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One of the research strands that has run through the journal Cultures & Conflits from its very inception deals with the relative exhaustion of the Clausewitzian heuristics of the “push towards the extremes of war.” Here, I delve into the implications and scope of these analyses of armed conflict with a retrospective view on the last thirty years. Clausewitz’s heuristic concept of war as a duel (with dynamics of polarization and a push towards the extremes of war) and, more broadly, the more recent centripetal “models” of war in political science (focusing, on the one hand, on elimination struggles leading to a monopolizing impetus in civil war; on the other, on competitive state-centralization leading to the emergence of “like-units” in the context of interstate war) must be considerably complexified in order to thoroughly understand the multi-scalar and multi-centered nature of contemporary armed conflict. In the majority of contemporary wars, centrifugal and centripetal forces coexist and interweave multiple levels of political interaction, from the “local” to the “global.”