The Changing Nature of Global Armed
Conflict
Ozcan Ozkan, Ph.D
Turkish National Police, Turkey
Email: [email protected]
Middle East Review of Public Administration (MERPA), (2)1, 2016
Page 1
The Changing Nature of Global Armed Conflict
Ozcan Ozkan, Ph.D
Abstract
In this new era where the United States has remained only superpower in the globe, the unipolar
trend was only challenged by emerging new threats such as global terrorism. The transition
period was not a peaceful one since the newly established states in Eastern Europe and some
failed states in Africa and the Middle East have seriously challenged security of the developed
countries both in Europe and the Americas. On the other hand, some states in Africa and
elsewhere had long lacked the colonial backing as a result of the decolonization process starting
in the 1960s. After the end of the Cold War, some of these states were further left without
support from either bloc. In this situation many states have failed because of lacking political,
economic, and authoritative capacity to meet their people’s needs, triggering intra-state wars
rather than previous interstate wars. The most important threat for both domestic and
international stability came from asymmetric warfare including terrorism. Among them, the 9/11
attacks marked a new period in which transnational terrorism changed the nature of armed
conflict greatly thanks to facilitating factors of globalization. In addition, advanced technology
made conventional wars obsolete, triggering a revolution in military affairs.
Keywords: War, Globalization, Arm Conflict, Terrorism
Introduction
The nature of global armed conflict has been undergone tremendous change in the past three
decades. Especially after the demise of the Soviet Union, the world entered into a new era. In this
new era where the United States has remained only superpower in the globe, the unipolar trend
was only challenged by emerging new threats such as global terrorism. The transition period was
not a peaceful one since the newly established states in Eastern Europe and some failed states in
Africa and the Middle East have seriously challenged security of the developed countries both in
Europe and the Americas. On the other hand, some states in Africa and elsewhere had long
lacked the colonial backing as a result of the decolonization process starting in the 1960s. After
the end of the Cold War, some of these states were further left without support from either bloc.
In this situation many states have failed because of lacking political, economic, and authoritative
capacity to meet their people’s needs, triggering intra-state wars rather than previous interstate
wars.
The most important threat for both domestic and international stability came from asymmetric
warfare including terrorism. Among them, the 9/11 attacks marked a new period in which
transnational terrorism changed the nature of armed conflict greatly thanks to facilitating factors
of globalization. In addition, advanced technology made conventional wars obsolete, triggering a
revolution in military affairs.
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The Changing Nature of War
The process of globalization has been great impacts on armed conflict. Economic
interdependence and spread of democracy in some parts of the world led states to form security
communities where war between them is becoming less and less likely. Kantian approach that
democracies will not fight with each other showed the instrumentality of democratic peace
theory for the last decade. However this does not mean that democratic countries will not go to
war with non-democratic states to spread democratic zone of peace. The American decision to
wage war against Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003 was partly due to this argument that a
democratic Iraq without a dictator would be an example for others in the region toward a
peaceful democratic region.
On the other hand, in some parts of the world wars are still present. As famous nineteenthcentury strategist Clausewitz said, war is a continuation of political activity by other means.
And, it is unlikely that it will disappear. The characteristics of war might change, but essential
nature of war could not. Although the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union
eliminated great wars between great powers, the political authority vacuum created by the
demise of the Soviet Union and violent and brutal transition period of non-democratic states
toward democracy caused states disintegrate into civil wars and insurgency. In addition,
temporary hegemonic control of the United States without a rival in the world together with
Westernization attempts faced with cultural and political resistance that has showed itself
brutally in many parts of the world.
In a globalized world where communication and transformation technologies expanded
worldwide thanks to recent advanced tools like satellites, telephones, and Internet, the notion of
battlefield changed to such extent that cyberspace has become battlespace itself. While new arms
technology allows states to launch long-range missiles in a far distance to the actual battlefield,
this technology may also be used by terrorists to disrupt and devastate government
infrastructures as well as to intimidate their enemies. Even if the great wars are not likely in the
near future, a possible conflict on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) may trigger an
unprecedented warfare by using these weapons. For instance, the possibility of a nuclear
confrontation is increasing as the practices of North Korea and Iran as well as terrorists
attempting to acquire nuclear weapons is challenging the international peace. Mass media is also
playing an important role in showing the brutality of war globally making it more understandable
for the global audience and viewers.
The nature of war has been shifting in recent decades under the impact of globalization, eroding
the autonomy of the state. International system, international law, norms and rules are greatly
concerned with how to prevent war. Formerly, after every great war, a new international system
was formed to better deal with the possible causes and consequences of wars. After the Thirty
Years Wars, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 first set up a system among states to prevent
another catastrophic war. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Concert of Europe was set up in 1815
and played an important role in sustaining relative peace among states with realist balance of
power and diplomatic tools. When the World War I broke out, the previous system collapsed and
the post-war arrangements under the umbrella of League of Nations tried to reach a consensus in
order to eliminate future wars by the notion of collective security. However, this system backed
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by liberal thinking did not work well and consequently could not prevent the outbreak of another
world war. The United Nations (UN) came into being with a distinctive authority to sustain
international peace with its Security Council after the World War II. The UN system and Bretton
Woods arrangements also gave priority to economic and social issues as low politics while
maintaining military and security issues as high politics since both economic and social affairs
are all important factors to leading to a war.
Realist and neorealist approaches giving priority to states and international system under anarchy
dominated the post-war environment. Their supporters criticized the naïve propositions of
liberalism which encouraged states cooperate rather than compete. Liberal and idealists proved
to be inadequate when cooperation and interdependence did not prevent states to wage war
against each other. With the beginning of the Cold War, the US and the Soviets started an arms
race. In addition, security and military blocs between the two powers led to a bipolar
international system. Neorealist thinkers like Waltz argued that a bipolar world is one of the most
stable kinds of international system since such system is easy to manage, and miscalculation is
minimal. On the other hand, multipolar system is complex and more prone to lead to war through
miscalculation and misperception. However, as far as nuclear proliferation is concerned, many
including Waltz argued that more nuclear-capable states may be better than fewer and
multipolarity is better than bipolarity since more uncertainty causes caution, and caution means
following tried and true policies of the past that avoid deviations.
It is argued that in the anarchy of international system, improving the means of defense and
deterrence relative to the means of offense increases the chances of peace. Weapons and
strategies that make defense and deterrence easier, and offensive strikes harder to mount, are
believed to decrease the likelihood of war. This argument is shared by most of the nuclearcapable states or states seeking nuclear technology. Since the 1962 Cuban crisis and later the
period of détente came with a time when striking was believed to lead to catastrophic
consequences, nuclear arms race between great powers did not end up with a hot war. Rather, it
led to developing smart weapons especially on the side of the United States which was known as
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or popularly as Star Wars.
This revolution in military affairs proved to be instrumental in the 1991 and 2003 Iraq Wars
which gave the US-led coalition effortless victory thanks to possessing these advanced weapons
and satellite systems. In this environment, unconventional or asymmetric responses to great
powers of superior capacity started to take place as seen in Soviet withdrawal of Afghanistan in
the 1980s, Arab-Israel conflict from the beginning until today, Yugoslavia in the 1990s and
today in Afghanistan and Iraq where military and technological superiority are being challenged
by insurgents and local militias with limited weapons and strategies but a novel and unstoppable
weapon among others: suicide bombing. The 9/11 attacks as suicide bombing has marked the
most complicated asymmetric assault to a superpower in history. This can be seen as the
changing nature of armed conflict where high-tech wars between sophisticated and organized
alliances were replaced by conflict of almost completely opposite character —low tech, local at
planning but globally trenchant and deeply disorganized.
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New Armed Conflict
Today, globalization not only causes a wide range of economic, cultural, social, and political
change, it also affects the character of war. Gender started to play an important role in suicide
bombings. Child soldiers are increasingly being used in African intra-state armed conflicts, in
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in Afghanistan by Taliban forces. In some places, advanced
states are willingly transferring some of its military functions to private authorities, creating a
kind of ‘outsourcing of war’ while these functions are being seized from the state by other actors
like warlords in another part of the world. Indeed, more and more states are contracting out some
military services to Privatized Military Firms (PMFs) which sell a great deal of war-related
services to states in the logistical and security roles rather than direct combat as seen in the 2003
US-led invasion of Iraq.
The concept of total war of twentieth century which involved the mobilization of whole
population, economy, and military resources of the state seems to fade away but the total loss of
both intra-state wars, civil wars, and terrorist attacks still remain very high as seen in Rwanda,
Bosnia, Liberia, Somalia and other places as well as in the 9/11 attacks.
War has long been seen as armed conflict between opposing states at least since the Westphalian
state order, fought by uniformed, organized bodies of soldiers. In most cases wars were regulated
by different acts, norms, and rules. This is not the case today when intra-state armed conflicts
have dominated the global agenda for the last 25 years. The driving force behinds these new
wars is globalization process which has increasingly eroded the economic, political, and military
autonomy of the state in some part of the world where disintegration of states and struggle for
control of the state by conflicting groups have mostly ended up with intra-state violent armed
struggle. As those states lose control, privatized and paramilitary groups gain access to weapons
of the state or usually via organized groups dealing with arms trade.
This new armed conflict in which religion, identity, and culture play an important role is also
reflected in Huntington’s ‘clash of civilization’. As opposed to his former student Fukayama
who prematurely called early post-cold war era as ‘the end of history’, Huntington never
expected an emergence of a global civilization after the end of the Cold War. Even if there is
increased interconnectedness between societies, the world would fragment into civilizational
blocs and cultural and ethnic enclaves. According to Huntington, world politics is entering a new
phase in which the fundamental source of conflict will not be primarily ideological or economic,
but cultural. Although he concedes that nation-states will remain the most powerful actor, he
contends that the principal conflicts will occur between nations and groups of different
civilizations. Particularly, the clash between the Western and Islamic states is likely to become
more rather than less intense. Part of the reason is that the West is now at the peak of power in
relations to other civilizations and there has been a hostile reaction to this dominance by other
civilizations.
Other important reasons for the new armed struggle are poverty, overpopulation, crime, disease,
and environmental degradation. In particular, the environmental degradation is increasingly
becoming a major cause of conflict in certain areas of the world. One of the most prominent
analysts on relations between environment and global conflict, Thomas Homer-Dixon, contends
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that wars and civil violence will often arise from depletion of resources such as water, cropland,
forest, and fish.
Finally, long ignored issue of terrorism gained priority in global arena. Neoliberal
institutionalists and realists mainly focused on nuclear weapons for a long time, and terrorism
was regarded as a secondary issue that required neither attention nor analytic rigor. This was
changed after 9/11. Terrorism experts such as Bruce Hoffman had long been warning of the
emergence of new and more lethal forms of terrorism including emergence of religious terrorist
organizations even before 9/11. His main argument was that religious motivations combined
with enhanced terrorist capabilities with new technological tools could indicate an even long,
bloodier and more destructive era of violence in the history. The 9/11 attacks proved Hoffman’s
assessment of changing nature of terrorism to be true.
Conclusion
The process of globalization has greatly changed the face of armed conflict. Some elements,
though, still remains the same. While in some places armed struggle is continuing for promoting
political activity, in other places armed conflict is occurring due to economic and environment
scarcity concerns. The asymmetric threat of terrorism is increasingly affecting state behavior
while the solutions to terrorism and armed conflict still remain inadequate. With the advanced
technological capacities becoming more and more accessible to anyone including terrorists, the
nature of threat has also gone global transcending boundaries. Terrorists’ wish to acquire
weapons of mass destruction underscores the gravity of the threat. As the character of conflict
goes beyond the traditional borders of states so must the response. Multilateral arrangements by
the United Nations and other supranational bodies to date have not addressed the issue
adequately but there is hope that new kinds of multilateral, regional and international cooperation
in all levels of political, economic, and cultural aspects as well as law enforcement and military
cooperation between individual states can emerge to reduce the risk and casualty in the face of
the changing nature of armed conflict globally.
About the Author
Ozcan Ozkan, Ph.D. is affiliated with Turkish National Police, Turkey. His Email address is:
[email protected]
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