ABSTRACT

The concept of new war, first set out by Mary Kaldor in her 1999 book New and Old Wars: Organized violence in a global era, maintains that a fundamental shift has occurred in the nature of warfare since the early 1990s.1 Kaldor and other ‘new war’ theorists assert that this shift is so substantial that a distinction must be drawn between old wars and new, with the former understood as occurring prior to the 1990s and declining in prominence since the end of the Cold War (Zangl & Heupel, 2010, p. 35). They maintain that the changes in the nature of warfare have required policymakers to respond with new approaches to peacekeeping and war-making (Kaldor, 2012, p. 71). The concept of new war unsettles many of the assumptions of conventional security studies, such as statism, focusing on formal militaries, abstracted views of violence and the public/private dichotomy (Mundy, 2011, p. 289). Due to this, the notion of new war provides feminists with an established framework that focuses on the interconnectedness of war, economy, culture, civilians and globalisation. Although this contribution is valuable it is currently undermined by an ahistorical focus on the distinction between new and old, as well as a shallow engagement with the concept of gender.