cybersecurity, urban war, robotics and artificial intelligence, climate change, the influence of science fiction on strategic imagination, and the new strategic concepts emerging from great-power competition.
What distinguishes the book theoretically is Lacy’s willingness to read the future of war alongside thinkers who are not standard fare in strategic studies syllabi. Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology of liquidity and Paul Virilio’s philosophy of speed and disappearance do much of the conceptual work, supplemented by sustained engagement with science fiction as a serious mode of strategic thought rather than a recreational sideline. The theoretical apparatus pays off in unusually concrete ways. In the chapter on impure war, Lacy offers a working taxonomy that practitioners will find immediately useful: “bombing underwater gas pipelines (like Nord Stream 1 in 2022) is impure war. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were acts of impure war; the killing of Bin Laden was impure war (the invasion of Iraq was not impure war).” That single passage clarifies more about contemporary subthreshold conflict than many longer treatments manage, and it captures the book’s wider argument that the wars of the next quarter-century will be fought less through decisive engagement than through the patient accumulation of granular events below the threshold of open war.
The intended audience is appropriately broad. The book will be most immediately useful to graduate students and researchers working in critical war and security studies, science and technology studies, and contemporary international relations. Its style and reach, however, also recommend it to a practitioner readership: defense planners; special operations and irregular warfare staff officers grappling with hybrid threats; intelligence analysts working on emerging technologies; and policy professionals in the cyber and AI governance space will find Lacy’s framework a useful corrective to the shorter conceptual horizons of much in-house futures work. Readers of Inter Populum will find the chapters on the impure and the granular directly relevant to current debates on irregular warfare, where the blurring of categories and the centrality of fine-grained intelligence are precisely the conditions practitioners now navigate.
The book is not without limitations, and a fair review should name them. The triad of impure, granular, and machinic is generative, but the categories overlap in ways that occasionally blur their analytical edges; readers seeking a tightly operationalized typology will find the framework more suggestive than determinative. The reliance on Bauman and Virilio, while one of the book’s genuine pleasures, will not persuade every reader, particularly those in the more positivist quarters of strategic studies who remain unconvinced that continental social theory adds value to the analysis of military affairs. To his credit, Lacy is open about a deeper limitation: for all the focus on tactical creativity, “future wars will be shaped by mistakes familiar to historians and philosophers of war, basic mistakes of logistics, faulty technology, of underestimating an enemy and overestimating the ability to manage and master the order and chaos of war” (p. 86). That is a candid acknowledgment that even a careful future-war framework must contend with the brute persistence of human and organizational failure. None of these reservations is fatal. Each is, in fact, the kind of objection a serious work of strategic theorizing invites.
Within the wider literature on the future of war, Theorising Future Conflict deserves to be read alongside, and in productive tension with, recent works such as Christopher Coker’s Future War and Antoine Bousquet’s The Eye of War, both of which Lacy himself engages. Where Coker emphasizes continuity with the deeper history of conflict and Bousquet excavates the genealogies of military perception, Lacy occupies a distinctive middle position: theoretically ambitious, empirically curious, and refreshingly humble about the limits of prediction. He closes his introduction with a line that doubles as the most accurate description of the book’s scholarly disposition: “a book like this one succeeds if it leads to better ideas and clearer thinking than is found here” (p. 6). On that measure, the book has already succeeded, and Theorising Future Conflict is recommended without reservation to scholars and practitioners willing to think seriously about the wars to come.
