Abstract
Wars are fought for a myriad of reasons, and employ a wide diversity of strategies. Yet it is the similarities of the war experience, rather than the differences, that are of interest in this analysis. In investigating the war phenomenon, I focus on two related arenas of conflict: dirty war strategies, and the impact of these on civilian populations. As roughly 90% of all war casualties today are civilians (Sivard annual; Bedjaoui, 1986), this will essentially entail a chronicle of the average person.
‘What is war?’
‘War is when there is lots of shooting and they kill your family and friends and blow big holes in the roads and houses, and you run around scared, and don’t have enough salt to eat, and not much food either.’
— Fieldnotes, 1989, Mozambique: three and four-year-old child war-refugees, three hours after yet another attack on the refugee centre.
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© 1992 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Nordstrom, C. (1992). The Dirty War: Civilian Experience of Conflict in Mozambique and Sri Lanka. In: Rupesinghe, K. (eds) Internal Conflict and Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22246-9_2
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