Extensive summary of every required reading for International Relations (lecture 12-18)
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Course
International relations (73220031LY)
Institution
Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
International Relations (LY) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Extensive summary of every required reading for exam 2 (lecture 12-18). Tables, figures and images are included to foster an understanding of every article. Reading the summary will be sufficient to understand the literature.
Kaldor, M. (2013). New and old wars: Organised violence in a global era -New and old
wars: Organised violence in a global era. John Wiley & Sons. Chapters 1 and 2.
Chapter 1 – Introduction
,In the summer of 1992 visited Nagorono-Karabakh in the Transcaucasian region in the midst
of the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia
-post-communist part of the world
-research about new types of wars in Eastern Europe shared a lot of features with new wars in
Africa or South Asia
Main claim – during the last decade of the 20th century a new type of organized violence has
developed (especially in Africa and Eastern Europe) which is one aspect of the current
globalized era
-new to distinguish such wars from prevailing perceptions of wars in earlier era’s
-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).
-mostly termed civil wars or low-intensity conflicts – but even though they are localized they
involve transnational connections and the distinctions 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
Defining these ‘new wars’
1 Low-intenstiy conflict
-coined during the Cold war by the US military to describe guerilla warfare – but do not
capture the distinctive character of the new wars
2 privatized/ informal wars
,- 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.
3 Post-modern 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 cyber-space; moreover, the
new wars involve elements of pre-modernity and modernity as well.
4 Frank Hoffman – hybrid wars
-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.
5 Martin Shaw – degenerate warfare/ john Mueller – remnants of war
-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
, -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.
-The main point of the distinction between new and old wars was to change the prevailing
perceptions of war, especially among policy makers.
Ø want 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 centerpiece of any international intervention (political, military, civil or economic).
Ø Globalization is a convenient catch-all to describe the various changes that
characterize the contemporary period and have influenced the character of war
Revolution in military affairs/ defense transformation = the advent of information technology
has implications for the future of warfare – modern war is now more precise and discriminate,
but these new conceptions are conceived within the inherited institutional structures of war
and the military – war in the traditional model in which techniques develop in a linear
extension from the past > sustain the imagined character of war which was typical in the Cold
War era and utilized to minimize own causalities
-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.
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