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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Mary Kaldor's New and Old Wars has fundamentally changed the way both scholars and policy-makers understand contemporary war and conflict. In the context of globalization, this path-breaking book has shown that what we think of as war - that is to say, war between states in which the aim is to inflict maximum violence - is becoming an anachronism. In its place is a new type of organized violence or 'new wars', which could be described as a mixture of war, organized crime and massive violations of human rights. The actors are both global and local, public and private. The wars are fought for particularistic political goals using tactics of terror and destabilization that are theoretically outlawed by the rules of modern warfare.
Kaldor's analysis offers a basis for a cosmopolitan political response to these wars, in which the monopoly of legitimate organized violence is reconstructed on a transnational basis and international peacekeeping is reconceptualized as cosmopolitan law enforcement. This approach also has implications for the reconstruction of civil society, political institutions, and economic and social relations.
This third edition has been fully revised and updated. Kaldor has added an afterword answering the critics of the New Wars argument and, in a new chapter, Kaldor shows how old war thinking in Afghanistan and Iraq greatly exacerbated what turned out to be, in many ways, archetypal new wars - characterised by identity politics, a criminalised war economy and civilians as the main victims.
Like its predecessors, the third edition of New and Old Wars will be essential reading for students of international relations, politics and conflict studies as well as to all those interested in the changing nature and prospect of warfare.
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Seitenzahl: 506
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface to the Third Edition
Notes
Abbreviations
1 Introduction
Notes
2 Old Wars
War and the Emergence of the Modern State
Clausewitz and the Wars of the Nineteenth Century
The Total Wars of the Twentieth Century
Notes
3 Bosnia–Herzegovina: A Case Study of a New War
Why the War was Fought – Political Goals
How the War was Fought – Military and Economic Means
The Nature of International Involvement
After Dayton
Notes
4 The Politics of New Wars
The Characteristics of Globalization
Identity Politics
Cosmopolitanism versus Particularism
Notes
5 The Globalized War Economy
The Privatization of Military Forces
Patterns of Violence
Financing the War Effort
The Spread of Violence
Conclusion
Notes
6 Towards a Cosmopolitan Approach
The Reconstruction of Legitimacy
From Top-down Diplomacy to Cosmopolitan Politics
From Peacekeeping and/or Peace-enforcement to Cosmopolitan Law-enforcement
From Humanitarian Assistance to Reconstruction
Notes
7 The New Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Technology-intensive Old War
Failing States
The New Wars
Adapting Old War?
Was There or is There an Alternative?
Notes
8 Governance, Legitimacy and Security
The Clash of Civilizations
The Coming Anarchy
Cosmopolitan Governance
Conclusion
Notes
Afterword
Are New Wars ‘New’?
Are New Wars ‘War’?
The Debate about Data
The Debate about Clausewitz
Conclusion
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons in countries experiencing violence …
Figure 5.2
Resource flows in new wars
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
The evolution of old wars
Chapter 3
Table 3.1
Regular forces in Bosnia–Herzegovina 1995
Table 3.2
Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia–Herzegovina
Chapter 8
Table 8.1
Patterns of governance
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface to the Third Edition
Abbreviations
Begin Reading
Afterword
Index
End User License Agreement
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New and Old Wars
Third Edition
MARY KALDOR
polity
Copyright © Mary Kaldor 2012
The right of Mary Kaldor to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2012 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6303-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
Preface to the Third Edition
In recent years, a number of scholars have remarked on what they describe as the decline of war in the twenty-first century, as well as the decline of combat-related casualties. These include the celebrated book by Steve Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, the Human Security Report and John Mueller’s book, The Remnants of War.1
What these studies show is a decline in what I call in this book ‘old war’ – that is to say, war involving states in which battle is the decisive encounter. Indeed, all these scholars base their conclusions on the Uppsala Conflict Data Program in which conflict is defined as involving states and is characterized by a certain minimum number of battle deaths. New wars involve networks of state and non-state actors and most violence is directed against civilians. Some critics of the ‘new war’ thesis conflate new wars with civil wars and argue that both inter-state and civil wars are declining. But new wars, as I explain in the introduction, are wars in which the difference between internal and external is blurred; they are both global and local and they are different both from classic inter-state wars and classic civil wars.
This tendency to define war as ‘old war’ obscures the reality of new wars. I do not know whether the number of new wars is increasing or not. Nor do we know the scale of casualties in new wars, although they are almost certainly lower than in ‘old wars’. But my point is rather that we need to understand and analyse this new type of violence. While we should celebrate the decline of ‘old war’, we cannot rest on our laurels; we need to be able to address the main contemporary sources of insecurity. In large parts of the world – Central Asia, East Africa or Central Africa – people experience great suffering, and this matters whether it is more or less than in the past. Moreover, new wars are associated with state weakness, extremist identity politics and transnational criminality, and there is a danger that this type of violence will spread as the world faces a growing economic crisis. In the context of spending cuts, there is a tendency for governments to cut the very capabilities most suitable for addressing new wars and to protect their capabilities for fighting ‘old wars’.
This is why it is important to present a new edition of this book. I have updated the book in places and included new material. The first edition of the book was published before 9/11 and I have included a new chapter on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I argue that the ‘old war’ mindset of the United States greatly exacerbated the conditions for what was to become in both countries a new war. In fact, the experience of the wars led to new thinking in the Pentagon; the revamped counter-insurgency doctrine included ideas such as nation-building and population security and bringing together military and civilian capabilities. But it turned out to be very difficult to change the culture of the military and now the United States has reverted to an ‘old war’ campaign of defeating terrorists, using, in particular, long-distance air strikes in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Even though precision has greatly improved and civilian casualties from air strikes are lower than in the past, as I argue in chapter 7, this further worsens the insecurity in these places.
The first edition of this book generated a lively debate about new wars and I have also included a new afterword that deals with this debate. Most of the criticisms question whether ‘new wars’ are really new or whether they are really war. My point is that they may not really be new and we may decide not to call them war but something is happening that is different from ‘old war’ and we need to understand it. It is the preoccupation with old war that prevents us from developing policy-relevant analysis.
Since writing the book, much of my work has focused on policy-oriented research and, in particular, developing the concept of human security as a way of addressing ‘new wars’. I have not included this research in the book, even though I have updated chapter 6 ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Approach’, which represented an early version of my ideas on human security. Those who wish to learn more about human security can refer to two more recent books: Human Security: Reflections on Globalisation and Intervention and The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon: Human Security and the New Rules of War and Peace, which I co-authored with a serving American army officer.2
Like Pinker and others, I greatly welcome the decline of ‘old war’. But ‘old war’ can always be reinvented. Many of the critics point out, rightly, that the wars of the early modern period were similar to ‘new wars’ before states became as strong as they are today. The process of pacification and of eliminating brigands, highwaymen, pirates, warlords and other private wars was associated with the development of what I call ‘old wars’ – the wars of modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as I describe in chapter 2. It was through war that states were able to centralize and control violence. If we fail to address the new wars of today, something along the same lines could always happen again.
The most important reason for optimism at the moment is the wave of peaceful protest that started in the Middle East and has become worldwide. It is the rise of civil society that has marginalized Al Qaeda and other extremist militant groups. It is the kind of cosmopolitan politics that I argue, in this book, is key to finding an answer to new wars. Much depends, therefore, on how far this new awakening, as it is often described, produces an institutional response. There is, of course, a huge risk that failure to produce an institutional response will have the opposite consequence. Indeed, at the time of writing, ‘old war’ thinking, that is to say geopolitical or realist approaches that focus on the security of Israel or the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons, could exacerbate ‘new wars’ in places like Syria and Iraq. The current brutal repression in Syria is not a civil war; it is a war against civilians and against cosmopolitan politics.
In preparing this third edition, I would like to thank Iavor Rangelov, Sabine Selchow and Yahia Said for discussions about the debate on new wars; Marika Theros for help with the new material on Afghanistan; Anouk Rigterink for help in the debate about data, especially displacement data; Tom Kirk for assistance in collecting the recent new wars literature; and Domenika Spyratou for general support.
Notes
1.
Steven Pinker,
The Better Angels of Our Nature
, London: Allen Lane, 2011; John Mueller,
The Remnants of War
, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004; Human Security Report 2009/10,
http://www.hsrgroup.org/human-security-reports/human-security-report.aspx
.
2.
Mary Kaldor,
Human Security: Reflections on Globalisation and Intervention
, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008; Shannon D. Beebe and Mary Kaldor,
The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon: Human Security and the New Rules of War and Peace
, New York: Public Affairs Books, 2010.
Abbreviations
ABiH
Army of Bosnia–Herzegovina
ANC
African National Congress
AU
African Union
BRA
Bougainville Revolutionary Army
BSA
Bosnian Serb Army
CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
CIS
Commonwealth of Independent States
CLC
Concerned Local Citizens
CPA
Coalition Provisional Authority
DDR
Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration
DRC
Democratic Republic of Congo
ECHO
European Community Humanitarian Office
ECOMOG
Economic Community of West African States Ceasefire Monitoring Group
ECOWAS
Economic Community of West African States
EU
European Union
EUFOR
European Force
GDP
Gross Domestic Product
GPS
Global Positioning System
HCA
Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly
HDZ
Croatian Democratic Party
HOS
Paramilitary wing of HSP
HSP
Croatian Party of Rights
HSR
Human Security Report
HV
Croatian Army
HVO
Croatian Defence Council
ICC
International Criminal Court
ICFY
International Conference on Former Yugoslavia
ICRC
International Committee of the Red Cross
IDP
Internally displaced person
IDMC
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
IED
Improvised explosive device
IFOR
Implementation Force
IFP
Inkatha Freedom Party
IGO
Intergovernmental organization
IISS
International Institute for Strategic Studies
IMF
International Monetary Fund
IRA
Irish Republican Army
IRC
International Rescue Committee
ISAF
International Security Assistance Force
ISCI
Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq
JAM
Jaish al-Mahdi (often known as Sadrists)
JNA
Yugoslav National Army
KLA
Kosovo Liberation Army
MIME-NET
Military-Industrial-Entertainment Network
MOS
Muslim Armed Forces
MPRI
Military Professional Resources Incorporated
NACC
NATO Coordination Council
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NGO
Non-governmental organization
OAU
Organization of African Unity
OHR
Office of the High Representative in Bosnia–Herzegovina
OSCE
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
PASOK
Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Greece)
PGM
Precision-guided missile
RENAMO
Resistência Nacional Mocambiçana
RMA
Revolution in Military Affairs
RPA
Remotely piloted vehicle
SCR
Security Council Resolution
SDA
(Muslim) Party of Democratic Action
SDS
Serbian Democratic Party
SFOR
Stabilization Force
SIPRI
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
SPLA
Sudan People’s Liberation Army
SRT
Serb Radio and Television station
TO
Territorial Defence Units
UAV
Unmanned aerial vehicle
UCDP
Uppsala Conflict Data Program
UN
United Nations
UNDP
United Nations Development Programme
UNHCR
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNICEF
United Nations Children’s Fund
UNPROFOR
United Nations Protection Force
UNU
United Nations University
WEU
Western European Union
WIDER
World Institute for Development Economics Research
WMD
Weapons of mass destruction
1Introduction
In the summer of 1992, I visited Nagorno-Karabakh in the Transcaucasian region in the midst of a war involving Azerbaijan and Armenia. It was then that I realized that what I had previously observed in the former Yugoslavia was not unique; it was not a throwback to the Balkan past but rather a contemporary predicament especially, or so I thought, to be found in the post-communist part of the world. The Wild West atmosphere of Knin (then the capital of the self-proclaimed Serbian republic in Croatia) and Nagorno-Karabakh, peopled by young men in home-made uniforms, desperate refugees and thuggish, neophyte politicians, was quite distinctive. Later, I embarked on a research project on the character of the new type of wars and I discovered from my colleagues who had first-hand experience of Africa that what I had noted in Eastern Europe shared many common features with the wars taking place in Africa and perhaps also other places, for example South Asia. Indeed, the experience of wars in other places shed new light on my understanding of what was happening in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.1
My central argument is that, during the last decades of the twentieth century, a new type of organized violence developed, especially in Africa and Eastern Europe, which is one aspect of the current globalized era. I describe this type of violence as ‘new war’. I use the term ‘new’ to distinguish such wars from prevailing perceptions of war drawn from an earlier era, which I outline in chapter 2. I use the term ‘war’ to emphasize the political nature of this new type of violence, even though, as will become clear in the following pages, the new wars involve a blurring of the distinctions between war (usually defined as violence between states or organized political groups for political motives), organized crime (violence undertaken by privately organized groups for private purposes, usually financial gain) and large-scale violations of human rights (violence undertaken by states or politically organized groups against individuals).
In most of the literature, the new wars are described as internal or civil wars or else as ‘low-intensity conflicts’. Yet, although most of these wars are localized, they involve a myriad of transnational connections so that the distinction between internal and external, between aggression (attacks from abroad) and repression (attacks from inside the country), or even between local and global, are difficult to sustain. The term ‘low-intensity conflict’ was coined during the Cold War period by the US military to describe guerrilla warfare or terrorism. Although it is possible to trace the evolution of the new wars from the so-called low-intensity conflicts of the Cold War period, they have distinctive characteristics which are masked by what is in effect a catch-all term. Some authors describe the new wars as privatized or informal wars;2 yet, while the privatization of violence is an important element of these wars, in practice, the distinction between what is private and what is public, state and non-state, informal and formal, what is done for economic and what for political motives, cannot easily be applied. A more appropriate term is perhaps ‘post-modern’, which is used by several authors.3 Like ‘new wars’, it offers a way of distinguishing these wars from the wars which could be said to be characteristic of classical modernity. However, the term is also used to refer to virtual wars and wars in cyberspace;4 moreover, the new wars involve elements of pre-modernity and modernity as well. A more recent term used by Frank Hoffman, which has gained widespread currency, particularly in the military, is ‘hybrid wars’5 – the term nicely captures the blurring of public and private, state or non-state, formal and informal that is characteristic of new wars; it is also used to refer to a mixture of different types of war (conventional warfare, counter-insurgency, civil war, for example) and, as such, may miss the specific logic of new wars. Finally, Martin Shaw uses the term ‘degenerate warfare’, while John Mueller talks about the ‘remnants’ of war.6 For Shaw, there is a continuity with the total wars of the twentieth century and their genocidal aspects; the term draws attention to the decay of the national frameworks, especially military forces. Mueller argues that war in general (what I call old wars) has declined and that what is left is banditry often disguised as political conflict.
Critics of the ‘new war’ argument have suggested that many features of the new wars can be found in earlier wars and that the dominance of the Cold War overshadowed the significance of ‘small wars’ or ‘low-intensity’ conflicts.7 There is some truth in this proposition. The main point of the distinction between new and old wars was to change the prevailing perceptions of war, especially among policy makers. In particular, I wanted to emphasize the growing illegitimacy of these wars and the need for a cosmopolitan political response – one that put individual rights and the rule of law as the centrepiece of any international intervention (political, military, civil or economic). Nevertheless, I do think that the ‘new war’ argument does reflect a new reality – a reality that was emerging before the end of the Cold War. Globalization is a convenient catch-all to describe the various changes that characterize the contemporary period and have influenced the character of war.8
Among American strategic writers, there has been much discussion about what is variously known as the Revolution in Military Affairs, or Defence Transformation.9 The argument is that the advent of information technology is as significant as was the advent of the tank and the aeroplane, or even as significant as the shift from horse power to mechanical power, with profound implications for the future of warfare. In particular, it is argued that these changes have made modern war much more precise and discriminate. However, these apparently new concepts are conceived within the inherited institutional structures of war and the military. They envisage wars on a traditional model in which the new techniques develop in a more or less linear extension from the past. Moreover, they are designed to sustain the imagined character of war which was typical of the Cold War era and utilized in such a way as to minimize own casualties. The preferred technique is spectacular aerial bombing or rapid and dramatic ground manoeuvres and most recently the use of robots and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) especially drones, which reproduce the appearance of classical war for public consumption but which turn out to be rather clumsy as an instrument and, in some cases, outright counterproductive, for influencing the reality on the ground. Hence Baudrillard’s famous remark that the Gulf War did not take place.10 These complex sophisticated techniques were initially applied in the Gulf War of 1991, developed further in the last phases of the war in Bosnia–Herzegovina and in Kosovo, and, most recently, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
I share the view that there has been a revolution in military affairs, but it is a revolution in the social relations of warfare, not in technology, even though the changes in social relations are influenced by and make use of new technology. Beneath the spectacular displays are real wars, which, even in the case of the 1991 Iraq war in which thousands of Kurds and Shi’ites died, are better explained in terms of my conception of new wars. In this third edition, I have added a new chapter on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to show the clash between what I call technology-updated ‘old war’ and the ‘new war’ in both places.
The new wars have to be understood in the context of the process known as globalization. By globalization, I mean the intensification of global interconnectedness – political, economic, military and cultural – and the changing character of political authority. Even though I accept the argument that globalization has its roots in modernity or even earlier, I consider that the globalization of the 1980s and 1990s was a qualitatively new phenomenon which can, at least in part, be explained as a consequence of the revolution in information technologies and dramatic improvements in communication and data processing. This process of intensifying interconnectedness is a contradictory one involving both integration and fragmentation, homogenization and diversification, globalization and localization. It is often argued that the new wars are a consequence of the end of the Cold War; they reflect a power vacuum which is typical of transition periods in world affairs. It is undoubtedly true that the consequences of the end of the Cold War – the availability of surplus arms, the discrediting of socialist ideologies, the disintegration of totalitarian empires, the withdrawal of superpower support to client regimes – contributed in important ways to the new wars. But equally, the end of the Cold War could be viewed as the way in which the Eastern bloc succumbed to the inevitable encroachment of globalization – the crumbling of the last bastions of territorial autarchy, the moment when Eastern Europe was ‘opened up’ to the rest of the world.
The impact of globalization is visible in many of the new wars. The global presence in these wars can include international reporters, mercenary troops and military advisers, and diaspora volunteers as well as a veritable ‘army’ of international agencies ranging from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Oxfam, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières, Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross to international institutions such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the European Union (EU), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the African Union (AU) and the United Nations (UN) itself, including peacekeeping troops. Indeed, the wars epitomize a new kind of global/local divide between those members of a global class who can speak English, have access to the Internet and satellite television, who use dollars or euros or credit cards, and who can travel freely, and those who are excluded from global processes, who live off what they can sell or barter or what they receive in humanitarian aid, whose movement is restricted by roadblocks, visas and the cost of travel, and who are prey to sieges, forced displacement, famines, landmines, etc.
In the literature on globalization, a central issue concerns the implications of global interconnectedness for the future of territorially based sovereignty – that is to say, for the future of the modern state.11 The new wars arise in the context of the erosion of the autonomy of the state and, in some extreme cases, the disintegration of the state. In particular, they occur in the context of the erosion of the monopoly of legitimate organized violence. This monopoly is eroded from above and from below. It has been eroded from above by the transnationalization of military forces which began during the two world wars and was institutionalized by the bloc system during the Cold War and by innumerable transnational connections between armed forces that developed in the post-war period.12The capacity of states to use force unilaterally against other states has been greatly weakened. This is partly for practical reasons – the growing destructiveness of military technology and the increasing interconnectedness of states, especially in the military field. It is difficult to imagine nowadays a state or group of states risking a large-scale war which could be even more destructive than what was experienced during the two world wars. Moreover, military alliances, international arms production and trade, various forms of military cooperation and exchanges, arms control agreements, etc., have created a form of global military integration. The weakening of states’ capacity to use unilateral force is also due to the evolution of international norms. The principle that unilateral aggression is illegitimate was first codified in the Kellogg–Briand pact of 1928, and reinforced after World War II in the UN Charter and through the reasoning used in the war crimes trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo.
At the same time, the monopoly of organized violence is eroded from below by privatization. Indeed, it could be argued that the new wars are part of a process which is more or less a reversal of the processes through which modern European states evolved. As I argue in chapter 2, the rise of the modern state was intimately connected to war. In order to fight wars, rulers needed to increase taxation and borrowing, to eliminate ‘wastage’ as a result of crime, corruption and inefficiency, to regularize armed forces and police and to eliminate private armies, and to mobilize popular support in order to raise money and men. As war became the exclusive province of the state, so the growing destructiveness of war against other states was paralleled by a process of growing security at home; hence the way in which the term ‘civil’ came to mean internal. The modern European state was reproduced elsewhere. The new wars occur in situations in which state revenues decline because of the decline of the economy as well as the spread of criminality, corruption and inefficiency, violence is increasingly privatized both as a result of growing organized crime and the emergence of paramilitary groups, and political legitimacy is disappearing. Thus the distinctions are breaking down between external barbarity and domestic civility, between the combatant as the legitimate bearer of arms and the non-combatant, or between the soldier or policeman and the criminal. The barbarity of war between states may have become a thing of the past. In its place is a new type of organized violence that is more pervasive and long-lasting, but also perhaps less extreme.
In chapter 3, I use the example of the war in Bosnia–Herzegovina to illustrate the main features of the new wars, mainly because it is the war with which I was most familiar when I originally wrote this book. The war in Bosnia–Herzegovina shares many of the characteristics of wars in other places. But in one sense it is exceptional; it became the focus of global and European attention during the 1990s. More resources – governmental and non-governmental – have been concentrated there than in any other new war up until the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the one hand, this means that, as a case study, it has atypical features. On the other hand, it also means that it became the paradigm case from which different lessons were drawn in the post-Cold War period, the example which has been used to argue out different general positions, and, at the same time, a laboratory in which experiments in the different ways of managing the new wars have taken place.
The new wars can be contrasted with earlier wars in terms of their goals, the methods of warfare and how they are financed. The goals of the new wars are about identity politics in contrast to the geo-political or ideological goals of earlier wars. In chapter 4, I argue that, in the context of globalization, ideological and/or territorial cleavages of an earlier era have increasingly been supplanted by an emerging political cleavage between what I call cosmopolitanism, based on inclusive, universalist, multicultural values, and the politics of particularist identities.13 This cleavage can be explained in terms of the growing divide between those who are part of global processes and those who are excluded, but it should not be equated with this division. Among the global class are members of transnational networks based on exclusivist identity, while at the local level there are many courageous individuals who refuse the politics of particularism.
By identity politics, I mean the claim to power on the basis of a particular identity – be it national, clan, religious or linguistic. In one sense, all wars involve a clash of identities – British against French, communists against democrats. But my point is that these earlier identities were linked either to a notion of state interest or to some forward-looking project – ideas about how society should be organized. Nineteenth-century European nationalisms or post-colonial nationalisms, for example, presented themselves as emancipatory nation-building projects. The new identity politics is about the claim to power on the basis of labels – in so far as there are ideas about political or social change, they tend to relate to an idealized nostalgic representation of the past. It is often claimed that the new wave of identity politics is merely a throwback to the past, a resurgence of ancient hatreds kept under control by colonialism and/or the Cold War. While it is true that the narratives of identity politics depend on memory and tradition, it is also the case that these are ‘reinvented’ in the context of the failure or the corrosion of other sources of political legitimacy – the discrediting of socialism or the nation-building rhetoric of the first generation of post-colonial leaders. These backward-looking political projects arise in the vacuum created by the absence of forward-looking projects. Unlike the politics of ideas which are open to all and therefore tend to be integrative, this type of identity politics is inherently exclusive and therefore tends towards fragmentation.
There are two aspects of the new wave of identity politics which specifically relate to the process of globalization. First, the new wave of identity politics is both local and global, national as well as transnational. In many cases, there are significant diaspora communities whose influence is greatly enhanced by the ease of travel and improved communication. Alienated diaspora groups in advanced industrial or oil-rich countries provide ideas, funds and techniques, thereby imposing their own frustrations and fantasies on what is often a very different situation. Second, this politics makes use of the new technology. The speed of political mobilization is greatly increased by the use of the electronic media. The effect of television, radio or videos on what is often a non-reading public cannot be overestimated. The protagonists of the new politics often display the symbols of a global mass culture – Mercedes cars, Rolex watches, Ray-Ban sunglasses – combined with the labels that signify their own brand of particularistic cultural identity. The use of mobiles and/or the Internet and social media hugely contribute to the construction of political networks.
The second characteristic of the new wars is the changed mode of warfare14 – the means through which the new wars are fought. The strategies of the new warfare draw on the experience of both guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency, yet they are quite distinctive. In conventional or regular war, the goal is the capture of territory by military means; battles are the decisive encounters of the war. Guerrilla warfare developed as a way of getting round the massive concentrations of military force which are characteristic of conventional war. In guerrilla warfare, territory is captured through political control of the population rather than through military advance, and battles are avoided as far as possible. The new warfare also tends to avoid battle and to control territory through political control of the population, but whereas guerrilla warfare, at least in theory as articulated by Mao Tse-tung or Che Guevara, aimed to capture ‘hearts and minds’, the new warfare borrows from counter-insurgency techniques of destabilization aimed at sowing ‘fear and hatred’. The aim is to control the population by getting rid of everyone of a different identity (and indeed of a different opinion) and by instilling terror. Hence the strategic goal of these wars is to mobilize extremist politics based on fear and hatred. This often involves population expulsion through various means such as mass killing and forcible resettlement, as well as a range of political, psychological and economic techniques of intimidation. This is why all these wars are characterized by high levels of refugees and displaced persons, and why most violence is directed against civilians. Behaviour that was proscribed according to the classical rules of warfare and codified in the laws of war in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, such as atrocities against non-combatants, sieges, destruction of historic monuments, etc., constitutes an essential component of the strategies of the new mode of warfare. The terrorism experienced in places such as New York, Madrid or London, as well as in Israel or Iraq, can be understood as a variant of the new strategy – the use of spectacular, often gruesome, violence to create fear and conflict.
In contrast to the vertically organized hierarchical units that were typical of ‘old wars’, among the units that fight these wars is a disparate range of different types of groups, such as para-military units, local warlords, criminal gangs, police forces, mercenary groups and also regular armies, including breakaway units from regular armies. In organizational terms, they are highly decentralized and they operate through a mixture of confrontation and cooperation even when on opposing sides. They make use of advanced technology even if it is not what we tend to call ‘high technology’ (stealth bombers or cruise missiles, for example). In the last fifty years, there have been significant advances in lighter weapons – undetectable landmines, for example, or small arms which are light, accurate and easy to use so that they can even be operated by children. Modern communications – cellular phones or computer links – are also used in order to coordinate, mediate and negotiate among the disparate fighting units.
The third way in which the new wars can be contrasted with earlier wars is what I call the new ‘globalized’ war economy, which is elaborated in chapter 5 along with the mode of warfare. The new globalized war economy is almost exactly the opposite of the war economies of the two world wars. The latter were centralized, totalizing and autarchic. The new war economies are decentralized. Participation in the war is low and unemployment is extremely high. Moreover, these economies are heavily dependent on external resources. In these wars, domestic production declines dramatically because of global competition, physical destruction or interruptions to normal trade, as does tax revenue. In these circumstances, the fighting units finance themselves through plunder, hostage-taking and the black market or through external assistance. The latter can take the following forms: remittances from the diaspora, ‘taxation’ of humanitarian assistance, support from neighbouring governments, or illegal trade in arms, drugs or valuable commodities such as oil or diamonds or human trafficking. All of these sources can only be sustained through continued violence so that a war logic is built into the functioning of the economy. This retrograde set of social relationships, which is entrenched by war, has a tendency to spread across borders through refugees or organized crime or ethnic minorities. It is possible to identify clusters of war economies or near war economies in places such as the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Horn of Africa, Central Africa or West Africa.
Because the various warring parties share the aim of sowing ‘fear and hatred’, they operate in a way that is mutually reinforcing, helping each other to create a climate of insecurity and suspicion – indeed, it is possible to find examples in both Eastern Europe and Africa, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, of mutual cooperation for both military and economic purposes.15 Often, among the first civilians to be targeted are those who espouse a different politics, those who try to maintain inclusive social relations and some sense of public morality. Thus, although the new wars appear to be between different linguistic, religious or tribal groups, they can also be presented as wars in which those who represent particularistic identity politics cooperate in suppressing the values of civility and multiculturalism. In other words, they can be understood as wars between exclusivism and cosmopolitanism.
This analysis of new wars has implications for the management of conflicts, which I explore in chapter 6. There is no possible long-term solution within the framework of identity politics. And because these are conflicts with extensive social and economic ramifications, top-down approaches are likely to fail. In the early 1990s there was great optimism about the prospects for humanitarian intervention to protect civilians. The concept of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ developed by the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001 was approved by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005 and has received considerable emphasis within the United Nations.16 However, the practice of humanitarian intervention was, on the one hand, subverted by what happened in New York on 11 September 2001 and the subsequent War on Terror. And, on the other hand, the development of Responsibility to Protect is, I would argue, constrained by a kind of myopia about the character of the new warfare. The persistence of inherited mandates and the tendency to interpret these wars in traditional terms, has been the main reason why humanitarian intervention has often failed to prevent the wars and may actually have helped to sustain them in various ways – for example, through the provision of humanitarian aid, which is an important source of income for the warring parties, or through the legitimation of war criminals by inviting them to the negotiating table, or through the effort to find political compromises based on exclusivist assumptions. Even in cases where the goals are clearly humanitarian, as in the Kosovo and Libya wars, the means are often those of updated old war with problematic consequences.
The key to any long-term solution is the restoration of legitimacy, the reconstitution of the control of organized violence by public authorities, whether local, national or global. This is both a political process – the rebuilding of trust in, and support for, public authorities – and a legal process – the reestablishment of a rule of law within which public authorities operate. This cannot be done on the basis of particularistic politics. An alternative forward-looking cosmopolitan political project which would cross the global/local divide and reconstruct legitimacy around an inclusive, democratic set of values has to be counterposed against the politics of exclusivism. In all the new wars there are local people and places that struggle against the politics of exclusivism – the Hutus and Tutsis who called themselves Hutsis and tried to defend their localities against genocide; the non-nationalists in the cities of Bosnia–Herzegovina, particularly Sarajevo and Tuzla, who kept alive civic multicultural values; the elders in Northwest Somaliland who negotiated peace; the civil society groups in both Iraq and Afghanistan who insist on the idea of Afghanistan and Iraq. What is needed is an alliance between local defenders of civility and transnational institutions which would guide a strategy aimed at controlling violence. Such a strategy would include political, military and economic components. It would operate within a framework of international law, based on that body of international law that comprises both the ‘laws of war’ and human rights law, which could perhaps be termed cosmopolitan law, and it would put emphasis on various forms of transitional justice. In this context, peacekeeping could be reconceptualized as cosmopolitan law-enforcement. Since the new wars are, in a sense, a mixture of war, crime and human rights violations, so the agents of cosmopolitan law-enforcement have to be a mixture of soldiers and police. I also argue that a new strategy of reconstruction, which includes the reconstruction of social, civic and institutional relationships, should supplant the current dominant approaches of structural adjustment or humanitarianism.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are good illustrations of the way in which misperceptions about the character of war exacerbate ‘new wars’. The fall of the Taliban in December 2001 seemed to offer a new model of how to defeat authoritarian regimes. In Iraq, the Bush administration believed that they could apply this model and defeat Saddam Hussein rapidly, using new technology to substitute for manpower, and install a new regime, along the lines of the occupation of post-war Germany and Japan. But in both countries, they found themselves caught up in an ever-worsening new war spiral, involving both state and non-state actors, identity politics, a criminalized war economy and growing numbers of civilian casualties. This is the subject of chapter 7, which has been written especially for this new edition.
In the final chapter of the book, I discuss the implications of the argument for global order. Although the new wars are concentrated in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, they are a global phenomenon not just because of the presence of global networks, or because they are reported globally. The characteristics of the new wars I have described are to be found in North America and Western Europe as well. The right-wing militia groups in the United States are not so very different from the paramilitary groups in other places. Indeed, in the United States it is reported that private security officers outnumber police officers by two to one. Nor is the salience of identity politics and the growing disillusionment with formal politics just a Southern and Eastern phenomenon. The violence in the inner cities of Western Europe and North America can, in some senses, be described as new wars. The suicide bombers responsible for the attacks of 7 July 2005 on London were, after all, home-grown. It is sometimes said that the advanced industrial world is integrating and the poorer parts of the world are fragmenting. I would argue that all parts of the world are characterized by a combination of integration and fragmentation even though the tendencies to integration are greater in the North and the tendencies to fragmentation may be greater in the South and East.
Since 9/11 it has become clear that it is no longer possible to insulate some parts of the world from others. Neither the idea that we can re-create some kind of bipolar or multipolar world order on the basis of identity – Christianity versus Islam, for example – nor the idea that the ‘anarchy’ in places such as Africa and Eastern Europe can be contained is feasible if my analysis of the changing character of organized violence has some basis in reality. This is why the cosmopolitan project has to be a global project even if it is, as it must be, local or regional in application.
The book was originally based on direct experience of the new wars, especially in the Balkans and the Transcaucasian region. As one of the chairs of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly (HCA), I travelled extensively in these areas and learned much of what I know from the critical intellectuals and activists involved in local branches of the HCA. In particular, in Bosnia–Herzegovina, the HCA was given the status of an implementing agency of the UNHCR, which enabled me to move around the country during the war in support of local activists. I was also lucky enough to have access to the various institutions responsible for carrying out the policies of the international community; as chair of the HCA, it was one of my tasks, along with others, to present the ideas and proposals of local branches to governments and international institutions such as the EU, NATO, the OSCE and the UN. More recently, I have been involved in projects aimed at supporting civil society in Iraq and Afghanistan. As an academic, I was able to supplement and put into context this knowledge through reading, through exchanges with colleagues working in related fields and through research projects undertaken for the United Nations University (UNU), the European Commission and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).17 In particular, I have been greatly helped by the newsletters, news digests, pleas for help and monitoring reports that now can be received daily on the Internet.
The aim of this book is not simply to inform, although I have tried to provide information and to back my assertions with examples. The aim is to offer a different perspective, the perspective derived from the experiences of critically minded individuals on the ground, tempered by my own experience in various international forums. It is a contribution to the reconceptualization of patterns of violence and war that has to be undertaken if the tragedies that are encroaching in many parts of the world are to be halted. I am not an optimist, yet my practical suggestions may seem utopian. I offer them in hope, not in confidence, as the only alternative to a grim future.
Notes
1.
The research project was undertaken for the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU/WIDER). The results are published in Mary Kaldor and Basker Vashee (eds),
Restructuring the Global Military Sector
, Volume I:
New Wars
, London: Cassell/Pinter, 1997.
2.
David Keen, ‘When war itself is privatized’,
Times Literary Supplement
(December 1995).
3.
Mark Duffield, ‘Post-modern conflict: warlords, postadjustment states and private protection’,
Journal of Civil Wars
(April 1998); Michael Ignatieff,
The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
, London: Chatto & Windus, 1998.
4.
Chris Hables Gray,
Post-Modern War: The New Politics of Conflicts
, London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
5.
Frank Hoffman,
Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars
, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, 2011.
6.
John Mueller,
The Remnants of War
, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004.
7.
See, for example, the various chapters including my own chapter ‘Elaborating the “new war” thesis’, in Jan Angstrom and Isabelle Duyvesteyn,
Rethinking the Nature of War
, London and New York: Frank Cass, 2005; see also Errol A. Henderson and David Singer, ‘ “New wars” and rumours of “new wars” ’,
International Interactions
, 7/2 (2002); Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘ “New” and “old” civil wars: a valid distinction?’,
World Politics
, 54 (October 2001).
8.
Martin Shaw, ‘War and globality: the role and character of war in the global transition’, in Ho-Won Jeong (ed.),
Peace and Conflict: A New Agenda
, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
9.
See David Jablonsky,
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Night: Doctrinal Change and Continuity and the Revolution in Military Affairs
, US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA, 1994; Elliott Cohen, ‘A revolution in warfare’,
Foreign Affairs
(March/April 1996); Robert J. Bunker, ‘Technology in a neo-Clausewitzean setting’, in Gert de Nooy (ed.),
The Clausewitzean Dictum and the Future of Western Military Strategy
, The Hague and London: Kluwer Law International, 1997.
10.
Jean Baudrillard,
The Gulf War
, London: Power Publishers, 1995.
11.
See Malcolm Waters,
Globalization
, London: Routledge, 1995; David Held,
Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance
, Cambridge: Polity, 1995.
12.
See Mary Kaldor, Ulrich Albrecht and Asbjörn Eide,
The International Military Order
, London: Macmillan, 1978.
13.
Anthony Giddens makes a similar argument about the new political cleavage between cosmopolitanism and fundamentalism. See Anthony Giddens,
Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics
, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.
14.
On the concept of the mode of warfare, see Mary Kaldor, ‘Warfare and capitalism’, in E.P. Thompson et al.,
Exterminism and Cold War
, London: Verso, 1981.
15.
See, for example, David Keen,
Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone
, Oxford: James Currey, 2005.
16.
The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2001.
http://responsibilitytoprotect.org/ICISS%20Report.pdf
.
17.
In addition to the research project undertaken for UNU/ WIDER, I and my colleagues at the Sussex European Institute undertook a research project in 1995 on Balkan reconstruction for the European Commission. See Vesna Bojičić, Mary Kaldor and Ivan Vejvoda, ‘Post-war reconstruction in the Balkans’,
SEI Working Paper
, Brighton: Sussex European Institute, 1995. A shorter updated version is published in
European Foreign Affairs Review
, 2/3 (Autumn 1997). See also the report of the UNDP project, ‘Evaluation of UNDP support to conflict-affected countries’,
http://www.undp.org/evaluation/documents/thematic/conflict/ConflictEvaluation2006.pdf
.
2Old Wars
As Clausewitz was fond of pointing out, war is a social activity.1 It involves the mobilization and organization of individual men, almost never women, for the purpose of inflicting physical violence; it entails the regulation of certain types of social relationships and has its own particular logic. Clausewitz, who was arguably the greatest exponent of modern war, insisted that war could not be reduced either to art or to science. Sometimes he likened war to business competition, and he often used economic analogies to illustrate his points.
Every society has its own characteristic form of war. What we tend to perceive as war, what policy makers and military leaders define as war, is, in fact, a specific phenomenon which took shape in Europe somewhere between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, although it has passed through several different phases since then. It was a phenomenon that was intimately bound up with the evolution of the modern state. It went through several phases, as I have tried to show in table 2.1, from the relatively limited wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries associated with the growing power of the absolutist state, to the more revolutionary wars of the nineteenth century such as the Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil War, both of which were linked to the establishment of nation-states, to the total wars of the early twentieth century, and the imagined Cold War of the late twentieth century, which were wars of alliances and, later, blocs.
Table 2.1The evolution of old wars
Each of these phases was characterized by a different mode of warfare, involving different types of military forces, different strategies and techniques, different relations and means of warfare. But, despite these differences, war was recognizably the same phenomenon: a construction of the centralized, ‘rationalized’, hierarchically ordered, territorialized modern state. As the centralized, territorialized modern state gives way to new types of polity emerging out of new global processes, so war, as we presently conceive it, is becoming an anachronism.
This chapter aims to provide a stylized description of old wars. Actual warfare never exactly fitted the stylized description. This type of war was predominantly European. There were always rebellions, colonial wars or guerrilla wars, both in Europe and elsewhere, which were sometimes given the description of ‘irregular warfare’ or else not called wars at all. Instead, they were called uprisings, insurgencies or, more recently, low-intensity conflicts. Nevertheless, it is the stylized notion of war that still profoundly affects our thinking about war and dominates, even today, the way policy makers conceive of national security.
War and the Emergence of the Modern State
Clausewitz defined war as ‘an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will’.2 At the time, this definition implied that ‘we’ and ‘our opponent’ were states, and the ‘will’ of one state could be clearly defined. Hence the kind of war that Clausewitz analysed, even though he did devote some writing to small wars, was predominantly war between states for a definable political end, i.e. state interest.
The notion of war as state activity was firmly established only towards the end of the eighteenth century. The only precedent for this type of war was ancient Rome, although even in this case it was one-sided; the state, i.e. Rome, fought against barbarians who had no notion of the separation of state and society. Van Creveld argues that war between the Greek city-states did not count as state warfare since there was no clear distinction between the state and the citizens. Wars were fought by citizen militias, and contemporary accounts of warfare tended to refer to war between ‘the Athenians’ and ‘the Spartans’ rather than to war between ‘Athens’ and ‘Sparta’.3 Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the late Middle Ages, war was fought by a variety of actors – the Church, feudal barons, barbarian tribes, city-states – each with its own characteristic military formations. Hence, the barbarian mode of fighting was generally based on warrior cults, the individual warrior being the key military unit. Feudal barons depended on knights, with their codes of honour and chivalry, supported by serfs. The city-states of Northern Italy typically depended on citizen militias, much like the earlier Greek city-states.
In the early stages of European state formation, monarchs raised armies to fight wars from coalitions of feudal barons rather as the UN Secretary-General, today, has to mobilize voluntary contributions from individual states in order to raise a peacekeeping force. Gradually, they were able to consolidate territorial borders and to centralize power by using their growing economic assets, derived from customs duties, various forms of taxation and borrowing from the emergent bourgeoisie, to raise mercenary armies which gave them a certain degree of independence from the barons. However, mercenary armies turned out to be unreliable; their loyalty could not be counted on. Moreover, they were disbanded after wars or for the winter. The cost of disbandment and of re-enlistment was often prohibitive and, in the closed seasons, the mercenaries could always find other less savoury ways of making a living. Thus, mercenary armies came to be replaced by standing armies which enabled monarchs to create specialized, professional military forces. The introduction of drill and exercise, pioneered by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Prince William of Orange, kept the army occupied in periods when there was no open warfare. According to Keegan, the establishment of permanent infantry troops, the creation of compagnies d’ordonnance or regiments, became the ‘device for securing the control of armed force by the state’. They were kept in garrison towns which became ‘schools of the nation’.4 Uniforms were introduced to distinguish soldiers from civilians. As Michael Roberts puts it, ‘the soldier became the King’s man for he wore the King’s coat’5 – literally, as it turned out, because kings increasingly tended to wear military uniforms to exhibit their roles as military commanders.
The new type of military organization was to become typical of the emerging administrative arrangements that were associated with modernity. The soldier was the agent of what Max Weber called rational-legal authority:
The modern military officer is a type of appointed official who is clearly marked out by certain class distinctions … In this respect, such officers differ radically from elected military leaders; from charismatic condottieri; from the type of officers who recruit and lead mercenary armies as a capitalistic enterprise; and finally from the incumbents of commissions which have been purchased. There may be gradual transitions between these types. The patrimonial ‘retainer’ who is separated from the means of carrying out his function and the proprietor of a mercenary army for capitalistic purposes, have along with the private capitalistic entrepreneur, become pioneers of the modern type of bureaucracy.6
The establishment of standing armies under the control of the state was an integral part of the monopolization of legitimate violence which was intrinsic to the modern state. State interest became the legitimate justification for war, supplanting concepts of justice, jus ad bellum, drawn from theology. The Clausewitzean insistence that war is a rational instrument for the pursuit of state interest – ‘the continuation of politics by other means’ – constituted a secularization of legitimacy that paralleled developments in other spheres of activity. Once state interest had become the dominant legitimation of war, then claims of just cause by non-state actors could no longer be pursued through violent means.
In the same vein, there developed rules about what constituted legitimate warfare which were later codified in the laws of war. All types of warfare are characterized by rules; the very fact that warfare is a socially sanctioned activity, that it has to be organized and justified, requires rules. There is a thin dividing line between socially acceptable killing and what is ostracized by society. But that dividing line is defined differently in different periods. In the Middle Ages, the rules of warfare, jus in bello, were derived from papal authority. Under the modern state, a new set of secular rules had to be evolved. According to van Creveld:
