Understanding Politics and Society by Fabio de Nardis

Author:Fabio de Nardis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030377601
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

7.2.2 New Wars

The “new wars”, as defined by Mary Kaldor (1999), developed in particular between the 1980s and 1990s in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, composing an important part of the globalisation processes. While maintaining some typical traits of total wars, they are distinguished in a significant way. The old wars represented the extreme point of that politicisation of violence inherent in political power and the modern state. They were violent conflicts between organised political groups or national states that directly managed the conflict, from finding the necessary resources to the strategic choices on the conduct to follow. With the new wars, it is very difficult to distinguish between war, organised crime and large-scale human rights violations. The political logic of war is confused with the private violence traditionally exercised by organised crime and with the disturbing practice of genocide or ethnic cleansing. Cases of this kind were also present in the past but were confined to civil war or “low intensity” conflicts, an expression coined by the American generals during the Cold War to describe cases of guerrilla warfare or terrorism. But as we shall see, the current qualitative leap in war phenomena makes them only remotely comparable to the low-intensity conflicts of the past. No doubt the aspect of guerrilla warfare exists but on a renewed basis. It is no coincidence that most observers have felt the need to coin expressions that signal the difference compared to traditional wars. While Kaldor (ibid.) prefers to speak of “new wars”, others use expressions such as “postmodern wars” (Duffield 1998), “informal wars” or “privatised wars” (Keen 1995). Martin Shaw speaks of “degenerate wars”, stating that what is new about the new wars are the indiscriminate murders, genocides and ethnic expulsions. They were a sub-theme of the classical total war but have now become the main thrust of conflicts (Shaw 1999). The adjective “degenerate” applied to the new wars serves to emphasise the decline of national and military forces in favour of irregular armed groups. Following the logic outlined by Kaldor (1999), we can say that there are essentially four characteristics of the new wars: (1) the erosion of the autonomy of the state and the consequent “privatisation of war”; (2) the emergence of so-called identity politics; (3) the different warfare and combat methods and (4) the presence of a globalised war economy.

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