This document provides a complete summary lectures 8-12 of the core module International relations. It includes all readings and lecture content for the second IR quiz.
International Relations
Lectures 8-12
Lecture 8: Security between states 2
Posen 1993: The security dilemma and ethnic conflict 10
Fazal and Poast 2019: War is not over: What the Optimists Get Wrong About Conflict 16
Lecture 9: From old to new wars - Civil wars 18
Kalyvas and Balcells 2010: International System and Technologies of Rebellion 25
Kaldor 1999: New and old wars chapter 1 and 2 31
Lecture 10: Terrorism 36
De la Calle and Sánchez Cuenca 2011: What We Talk About When We Talk About Terrorism
45
Meier 2019: Identity, law and how political elites define terrorism 50
Lecture 11: Peacekeeping and Peace building 51
Autesserre 2012: Dominant narratives on the Congo and their unintended consequences 59
De coning 2020: Principled peacekeeping works 65
Lecture 12: (Guest lecture Robert Nagel) Gender and International Security (Talking to the
shameless? Sexual violence and mediation in civil wars) 67
Locher and Prügl 2001: Feminism and Constructivism: Worlds Apart or Sharing the Middle
Ground? 73
Sjoberg and Peet 2011: Targeting women in wars (Eva) 76
,Lecture 8: Security between states
What we are talking about
● Why are conflicts between states still important?
● Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a war in 2020
○ The concern dates back 30 years or more
○ At the time the Soviet Union collapsed this conflict became more intense
○ The conflict was over a population of Armenians in an enclave in Azerbaijan
○ Back then Armenia had more power but last year Azerbaijan managed to take
back some of their territory
● Why should we care?
○ 5000 people died
○ But also international involvement
■ Turkey allied with Azerbaijan
■ Russia allied with Armenia (the reason why it managed to stop)
Security - A fuzzy concept
● Latin sine cura → “without worries”
● Security as “a low probability of damage to acquired values” (Baldwin 1997: 485)
● Defining security
○ Whose security?
■ Traditionally → security of states (leaders also)
■ Challenge to tradition → security of groups and people in general
○ From which threats?
■ Basic level → security from war (physically secure)
■ Other perspective → secure from hunger, economic well being etc.
■ Even broader → secure from diseases (Covid)
○ For which values? (would we pursue to achieve security)
■ Should it be about order?
■ Also about freedom, justice, wealth etc?
○ Objective or subjective security?
■ Crime statistics or subjectivist security (do i feel secure)
○ How much security?
○ By what means?
○ At what cost?
Defining war and conflict
2
, ● “War, to be abolished, must be understood. To be understood, it must be studied.”
(Deutsch, 1970: 473)
● What counts as a war?
○ Massacres? The Cold War? Cyber war?
● Conceptual definition → “War is organized violence carried on by political units against
each other.” (Bull, 1983: 184).
○ Key values:
■ Organised violence
■ Political actors
■ Reciprocity
○ But this is not specific enough for empirical trends
● Operational definition (UCDP data)
○ Intensity threshold (intensity of fighting):
■ War >1,000 fatalities per year
■ Armed conflict >25 fatalities per year
Empirical trends
● Organised violence in pre-modern era
○ So lets compare the current period to earlier times (is it more or less violent)
○ Some claim pre modern times were more violent
■ e.g. medieval times, the bible etc.
○ Historians and sociologists → pre modern societies didn’t have the infrastructure
to engage in mass violence
■ The argument of the state growing because of its war making capacity is
consistent with this view (Tilly)
● Wars since 1816 (incidence)
○ Very western bias data
○ What we see in the figure below:
■ Quite rare especially for interstate war
3
, ● Wars and conflict since 1945 (incidence)
○ Pay attention to the black bars → there is a decrease in the incidence of conflict
between countries
● Battle deaths in war since 1816 (incidence) → intensity of war
○ We see how much the world wars are outliers
○ But comparing before and after world wars → wars have become more lethal
after the world wars (but they do not consider increase in population)
4
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