The "New Wars" Debate Revisited: An Empirical Evaluation of the Atrociousness of "New Wars" (original) (raw)
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Literature Review: New and Old Wars: A Developing Debate
In this paper I confront the work of Mary Kaldor, the main ideologue of the new wars thesis that asserts that the end of the Cold War changed the nature of violent conflict, with the works of Colin M. Fleming, Stathis Kalyvas, Edward Newman and Bart Schuurman who contest this theory.
Despite the changes and continuities, war (usually defined as violence between state or organized political groups for political motives) and conflict have been at the roots of human history. Characterizing war and conflict as well as the means to end is also part of human social dynamism. It is therefore, the changes and continuities involved in human social dynamism, in war and conflict, that we call the changing features and patterns of contemporary conflict and earlier wars. For Contemporary conflict research, the early 1990s (the decadent stages of the cold war), was the period where the changing features of the ‘New Wars’ thesis begun. Undoubtedly, discrediting of the east-west tension after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the cooling of arms race fully changed the pattern of global politics of conflict. The number of interstate conflict in which the world has been most accustomed were reduced, but in parallel it increased the rate and the intensity of intrastate conflicts (Kaldor, 1991, 2007; Kalyvas, 2001; Fearon & Laitin, 2003). The long lived interstate conflicts in global history, and their everyday usage in media and politics established protected belts around the concept of war and conflict. Classification (total wars, minor conflicts) of violent conflicts (war or organized crimes) was common across human history based on the intensity, intended objectives, ramifications and or catastrophes. For the longer past, much of the debate, however, was on the ‘state’ centrality. The state was the ultimate referent object for the determination of war and ultimate security (Mearsheimer, 2001). The greater concentration of ‘state centrality’ to define and wage war therefore, pushed the distinction of earlier wars to be interstate. It was only towards the 1980s and 90s, with the emergence of some forms of high intensity internal conflicts slightly different from the earlier notion of wars, forced scholars, academicians and statesmen to coin a new ontology of war and conflict as ‘New Wars’. The literature on the departure between contemporary forms of conflict as vividly described by the “New War” thesis proponents (Gray, 1997; Kaldor, 1999), and earlier forms of war produced a wide range of scholastic debate with a mixed track record. In recent years, the ‘New Wars’ debate has gained momentum in academic circles. A number of scholars have argued that the patterns of violence are shifting, and the nature of contemporary wars are qualitatively and quantitatively different from the nature of earlier wars. However, this new thesis have been criticized by scholars from the outset for exaggerating the distinction points claimed to differentiate contemporary forms of conflict from the earlier forms of war, mainly from historical perspectives. Historical narratives suggest that the patterns of new wars also existed in the old wars too (Kalyvas, 2001; Henderson & Singer, 2002; Newman, 2004; Hiroyuki, 2010), and their argument compromises the validity and utility of the ‘New Wars’ thesis. This paper is not geared to discredit the ‘new wars’ thesis but directed to look on some exaggeration involved in the thesis while proposing departing elements between contemporary conflicts and earlier wars from a historical perspectives. To support the argument, the study used empirical illustrative examples from African conflicts and substantiate in line with historical context whether the thesis is a valid distinction. Finally, the study winds by jotting some concluding remarks regarding the debate on the ‘New Wars’ hypothesis and the various features worth considering in the study of contemporary civil wars that can contribute to policy dialogue and pave the panel to sustainable peace and development.
New Wars in Numbers. An empirical test of the ‘New Wars’ thesis.
This paper investigates to what extent the ‘new war’ thesis, the notion that the character of warfare is progressively changing since the Second World War (Kaldor 2006), is supported by empirical evidence. Existing analyses (Chojnacki 2006, Melander et al. 2006, Newman 2004), commonly failing to find evidence in favour of the ‘new war’ thesis, focus on absolute trends and overall classifications of conflict, which may obscure trends within conflicts. This paper finds that within-conflict empirical evidence does support the idea that warfare increasingly targets civilians. Evidence on the participation of non-state combatants is mixed.
Another brick in the wall? New wars and the resurrection of classic war
Civil war and conflict ‘changed’ dramatically since the fall of the iron curtain, in the same way our understanding of internal conflicts and they way we explain them changed. As this paper will argue, all this could be wrong, especially in a field of study that addresses complex interactions and mutations of armed groups in explosive environments. The paper argues that any dichotomist definition (old /new) is useless. I propose a return to cold war definitions, the return to the classic theories of conflict, particularly the idea of the importance of the state and its relationship with war. To do this, the article will address the emergence of the concept of new wars presented by Kaldor (1999), contesting their nature as an epistemic breakthrough. The papers positions itself seeing the label of “new wars” as a marketing-like exercise where violence that is historically rooted is ‘sold’ as a novelty, focusing more on the way violence is exerted and the sources of funding for armed groups, rather than on the causes of it. Later an analysis of classic war concepts and their relation with the idea of state building will be analyzed in a particular case. Finally, it discusses the neutrality and the strength of the impartiality of the theories we have built around conflict studies.
The war is a subject of study that still raises many questions within the scientific community and, especially, among historians. Despite the thousands of books on the subject, this phenomenon remains a major focus of social science research and this for a fundamental reason: Armed conflict societies disintegrate, generate a rupture of the sense of history, a semiotic break in the evolution of human communities, because war is a major crisis that affects individuals as social subjects in their ability to serve and to make sense.Humankind has faced with two world wars and with their loses in its history. After the two total war, ColdWar followed the war and peace field in the world. At the end of the Cold War era, the world have been expected to have a stable universal peace, thanks to " new international order ". However, this expectation has been failed by the mid 1990s and a new type of conflict has been emerged. If we call total wars in the history of humankind as " old wars " , these new conflicts emerged in the world are to be called as " new wars ". The traditional war concept have been firstly introducedThere are three distinguishing differences argued on the intellectual and academic debate, which have had significant impact on this debate. In this essay, I will argue how the three differences shows the illustration the differences between " old wars " and " new wars " , which are universalism versus fundemantalism, methods and economic features. First of all, Kaldor(1999) explains the features of the " new wars " mainly based on cases of Bosnia and Karabakh. The new wars fundemantally based on identity
‘New’ and ‘old’ wars – the changing dimensions of warfare
Przegląd Politologiczny
The article aims to present the issue of 'old' versus 'new' wars in relation to their specific features. It focuses on the characteristics of both phenomena, as well as providing an analysis of the causes and sources of armed conflicts and their changing dimensions. Methods of waging war have changed along with the political, economic, social and technological developments which have been observed over the years. The very philosophy of war has undergone changes in a similar way. The article aims to identify the direction of changes in the dimensions of war. It also provides an insight into the privatization of warfare and the constantly growing importance of non-state actors in shaping the international order, and therefore their role in post-modern wars.
The Sociology of New Wars?: Assessing the Causes and Objectives of Contemporary Violent Conflicts
The recent accounts of the new war paradigm have been thoroughly scrutinized in a variety of disciplines from security studies and international relations to political economy. The general trend is to focus on the scope, methods, tactics, strategies, forms of war, and ⁄ or the level of atrocity. However, there has been little sustained attempt to assess structural causes and the arguments about the changing aims of contemporary warfare. This paper provides a critical analysis of the macro sociological accounts of the new war paradigm with a spotlight on the purpose and causes of the recent wars. The author argues that despite the development of elaborate models, the sociology of contemporary warfare rests on shaky foundations and hence fails to convince. Rather than witnessing a dramatic shift in the causes and objectives of contemporary violent conflict, one encounters a significant transformation in the social and historical context in which these wars are waged.
On the transformation of warfare: a plausibility probe of the new war thesis
Journal of International Relations and …, 2010
This article intends to contribute to the debate on the emergence of so-called new wars by reconstructing the new war thesis in a way that allows an empirical assessment of the plausibility of the thesis. It makes explicit the defining criteria implicit to the new war thesis which claims that a fundamental transformation of modern intra-state warfare has taken place due to the end of the Cold War. It also lays out the causal mechanisms that underpin the alleged transformation of warfare. Based on the reconstructed conceptual framework and drawing on case studies of the wars in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola, Somalia and Sierra Leone, the article then lends support to the new war thesis. The cases demonstrate that, in the 1990s, war economies based on criminal activities became more important and triggered the fragmentation of warring parties and the economisation of their war motives. Moreover, in combination, the fragmentation of warring parties and the economisation of their war motives facilitate the application of brutal violence against civilians.