ABSTRACT
Politically motivated violence aimed at civilians and used by both state and nonstate entities is not new in international relations (IR). The end of the cold war and the ‘nervous nineties’1 facilitated an academic transition within IR from a focus on inter-state wars to intra-state conflicts, particularly those marked by politically motivated violence and terrorism. In some cases, states grappling with diverse ethnic and religious identities confronted powerful internal groups bent on injuring fellow and sister citizens, as in Rwanda, Sudan, and Bosnia. In other cases, unfinished wars left violence simmering and provided the background for people’s wars against injustice; the Palestinian Intifada and the Kashmiri insurgency became seemingly permanent ‘wars’ against state oppression as the international community proved incapable of resolving them. Some wars have been seen as progressive, some are ruthless and regressive: how one categorizes conflicts in Southern Thailand, Mindanao, Aceh, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, North Eastern states in India, Nepal, Chechnya, Palestine and in parts of West Asia and North Africa, depends on the side one supports. There are also state-to-state-to-nonstate actor wars of recent vintage in Afghanistan and Iraq – the terrorism wars.
