In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari develop the concept of the war machine as an alternative form of organization distinct from the state. In the chapter The War Machine, they analyze the role of war in primitive societies, emphasizing its function as resistance to centralized structures of power.
The warrior, they suggest, often risks betraying even the military function itself, or else fails to understand anything—historians have sometimes accused figures such as Khan of not grasping the state or urban phenomena. Primitive segmentary societies, frequently described as stateless, are not simply “undeveloped”; rather, they may actively seek to prevent the emergence of the state. Leadership in such societies is fragile: chiefs rely not on institutionalized power but on persuasion, prestige, and responsiveness to group desires.
Deleuze and Guattari argue that war in these societies is the most reliable mechanism to prevent state formation. War disperses groups, sustains alliances without letting them solidify into state structures, and ultimately resists fusion into centralized systems. Thus, the state is against war, and war is against the state.
The war machine appears more intensely among nomadic assemblages than in primitive societies, yet in both cases it is fundamentally opposed to the state. War does not produce the state, nor is the state the result of war; rather, the war machine is oriented against the state’s very form, whether actual or potential.
This framework redefines war not as the origin of the state but as a mode of resistance and alternative social existence, challenging political evolutionism and offering a radically different model of organisation beyond centralised power.