Abstract
Conflict research was in vogue during the 1990s as theorists grappled with new global realities after the end of the Cold War, including the dissolution of the Soviet Union and global bipolarity. While Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of an ‘end of history’ was widely contested, it certainly seemed that ideology — which had so busied people during the Cold War — occupied a less prominent role in explaining conflict following the fall of the Berlin Wall than it had in the decades prior. The demise of superpower rivalry was followed by widespread assumptions about a growing international liberal consensus; to those so minded, the post-Cold War world offered unprecedented promise for more peaceful relations both between and within states. It was this mood that then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, captured when he in 1992 declared that ‘the nations and peoples of the United Nations are fortunate in a way that those of the League of Nations were not. We have been given a second chance to create the world of our Charter that they were denied.’1 Optimism about the prospects for a new international order was by no means confined to discussions within the UN, however; then US President Bill Clinton uttered similar hopes at the time of the signing of the Bosnia-Croat peace agreement in 1994.2 The most paradigmatic statement is probably that given by Tony Blair, two years into his period as UK Prime Minister, in a speech at the Economic Club in Chicago in 1999: Blair proclaimed prospects for international order under the banner that ‘we are all internationalists now’.3
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Notes
According to data presented by the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme, only four of the 57 conflicts between 1990 and 2005 were inter-state conflicts. Lotta Harbom and Peter Wallensteen, ‘Appendix 2A: Patterns of major armed conflicts, 1990–2005’ in Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), ed., SIPRI Yearbook 2006: Armaments, disarmament and international security (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
M. Kaldor (1999) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press).
See also H. Münkler (2005) The New Wars, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity Press).
G.B. Helman and S.R. Ratner (1992) ‘Saving failed states’, Foreign Policy 89, Winter, p. 3.
I.W. Zartman (ed.) (1995) Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner), p. 1.
See also J. Herbst (1997) ‘Responding to state failure in Africa’, International Security 21, pp. 120–44.
For an example of the former view, see K. Menkhaus (2004) Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, Adelphi Papers (London: Routledge, for IISS); and for an example of the latter, see
W. Reno (1998) Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner).
R. Marchal (2007) ‘Warlordism and terrorism: how to obscure an already confusing crisis? The case of Somalia’, International Affairs 83, no. 6, p. 1094.
T. Lyons and A.I. Samatar (1995) Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Intervention, and Strategies for Political Reconstruction (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution)
quoted in T. Langford (1999) ‘Things fall apart: state failure and the politics of intervention’, International Studies Review 1, no. 1, p. 61.
C. Hedges (2002) War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (Oxford: Public Affairs Ltd).
Helman and Ratner, ‘Saving failed states’. See also A. Mazrui (1994) ‘Decaying parts of Africa need benign colonization’, International Herald Tribune, 4 Aug.
For an account of how the concept has evolved, see R.H. Dorff (2005) ‘Failed states after 9/11: what did we know and what have we learned?’ International Studies Perspective vol. 6. ‘State fragility’ has been used to denote a combination of a lack of capacity and a lack of resilience on the part of states.
R. Picciotto, F. Olonisakin and M. Clarke (2007) Global Development and Human Security (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers).
R.D. Kaplan (1994) ‘The coming anarchy: how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet’, Atlantic Monthly, Feb.
See also R.D. Kaplan (1993) Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: St Martin’s Press);
R.D. Kaplan (1996) The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, From Iran to Cambodia — A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (New York: Vintage Press).
M. Duffield (2001) Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Security and Development (London: Zed Books), pp. 109–13.
T. Homer-Dixon, J. Boutwell and G. Rathjens (1993) ‘Environmental scarcity and violent conflict’, Scientific American, Feb., pp. 38–45.
M. Ignatieff (1998) The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Metropolitan Books).
For further critique of the concept of ethnic conflict, see D. Campbell (1998) National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press).
A. Lieven (1998) Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. 110.
For illuminating discussions, see Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honour; S. Woodward (1995) Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution).
S.P. Huntington (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: The Free Press, Simon and Schuster UK Ltd), Preface.
Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 47. S.P. Huntington (1993) ‘The clash of civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3, p. 27.
For Sen it is the illusion of identity rather than identity per se that is the operating factor. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (London: Allen Lane, 2006).
P. Collier and A. Hoeffler (2000) Greed and grievance in civil wars, Policy Research Working Paper 2355 (The World Bank Development Research Group). See also
P. Collier (2000) ‘Doing well out of war’, in M. Berdal and D. Malone (eds) Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner).
D. Keen (2000) ‘Incentives and disincentives for violence’, in Berdal and Malone (eds) Greed and Grievance. See also Cramer, ‘Homo economicus goes to war’;
D. Keen (1998) The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, Adelphi Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press on behalf of the IISS).
D. Keen and M. Berdal (1997) ‘Violence and economic agendas in civil wars: some policy implications’, Millennium 26, no. 3, pp. 798–9.
K. Ballentine and J. Sherman (eds) (2003) The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner).
See also M. Berdal (2005) ‘Beyond greed and grievance — and not too soon…A review essay’, Review of International Studies 31.
Compare also Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, and D. Keen (2005) Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone (Oxford: James Curry). In the latter, Keen places more emphasis than previously on the role played by ‘psychological functions’, especially the role of emotions such as shame and humiliation (both on the part of rebels and government forces) in producing and sustaining violence. See esp. pp. 48–55 and pp. 56–81.
For a discussion of Philip Windsor’s critique of positivist thought, see M. Berdal (2002) ‘“A cross-roads rather than an academic discipline” — Philip Windsor and the study of International Relations’, in P. Windsor and M. Berdal (eds) Studies in International Relations: Essays by Philip Windsor (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press), pp. 3–6.
J. Mueller (2004) The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Ibid., p. 99. See also P. Gourevitch (1998) We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Chris Hedges struck a similar note when he wrote that the warlords in the former republic of Yugoslavia were ‘made up of the dregs of Yugoslav society… thieves, embezzlers, petty thugs’.
C. Hedges (2002) War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Perseus Books), p. 27.
Alex Schmid’s (1988) study comparing a vast number of academic definitions of terrorism finds that the second most common feature (in 65 percent) of terrorism cited was that the violence was ‘political’. See A.P. Schmid, A.J. Jongman et al. (1988) Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Databases, Theories and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction), pp. 5–6.
See, for example, R. Shultz and A. Dew (2006) Insurgents, Terrorists and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat (New York: Columbia University Press).
I. Duyvesteyn (2004) ‘How new is the new terrorism?’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27, p. 443.
See also W. Laqueur (2004) No End to War (New York: Continuum).
M.B. Salter (2002) Barbarians and Civilisation in International Relations (London: Pluto Press), pp. 128–56.
C.R. Browning (1998) Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins).
M.V. Rasmussen (2006) The Risk Society at War: Terror, Technology and Strategy in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 10.
R. Cooper (2000) The Post-modern State and the World Order (London: Demos, 2000).
The literature on state-building is vast. For two influential works on the topic, see S. Chesterman (2004) You, the People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration and State-Building (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
R.I. Rotberg (ed.) (2004) When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 151–302.
OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) (2004) ‘Security Sector Reform and Governance: Policy and Good Practice’ (OECD: Paris), pp. 16–18.
D. Campbell (1992) ‘Apartheid cartography: the political anthropology and spatial effects of international diplomacy in Bosnia’, Political Geography 18, p. 402.
W. Posch (2005) ‘A majority ignored: the Arabs in Iraq’, in W. Posch (ed.) Looking Into Iraq, Chaillot Paper (Paris: ISS), p. 26.
See also T. Dodge (2005) Iraq’s Future: The Aftermath of Regime Change (London: Routledge, for IISS).
For an overview of some of the most important initiatives in this regard, see M. Taylor and A. Huser (2003) Security, Development and Economies of Conflict: Problems and Responses, Fafo AIS Policy Brief (Oslo: Fafo);
N. Tschirgi (2003) Peacebuilding as the Link between Security and Development: Is the Window of Opportunity Closing?, IPA Studies in Security and Development (New York: International Peace Academy).
For a pro-integration view of counter-terrorism and development, see K. von Hippel (2006) Counter-radicalization Development Assistance, Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) Working Paper (Copenhagen: DIIS).
For a critical view, see J. Beall, T. Goodfellow and J. Putzel (2006) ‘Introductory article: on the discourse of terrorism, security and development’, Journal of International Development 18.
J. Mayall (2007) ‘The new interventionism’, in M. Berdal and S. Economides (eds) United Nations Interventionism, 1991–2004 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
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© 2014 Caroline Holmqvist
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Holmqvist, C. (2014). Narratives of Disorder. In: Policing Wars. Rethinking Political Violence Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137323613_2
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