By Bola A. Akinterinwa
The word polemology, is the English translation for the French word polémologie, coined from the Greek words, polemos, meaning war, and from logos, meaning discourse or study. Polemology therefore simply means the study, or more precisely, the science of war. A French school of thought has differentiated between a crisis and a conflict in a study of all the wars since the 1770s. The fundamental difference between crisis and conflict is that a crisis is the beginning of a conflict in the continuum of violence.
A crisis is first a dispute that is managed by diplomatic means, without allowing the dispute to degenerate into the level of a conflict, at which level there is use of force. Put differently, crises are managed by mediators and conciliators without the use of violence, but when diplomatic conciliation or mediation fails and gives room for the use of force, then the dispute necessarily becomes a conflict that has to be addressed from a multidimensional