1 Untold sorrow
Civil wars and war termination, 1990â2007
By 1992, early in the post-Cold War period, there were more armed conflicts occurring worldwide than for nearly 50 years, and most of the violence unfolded within the boundaries of United Nations (UN) member states. While major, international war turns out not to be wholly obsolete as some have argued1âas the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Ethiopia-Eritrea war of the early 2000s, or the cross-border IsraeliâHizbollah conflict of 2006 attestâoverall mostly internal or civil wars are the principal present threat to contemporary international peace and security. The post-Cold War civil wars were accompanied by hideous features: attacks on civilians increased dramatically, and the protagonists in warfare were often amorphous ânon-state actorsââirregular insurgents, paramilitaries, quasi-criminal gangs, and shadowy factions within state security forces.2
Some of the post-Cold War conflicts had antecedents in the mid-twentieth century, such as the tensions in Kashmir which find their origins in the partition of colonial India in 1948, whereas others, such as in the former Yugoslavia, were essentially new wars without immediate antecedents of violence. New challenges to âhuman securityâ arose in the context of these wars, such as conflict-induced famine, ethnic cleansing, landmines, blood diamonds, small arms, child soldiers, and âstate failureâ; these pressing humanitarian issues all crowded their way onto the international agenda as a consequence of these conflagrations.3
The popular impression that the post-Cold War era witnessed a dramatic increase in the total frequency of all armed conflicts around the globe is only partially correct; it is true that in the early 1990s new wars escalated dramatically and, in general, that they lasted longer than historically has been the case. However, over time, war terminations have outpaced the escalation of new wars such that the number of armed conflicts over the period actually decreased, and this trend continued into the mid-2000s. Another trend is worth noting. Most civil wars today end at the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield, with critical implications for international efforts to end the scourge of war. While in some conflicts there are clear unilateral victories (as in Rwanda after the genocide there), conflicts that end at the negotiating table have important implications for international responses.
Through negotiation, warring factions are disarmed, power shared, new constitutions drafted, elections held to legitimate newly formed governments (or in some instances to determine the sovereign status of disputed territory), transitional justice is pursued, and relief and reconstruction takes place in situations where rival factions retain power and sometimes military control of territory. This chapter addresses three context-setting questions. First, what do we know about the nature and patterns of war during the post-Cold War period? Second, what are the putative root causes of these wars and why did they escalate? Finally, what are the implications of conflict analysis for peacemaking strategies?
Civil war and international security
Armed conflicts, most of which are internal or âcivil wars,â pose new and dramatic challenges to realizing the UN Charterâs lofty aims to âsave succeeding generations from the scourge of war which ⌠has brought untold sorrow to mankind.â4 The post-Cold War era, which lasted roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 through the middle of the 2000s, saw a sea change in the nature and intensity of contemporary war: wars more internal to states emerged as the principal threat to international peace and security as protracted wars between states (such as the World Wars of the twentieth century) became fewer as a proportion of all instances of war. Particularly in the first half of the 1990s, there was a sharp, unprecedented increase in the frequency, or overall number, of armed conflicts on the globe, and most of them are in fact essentially internal to states (but with transnational linkages and global implications). The trend lasts well into the twenty-first century.
By 2005, wars had decreased by 60 percent from an earlier peak in 1992 to the lowest level of warfare on the globe since the 1950s. The overall pattern of the post-Cold War period is an unambiguous one of progressive war termination: old wars are settled much more rapidly than new wars break out. From 1989 to 2004, some 84 armed conflicts (of 118 for the period) had ended despite the onset of new wars in the early 2000s in places such as CĂ´te dâIvoire and Sudan (Darfur), and the burgeoning sectarian conflict within Iraq.
According to the 2007 Human Security Brief, which uses the Uppsala Conflict Data Program analysis, there is an undeniable trend in armed conflict, such that âworldwide, non-state conflict numbers have undergone a marked and consistent decline since the data were first collected in 2002. In fact, they decline by a thirdâfrom 36 to 24âbetween 2002 and 2006â (Mack 2008: 6); the same report argues that the trends show an apparent leveling off of armed conflict, despite a clear downward trend in sub-Saharan Africa.5 Not since 1970 has the incidence of armed conflict been as low if the measure of conflict is âbattle-related deaths.â Updated data for between 1989 and 2005 revealed a reinforced trend, such that there were, between these years, 121 armed conflicts in 81 locations, of which 49 reached the threshold of âwar.â In 2005, there were 31 armed conflicts of which all were primarily intrastate, and five of which reached the intensity of war: Iraq (coded as an internationalized internal conflict), Afghanistan, India (Kashmir), Nepal, and Colombia (Harbom et al. 2006).
Although headlines in the mid-2000s led with insurgency-related violence in Iraq following the 2003 invasion, or terrorist bombings in London, Lebanon, or Israel, the principal threats to international and human security continues to be found in mostly internal wars; indeed, in Iraq most deaths are the result of sectarian strife rather than confrontation between insurgents and the occupation forces (www.iraqbodycount.org). While the other issues on the international security agenda, such as weapons of mass destruction and the consequences of the al-Qaeda 9/11 attacks in the United States, the Madrid bombings in 2004, or events like the Beslan school hostage-taking and massacre in Russia in 2004, are injurious to international security, the principal form of international violence todayâas measured in deaths in political violenceâcontinues to be protracted social strife that is internal to countries over national identity, borders, and religion and the state. By 2007, the number of violent armed conflicts had dwindled to the point where the aftermath of misguided US intervention in Iraq clearly emerged as the most violent setting on earth, with an estimated 60,000 deaths between 2003 and 2006.6 Whether Iraq is a âcivil war,â sectarian conflict, âinternational war,â or âoccupationâ really doesnât matter much to those who suffer today from so many lives lost.
Context: the scourge of war into the twenty-first century
During the Cold War, internal conflicts were often seen as contests between superpowersâ proxies in the field (governments, rebel forces allied to the big powers), despite the fact that the actual military forces of the Soviet Union and the United States never met directly on the battlefield. Indeed, the danger of quick escalation to an all-out nuclear exchange worked against direct superpower engagement, as Smoke argued in War: Controlling Escalation (1977). Realists, such as Mearsheimer, view the Cold War as a period of remarkable global stability. He argues that given the contemporary sense of chaos, one day the relative security of the bipolar standoff between the United States and the Soviets will be missed.
The next forty-five years in Europe are not likely to be so violent as the forty-five years before the Cold War, but they are likely to be substantially more violent than the past forty-five years, the era that we may someday look back upon not as the Cold War but as the Long Peace.
(Mearsheimer 1990: 35)7
If the Cold War produced an essentially bipolar system of international relations from the 1950s through the 1980s, the dominant theme of post-Cold War international relations in the 1990s and early 2000s has been one of fragmentation and multipolarity. The weakening of the sovereign, national state as the central unit of politics is a consequence of globalization and international economic integration from outside and the appeal of ethnic nationalism from within. Lundestad observed that these schizophrenic centralizing and centrifugal trends characterize the post-Cold War period (Lundestad 1993). For this reason, it is difficult to even give the contemporary era a defining name; its reference point is what has come before: the post-Cold War era. Rosenau, describing the period as one of âturbulenceâ in world affairs, wrote presciently: âLocal conflicts and violence are likely to persist, even intensify, since the dynamics of decentralization weaken the control that can be asserted over ethnic and aggrieved groupsâ (Rosenau 1990: 196).8
Local security dynamics, with all of their instabilities and complexities, emerged more openly as the overarching context of superpower rivalry dissipated. Väyrynen summed up the problem of internal conflicts in the post-Cold War era, writing that âWith the removal of the global overlay, local and regional conflict dynamics can operate more autonomously and with less restraintâ (Väyrynen 1993: 104). For example, Western countries and neighbors alike found it very difficult to influence the course of events in tumultuous Central Africa. In the countries of the Great Lakes region (especially Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)), intense conflicts raged throughout much of the 1990s without the ability of the international community to significantly affect their trajectory; similarly, today, there is little ability or willingness to stem fighting in conflict settings such as Sri Lanka as sanctions have marginal effects and there is no willingness or ability to field substantial military deployments.
Whatâs in a name? âPolitical violence,â armed conflicts, and âbattle-related deathsâ
Civil war is but one type of internationalized, internal violence, so it is critical to attempt some definitional precision. Violence in contemporary internal conflicts takes many forms, including spontaneous rioting, coldly calculated terrorism by small but motivated groups, targeted assassination and the use of âhit squads,â and massive organized violence such as civil war.9 There is a fine line, perhaps indistinguishable, between actual violence and related acts, such as intimidation, threats of violence, and systematic damage to property or liberty (Tilly 2003: 26â31). Equally ambiguous in some cases is the distinction between criminal violence and political violence. Thus, the intensity of violence in an internal conflict is invariably difficult to precisely measure; in the case-study chapters that follow, for example, best guesses are given from the ostensibly most reliable sources.
Often, the ability to assess levels of fatality can only be approximated post facto, as has been the case in determining the overall fatality count due to war in Bosnia.10 Indeed, for the purposes of this study it is clear that the threat of violence is often as important as its actual application in terms of influencing an adversaryâs behavior, even as our measures allow us to operationalize violence in difficult to measure âbattle-related deaths.â Terrorism, for example, is not an entity against which war can be waged: instead, it is a type of violence of particular interest, precisely because it is indiscriminate, directed at influencing public opinion, and the purposes of terror may be less distinguishable than a military campaign, for example.11 Nonetheless, terrorism is typically waged for some strategic purpose, more often than not to undermine accommodation among moderates across lines of conflict (reflected often in the case studies that follow), or to wage âasymmetricalâ warfare in the context of internal conflicts (such as Spain or IsraelâPalestine, or in the campaign waged against the West by al-Qaeda).
There is some concern that the measures used to track âarmed conflictâ obscure the severity and intensity of todayâs wars. By considering only frequency of conflict, we may be lulled into believing there is an overall downward trend in armed violence when it may be that those conflicts now raging are much more intense. In todayâs wars, civilians are targeted directly; the historically defined line between military combatants and civilians has been distinctly blurred (Kaldor 1999). One way to assess the human costs of war, beyond fatalities, is to consider the exponential increase in refugees that wars generate. In early 2000, at the height of the global refugee crisis, there were an estimated 21.5 million refugees and internally displaced persons; the vast number of these refugees and displaced were homeless from armed conflicts.12
Internal wars, regional and global spillovers
The problem of measuring internal conflicts is exacerbated by the fact that few armed conflicts in the contemporary world are truly âinternal.â These conflicts and their consequences have become internationalized, both empirically and in the realm of international or collective responses to them.13 Increasingly, it is clear that putatively internal conflicts have strong transnational linkages in at least two ways: in terms of diffusion or spread of conflict and in terms of the consequences of internal wars as âglobal issuesâ (the global issues theme is taken up in âThe impetus for intervention and the challenge of peacemaking,â p. 30).
The concern with diffusion of civil war is about the escalation of internal conflict across borders and the tangible linkages that make contemporary borders lines on a map. Lake and Rothchild argue in their analysis of ethnic conflict that:
Diffusion occurs when ethnic violence in one state increases the probability of conflict in a second. In other words, if conflict in Rwanda incites similar violence directly or indirectly in Burundi, the conflict will have diffused. Escalation occurs when a conflict in one country brings in new, foreign belligerentsâwhether neighbors or great powers with global reach.
(Lake and Rothchild 1998: 23â24)
Related, there is a burgeoning literature on the âinternationalizationâ of ethnic conflict and the cross-border ties through which many ethnic groups derive critical moral and material support (Wolff 2003). In many instancesâsuch as Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union,14 Rwanda, and Burundi, to name just a fewâconflicts are fueled and complicated by strong identity bonds that link groups across borders. For example, the conflict between Tamil separatists and the government of Sri Lanka is linked to the nearby Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and such seriously complicating attempts to peacefully resolve the civil war in Sri Lanka; likewise global remittance flows to the Tigers are significant (see Chapter 7).
Many armed conflicts thus are âregional conflict complexes,â or situations in which âneighboring countries experience internal or interstate conflicts, and with significant links between the conflictsâ (Wallensteen and Sollenberg 1998: 623). Conflicts may be linked when ethnic groups reside astride international frontiers, or when military or political alliances yield military and political support across borders. For this reason, the civil war in the DRC in the late 1990s and early 2000s earned the appellation âAfricaâs First World War.â If most âinternal conflictsâ are part of a regional conflict complex, or clusters of interrelated conflicts, there are important implications for efforts at peacemaking. Solving one problem may mean, in fact, solving several, or the failure to address the regional dynamics of conflict may lead to war recurrence.
Civil wars: the elusive search for causation
Arguments about trends in armed conflict and peacemaking strategies in them beg the tough questions about the underlying or ârootâ causes of contemporary armed conflict in the first place. Explanations for the prevalence of internal or society war may be found in the structure of the international system, such as the historical legacy of colonial-era borders and dysfunctional states, or globalization-induced growth of socio-economic inequalities;15 other levels of analysis have also entered into the research on the underlying or root or once-removed caus...
