ABSTRACT

War is a notoriously difficult notion to define. At its most basic, the idea of war implies conflict and the acceptance of people being killed. But conflict of what kind? Does it have to be armed conflict? Do certain numbers of people have to be involved? Do people always have to be killed in war? Furthermore, even when more precise definitions of warfare are adopted, it is difficult to reach general agreement on what any one particular kind of conflict actually is. As the ongoing military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan so clearly indicate, a peacekeeping operation in one person’s mind is often seen as a repressive act of violence to somebody else. One of the most widely accepted classifications of armed conflicts in the 1990s was that adopted by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) (see also Craft 1999). As Williams (1994) emphasized, SIPRI subdivided the majority of post-1945 conflicts other than those associated with decolonization into three categories. First, there were inter-state conflicts, which have generally been relatively rare phenomena, but which have, for example, included the Gulf War (1990-91) between the US-led coalition and Iraq following the latter’s invasion of Kuwait, and the conflict between Pakistan and India in 1998. Second, there were internal conflicts. These have been the most frequent category of conflict in the post-1945 period, and involve disputes over control of government by an armed opposition, often with the intervention of external powers. Third, there were state formation conflicts, involving non-government forces seeking to secede or change the constitutional status of territory, with recent examples including the violence that came to a peak in East Timor in 1999, as well as the conflicts in Chechnya during the late 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Interestingly, SIPRI (2006) has highlighted that non-state actors have recently become increasingly prominent in conflicts, and notes that the international community has had only limited success in dealing with these, thereby giving rise to serious concern.