International Security: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (8 page)

Despite such concerns, the UN’s endorsement of the R2P indicates a significant change in the international community’s understanding of what constitute threats to international peace and security. Although the emphasis remains on upholding the international order of states and preventing war between them, increasingly the value accorded to states is being derived through their ability to protect and advance human rights.

From the previous discussion it is clear that war remains a central concern for thinking about international security. And war, we have seen, can be indicative of both a breakdown of the international security order and also a mechanism for restoring it. Traditionally, war has been understood as involving states pitted against each other in armed combat over conflicting interests, with the state’s resort to violence generally viewed as legitimate and legal, in contrast to the violence of other groups often regarded as illegitimate and criminal. Indeed, the legitimacy of state-to-state combat has been enshrined through the development of international humanitarian law—laws of war designed to regulate and formalize its conduct. These include the Geneva Conventions, which, among other things, outline rules for the treatment of combatants and non-combatants, emphasize the need to minimize civilian casualties, and emphasize proportionality in the methods used to conduct warfare. Finally, aside from being viewed as legal and legitimate, when connected to defence of the homeland and protecting vital national interests, inter-state violence is also often viewed as a moral and patriotic activity.

Since the Cold War’s end, however, this traditional state-centric view of the nature of warfare and its conduct has been challenged
by three notable developments: the apparent decline in the prevalence of inter-state warfare in comparison to the proliferation of intra-state conflicts; the impact of technological developments on Western approaches to warfare; and the increasing reliance on private security companies in military campaigns.

Established visions of war as a conflict between states undertaken in accordance with an emerging body of rules of the game, and perhaps also a deeper sense of the warrior’s honour, were significantly challenged in the 1990s, in particular with the break-up of Yugoslavia, occasioned by five wars between 1991 and 1999, and the descent of Rwanda into genocidal violence in 1994. Mass atrocities, like the summary execution in 1995 of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, ostensibly under UN protection in Srebrenica, and the massacre of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis by their Hutu neighbours, shocked the world. The defenceless nature of the victims caused puzzlement. In Rwanda men, women, and children were burned alive while seeking refuge in churches or hacked to death by machete at roadblocks. Meanwhile, during the Bosnian War Serbian forces established rape camps and set about a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, with the Bosnian War creating an estimated 3.5 million refugees.

Of course, atrocities in war are not new, but in these contexts international humanitarian law was being flouted with apparent impunity. Moreover, while wartime atrocities have often been understood as regrettable and unintended side effects of conflict (the Holocaust being a notable exception), as these conflicts progressed the targeting of civilians on the basis of their ethnic or religious identity increasingly appeared the primary goal, with civilians accounting for the majority of casualties. Such killing was also accompanied by the destruction of the cultural artefacts of
the ‘others’ in apparent attempts to erase any historical trace of their existence in particular territories (
Figure 4
). In both cases the international community looked on, apparently unable to comprehend the events under way, with international attempts at intervention or mediation woefully inadequate and often counter-productive.

The pattern played out in Bosnia and Rwanda has reappeared elsewhere, amongst others in Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and perhaps most devastatingly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the 1998–2003 war claimed the lives of an estimated 3 million people, with parts of the country still at the mercy of marauding militias. Such events raise the question of how such extreme violence targeted at civilian populations, apparently purely on the basis of the difference of identity, can be explained. Our answers to this question are fundamental since how we view the nature and causes of these conflicts impacts significantly on what, if anything, we are likely to think should be done about them.

In answering this question labels become important. Two common labels describe these conflicts as being either civil wars—in reference to their predominantly intra-state character—or ethnic conflicts—in reference to the specific identity dimension evident in the violence. Both labels, however, present problems. The ‘civil war’ label is problematic for two reasons. First, such conflicts often spread across borders and become issues of broader regional and international concern. In the Rwandan case, for example, faced with the advancing Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front the extremist Hutu militia, the
Interahamwe
, fled to the DRC and began terrorizing the local population and Tutsi refugees. Second, such conflicts are often internationalized via the support of diasporic communities and foreign governments for particular parties. For example, during the Bosnian War the Bosnian Muslims were supported by various Islamic states and covertly by the USA. Another example is the popular uprising in Syria which began in 2011, but which by 2012 had become characterized by much greater levels of violence as regional and global powers began actively supporting the
different sides. These transnational dimensions complicate both dynamics on the ground, but also the possibilities for conflict resolution.

Meanwhile, the label ‘ethnic war’ is problematic as it easily supports the view that such conflicts derive from almost uncontrollable anciently inscribed mass hatreds. Understood this way it is easy to conclude that little can be done to stop them or to ameliorate tensions. Indeed, it is sometimes suggested that the international community should let these conflicts, bloody as they may be, take their course, since any measures will only provide a temporary resolution and might even make the next violent outburst worse. Such a view characterized much of the international community’s response to the Bosnian War. For example, on 28 May 1993 US Secretary of State Warren Christopher told CBS News:

It’s really a tragic problem. The hatred between all three groups—the Bosnians and the Serbs and the Croatians—is almost unbelievable. It’s almost terrifying, and it’s centuries old. That really is a problem from hell. And I think that the United States is doing all we can to try to deal with that problem … [but] … The United States simply doesn’t have the means to make people in that region of the world like each other.

On the one hand, such statements reflect a well-worn temptation—also evident in the war on terror—to draw a distinction between the civilized behaviour of us and the inherent barbarism of others. However, they are also reflective of claims about the inevitability of conflict
between
civilizations popularized by Samuel Huntington. From this perspective multiculturalism is inherently problematic and different cultures are best kept separate from each other. Notably, such a view came to inform the various peace proposals negotiated by the international community in the case of Bosnia. These culminated in the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995, which entailed dividing Bosnia into ethnically homogeneous areas (
Figure 5
). The settlement therefore supported the very goals of the nationalists, with ethnic separation seen as the only sensible policy option.

Critics argue such interpretations, and the emphasis on ethnicity and identity, are often empirically flawed and overlook key political, social, and economic dynamics underlying these conflicts. Empirically, such claims are often blind to longer histories of co-habitation, multiculturalism, and intermarriage between ethnic groups. Typically they also pay little attention to identifying the perpetrators of the violence, who are often a mixture of opportunists, hooligans, and paramilitary and criminal
elements. Meanwhile, at least in the Rwandan case, many Hutu civilians were coerced under pain of death into undertaking killings, while some estimates suggest that less than 10 per cent of Hutus were implicated in the violence. The picture of mass ethnic hatred therefore begins to look less clear.

The academic Mary Kaldor has therefore suggested ‘New Wars’ as a term that might better capture the dynamics of many contemporary conflicts. While New Wars are often characterized by identity related violence and justified in terms of ancient hatreds, she argues these are not natural but need to be manufactured by protagonists who excel in the politics of fear and scapegoating as a means of capturing economic and political power. As such, while at one level these wars can be understood as conflicts between groups making mutually exclusive claims to identity, more fundamentally they represent an attack on inclusive multicultural and cosmopolitan ideals of political community. Thus, some of the first victims of violence in both the Bosnian War and the Rwandan genocide were precisely those moderates who refused to hate the other and were therefore targeted for extermination.

Furthermore, while traditionally war has been understood as an instrumental tool by which states pursue various political goals, in New Wars key protagonists may view the perpetuation of conflict as an end in itself. This is because such wars often provide cover for rampant criminal activity, whether in the form of extortion and pillage from the civilian population, the siphoning off of humanitarian aid, or in the establishment of broader networks of organized crime specializing in the smuggling of drugs, arms, precious metals, and people. For people involved in such activities war can prove highly lucrative. If understood this way, proponents of the New Wars thesis suggest the international community has much to lose in not responding effectively to the outbreak of such conflicts. This is because at stake are ideological and moral commitments to tolerance as well as narrower interests in
preventing the emergence of zones of instability that might prove destabilizing regionally and internationally. From this perspective, instead of letting such conflicts unfold on their own terms, or seeking to mediate between the various parties, the international community should be prepared to intervene in support of those moderates who continue to uphold the cosmopolitan values endorsed by various international agreements, treaties, and organizations.

In parts of the world, therefore, warfare appears to be getting messier, increasingly engulfing whole communities and fostering social instabilities and mass population movements. For people living in these societies their relationship to, and experience and perception of, war is often very direct. For most of the West, however, a different dynamic has been under way. During the Second World War whole populations were mobilized for the war effort, and throughout the Cold War visions of a future ‘total war’ between East and West still framed popular conceptions of warfare. The experience of the world wars indicated that wars tended to escalate, requiring the full mobilization of society. Moreover, in an industrial age the destructive capacity of wars seemed to have increased exponentially.

Today, however, in the West visions of potential future conflicts on the scale of the world wars seem less applicable. The establishment of lasting peace in Europe, partly premised on the desire to avoid a nuclear Armageddon, and partly the result of a preference for compromise, negotiation, and economic prosperity over military conflict, has been important here, as has the fact that the West increasingly identifies its enemies in more limited terms, not as states, but as regimes, networks, terrorist cells, and sometimes as specific individuals. The result is that in general war has become territorially distant, with most people’s experience of it second hand and mediated through television,
newspapers, and the internet. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that most Westerners’ understanding and experience of war has come to assume a virtual quality, with their involvement similar to that of people playing a computer game or as spectators of a sporting event.