The form of war has been dramatically changing within Europe, as has Europe’s role within the international system. Until 1945, Europe was at the center of the international system, and the European wars were the pivotal events of international politics, whether due to a change in the hierarchy of power and prestige among the great powers, or because they went so far as to escalate into world wars. Currently, by contrast, Europe is no longer at the center of the international system, and war has come to play a marginal role in the European states-system. On the one hand, no major wars have taken place (and are expected to take place) on the European soil, whereas only secondary states or non-state actors have turned out to be the protagonists of the so-called «new wars». On the other hand, although the principal European states have repeatedly resorted to the use of force, their wars have been fought at a distance, at the periphery of the continent or, more often, outside Europe itself. This article addresses such a mutual change, by focusing on the ongoing transformations of war. In the first part, a brief overview is provided of the cultural and theoretical attitudes of Europe towards war, from the traditional emphasis on the political and legal relationship between state and war, to the experience of the Long Peace following the Second World War, up to the proliferation of non-state actors involved in both politics and political violence. The second part shifts its attention to the threefold nature of war in the contemporary Europe: the so-called «new wars» fought in such «peripheral» areas as former Yugoslavia, Georgia or Eastern Ukraine; the military interventions conducted by the strongest European states «out of area», and legitimized by the narrative of the Just War tradition; the terrorist attacks brought by external actors back to the European soil. The last part focuses on some basic features which all three kinds of war share: the disappearance of any shared conception of what a war is or should be like; the eclipse of the «public » dimension of violence; the blurring of any clear distinctions between internal and external, military and civilian, war and violence short of war; the impossibility to draw a clear distinction between peace and war.