New Wars: Critics and Queries

In the latest issue of Global Policy, Professor Mary Kaldor further develops on her conceptualization of contemporary military conflict in the course of reviewing the contempory significance of Clausewitz' classic On War.

The prolific Kaldor has for some years been arguing that the current period of globalization features a new ‘type of organized violence’ that she describes as ‘new wars’.  Kaldor’s 'new wars' thesis is most fully realized in her work Old and New Wars, published in 1998 and expanded and revised in a second edition released in 2006, though she has also elaborated on the central ideas in various other publications. 

Since her initial propounding of the theory, Kaldor's notion of 'new wars' has been heavily buffeted by critics on empirical grounds.  Some have pointed out that there is nothing especially ‘new’ about any of the elements said to be characteristic of ‘new wars’. None of what went on in the various conflicts held up as examples of ‘new wars’ by Kaldor - including irregular participants and fighting, a complex of non-state actors, violence targeting civilians not territory, widespread criminality, the prevalence of identity politics, an absence of centralized state direction and the involvement of transnational networks in providing soldiers, weapons and financing - are novel: indeed all have been present in various conflicts of the past.

Kaldor has also previously asserted that the far higher proportion of non-military to military casualties is ‘perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of new wars’, but in statistical terms the historical record does not necessarily support her claim.  One critical study concluded bluntly that 'there is no support for the claim that the ratio of civilian to military casualties has increased significantly in the ‘new wars’ period'.

In the most recent article, Kaldor rejoins to her empirical critics by arguing that her point is not necessarily about what has actually happened; but rather that the ‘contrast between new and old wars...is … a contrast between ideal types of war rather than a contrast between actual historical experiences’. This appears to contrast with her earlier proposition that ‘new wars’ are distinct ‘in terms of their goals, the methods of warfare and how they are financed’.

Kaldor acknowledges that her ‘new wars’ thesis has indeed evolved considerably over time, but the continual evolution can tend to make it difficult to pin the concept down. In the current article, for example, Kaldor says:

My argument is that ‘new wars’ are the wars that come after the knowledge of those ‘wide barriers’. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki came the realisation that war in Clausewitzean terms would lead, in Sakharov’s words, to the ‘self-destruction of civilisation’…

This seems to stand in contrast to a number of earlier iterations, in which Kaldor largely omitted any consideration of the geo-political implications of atomic weapons in propounding the idea of ‘new wars’.

There is an intuitive appeal to the proposition that an era of unprecedented globalization necessarily gives the wars of the period a unique character. Clearly, warfare has its own historicity and organized violence will always display contextual particularities. The ‘new wars’ thesis provides an intriguing interpretation of the functioning of conflict in a globalized world – but it is not without its critics.