New wars

New wars describe international or civil wars of low-intensity conflict that involve myriad transnational connections so that the distinctions between internal and external, aggression and repression, local and global are difficult to sustain. The term is an antonym of conventional warfare whereupon conventional military weapons and battlefield tactics are no longer used between two or more states in open confrontation.

A key thinker in New Wars theory is Mary Kaldor^[1] who explained how globalisation has made three changes to war; it is based on claiming identity not territory, Guerrilla or terror tactics are used and international crime has changed how wars are funded. An example for the theory is the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Other supporters of the new wars theory are Herfried Münkler from Germany, Martin van Creveld from the Netherlands and Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou.

References

1. ^ Kaldor, Mary (1999) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Polity Press, Oxford

Further reading

• Mary Kaldor: New and Old Wars. Organized Violence in a Global Era. Stanford 1999, ISBN 978-0804756464
• Mary Kaldor: “Old Wars, Cold Wars, New Wars, and the War on Terror”, Lecture given to the Cold War Studies Centre, London School of Economics, February 2nd, 2005
• Ismail Küpeli: Die neuen Kriege - Einige Anmerkungen zu Kriegslegitimationen des 21. Jahrhunderts, in: ibd.: Europas "Neue Kriege", Moers 2007, ISBN 978-3-9810846-4-1 (critique on the idea of "new wars" in German, free download)
• Herfried Münkler: The New Wars. 2004, ISBN 978-0745633374