New Wars



New Wars

Introduction

Today's world has become one of private issues and public issues as described by Kaldo (2007) and Hirst (2002). A world where poverty, pollution, hunger and many other ills have been pushed away from the public domain to become private issues to be dealt with by the individual. A world dominated by the stupid and ignorant. Where NIMBY's (not in my backyard) are every where. The issue of poverty should be a public issue; societies should not ostracize large portions of their population because of their income. Poverty is the cause of many of our social ills including bad health, pollution and crime. Therefore it should be dealt with by a society and not mad a private issue. The paper discusses the views of Kaldo (2007) and Hirst (2002) in relevance with new fronts and wars we're facing in this modern world.

Exploring views of Kaldor & Hirst

Mary Kaldor's New and Old Wars has fundamentally changed the way we understand contemporary war and conflict. In the context of globalization, this path-breaking book has shown that what we think of as war that is to say, war between states in which the aim is to inflict maximum violence -- is becoming an anachronism. In its place is a new type of organized violence or `new wars', which could be described as a mixture of war, organized crime and massive violations of human rights. The actors are both global and local, public and private. The wars are fought for particularistic political goals using tactics of terror and destabilization that are theoretically outlawed by the rules of modern warfare. An informal criminalized economy is built into the functioning of the new wars (Kaldor, 2007).

Analysis by Kaldor (2007) offers a basis for a cosmopolitan political response to these wars, in which the monopoly of legitimate organized violence is reconstructed on a transnational basis and international peacekeeping is reconceptualized as cosmopolitan law enforcement. This approach also has implications for the reconstruction of civil society, political institutions, and economic and social relations.

According to Hirst (2002) future developments in war, armed conflict and international relations are central to our collective fate in this century. Hirst (2002) looks forward by considering the forces that will drive changes in military organizations, sources of conflict, the power of states and the nature of the international system.

Hirst (2002) notes that new military technologies will alter how wars are fought and will influence the balance of power. Changes in the global environment will provide new causes of conflict and will change economic priorities. As a result, the state will survive as the key social institution and populations will look to it to acquire and to distribute scarce resources like water, energy and land. Many of the changes that seem transformatory today, like globalization, the internet and mass consumerism, will be shown to be less significant than we believe them to be (Hirst, 2002).

Hirst (2002) puts such changes into perspective by comparing them with the revolutionary changes in the ...