[War] like disease, exhibits the capacity to mutate, and mutates fastest in the face of efforts to control or eliminate it. War is collective killing for some collective purpose; that is as far as I would go in attempting to describe it" (Keagan, 1998 p. 165).
My thoughts: the number of wars had risen in the 1990s, many due to ethnic conflict and this is unfortunate because war kills many people, causes strife, a collapse of infrastructure, security, the education system, and decreases livelihoods. It can also cause deep bitterness between two parties and many innocent bystanders are trapped in a fight that they had no say in. I agree with Keagan that wars have the capacity to mutate in its forms and origins, because there will always be disagreements in the world. However if careful deliberation and decisions take place, wars can be avoided, just like diseases can be stopped from spreading. In measuring the evolution of wars, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has coined definitions for 'major armed conflict,' 'intermediate armed conflict,' and 'minor armed conflict.'
1994 marked the year of massive genocide and after that the world's perception of civil war had changed. 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda and the single most largest exodus of 200,000 refugees fled to Tanzania. Epic fail on the international community's part. The UN Security council refused to take any action when they heard that genocide was taking place, and refused to establish the UN peace-keeping force in the country. People were dying like flies in Goma, the refugee camps due to the spread of cholera.
"Counter-productive conflicts between international NGOs were well documented for most of the main African emergencies in the 1980s, including those in the Sahel, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique" (p. 182).
My thoughts: Reading quotes like these make it seem like everyone and everything has failed Africa. The attempts of support and aid has led to more corruption... interventions are not sustainable, creation of aid dependency and supporting the enemy and common themes that emerge when it comes to NGO intervention. The book says that "scores of agencies fell over each other, occasionally going so far as to deliberately undermine what were perceived as being rival projects" (p. 182). There seems to have been a mad rush to help... but too much of any good thing is detrimental. I guess this applies to aid without proper management and direction. It is tough to distinguish between maintaining national sovereignty/territorial integrity and maintaining international peace and security (Article One of the UN Charter).
New modes of fighting. In the post Cold War era, there were new forms of fighting being developed, as well as new ways to accumulate weapons, arms and equipment. Therefore the discipline of warring between groups is less important and insurgents might terrorize civilians more explicitly and arm the local people to fight rebels. New military tactics have been developed such as land mines which traumatize populations. Children can learn how to operate AK-47s.
Characteristics of contemporary war:
- economic exclusion
- decline of state institutions
- ethnic essentialism - where ethnic views are considered to be the only option
- the media - refugees spread info about atrocities, the book says that refugees "engender sympathy" (p. 175). Can sympathy be engendered? I believe refugees may engender helplessness, despair or hunger. The author must mean that refugees provoke biased sympathy, but can sympathy really be one-sided during a war, and in a refugee camp...?
Summary: War is a complicated thing. Internally displaced people are not technically refugees and we cannot judge the scale of contemporary warfare based on refugee numbers. In conclusion, there does not seem to have been a massive increase of wars since 1990 and most of the wars being fought are not between states, rather they occur in the poorer parts of the world that cannot recover quickly from war's destruction (p. 172).
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