Despite the transformative potential of the ‘New Wars’ paradigm, what might be labeled the ‘first generation’ of scholarship has been subject to a range of cross-disciplinary conceptual and empirical challenges that have called into question many of its key findings. While there is much that is valid in these critiques of the New Wars thesis, ultimately it is premature to conclude that they have fatally undermined the New Wars paradigm as a heuristically useful framework for inquiring into the (changing) character of violent political conflict. All of this suggests that what is needed now is not the abandonment of the New Wars paradigm, but a longer-term historical perspective that can help us avoid many of the conceptual errors that plague the extant literature.