Internal Conflict and the International Community

Wars Without End?

Roderic Alley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754609766
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351926980
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This insightful book debates whether conflict within states has emerged as the Achilles Heel of the international community. It covers a wide-range of issues including the roots of internal conflict, small arms supplies, intervention, human rights and international humanitarian law, refugees and post-conflict reconstruction. Internal Conflict and the International Community provides supplementary reading for third level undergraduates, post-graduates and scholars of international relations, comparative politics, development studies, international law and security and defence studies.

1	Introduction

Wars within states now incur international consequences of a disturbing magnitude. That is the theme of this book. It treats internal conflict as a phenomenon whose causes, dynamics and impacts are incomprehensible outside the global sphere. In human terms alone, that claim is readily intelligible. Organized violence within countries rivals interstate conflicts for its toll of lives taken, deformed or uprooted, as well as the social, economic and physical damage sustained to localities, societies, cultures and nations. From the end of World War II until 2000, over sixteen million perished through internal wars, compared to three and a half million from interstate wars. For each interstate war during that period, approximately five internal conflicts occurred, the relative totals being 25 and 122 respectively. The incidence of internal war has abated since its peak during the early 1990s, although not markedly (Wallensteen and Sollenberg 1998:623; 1999:524).

Averaging 53 months in duration, internal wars are often protracted, their bitter political effects and legacies of crime, lawlessness and impunity lingering even longer after the guns have fallen silent. Even when seemingly ‘settled’,they often maintain a lethal potential to reignite. Variously termed internal, intra-state, or civil wars, these events often lack finite starting and concluding points. Conditions of neither war nor peace testify to inconclusive military outcomes and continuing settlement failure. These conditions harbour unaccountable local elites exploiting them to loot the national patrimony.

Much about the causes, costs and impacts of internal conflict remains essentially domestic, but its international dimensions are usually germane and often telling. Embattled governments invite outsiders in; internal conflicts spread across borders; wars within states feed off and sustain transnational commercial penetrations; intergovernmental and externally based non-governmental relief operations establish their presence; and these conflicts evoke an array of external interventions ranging from military infiltration to United Nations (UN) Security Council enforcement engagements authorized under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter. Criminality is now a significant factor in the internationalization of internal conflict. The comprehension of internal wars, therefore, requires an appreciation of their international dimensions and implications. How might that proceed? In the first instance, enquiry is directed to the definition, status and functions of such conflicts.

Some Key Features

Without denying their significant international dimensions, definitions of intra-state wars focus primarily on domestic origins; events ‘fought between self-aware, defined groups that have organizational capacities to plan and carry out military operations in support of political goals’ (Brown, 2001:212). When viewed as insurgencies, internal wars comprise unconventional armed violence organized to either topple an existing regime or secede from an existing state (Snow, 1996:65; Thakur, 2001:117). A distinctive feature is the widespread entanglement of civilians as agents and victims. They risk overt targeting by protecting and harbouring combatants, operating inside borders and without sanctuaries to which they can withdraw.

This confinement intensifies internal wars, combatants and civilians alike forced to live by the knowledge that, should they survive, they will likely have to physically coexist as former enemies. Revenge exacted locally as an end in itself confuses wider objectives, complicating agreement about negotiating priorities or settlement implementation within and between warring factions. Some internal conflicts drag on for so long that few involved retain notions of the originating casus belli or political purpose, the conflict in Angola a good example. To revise Hobbes, internal wars are nasty, brutish and long.

One broad typology distinguishes between internal conflicts that are primarily resource-based; that entail legitimacy struggles over governance and authority; that are fought on ideological grounds; and that comprise primarily identity conflicts (Rupersinghe, 1998:33). Examples of each type are identifiable, as are self-generating conflicts imprisoned within unique circumstances. That includes distinctive interactions between resource scarcity, poverty and violence. Eight of the ten countries at the bottom of the United Nations Human Development Index for 2002, all in Africa, had suffered serious internal conflict during the preceding decade.¹ Identifiable associations exist between intra-state conflict and markedly sub-standard performance in economic growth, low food production per capita, wealth inequalities, high infant mortality rates and poor school enrolment. Another association encompasses high levels of external debt and a narrow range of primary commodity exports subject to adverse price fluctuations.

From a structuralist perspective, internal war results from forces driving asymmetry and dependency. Ideologically, these claims are not new. On 29 June 1848, a few days following that year’s bloody reprisals, Marx asserted (italics original) through his newly founded Neue Rhenische Zeitung that: ‘The fraternity of the antagonistic classes, one of which exploits the other, that fraternity which was claimed in February, inscribed in large letters on the brow of Paris, above every prison, every barracks — its true, authentic, prosaic expression is civil war, the war between labour and capital’.² Indeed a theme of revolutionary movements historically is that the forces driving domestic upheaval convey relevance for other societies and are not territorially confined (Walt, 1996:27-28). Gramsci saw international relations trailing in the footsteps of fundamentally derived internal social relations of whatever form.³ The historical antecedents driving structural explanations retain political significance; the popular intellectual leitmotif that helped mobilize nationalist elites against colonialism reverberates as developing country hostility towards international financial institutions.

Less didactically, intra-state war generates international uncertainty and confusion over appropriate responses. This is because it exposes state authority systems as both the prosecutors and the target objects of internal strife. Reviewing post-Cold War conditions, Hobsbawm found that these activities did not fit conventional classifications of either international or civil war resulting ‘in a global disorder whose nature was unclear’.⁴ The unsettled demarcation delineating internal from international conflict, has continued into what some now loosely term ‘global civil wars’, Afghanistan a prime example.⁵ Appreciation of how external factors contort domestic features may assist comprehension of other current internal conflicts. Long running conflict in Sudan has occurred within a framework incorporating ‘a configuration of Arab-African identities (that) has been the outcome of historical links to the outside world. While these connections have had the positive effect of extending Sudan’s ties abroad, they have tom the country apart domestically, destroying its internal cohesiveness and unity of purpose’ (Deng, 1997:58).

Internal war is also a site for what Coker (2002:39-40) has termed expressive violence (whether ritualistic, symbolic or communicative), facilitated by globalization’s downward pressures, and designed as much to terrorize citizens as governments. In a number of internal wars, the purpose is less that of killing so as to win, than winning in order to kill. These conditions highlight the dilemmas confronting external actors ostensibly seeking to mitigate security problems, establish civil order, and foster basic welfare within warring states. These conditions see ruling authority, such as it exists, constituting as much the problem as the means to any eventual settlement.

Current International Salience

Since the early 1990s, international publics have experienced greater, though still selective exposure to the impacts of internal wars. This has assisted non-governmental initiatives promoting activities generating global publicity. The Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines attracted substantial news media attention by relaying information and images drawn primarily from internal conflict. This helped to persuade governments to adopt the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning landmines and establishing an international monitoring network to verify and encourage compliance.⁶ Following the landmark 1996 Machel Report, child soldiering gained greater international attention.⁷ This facilitated approval of an additional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, agreed in May 2000, and establishing eighteen as the minimum age for direct participation in hostilities, compulsory recruitment, or use in hostilities by non-government military formations.⁸ Advocacy to ban landmines and end child soldiering endorsed security agendas giving priority to the civilian as victim.

The 1990s also saw major internal conflict episodes provoke considerable international anguish and soul searching. An unwillingness to suffer casualties by those having the capacity to intervene, confronted the unhappy moral realization that belligerents within these conflicts were prepared to follow ‘ethnic cleansing’, final solutions as steps necessary for their survival. After an ill-fated American intervention into Somalia, resistance to further involvement in Africa’s internal strife hardened, the 1994 Rwandan genocide facilitated by major power pusillanimity in the UN Security Council. This aggravated UN Secretary General Boutros Ghali’s already difficult relations with the United States, as he maintained that the West, in particular, was more mindful of its responsibilities towards the former Yugoslavia than towards Africa. The contrasting emphasis accorded to internal conflicts in Europe and Africa by the UN Security Council sustained ‘North/South’ divisions and polemics at the UN and beyond.

The mea culpas that followed UN reports over the mishandling of the Rwandan genocide, and mismanaged international peacekeeping in Bosnia, reinforced suspicions that the moral void between state conduct and respect for humanity was as wide for internal, as any other form of war. Internal war, it appeared, had exposed a now relatively veto-free UN Security Council to conscience of humanity criteria for which it was neither prepared nor willing to engage. Leading commentator Stanley Hoffman’s aspiration seemed as distant as ever, namely: ‘an international society in which neither the injustices nor the disorder associated with domestic strife and violations of basic rights will run wild’.⁹ Intervention authorized by the UN Security Council, as over Haiti, reflected more the foreign policy considerations of the major powers, particularly the United States, than a consensus over normative criteria galvanizing the international community towards action (von Hippel, 2000:183).

Evidence that revealed gross failures of protection for victims and civilians uprooted by internal armed conflict and its aftermath stood increasingly exposed. So far as external intervention was concerned, outwardly the key issues seemed clear: for one observer the key question was whether a lawful use of force was justified in situations other than those foreshadowed in the UN Charter (de Jonge Oudraat, 2000:420). Less evident were criteria for determining what constituted ‘an authority’ in the form of an operable government within a civil war situation, or its justification for rejecting assistance from outsiders towards those that it deemed rebellious nationals. This dilemma, revisited in subsequent chapters, enlivened controversy about how to reconcile existing legal limitations over the use of force, should the UN Security Council fail to act, and how to respond decisively in order to shield civilians from crimes against humanity. Such violations, it was clear, were occurring with distressing regularity through internal conflicts and the widespread persecution of citizens by their governments.

But was the supposed cure of intervention, even into a Rwanda of 1994, worse than the disease? Sovereignty violation is a serious matter under any circumstances, but not to intervene into a potential Rwanda of 1994 risked denuding the international community of ethical self-respect. Yet as a precedent for incursions driven primarily by state interest, ‘humanitarian’ intervention understandably engendered international polarization. In particular, it drew accusations that the sovereignty protecting states against intervention remained primarily a privilege retained by the powerful. Regardless of its accuracy, this perception hardened appreciably.

Heightened scepticism about the motives driving collective humanitarian action placed added pressure on existing operational, funding and collaborative shortcomings. That included delivery assistance left unaccounted for, unprotected field personnel, and derailed settlement implementation. For recipients, conflict-induced vulnerability appeared externally compounded by the arbitrary impact of possible sanctions, incoherent or inadequate assistance from external relief and development agencies, and confusion as to conditionalities stipulated by rights standards.¹⁰ Deserving note, therefore, is the manner in which internal conflict has generated ambivalence about the nature and justification for external response and how that response, once made, has aggravated recipient suspicions as to its actual scope, value and purpose.

Impacts upon International Politics

Internal conflicts now cost the international community in a variety of ways. A first cost results from habituation to crisis as the trigger for resource mobilization. Claims that such mobilization is either too little and too late, or that an ounce of prevention would have proven worth more than a pound of cure, are less important than another effect. That is a perception, rightly or wrongly construed within conflict locations, that it takes eruptions of death and violence to activate the wavelengths communicating demands to, and receiving responses from the international community. Vindicating those beliefs is the increasing militarization of humanitarian assistance into internal conflict settings. Although not deliberately intended, this has had the effect of crowding out, postponing, or partitioning off longer-term development agendas and functions. Issues that loom large for the conventional diplomatic discourse, as potential threats for relations between states, seem to subside once confined within borders. This is a dubious assumption, given the scope of intra-state conflicts over water, narcotics and access to mineral resources, to project internationally.

A second cost is conceptual: segregated responses ignore the linkages that facilitate internal war which, if neglected, leave the international community groping for coherent responses. They include medical, demographic, social and migrant impacts; internal conflicts as seedbeds for readily exportable technologies of disorder, terror and destabilization; encouragement to transnational crime; and capacity to compromise private sector/governmental relationships. Collapsing state functions, and degradation of the rule of law, intimidate peaceful dispute settlement and reward resort to the gun in the lethal micro-politics of revenge, personal enrichment and survival. International responses that offer beachhead relief through truces or ceasefires may contain, but do not disentangle so-called ‘complex political emergencies’ characterized by chronic governmental instability, widespread rights abuses, food insecurity, major population movements, and fundamental macroeconomic afflictions such as massive unemployment and hyperinflation.

Thirdly, internal conflicts generate external costs through strains and tensions that, while seemingly manageable on an individual basis, in totality constitute potentially harmful orders of difficulty. Politically that includes strains within alliances and coalitions over sanctions applied to internal conflict settings; coercive measures adopted without UN Security Council authorization; dispute about whether to recognize secessionist entities; and the extent and duration of relief, force or humanitarian commitments. For remedial functions, this includes tensions within the official and non-governmental assistance community about how to balance post-conflict relief and development priorities; between governments and international agencies over risks to national field personnel; between development agencies over gaining resource allocations from major donors; and over the relevant direction and focus of international financial institutional responses and initiatives. Systemically, internal conflict impacts sustain North/South polarizations already inflamed, for example, by governing elites playing on the guilt of the West (as has Rwanda); the symbolic as well as material impact of the US Bush Administration’s callous 2001 cessation of funding to UNICEF’s reproductive health programme; and claims that Africa’s wars have mattered much less to the UN Security Council than those in the Balkans.

Chapter Scope of this Study

These problems and dilemmas are explored through the chapters that follow. A first open...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Roots of Internal Conflict
• 3 Small Arms and Light Weapons
• 4 Refugees and Internal Conflicts
• 5 Human Rights and Internal Conflicts
• 6 International Humanitarian Law
• 7 Responses to Internal Conflicts
• 8 Post-Conflict Reconstruction
• 9 The Analytical Dimensions
• 10 Conclusions
• Select Bibliography
• Index