ABSTRACT
The Cold War shaped, for more than four decades, every facet of the international environment. It created an incompatibility of goals and interests between two superpowers and their spheres of influence, and led to tensions and conflicts at both the international and the intranational levels. While there was an exceptional level of stability at the superpowers’ level, the Third World became the de facto location of the majority of conflict, with the after-effects of colonialism – namely, internal division and economic decline – leaving many Third World countries ripe for external interference and suppressed internal conflict. The United States and the Soviet Union were not directly engaged in a conflict but, rather, indirectly, allowing or encouraging their respective client states (mostly in Asia and Africa) to go to war against each other. Conflict management during this period was characterized mostly by deterrence, suppression and diversion (proxy conflicts) rather than resolution. The United States and Soviet Union intervened unilaterally in a number of conflicts, but their interventions served limited interests, mostly those of leaders or groups supported by either superpower. Conflict suppression, under the umbrella of deterrence and the spheres of superpowers’ influence, served, paradoxically, to intensify latent demands for political identity. With the collapse of the Cold War and the associated changes in the social, economic and political environments, much has been made of the nature of conflict in this new environment. The bipolar international system changed into a very different system; East-West security and alignment tensions decreased, and with them the expectation that a prolonged period of stability would characterize the new system. The Great Powers, acting through the international community, would effectively prevent any conflict from breaking out. The end of the Cold War marked the end of conflict – the ‘end of history’, even. An era of long peace was what we all expected at the dawn of the 1990s. What we have seen since 1991 is not a decrease but an increase in the number and intensity of conflicts. The post-Cold War period is characterized by an explosion of nationalism, the accentuation of national identity, and the eruption of violent conflicts in places as diverse as Angola, Burma, Sudan, Iraq, Russia,
Turkey, Ethiopia, Bosnia, and many other places. These conflicts, largely generated within state boundaries, have become known as ethnic conflicts, or ethnonational conflicts (a superfluous term, as it happens). By one account, only 7 out of 111 militarized conflicts in the 12 years after 1989 were of the traditional interstate kind, and even these may have had a strong internal or communal dimension (see Table 11.1) (Sollenberg and Wallensteen, 2001).
