#war

By the end of the year, France will pull more than 2,000 troops from the Sahel, but its military involvement in the region will persist. Blindly referring to ideological root causes of violence, however, leaves local conflicts out of the equation, while ignoring religious factors altogether is equally problematic.

Roughly 2,000 peace treaties made between the 15th and the 19th century show us how early modern peacemaking laid the foundations for both the modern constitutional development of European states and for relations between those states to the present.