Ending Wars

Ending Wars

FEARGAL COCHRANE

polity

Copyright © Feargal Cochrane 2008

The right of Feargal Cochrane to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2008 by Polity Press

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For Rosaleen

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction

Focus of the Book

Structure of the Book

Conclusion

What is War?

The Social Meaning of War

The Limits of War

Modern Trends in War

How Do Modern Wars End?

Making Wars Ripe for Ending

What is Third-Party Intervention?

Different Forms of Third-Party Intervention

Chechnya and the Limits of Third-Party Intervention

Getting to the Table: Pre-Negotiations and the First Steps towards Dialogue

Making the First Move

When the Talking Begins: Political Negotiations

The Importance of Leadership in Negotiations

Why Resist the Ending of War?

What is a Spoiler?

Violent Resisters

Peaceful Resisters

Understanding the Global War on Terror

Can the Global War on Terror be Ended?

Conclusion

Rebuilding through Reconciliation

Rebuilding through Reconstruction

Rebuilding Whose Peace?

The Need for Effective Reconstruction to End Wars

Conclusion

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface and Acknowledgements

This has not been an easy book to write. I have sat in front of my computer for most of the last year trying to think through the changing dynamics of armed conflicts and the patterns that exist in how they are brought to an end. When Louise Knight pitched the idea to me of writing a book entitled Ending Wars, I was both attracted by the ambition of such a project and at the same time horrified by its difficulty. To put it flippantly, if I knew how to end wars I would probably already have solved less difficult puzzles such as alchemy and perhaps a low-cost solution to global warming. Yet while writing the book I have tried to think through a number of questions that have confounded me for most of my life. What are the tipping points that lead some people both to engage in violence against others for political objectives, and to agree finally to stop doing so? To what extent do we see war as an ethical last resort, driven by our belief in the state system and the integrity of transnational organizations? Finally, how does the apparent miracle of ‘peace’ emerge out of these egregious acts of violence? When we consider the pain, suffering and dislocation caused by armed conflict, it is not surprising that the process of ending political violence is a difficult task, where breakdowns rather than breakthroughs are the norm.

On a more personal note, my interest in these questions comes out of the particular experience of being born and raised in Northern Ireland, where violence and politics have been regular partners in crime and where issues of the legitimacy and rationality of the use of violence for political purposes have been contested by many of those who live there. For most of my life Northern Ireland was regarded by many people as being an ‘intractable’ conflict, where the best that could be hoped for was an ‘acceptable level of violence’.

This does not necessarily give me any particular skills for writing a book such as this one, but it does perhaps explain my reluctance to view ‘official’ wars through an ethical lens. My starting point is not whether a paramilitary or a politician claims to have legitimacy for the use of violence, but rather whether this was the only option available to them.

My other starting point in this book is a hopeful one. Armed conflicts are (in the main) started and perpetuated by rational actors with different sets of political goals and interests. Wars are usually ended by exactly the same people, once they determine that further violence will be counterproductive and that a political route out of conflict is the only way to secure their objectives. While it is easy to cast some actors in war as psychopaths, demagogues or ‘evil-doers’, who cannot be reasoned with, these are the exception rather than the rule in modern warfare. For the most part, people go to war because they think that it will work or due to other calculations such as pressure from internal political rivals or perceived aggression from external forces.

However, when this view about the productivity of war changes, real prospects for ending the violence can often emerge. All of this is easier said than done, of course, and the difficulties of getting to this point should not be underestimated. Ending an armed conflict cannot be viewed as a mechanistic exercise where the motivations and behaviour of the direct and indirect actors will conform to the same pattern. A one-size-fits-all analysis of conflict transformation inevitably risks misunderstanding the unique dynamics of individual cases in the search for simplified formulae to explain them.

The process of writing the book has been made much easier by the team at Polity, especially Louise Knight and Emma Hutchinson, both of whom guided me through the process of producing and refining the manuscript with consummate professionalism and care. I am also indebted to my colleagues in the Richardson Institute at Lancaster University, Dr Nina Caspersen and Dr Vicky Mason, whose own research has informed my thinking on several of the major debates covered within the book. I also want to thank my other colleagues in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster, in particular Professor David Denver, who provided encouragement and friendship throughout the project, and my Head of Department, Professor Chris May, who helped me to balance my responsibilities at the university with the task of researching and writing the book. I would also like to thank a number of other colleagues within and beyond Lancaster who have discussed many of the ideas within these pages and helped me to clarify my own thoughts on the wider debates, including Dr Patrick Bishop, Professor Adrian Guelke, Dr Roger Mac Ginty, Professor Hugh Miall, Professor Gerd Nonneman, Dr Graham Smith and Professor Andrew Williams.

I would also like to thank my students (past and present) who have taken my third-year undergraduate course ‘Understanding Peace Processes’ at Lancaster, for their enthusiasm and engagement with many of the themes at the centre of this book. The teaching has not all been one-way traffic, and I have benefited greatly from listening to their insights about how armed conflicts can be brought to an end.

A special word of thanks has to go to the anonymous reviewers of the book proposal and also the reviewers of the initial manuscript, for their constructive criticisms and suggestions. I am sure I am not the only author to think the first draft to be a work of beauty and then slowly come to the realization that the suggestions of expert readers would actually help to substantiate assertions and clarify analysis. Notwithstanding the help and guidance I have received in this process, all remaining errors of fact and analysis lie solely with the author.

My hope is that this book beats with an optimistic heart while looking at the world with a sceptical eye. It is up to those who read it to determine whether I have succeeded.

I would like to thank Greg and Kathie Irwin, Donald and Deborah McWhirter and Dr Alison Montgomery for their friendship, as well as friends and former colleagues from the Centre for the Study of Conflict at the University of Ulster, including Professor Seamus Dunn, Professor Valerie Morgan and Helen Dawson.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, Niall, Geraldine, Eamonn, Peter, Sean and my mother and father, Roisin and Gerry Cochrane, for their love and support.

The book is dedicated to my wife, Professor Rosaleen Duffy, who has had to listen to me pontificate upon the arguments within these pages since the writing began. I would like to thank her for carrying this burden with such fortitude, patience and encouragement.

Introduction

There is no such thing as a bad peace or a good war.

Benjamin Franklin¹

This is a book about what war is, how war ends, and how this has been evolving in recent times. The starting point for this study is the view that violent conflicts are acts of human agency combined with a set of structural circumstances that trigger, cause or even encourage such acts.

War has been a familiar theme within human history which has shaped our world, geographically, politically and economically. In addition to the human death toll it has generated, it has also driven economies, caused famines, re-ordered political regimes and changed physical infrastructures. While much has been written on the causes of war, less attention has been given to the reasons why wars end. This book is aimed at understanding how wars are brought to an end and how this has been changing in line with the evolution of armed conflict over the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The premise that runs through the book is that wars can be controlled and eventually terminated by human agency, given conducive structural conditions. In other words, war is not simply a force of nature, where we are all victims of violent primordial circumstances. Notwithstanding the work of Sigmund Freud on the human mind or Konrad Lorenz on the nature of aggression, we do not have to accept war as integral to the human condition. Large-scale wars and smaller low-intensity conflicts are driven by political, economic and cultural imperatives. These forms of violence emerge as a means to an end and are not normally an end in themselves, even if the causal factors are difficult to determine. As Peter Wallensteen boldly puts it: ‘A strong statement is that conflicts are solvable. This is not necessarily an idealistic or optimistic position . . . it is a realistic position.’²

There have, of course, been violent conflicts that have defied termination and wars that seem to be dominated by ‘ancient hatreds’ that appear beyond hope. However, the view that violence is inevitable due to such enmities has often been an excuse for policy-makers to justify non-interventionist strategies until such regions burn themselves out and find a new political equilibrium.

This book argues that while there may be disagreement about how it should be achieved – e.g. realist notions of balance of power or deterrence strategies, the pacifist emphasis on the principles of non-violence, or the liberal belief in ‘good governance’, international mediation, constructive engagement and ultimately coercion – the contention here is that wars between states and wars within states can, under certain circumstances, be brought to an end.

Focus of the Book

A comment on terminology is important at the outset. This book deals primarily with how wars end within states rather than how such violence ends between them. There is a general consensus that armed conflict in the modern world is mainly characterized by violence within states rather than by violence between them. As a result this book focuses in particular on the processes through which these types of conflict are brought to an end. Despite conflicting methodologies, leading scholars and researchers in the area are in general agreement that the trend in modern warfare since the end of the Cold War has seen a reduction in inter-state war and a growth of intrastate violence (though this peaked in the early 1990s and has not grown consistently). As the authors of Contemporary Conflict Resolution explain:

One major trend, however, shows through in almost all accounts and that is a decline in the proportion of interstate wars. . . . There were no interstate wars in 1993 and 1994, . . . only a minor border altercation between Peru and Ecuador in 1995 and a flare-up in the long-running dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir in 1996. . . . In 2002 there was only one interstate war. . . [though] Iraq would be added in 2003.³

Peter Wallensteen and Margareta Sollenberg report from their study of armed conflict during the 1990s that, while perhaps not ‘extinct’, inter-state wars have markedly decreased in number during the post-Cold War period. ‘Of the 96 conflicts recorded for the 1989–95 period, only five were clear-cut interstate armed conflicts, i.e. cases of two internationally recognized governments sending forces against one another over an issue of government and/or territory.’⁴ The 2005 Human Security Report is more strident in its conclusions, declaring that there has been an inexorable shift from inter-state to intrastate conflict over time.

Between 1816 and 2002 there were 199 international wars (including wars of colonial conquest and liberation) and 251 civil wars – one international war on average for every 1.3 civil wars over the entire period. International wars accounted for one-fifth to three-quarters of all wars being waged in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. . . . From the early 1980s to the early 1990s the number of international wars declined. For the rest of the 1990s and the early years of the 21st century there have been almost no international wars. The one exception was 1999, when there were three wars – two of which, Kosovo and India–Pakistan, had relatively small death tolls.⁵

Notwithstanding the war in Iraq (which might be seen as an inter-state conflict which has also become an internal one), the emphasis of this book, in a series which focuses on war in the modern world, has to be on intra-state rather than inter-state conflicts. The intention of the book is that it extends the analysis of warfare outside the boundaries of the state system, focusing on wars within states rather than on wars between them. While states remain an important point of reference when discussing the dynamics of war and strategies to bring such violence to an end, they are no longer the only one, and in some cases, where states are weak and shadow economies are strong, the state may be peripheral to the issue of whether violence continues or ends. William Reno coined the phrase the ‘shadow state’ in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, where conflict entrepreneurs combined across the private and public spheres to subvert the state for personal gain.⁶ In the twenty-first century, states do not have a monopoly over decisions about whether to go to war, and in some instances, individual ‘warlords’, groups of militias, diaspora communities or trans national networks such as Al-Qaeda can play a more influential role.

The focus of this book on warfare within states is more appropriate to the conflicts of the twenty-first century and facilitates a discussion of the important roles played by transnational and civil society actors in helping to bring violent conflicts to an end. In addressing this, the chapters that follow engage with a number of current debates concerning the limits of war, the ethics of war in the modern world, the perpetrators and victims of violence, and whether it is possible for external third parties to intervene successfully in wars to help end them.

The central argument of the book is that the nature of war changed dramatically during the twentieth century in ways that make ending these conflicts more difficult to achieve in the modern world. This change has been towards a widening of the actors and victims of warfare that has accompanied the post-Cold War growth of intra-state and ethnic conflict. The pain and human suffering incurred as a result of armed conflict has increasingly been borne by civilian populations rather than by military forces in modern warfare, and this has had damaging knock-on effects in the search to end such violence. Focusing on civil wars, Roy Licklider has pointed out the obstacles in the way of bringing them to a close.

Sustained wars produce and reinforce hatred that does not end with the violence. How do groups of people who have been killing one another with considerable enthusiasm and success come together to form a common government? How can you work together, politically and economically, with the people who killed your parents, siblings, children, friends, or lovers? On the surface it seems impossible, even grotesque. But in fact we know that it happens all the time.⁷

The decision-making process related to maintaining cease-fires, entering negotiations and implementing the terms of a settlement has been decentralized from military and political leaders to a much wider range of direct actors with less tangible mandates of support. The book examines how this change in the nature of how wars are fought (and whom they affect) has influenced the complex processes of bringing violence to an end.

Structure of the Book

The book has a thematic structure, examining the obstacles that lie in the way of ending wars and the circumstances within which efforts have been made to curtail this type of violent conflict. The purpose here is not to provide a comprehensive measurement of how many wars have ended within a given period, or to provide statistics about the number of battle deaths endured, cease-fires declared or peace agreements reached. While these issues are, of course, important, the aim of this book is to highlight a number of themes that are critical to the task of bringing modern violent political conflicts to an end. The book does not argue that the dynamics of all such conflicts are the same, or that every war can be ended through peaceful dialogue. What it does hope to demonstrate is that wars can be brought to an end, that conditions can at times be promoted which may make this more likely, and that under these circumstances, non-violent political alternatives can be pursued. While the premise here is an optimistic one, namely that violent conflict is a product of human agency, combined with malign or dysfunctional political/economic structures, it does not underestimate the difficulties inherent in ending war for those both within and beyond such conflict zones.

Chapter 1 charts the changing nature of war and includes an examination of terms such as ‘war’, ‘conflict’ and ‘terrorism’, explaining the way in which these terms have bled into one another as the nature of warfare has evolved over time. The academic, policy and media communities use an alphabet soup of phrases to describe warfare, including ‘internal conflicts’, ‘new wars’, ‘small wars’, ‘civil wars’ and many others besides,⁸ including the more recent ‘network-centric war’ and ‘complex political emergencies’. All of these terms have different nuances that try to capture the complexity of modern warfare and the fact that its boundaries go beyond and beneath the level of the formal state system. These changing trends in how wars are conducted are linked to the social meaning of war in the modern world and to the way in which armed conflicts are justified by those who engage in them.

The central argument put forward in this first chapter is that the process of ending wars between states is radically different to ending wars within states, where decision-making and political power are often more fractured, where civilians will often be more involved as both perpetrators and victims, and where humanitarian abuses may have been more extreme. In cases such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Liberia, the act of killing itself was often so traumatic that it added to the difficulty of ending the violence. It is important to recognize this evolution in how wars have been fought since the latter part of the twentieth century in order to understand the process though which such violent conflicts are brought to an end.

Chapter 2 examines the role of international and local third-party intervention aimed at ending war. In many armed conflicts, external third parties have played a role in bringing violence to a halt. This chapter explores the history of third-party intervention and looks at the various roles, from fact-finding and mediation to peace-keeping and peace-enforcement. This will illustrate the vast range of tasks often undertaken by third parties in efforts to promote negotiations, cease-fires, demilitarization and post-war reconstruction. In addition to looking at a number of high-profile external interventions aimed at ending violence, the chapter looks at examples such as Chechnya and Darfur where such intervention has not taken place. It considers why this has not happened and what this tells us about the international political system and its capacity to intervene to end armed conflict. One of the key features of this chapter is an assessment of the record of external agencies in helping to end war, highlighting the dilemmas facing humanitarian intervention and the failures of transnational actors in regions such as Rwanda and Bosnia.

Chapter 3 focuses on the role that political negotiations play in the task of bringing warfare to an end and examines the complexities and setbacks that often accompany such processes. Once it is clear to the conflict parties that military victory is unlikely (or that defeat is inevitable), the process of looking for a political route out of war will intensify. While many of these negotiations often end in failure, this chapter looks at the dynamics of the negotiating process and at the techniques that can help move such dialogue out of political stalemate. The chapter highlights the difficulties associated with negotiating the journey out of warfare and focuses on contemporary examples, including South Africa, Northern Ireland and the Middle East. These case studies illustrate the way in which military and political stalemates evolve over time, leading to informal talks and formal negotiations aimed at ending violence and achieving political settlements. It connects to the previous chapter by examining the differences between negotiating an end to inter-and intra-state warfare: William Zartman declared that ‘internal conflicts – civil wars – are the most difficult of conflicts to negotiate. Only a quarter to a third of modern civil wars (including anticolonial wars) have found their way to negotiation, whereas more than half of modern interstate wars have done so.’⁹

Chapter 4 explores the manner in which certain groups have tried to resist or undermine efforts to negotiate an end to war. Groups who may have an interest in violent conflict continuing, or who disagree with the political conditions under which the war is being ended, may try to destabilize efforts to bring the war to a close. This is particularly relevant within intrastate warfare, where some actors have political and economic interests in its continuation and may lose out if the conflict is brought to an end. The chapter proposes refinements to Stephen Stedman’s concept of ‘spoiler’ groups who seek to undermine political efforts to end warfare.¹⁰ While Stedman seeks to differentiate between various categories, such as ‘limited spoilers’, ‘total spoilers’ and ‘greedy spoilers’,¹¹ it is argued here that such labelling too easily collapses supposed spoiler activity with support for, or actual involvement in, continued violence. However, some of those who resist political efforts aimed at ending warfare or managing conflict may do so because they feel that these political processes are so seriously flawed that they will lead to the re-emergence of violence, or that they seek to prioritize order over justice by imposing inequitable political and economic arrangements on one or more of the conflict parties. There is a danger here that this too easily equates spoilers with opponents of peace and implicitly identifies the ‘peace process’ itself as being equivalent to moderation and any opposition to it as extreme.

Chapter 4 therefore seeks to separate out those who have resisted the ending of war and the reasons why they have done so, ranging from military and political leaders with political, economic and personal self-interest in perpetuating the war, to those who see cease-fire agreements or treaty agreements as being ‘peace at any price’ which will ultimately lead to the reemergence of violence at a later date.

Chapter 5 moves on to examine the global war on terror (GWOT) and the extent to which this represents a new form of warfare with different implications for termination. In his agenda-setting address to a joint session of the US Congress on 20 September 2001 in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, US President George Bush claimed that the attack opened up a new departure in conflict. War had gone global, and bringing this violence to an end required a co-ordinated global response between two mutually exclusive parties: those who valued freedom and tolerance, on the one hand, and the purveyors of fear and terror, on the other. This chapter engages with the debates surrounding the new security environment post-9/11 and focuses in particular on the newly identified paradigm of violent conflict represented by sub-state warfare. It has been suggested by some commentators that this represents a departure in traditional notions of how wars are conducted, whom they impact upon and how they can be managed or resolved. The chapter explores the dynamics of sub-state warfare and assesses the difficulties associated with bringing these violent conflicts to an end. It also challenges the claim that a new paradigm of warfare opened up after September 11, 2001. It is argued here that many of the techniques and practices believed to be new departures in war (attacks on civilians; no-warning, maximum-impact bombings or ‘spectaculars’; the use of fear and terror for political leverage; the use of legal mechanisms by security forces – detention/expulsion, use of military intelligence, torture – aka ‘extraordinary renditions’) are in fact well-worn practices in war and in attempts to control it. What has changed since September 11, 2001 is that war has been extended to the point where it now impacts much more directly upon Western civilian societies than was the case in the past, as do the symptoms of modern warfare such as refugee flows, the extension of emergency laws and the surveillance of civilian populations. It is also argued that the GWOT cannot be won by military means and can only be ended in conjunction with a strategic review of US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Chapter 6 turns its attention to the importance of reconciliation and reconstruction in rebuilding war-torn societies. The main focus here is on the complexities of the efforts that have been made towards these ends and at the structures and agencies that have been set in place to achieve them. The chapter examines the difficulties faced by ethically divided societies (and external third parties) in the process of dealing with the political, economic and personal traumas that are the inevitable consequence of war. Using examples including Rwanda, Bosnia, South Africa, Northern Ireland and Iraq, this chapter outlines the array of tasks that face shattered societies after the physical violence has been brought to an end. It is argued here that while justice is an inherent requirement for reconciliation to occur, it is difficult to devise political institutions capable of delivering this within the highly sensitive context of a shattered society. In addition, while reconstruction is needed to help the victims of violence reconstruct their shattered lives, this is often more than a neutral or technical exercise, and is frequently embedded within the liberal ideology of powerful Western interests. In circumstances where these Western states and transnational organizations were part of the war itself, attempts to engage in post-war reconstruction have inevitably been accompanied by allegations of bias and political self-interest, which have hampered the rebuilding effort.

Conclusion

This book argues that the ideology and sinews of war are the products of aggressive human interactions, enabled and driven by particular sets of political, economic and social conditions. The task for students of international relations and those seeking to play a positive policy role within violently divided societies is to understand the combination of structure and agency that produces and escalates this violence and to determine whether strategies are available to de-escalate and terminate it. The chapters that follow are an attempt to illustrate the challenges and opportunities that exist in the effort to end armed conflict in the modern world.

CHAPTER ONE

The Changing Nature of War

Through much of history, war has been the norm rather than the exception in relations among nations.

Joseph Nye¹

All of us are familiar with the concept of war and are aware of the heavy cost it brings in terms of death, injury and destruction to the world in which we live. As the journalist Robert Fisk has eloquently remarked, ‘[W]ar is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.’² While most readers of this book will thankfully not have been exposed to the full horrors of warfare, we all have at least a working knowledge of some of the larger-scale ‘hegemonic’ wars that have been documented through recent human history and know something of their causal factors and how these violent conflagrations were eventually brought to an end. However, much less attention has been paid to the fact that wars have been evolving and mutating in three inter-connecting ways: firstly, in how they are conducted; secondly, in terms of the people affected by them; and, thirdly, in the challenges and opportunities this presents for bringing wars to an end.

Violent conflict in the twenty-first century is a different phenomenon to its ancient relation, described by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC, or more recent examples such as World Wars I and II during the twentieth century. Contemporary conflicts are often mobile and fluid, with complex arrays of direct and indirect actors and uncertain timelines. As a consequence, decisions about why to go to war, when to go to war, whom to go to war with, how to engage in battle and when to stop are more complicated now than they were in the past. It is important to account for and understand the changing nature of warfare, as this is directly connected to how such conflicts can be brought to an end in today’s world.

What is War?

Before discussing how the practice of war has changed, it is sensible to provide some definition about how war is understood. This book prefers an inclusive definition of armed conflict that treats war as an issue of scale, rather than as an inherently different form of physical violence. War, therefore, is defined here as being a period of organized violence between at least two parties, who may come from transnational, state or sub-state sources. As the impact on the victim remains the same (death, injury, displacement), little effort is made here to distinguish between levels of legitimate authority in the act of violence. As Quincy Wright has remarked in his classic analysis A Study of War: ‘[W]ar is only one of many abnormal legal situations. It is but one of numerous conflict procedures. It is only an extreme case of group attitudes. It is only a very large-scale resort to violence.’³

Categorizations of violence can easily lead to justifications of it for the purposes of national defence or in pursuit of that increasingly hollow phrase within international affairs, ‘international peace and security’. Thus, acts of violence up to and including acts of war committed by states are easily deemed to be acts of ‘reasonable force’, while those committed by paramilitary factions are categorized as ‘acts of terrorism’. However, it is important to ensure that arithmetic categories do not become moral ones and that violence from undeclared wars gets its share of attention alongside the violence authorized/legitimized by the state and powerful international institutions.⁴ To focus on large-scale war at the expense of undeclared or smaller-scale (but more numerous) conflicts within states would risk taking an unnecessarily state-centric view of violent conflict in the contemporary world. Worse still, to engage in the binary logic of state-driven ‘force’ versus non-state-based ‘terror’ is of little comfort to those who experience and suffer such violence in their lives.

While many commentators (and perpetrators) agree that war is horrific, painful and costly in human and economic terms, there remains a belief that states (and their elite actors) can be absolved from the responsibility and guilt of the act of killing if such violence is organized along certain lines, or if it is sanctioned by a ‘legitimate’ authority. As a consequence, the treatment of war is not limited in this book to inter-state conflict, or to a particular threshold of casualties, but is taken to include intra-state and sub-state conflict of the type highlighted in the post-9/11 era, with the global war on terror. The purpose here is to extend the analysis of warfare outside the boundaries of the international state system and focus on wars within states rather than on wars between them. This framing is more appropriate to the conflicts of the twenty-first century and facilitates an integrated discussion of the important roles played by state, sub-state and transnational actors in both the conduct and termination of warfare.

Several different approaches have been taken by conflict researchers in order to define, categorize and quantify warfare, most of which attempt to analyse the patterns and frequency of armed conflict over time. While plenty of information has been collected to define, map and quantify the intensity of armed conflict, its power as an explanatory tool is less certain. As Dennis Sandole points out, ‘[N]ot only do we not know much, if anything, about the sources of influence on decisions to go to war, but what we think we know could be challenged by other (contradictory) findings.’⁵ One of the central reasons for the debate surrounding the limits of war, the precise figures that surround its frequency and intensity, and whether its causal factors can be understood and controlled relates to the varied methodologies that have been used to gather such information. However, another more fundamental issue is pertinent here, namely that armed conflict is not a closed system that lends itself easily to quantification. The edges of measurement in the gathering (and interpretation) of these data are often blurred and subject to different techniques. These different methodologies can produce alarming variations in assessments of war frequency and intensity and diverse interpretations about what these figures mean for future trends in armed conflict and possible strategies that might be pursued for ending it.⁶

The Social Meaning of War

While quantitative researchers have spent some time defining what wars are,⁷ less attention has been given to the changing meaning of war as a social descriptor of armed conflict. In the past, the act of war was indelibly connected to statehood, and decisions about going to war, the conduct during war and when to end the conflict were taken by the elite political and military groups within states. This, together with the organization of the international political system which recognized the rights of states, served to connect the concept of ‘war’ with the legitimacy of states, and to render the act of warfare as being, on certain occasions, ‘just’. The use of armed conflict from non-state sources, on the other hand, has generally been regarded as unwarranted and illegitimate ‘terrorism’ (e.g. the Tamil Tigers, the Provisional IRA and, of course, Al-Qaeda) or the more recently coined ‘insurgency’, to describe the actions of various groups of militant Sunni nationalists in Iraq. This is not to say that the actions of paramilitary groups have not been deadly and to deny that many people have been (and continue to be) killed or injured in horrifying ways by such groups. However, as Fred Halliday has pointed out, ‘[T]he great mass of criminal activities against civilians and others are carried out not by rebel groups, but by states.’⁸ It might also be argued that not all of this death and destruction is carried out by states that we might describe as being ‘rogue’, ‘weak’, ‘collapsed’ or otherwise dysfunctional regimes within the neo-liberal paradigm of ‘good governance’.

The ending of the Cold War witnessed the curious phenomenon of the ‘democratic peace’ and its close associate, ‘humanitarian war’. These are at the heart of the distinction between war as being a regrettable but essential and even reasonable social phenomenon, on the one hand, and war as unnecessary and pernicious, on the other. Advocates of the ‘democratic peace’ advance the neo-liberal view that international peace and security can only be achieved through the promotion of the values and structures of Western democracy and liberal market reform. The logic goes that as democracies do not wage war on other democracies, then the world will be a safer place when the values and practices of democratization are extended from the Global North to the Global South. One of the leading thinkers behind democratic peace theory is Michael Doyle, who argues that, for all of their flaws, inconsistencies and selfish motivations, liberal states have the capacity to tame the anarchic nature of the international system and produce greater peace and stability. ‘Even though liberal states have become involved in numerous wars with nonliberal states, constitutionally secure liberal states have yet to engage in war with one another. . . . A liberal zone of peace, a pacific union, has been maintained and has expanded despite numerous particular conflicts of economic and strategic interest.’⁹ Todd Landman outlines the case for the democratic peace in the following summary of academic literature on the subject.

In the international sphere, the very large literature on the democratic peace has shown that since the late 1800s pairs of democracies (i.e. dyads) do not go to war with one another . . . . Some commentators have argued that this empirical finding is the closest thing to a law that political science has established . . . . Further research argues that democracies are less conflict-prone than non-democracies . . . and that democratizing countries that have well-managed transitions are less likely to be engaged in interstate warfare . . . .¹⁰

Critics of this view would argue that while democratic states might have demonstrated a reluctance to go to war with one another, they seemed more enthusiastic about going to war with those whom they felt did not live up to their standards of governance. In fact, those at the policy end of the democratic peace have been zealous – even evangelical – in their desire to bring war to a host of countries in the developing world. As the 2005 Human Security Report suggests, ‘[T]he UK, France, the US and the Soviet Union/Russia top the list of countries involved in international wars in the last 60 years.’¹¹

In his challenging book At War’s End, Roland Paris makes an important distinction which he claims advocates of the democratic peace model fail fully to appreciate. ‘Although well-established market democracies may be more peaceful in their internal and international affairs than non-democracies, the policy of promoting democracy necessarily involves transforming a state into a market democracy.’¹² For Paris, it is not so much the pursuit of democratic norms and market liberalization that is the problem, but rather the means of getting there that creates the difficulty. This transition, often forced at an unreasonable pace within societies still dealing with the trauma of war, is likely to exacerbate rather than end conflict in the region. David Keen, writing about the role of international financial institutions and their promotion of liberal market reforms in Sierra Leone, remarks that

one can certainly point to many western countries with relatively free markets where democracy is well established and where the risk of war (or at least internal war) seems minimal. However, an apparent correlation between (relatively) free markets, democracy, and peace within developed countries tells us little about how less fortunate countries might best arrive at this enviable state of affairs.¹³

Roger Mac Ginty has critiqued what he terms the hegemonic dominance of democratic peace theory, and points out that ‘correlation is not the same as causation. . . . The precise reasons for the seeming association between democratic states and warlessness are unclear and are likely to reside in such a complex matrix of reasons (enduring alliances and patterns of trade, etc.) that it is difficult to promote one war-resisting factor such as democracy above others.’¹⁴

The assumptions behind the democratic peace have even led some to extrapolate beyond the bounds of reason. The New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman, for instance, famously expounded the ‘Golden Arches Theory’ in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree.¹⁵ This theory put forward the notion that no two countries with a McDonald’s restaurant have ever gone to war with one another and that most of their franchises are in democratic states. Thus to follow the theory through, the more McDonald’s outlets there are around the world, the fewer wars there will be (though perhaps the more deaths from obesity). The one problem with the Golden Arches Theory, of course, is that it is super-sized nonsense(e.g. the fact that Panama had a McDonald’s did not prevent a US invasion in 1989). However, if nothing else, it illustrates the hegemony of democratic peace theory within contemporary Western discourse as a way of bringing wars to an end.

Justice in War

The argument put forward in this book is that the state does not have any superior moral authority compared to non-state actors when it comes to using violence for political purposes, even if it claims the legal authority to do so. The modern nation-state was, of course, carved out of violent conflict, and so should be circumspect about staking any claims in the area of political morality. While the state certainly has the ability to deliver death on a massive scale and has demonstrated its capacity to do so for many centuries, we no longer live in a Hobbesian world where the sovereign is granted tyrannical powers, including those of life or death, in return for delivering stability and order to anarchic communities. The belief that there is a ‘legitimate authority’ for killing has been an integral element of Just War Theory (JWT) for many centuries, but is frequently in the eye of the beholder, or the mob, and has been used by everyone from Oliver Cromwell to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to argue that society will be improved through the use of regrettable, but necessary, acts of violence. While states have and will continue to use violence in pursuit of various political, economic and ideological ends, they should not boast about it or try to justify it. More importantly perhaps, we as citizens of these states should not encourage it.

Assessments about the legitimacy of war will vary depending on the context involved and the political perspectives of those engaged in such debates; the point here is that the rules for the use of violent force have been changing in subtle but important ways since the end of the twentieth century. There are several areas where this can be observed, which intersect with modern readings of classical JWT. As Stephen Chan has suggested, the concept of the just war has become embedded within the transnational foundations of the international ¹⁶