Wars of the third kind have numerous unique qualities. Their histories vary, as do their outcomes – defeat of insurgents in Malaya, victory in Algeria, stalemate in Kashmir and the Sudan – but they have a common source: the definition of a legitimate political community and the search for statehood. The mystiques of statehood and “nationality” drive today's wars, just as balances of power, successions, searches for hegemony, and rivalry over colonies drove most eighteenth-century wars. The end of the Cold War has not brought a “new world order” because that rivalry was largely irrelevant to a much more fundamental historical process, the definition and determination of legitimate community from imperial to other forms, and the transformation of a heterogeneity of political organizations into a single format, the modern state. To understand why we will continue to have wars of the third kind in future years, we need to have a better understanding, first, of the origins, the drive for, and forms of political community and statehood and, second, of the difficulties facing many new states.

The process of state-formation in Europe has become an area of increased research by historical sociologists and political scientists during the past several decades. We now have a reasonably rich literature that generalizes across many eras and locales and develops a variety of perspectives (cf. Tilly 1990; Hall 1986; Rasler and Thompson 1989; Ruggie 1993).