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Indlæser... New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (1999)af Mary Kaldor
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Mary Kaldor's New and Old Wars has fundamentally changed the way both scholars and policy-makers understand contemporary war and conflict. In the context of globalization, this path-breaking book has shown that what we think of as war - that is to say, war between states in which the aim is to inflict maximum violence - is becoming an anachronism. In its place is a new type of organized violence or 'new wars', which could be described as a mixture of war, organized crime and massive violations of human rights. The actors are both global and local, public and private. The wars are fought for particularistic political goals using tactics of terror and destabilization that are theoretically outlawed by the rules of modern warfare. Kaldor's analysis offers a basis for a cosmopolitan political response to these wars, in which the monopoly of legitimate organized violence is reconstructed on a transnational basis and international peacekeeping is reconceptualized as cosmopolitan law enforcement. This approach also has implications for the reconstruction of civil society, political institutions, and economic and social relations. This third edition has been fully revised and updated. Kaldor has added an afterword answering the critics of the New Wars argument and, in a new chapter, Kaldor shows how old war thinking in Afghanistan and Iraq greatly exacerbated what turned out to be, in many ways, archetypal new wars - characterised by identity politics, a criminalised war economy and civilians as the main victims. Like its predecessors, the third edition of New and Old Wars will be essential reading for students of international relations, politics and conflict studies as well as to all those interested in the changing nature and prospect of warfare. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)327.0904Social sciences Political Science International Relations Biography And HistoryLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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By contrast, new war has different goals and different means. It is fought by a mix of state and non-state actors: regular armed forces, criminal groups, and paramilitary organizations. Its goals are population control and its ideologies are identity politics: a revolutionary wants to build a new society, but new wars are about labels, so the main goal is to purge undesirable labels. Mass relocation of civilians and ethnic cleansing becomes a goal, not a by-product. In some ways they're more rational than old wars-- many of their tactics are war crimes, but these new actors are unfettered by that: "These wars are rational in the sense that they apply rational thinking to the aims of war and refuse normative constraints" (106). New war is more like a social condition than old war, and thus new war breeds new war, like an infection, as areas collapse, they set up conditions that cause adjacent areas to collapse. New war is also globalized: modern communications technology means that a war in one country can be supported by a financial infrastructure stretching over the whole world.
Kaldor primarily explains the concept via the Bosnian War (1992-95), where she was an observer, and the contemporary wars in Afghanistan (2001-14) and Iraq (2003-11), but as you read, you can easily see how the wars of the Islamic State (which came to prominence two years after this edition was published) are an example of the phenomenon she describes in almost perfect detail. There are times the book gets into a level of detail that's more than is desired by the non-political scientist, I suspect, but I found it a compelling and useful thesis, making clear something I had not exactly seen before. I had hoped for some connections with my own (literary) interests in political violence, and I don't think there was much of that here, but it was still a worthwhile read for understanding the modern political landscape.