Modern War – Its Present Status and New Identity

Europe's Optical Illusion first appeared in 1909, although it was later reprinted as external pageThe Great Illusioncall_made. Its author, Norman Angell, would later win the 1933 Noble Peace Prize and was very much a child of the Enlightenment. In his view, economics was more powerfully linked to peace rather than to war. Indeed, the more industrial nations traded with each other, the more their mutual interdependencies would grow. Attacking another nation, in other words, was now tantamount to shooting yourself in the economic foot. This did not mean that war between trading states was impossible; it merely meant that it had become self-defeating. And since attacking someone else meant you were attacking yourself, at least economically, it was only a question of time before militarism, war, and even conquest would start to wither on the vine. Their socio-economic utility would inevitably decrease, or so the argument went.

Although some aspects of Angell's argument have dated, his discussion of economic interdependence remains part of a rich polemical-philosophical history. Indeed, his unique brand of economic determinism looked back to the 18th century philosophes and forward to a European Union that continues to embrace “Norman Angellism” as one of its core principles. But has economic globalization, the semi-successful promotion of transnational legal-ethical norms and expanded notions of human or even civilizational-level security actually impacted the practice of war? In other words, either as an instrument of state or of private gain, has war recently lost its economic and socio-political utility?

The Present Status of War

Well, the data is sometimes more ambiguous than the progeny of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Norman Angell or pioneering cultural anthropologists would have us believe. (The latter three believed that there is nothing ‘eternal’ or ‘innate’ about war. It is a humanly created cultural artifact; it can be unlearned as readily as it can be embraced.) According to researchers at the Uppsala Data Program (UCDP), for example, 2011 was not a particularly good news story, or was it? On the debit side, we have the following truths to consider.

• The number of armed conflicts in the world increased from 31 to 37, an almost 20% rise and the largest increase between any two years since 1990.
  
• 2011 also saw an increase in the most severe conflicts. By passing the accepted threshold of at least 1,000 battle-related deaths, six conflicts were categorized as wars. (This total is up from four in 2010 and includes Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.)
  
• Finally, only one new peace agreement was signed in 2011, which is the lowest number since 1987 and which fell apart after three days.

And yet, as the following graphs illustrate, one could argue that last year’s jump in violence represents a mere deviation from a long-term trend towards greater peace.

• For example, the number of “minor” conflicts and wars over the last decade has stabilized around roughly 30-40 per year, which is far below the peak years of the early 1990s. (The highpoint was 53 in 1993.)
  
• Extra-systemic wars (i.e., anticolonial ones) have basically disappeared and interstate wars are truly negligible in number. (The lone one in 2011 pitted Cambodia against Thailand).
  
• In the case of the dominant form of organized violence today – intrastate conflicts – the overwhelming majority of them are concentrated in portions of Africa, Asia and the Mexico-to-Columbia portion of the Americas.
  
• “Conflict episodes” that have lasted five years or more have become less common in recent years. Indeed, roughly 80 percent of the more recent conflict outbreaks were followed by less than five years of continuous fighting. Ah, but wait, demand the critics. Aren’t most conflicts today increasingly episodic? Yes, a substantial number of them are indeed “on-and-off affairs.” Recurrences of earlier civil wars now make up almost 80 percent of all conflict episode outbreaks. Nevertheless, when you add up the total number of active years spread over a number of episodes, the trend towards shorter conflict duration in recent history still holds true.