Revision:Politics - Conflict

TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > Politics > Politics - Conflict

Conflict

What are the main causes of war in the modern world?

• According to Walter Fritz, beyond survival and emotion there are other subjective reasons for war including:
  • The belief that the war will be beneficial to society in the long run
  • Errors of appreciation of the political, economic and social situation of a country’s own society and of the adversary
  • Accidents in which a critical situation gets out of hand
  • A fight over resources
• The Centre for War and Peace Research in Uppsala, Sweden, issued a report that stated that most armed conflict today occurs within a country’s own borders, whereas in years past most wars were fought between different countries
• Also according to the report poverty was the major cause of about 80% of today’s wars. Poorer countries were found to be 3 times at greater risk of war than richer countries. Indeed throughout the decade of the 1990s most wars were fought by countries with severe economic problems (e.g. Somalia and Rwanda)
• Ethnicity was also a factor but it is only when ethnicity is tied to poverty that war often results. In richer countries ethnic divides are more easily breached without violence and war
• Thalif Deen characterises UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s beliefs on the causes of war as follows: Although Annan acknowledges that poverty does play a role in many contemporary standoffs, he would like us to shift our focus to the lack of equality and power many domestic social groups face in the world today as “it is this [inequality], rather than poverty, that seems to be the critical factor” (Annan) in war.
• According to Annan, inequality “tends to be reflected in unequal access to political power that too often forecloses paths to peaceful change”
• According to Annan “the upsurge of ethnic cleansing in the 1990s provides stark evidence of the appalling human costs that this vicious exploitation of identity politics can generate.”
• According to Steven Strauss “clearly resources are another reason that countries go to war”. The example he gives is the Gulf War, stating that “it is common knowledge that the first Golf War was a war over oil, and who would control it. The United States was loathe to cede that power to Saddam Hussein”
• However Strauss continues to say that “fighting over resources is a relatively rare reason for countries to go to war. As in the case of the Gulf War, it is the power to control the resource, and not the resource itself, that is usually the reason for war.
• When the USSR collapsed in1990 many of the conflicts that were subdued during the Cold War came to life. Many of these conflicts, for example Kashmir and Chechnya were caused by ethnic nationalism.
• Many present day conflicts have religion as an underlying cause. For example the War on Terror was caused by Muslim extremists carrying out acts of terrorism, mainly on the 11th of September 2001, when they attacked the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
• In Haiti the cause for the conflict was a struggle for power, a civil rebellion.
• In Columbia there are in theory two conflicts occurring- the War on drugs between the US and Columbia and a long-lasting civil war fought between the left-wing and right-wing factions of the country and fuelled by drugs. These wars have now merged as one with the US supporting the right-wing faction in order to beat he communists. However the cause of the war on drugs is the US looking after national interest and the cause of the long-lasting conflict is again a struggle for power
• A study by Paul Collier of the World Bank found that societies composed of several different ethnic and religious groups were actually less likely to experience civil war than homogeneous societies. However in multi-ethnic societies where one groups forms an absolute majority, the risk of war is 50% higher.
• The World Bank found that when income per capita doubles the risk of civil war halves, and that for each percentage point by which the growth rate rises, the risk of conflict falls by a point. Thus the best predictors of conflict are low average incomes, low growth and a high dependence on income from exports of raw materials.
• War creates a vicious circle. “Poverty fosters war and war impoverishes” (The Economist)
• Territorial –to redraw borders Kashmir
• Historical conflicts over territories and resource which end up transcending their tangible causes Darfur
• Ethnocentrism – them vs. us mentality Rwanda
• Michael E. Brown, in his book The International Dimension of Internal Conflict, writes that the literature identifies five main clusters of variables that "predispose" some places in the world to conflict, while not others. They are:
  • Structural factors (weak states; intra-state security concerns; ethnic geography)
  • Political Factors (Discriminatory political institutions; exclusionary national ideologies; inter-group politics; elite politics)
  • Economic/Social factors (Economic problems; Discriminatory economic systems; modernization)
  • Cultural/Perceptual factors (patters of cultural discrimination; problematic group histories)

Is conflict more prevalent in the modern world?

• During the Cold War the prevailing cause of conflict was the clash between communist and capitalist ideologies.
• The threat of nuclear warfare is claimed to have kept all other conflicts under wraps, but it did not fix the problems underlying potential conflicts.
• “The end of the Cold War helped unleash a spate of civil conflicts among ethnic groups whose simmering animosities had been stifled by superpower hegemony” (Lisa Trei)
• Deen reports “ a more than 30 percent decline in the overall number and intensity of armed conflicts worldwide from 1992 to 1997”
• According to the UN’s first ever Human Security Report, published in October 2005, armed conflicts around the globe have plummeted by more than 40 percent since 1992, and genocide and human rights abuses declined even more. The break-up of the USSR was the main cause for this dramatic development as it reduced the number of “proxy wars” around the globe. The only conflict that is presently getting worse is terrorism
• According to the Economist “Civil wars are much more common than they were 40 years ago. This is mainly because, back then, most of the countries currently fighting were colonies, so powerful outside forces imposed stability”
• The peak of the number of wars was in the 1990s at the end of the cold war. Now less wars start but those that do last for twice the time that the average war lasted in1980.
• According to James Fearon and David Laitin “the number of civil conflicts has increased over time because they break out faster than they end”

Is it still meaningful to distinguish between civil wars and inter-state wars?

• It is meaningful - there is a clear difference between civil war and inter-state war and they are very separate things
• A civil war is a war in which parties within the same culture, society or nationality fight for political power or control of an area. Many historians state the criteria for a civil war is that there must be prolonged violence between organized factions or defined regions of a country
• Inter-state wars are wars between nations requiring the armed forces of at least two sovereign states, sustained combat and at least 1,000 battle casualties.
• It is not meaningful because there are increasingly more civil wars e.g. Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Sudan
• It is not meaningful now because the two are so interlinked - civil war can lead to interstate war, and interstate war can lead to civil war (Iraq now)
• It is even more meaningful now because of the continued persistence of the UN and international community to differentiate between inter-state wars (like the US in Iraq) for security reasons, and the lack of intervention for humanitarian reasons in civil wars.
• It is not meaningful because borders have become slightly more unclear since the collapse of the Soviet Union e.g. Chechnya & Russia. Is Chechnya an independent state (and therefore the situation there is an inter-state war between Chechnya and Russia) or is it still part of Russia's territory (and therefore a civil war)
• There is a clear difference between civil wars and inter-state wars, and hence the definition is still meaningful because they are not the same thing and are responded to in different ways
• Over 120 civil wars have raged since 1945 compared with 20-odd conventional wars.
• Since the end of WW2 16.5 million people have died in internal conflicts, compared with 3.3 million in interstate wars

Comments

These notes are aimed at people studying for Edexcel A Level Politics, module 5 and 6, route D, but will be suitable for other people too.

Originally submitted by joker13na on TSR Forums.