Recent Conflicts

7 Key excerpts on "Recent Conflicts"

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  eBook - ePub

  Engaging Geopolitics

  • Kathleen E Braden, Fred M Shelley(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Distance plays a key role in most conflicts over history, as neighboring states are more apt to war with each another. Yet some areas of the world are especially prone to conflict, as we saw in Chapter 3. Shatterbelts such as the Middle East and Southeast Asia have experienced numerous armed conflicts over the past centuries. Various approaches to analysis have been made in political geography, from behavioral studies to world systems theories about conflict. In addition to these more traditional ways in which geographic inquiry helps us understand warfare, a new wrinkle on geography and war has been occurring since World War II: the globalization of security threats. This process takes us beyond the realm of traditional borders between states and beyond traditional interstate warfare, to look at the geography of security, not the geography of war. In terms of external or outside threats to citizens of states, borders are becoming more and more permeable despite the best efforts of even wealthy states to protect their citizens. Thus, a new kind of geography, one that looks beyond physical definitions of space to explore perceptual space, and one that moves beyond the state level to global security questions is essential. Four examples of such “unbounded” threats may be noted already within world geopolitics: 1 Weapons technology changes: as nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons evolve, they overcome space barriers more and more effectively. Even so-called conventional weapons are now reaching a level of technology that will put them on a par in destructive power with nuclear weapons

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  Peace and Conflict Studies

  Perspectives from South Asia

  • Anindya Jyoti Majumdar, Shibashis Chatterjee, Anindya Jyoti Majumdar, Shibashis Chatterjee(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  6

  Geopolitics, Conflicts and Peace

  Anindya Jyoti Majumdar and Sohini Bose

  Geopolitics is an attempt to understand the world's political relations and possible political behaviour of states based on the geographical lay out and arrangements of lands and seas. Geopolitics presupposes geography's conditioning influence upon history and politics. However, with time, understanding of geopolitics changed and deterministic laws of classical genre gave way to new interpretations. Instead of seeking out universal principles emanating from the physical geographical realities, constructing narratives that would influence policy-decisions towards attainment of particular objectives became important. Hence, more than being merely physical and a product of nature, geography as the product of contests of narratives in order to establish control over space becomes relevant in contemporary times and as a result geopolitics is inherently intertwined with conflicts and peace. In fact, geopolitics itself is considered to be a cause for conflicts and as such geopolitics has often been criticized as a dubious concept or an unconvincing field of study. “Few modern ideologies”, according to one analyst, “are as whimsically all-encompassing, as romantically obscure, as intellectually sloppy, and as likely to start a third world war as the theory of ‘geopolitics’” (Clover 1999).

  The tendency to have a simpler model of the complex world often ignores particularities as areas are branded with specific labels generating corresponding intended identities. The tags and labels attached to the vast tracts of territory emanate from the renewed focus on a particular area at a particular point of time by the dominant powers of a particular epoch. Narratives constructed and used by policy-makers in pursuit of national interests lead to imaginative geographies affirming particular political perspectives and legitimizing foreign policy decisions. The interplay of imagined spaces and imposed identities, changing perceptions of emerging geopolitical realities and the continuous attempts to construct and tag new regions suitable to the preferences of the major powers of the day determine the probabilities of conflicts and feasibility of durable peace. “The ‘geo’ in geopolitics is never settled” says Chaturvedi, “in the sense that it is the manifestation of a complex interplay between the ‘facts’ and features of material-physical geographies (location, topography, resources etc.) and the myths and mental maps of symbolic-imagined geographies” (Chaturvedi 2012: 150). In effect, geopolitics is an intriguing concoction of reality and imagination.

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  Spatialising Peace and Conflict

  Mapping the Production of Places, Sites and Scales of Violence

  • Annika Bjorkdahl, Susanne Buckley-Zistel, Annika Bjorkdahl, Susanne Buckley-Zistel(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  As early as the 1970s, research on international war conceptualized geographic conditions (e.g. direct neighbourhood and spatial distance) as explanatory factors for the occurrence of armed conflict and war (see Diehl 1991; Starr 1991). Ever since, physical features such as borders or contiguity have been identified as enabling interaction between territorial entities, or as providing opportunity structures under which actors formulate preferences and make decisions (Siverson and Starr 1991). Quantitative studies on the causes of interstate wars emphasize the importance of territorial aspects (notably boundary disputes) as the most conflicting among all contentious issues (Vasquez 2009). Here, both the understanding of geography and the twin concept of opportunity and willingness (Most and Starr 1980) are oriented towards the relatively static notion of boundaries as central to methodological nationalism.

  At present, most quantitative empirical studies of the field operate in a territorial container, though, when focusing on correlations between physical variables such as topography, infrastructure, borders or proximity and conflict. In other words, most studies are based on an understanding of geography that restricts space to allegedly fixed material factors, such as the availability of resources or physical demarcation (bordering) in order to explain and predict armed conflict. One central argument holds that the dynamics of armed conflict are conditioned by the location of and distance to political, natural or other resources – for instance, when arguing that in strong regimes, civil wars are located further away from the capital (Buhaug 2010), or that conflicts last longer if they are located along remote international borders, in regions with valuable minerals or at a distance from the main government (Buhaug et al. 2009).

  Other studies show that the existence, concentration and type of natural resources impacts on the occurrence of civil war. In this reading, diamonds and oil have highly significant effects, while agricultural goods are hardly significant at all (Fearon 2005; Lujala et al. 2005; Ross 2004). Moreover, centralized resources, such as petroleum or easily accessible mines, are considerably easier to monitor and protect than geographically dispersed resources, such as opium plantations, alluvial diamonds or tropical forests (Le Billon 2001). One critical aspect is also the proximity of key resources to a fighting faction’s headquarters or the capital. Buhaug and Rød (2006) demonstrate furthermore that armed conflict correlates with the spatial distribution of features such as relative road density, while O’Loughlin et al. (2011) found evidence that the proximity to strategic locations (military installations, administrative institutions) affects the incidences and diffusion patterns of violence over time.

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  Reordering The World

  Geopolitical Perspectives On The 21st Century

  • George J Demko(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Although the range of essays in this volume is deliberately broad, the essays are united by a political geographic framework. Political geography is the analysis of how political systems and structures—from the local to international levels—influence and are influenced by the spatial distribution of resources, events, and groups, and by interactions among subnational, national, and international political units across the globe. Such a definition includes group decisionmaking, organization, and implementation activities that affect natural resources. Political geography focuses, on one hand, on how groups interact—particularly the ways they manipulate each other—in the pursuit of controlling resources and, on the other, on how these social, economic, and political activities determine the use of, and thereby modify, the resource base. The resource most often directly implicated in international conflicts is land, whether for intrinsic (it contains minerals or a fresh water source), strategic (it straddles a key trade route), or nationalistic (it embodies a “homeland”) reasons. The discipline also assesses the political effects of information and resource flows that change spatial distributions and balances of power.

  The political geography of international relations, then, often comes down to control over key resources and flows—be they a commodity such as oil, a specific border crossing, or the “global commons”—and who is best connected in the global system in terms of communications, trade, and idea flows. Apart from territorial and boundary disputes, other less apparent foreign policy issues are also directly influenced by this perspective. For example, the measure of a “regional power” is its exploitative capability, both militarily and economically, over domestic and foreign resources. Many of our humanitarian crises are the result of the tragic inability of different ethnic groups to share resources and the forced displacement of one group by another, setting up flows of refugees and even “brain power” from one polity to another. And, on the global front, much of our concern over population growth, environmental protection, and sustainable development comes down to the fear that our descendants will be living on a smaller, dirtier, and less exploitable region of the earth’s surface.

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  Asian Security Reassessed

  • Stephen Hoadley, Jurgen Ruland(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • ISEAS Publishing

    (Publisher)

  ECONOMIC MISDISTRIBUTION AND CONFLICTS ARISING FROM THE USE OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT Many conflicts have taken place in this region in the post-World War II period. These have been both within and between nations. Most inter- Conflicts over Natural Resources and the Environment 193 state conflicts between nations have been territorial disputes while the internal conflicts have been due to diverse issues ranging from the awkward geography of some countries, differences in political ideology, ethnicity, and distinct religions and languages. It is not possible to discuss all these conflicts and the underlying issues, so in keeping with the theme of the chapter we examine only those that are directly or indirectly attributable to the use of or the existence of natural resources and the environment, both within and between countries. In the case of internal conflicts, the distinguishing feature in most cases is the misdistribution of wealth created by natural resources exploitation. In the case of inter-state conflicts, the striking feature in most instances is conflicts arising over the control of resources. Current history shows that conflicts within countries have become far more common than conflicts between countries. In certain cases, tensions have been ongoing for decades, if not for centuries. This should not be surprising inasmuch as resource scarcity conflicts were analysed two centuries ago by Malthus. 42 INTER-STATE CONFLICT Given the large size of the region with many of the countries sharing common borders, both land and marine, sharing resources is a complex activity and in such cases conflicts are inevitable between neighbours and rivals. In many cases larger countries and those that are more economically affluent and politically dominant are likely to have access to more resources than smaller and weaker countries.

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  Conflicts and Wars

  Their Fallout and Prevention

  • Hossein Askari(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Lacina et al., using revised information on battle-related deaths from 1900 to 2002, demon- strated that the risk of death in battle declined significantly after World War II and again after the end of the cold war. 4 Another important charac- teristic of Recent Conflicts is that most were fought in developing countries and regions. Politicians invariably focus on ethnicity, linguistics, and reli- gion, and emphasize the differences between people rather than their simi- larities. This fuels both interstate and intrastate conflicts, both of which Conflicts and Wars 26 can be a mixture of independence movements or anti-regime movements. In recent years, there has been a significant overlapping of organized crime and insurgencies, with rebels profiting from crime because of the close connection of the arms and drug trades, enabling criminals to use political conflict to cover their activities. Most recently, the number of armed conflicts has been declining from their peak in the early 1990s. This is in part the result of successful inter- national efforts to negotiate settlements and because of an increase in the number of democratic governments worldwide (Hewitt et al.). However, this trend appears to have come to an end in large part because of instability and failure in poor countries. The rate of recurring conflicts has increased notably since the end of the cold war. The majority of conflicts in the past ten years have been a recurrence of previous conflicts. According to Hewitt et al., of the 39 different conflicts that became active in the past ten years, 31 (or 80 percent) were recurrences of previous conflicts as compared to eight conflicts fought over new issues and interests, a trend with ominous implications for the future. These figures do not include the uprisings, conflicts, and resulting casualties that have been identified with the Arab Spring of 2011.

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  Making Geographies of Peace and Conflict

  • Colin Flint, Kara E. Dempsey, Colin Flint, Kara E. Dempsey(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  13 Geographies of environmental peace and conflict Shannon O’Lear

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003345794-13

  Oil wars. Conflict diamonds. Climate change exacerbated conflict. Environmental features are frequently associated with violence and conflict, but how well do we understand these connections? A geographic perspective is valuable for critiquing assumptions about how environmental features are related to conflict. This chapter reviews key themes in scholarship on resource-related conflict. It also considers how different ways of managing and valuing environmental resources can create multiple geographies of haves and have-nots and of environmental benefits and harms. Even seemingly peaceful relationships involving natural resources warrant close attention through a geographic perspective: What may appear to be peaceful at one spatial scale or through the eyes of particular actors may not be as peaceful from another vantage point.

  This chapter connects with the overarching themes of this book in several ways. Human interactions with environmental systems involve various forms of agency: Who gets to decide how environmental resources are valued or devalued, who gets to benefit from their use, and who faces negative impacts of these decisions without any agency. Importantly, a critical aspect of human agency in regard to environmental features has to do with our understanding of environmental features and resources and how that understanding informs behavior and practice. This chapter includes examples of how certain ideas about environmental features were formed and how those ideas have continued to shape how we utilize (or disregard) environmental resources. How we value or disregard particular aspects of “the environment” contributes to another theme of this book, namely, multiple geographies. Humans have altered the surface of the planet in many ways with a multitude of results and impacts and at a variety of spatial scales. Yet there are also different approaches to understanding environmental features and how human systems interact with, draw from, or alter environmental systems. Much of the Western world’s relationship to environmental features is grounded in othering and partitioning, which is deeply rooted in the notion that humans and environmental features are separate and distinct. Other ways of understanding the world view humans and environmental features as integrated and dependent on each other for survival. Spaces that are constructed through human interactions with their environmental surroundings reflect variations in political power: power to shape how environmental resources and systems are valued, power to impose a particular set of values on a landscape or waterway, and power to voice alternative ways of valuing environmental systems and our relationship to them. These themes of agency, multiple geographies and spatial scales, partitioning or inclusive views of environmental features, and political aspects of how humans value and (de)value environmental features all come into play in this chapter’s consideration of geographies of environmental peace and conflict.

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