New & Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era

Well, what can I say? It's an academic work (read--puts you to sleep), very narrow, that tries to advance the field of current military affairs. Some chapters, actually, are interesting--especially the first one, where Kaldor describes in good detail her distinctions between old and new wars. Very briefly, Mary Kaldor (lecturer at the LSE) argues that America--the last nation-state, cannot understand the new era of globalization in conjunction with identity politics (read--ethnic hatred, linguistic identities, or religious) and militarization. And America, and Americans, accd. to Kaldor, still live in the Rumsfeld Cold War mentality, where the world is divided into blocs between democratic and authoritarian-communist regimes, and that the only way to prevail over "evil" is to advance military technology evermore. She says that this is fictitious, at best, and at worse, extremely dangerous. Old wars are between states, involving a clear distinction between combatants and civilians alike, and are organized vertically, with clear goals and objectives. New wars, on the other hand, begin as civil wars within states, and spill over into adjoining neighbor states, creating a mass diaspora and refugee crisis. In addition, there are mass rapes, civilians are the primary targets (rather than soldiers), genocide is typically the aim, and funding is very different--instead of coming from a vibrant economy, it comes from extortion through insidious taxes on illicit drugs, alcohol, arms weaponry, etc. In short, Kaldor contends that the new wars are those that occurred after the fall of the Berlin Wall (such as those in Eastern Europe, Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, Bosnia, and Iraq 2003). And what has empowered these "super-angry men" (ala Friedman) is globalization. How? Through the cheap weaponry in the global arms trade, the mass proliferation of Kalashnikovs (over 100,000,000 still unaccounted for, accd. to Michael Mann), the internet (facilitating easy communications via IM or email, or temporary web pages), and also, the negative effects of globalization: being excluded from those parts of the world where globalization has not yet included. This goes along the lines with Thomas Barnetts's "The Pentagon's New Map"--namely, draw a circle around those parts of the world that don't benefit from globalization, and you will find failed states, failing states, and mass insurrections. Kaldor's solution, which in my opinion is grossly nieve, is in implementing a cosmopolitan rule of law by encouraging local police officers to arrest local agents (insurgents, etc.) before they can become too destructive. This is nieve because some people cannot be reasoned with, under any circumstances: see Eric Hoffer's wonderful "The True Believer" for further clarification. People such as Hitler, al-Zarqawi, bin Laden, Pol Pot, etc., are all ideologues, and they were and are unwilling to bend under any circumstances to permit those cosmopolitan forces from rising in the first place

Based on the field research on the conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia, especially those in Bosnia, Mary Kaldor offered a multifaced socio-economic analysis of organized violence in the Post-Westpharian System. She not only claimed the transformation of inter-state wars into civil wars, LICs and so on but also complex and privatized nature of 'New Wars,': the role of Military-Industrial Complex as well as underground economy, identity politics and the role of unofficial organizations such as NGO and Mafia.