ABSTRACT
Mary Kaldor’s ‘new wars’ thesis was greeted as a breakthrough – and it was.1 It met resistance from some for not being radical enough in its analysis, and for not recognising the complex diversity of new wars.2 Briefly, what Kaldor did was to argue for a new approach towards the wars of today. Existing templates of analysis, established on strategic doctrines and rational purposes and planning, which it was assumed all belligerents would share, were clearly no longer applicable in all cases. Increasingly, wars seemed irrational and their accompanying slaughters gratuitous, amoral and certainly beyond the constraints of any Geneva conventions. Particularly in ‘unknown’ and ‘dark’ continents, wars assumed the aspect of savagery, having neither discernible justice in the reasons for conflict, nor just proportion in who was killed and how. The torturing and raping to death, the starving or kidnapping of children – their press-ganging into child militias – were all taken to be something both ‘new’ and, simultaneously, a throwback to primordial and primitive atrocities. The problem was that the ‘new’ wars, with their old savageries, were each different from the other. The temptation, when confronted by Kaldor, was to aggregate all new wars together, and the follow-on was to counterpose Western rationality and Augustinian limits and Geneva laws of war as ‘civilised’ ameliorations of war, against the brutality and unconsidered mindlessness of the ‘new’. But a ‘new’ war in the Democratic Republic of Congo would be, in fact, very different from one in Liberia – even though terrible things occurred in both. The genocide and war in Rwanda would be different to the attacks on Darfur, and they would be different from the wars between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Even if there was such a generalised thing as a ‘new’ African war, they would be in turn different from, say, ‘new’ wars in the Balkans, with the cold-blooded slaughter of thousands of men in, for instance, Srebrenica. There was almost universal acceptance, however, that Kaldor had initiated a departure in thought from the way ‘old wars’ had superimposed themselves – their conceptions, their purposes and their operational requirements – upon new wars that were very different; and, tellingly, which the modern world with its ethical values could neither restrain nor defeat. Acceptance of the new was the prerequisite for dealing with the new and, basically, restoring the ‘universal’ global values of what was ironically ‘old’.
