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Globalizations
ISSN: 1474-7731 (Print) 1474-774X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rglo20
Connection and constitution: locating war and
culture in globalization studies
Tarak Barkawi lecturer in international security
To cite this article: Tarak Barkawi lecturer in international security (2004) Connection and
constitution: locating war and culture in globalization studies, Globalizations, 1:2, 155-170, DOI:
10.1080/1474773042000308532
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Connection and Constitution: Locating War and Culture
in Globalization Studies
TARAK BARKAWI
University of Cambridge
ABSTRACT War and the military are neglected in globalization studies, despite the fact that the
worldwide circulation of people, goods and ideas often takes warlike form. This article seeks to
remedy this neglect by conceiving war itself as a form of interconnection between peoples and
locales, and as an occasion for circulation and interchange. The article develops a multi-
dimensional and historical conception of globalization as relations of connection and mutual
constitution, and locates war and culture within them. Cultural approaches to globalization
are used to illuminate the role of war and the military in consciousness of the world as a
whole and to address the significance of military ‘traveling cultures’.
The end of the Cold War saw the rise of globalization as a frame for conceiving world politics,
for scholars, politicians, policy analysts and the public. Alongside the neoliberal ‘globalist’
agenda that framed much discussion in policy and media circles, a diverse and multidisciplinary
scholarly literature developed with extraordinary rapidity. Liberated from the peculiar confines
of the discipline of International Relations (IR), with its obsession for sovereignty and relative
neglect of social relations, a rich and exciting body of thought concerning the ‘international’
broadly conceived has grown around the globalization concept, with economists, sociologists,
anthropologists and historians as well as political scientists making important if sometimes
contradictory contributions. IR took as its central problem the question of war and peace.
By contrast, with some important exceptions, in globalization studies relatively little attention
is paid to war, despite the frequency of armed conflict since 1989.
Where war is considered, it most often is understood as a separate and distinct phenomenon
from globalization. There is for example a debate over whether or not economic globalization
promotes peace or causes war (Schneider et al., 2003). Al Qaeda is sometimes conceived as
Globalizations
December 2004, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 155 – 170
Correspondence Address: T. Barkawi, Centre for International Studies, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK. Email:
t.barkawi@ntlworld.com
1474-7731 Print=1474-774X Online=04=020155 – 16 # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080=1474773042000308532
resisting Western globalization (Mandelbaum, 2002; see also Black, 2004, pp. 3 – 4 on ‘counter-
globalism’). More promising are efforts to conceive globalization as the worldwide social terrain
of contemporary armed conflict.
1
This essay seeks to theorize war as a pervasive and historically
significant form of international interconnectedness, as a globalizing force. In and through war,
peoples come to intensified awareness of one another, leaderships initiate and react to each
other’s moves, and armed forces and other populations circulate. To be at war is to be intercon-
nected with the enemy. Such connections lead to social processes as well as political and cultural
transformations that are usefully understood through the globalization concept.
The first step is to critique the pacific tendencies of globalization studies. In diverse and sig-
nificant ways, globalization is defined in terms of flows which qualify, or even fatally corrode, a
world of nation-states (Appadurai, 1996; Ohmae, 1994; 1996; Tomlinson, 1999). At the same
time, nation-states are typically conceived, implicitly or explicitly, as the site of the problem
of war in world politics, despite widespread histories of imperial violence in modern times.
In neoliberal formulations in particular, globalization is seen as considerably ameliorating the
problem of war among nation-states (e.g. Weede, 2003). Such economistic readings of globali-
zation are blind to the roles of the state and coercive power in creating and maintaining a free
trading world, a recovery of which is the burden of the discussion immediately following this
introduction.
The pacificity of globalization studies extends well beyond the liberals, who long have been
unable to conceive their own implication in violence. The most sophisticated discussions of glo-
balization are found among social and cultural theorists (e.g. Castells, 2000; Clifford, 1997;
Robertson, 1992; Tomlinson, 1999), but here too there is relatively little explicit attention to
war or even other political violence (although cf. Appadurai, 1996, chaps. 7 – 8; Shaw, 2000).
Why is this, given the ubiquity of war and political violence since 1989? In contrast to liberal
conceptions of globalization, elsewhere in the academy assumptions about peace and globaliza-
tion are more implicit in nature. They are part and parcel of social and political theories which
rarely reserve for war—one of the most persistent and widespread of human phenomena—a
central role (Shaw, 1988). As Hans Joas argues, modern social theory largely fails to grapple
with the centrality of war for modernity: ‘The major theories that are the subject of general dis-
cussion today—let us take Habermas, Luhmann or the poststructuralists as examples—contain
hardly any mention of war and peace’ (2003, p. 126). Globalization studies largely partook of
this milieu, until confronted with 9/11 and the war on terror. The inattention to violent conflict
impoverishes our understanding of the social and cultural dimensions of globalization. Force and
war made possible many of the processes we associate with globalization broadly conceived, for
example by joining up the world during the period of European expansion. As important are the
distinctive social and cultural processes set in train by violent conflict itself.
That said, social and cultural as well as historical approaches to the globalization concept
provide the essential foundations for theorizing war and globalization. They do so by conceiving
globalization as multi-dimensional, as consisting of social and political as well as economic
flows, and by emphasizing the centrality of culture, conceived as structures of meaning.
Before realizing this contribution, the all too common trope of a world of flows corroding a
world of territorial states must be dealt with decisively. In focusing on global flows held to
be corrosive of territorially defined entities, globalization studies lost sight of war. Implicitly,
war here is misconceived as a breakdown of communication and interchange, rather than as
an occasion for circulation. Attention to flows should illuminate the nature of war, for war
works its effects precisely through interconnection. Relatedly, in opposing flows to a world of
territorially defined entities, globalization studies overlooked the role of flows in constituting
156 T. Barkawi
such entities. This is one reason for the presentism of much that has been written on globaliza-
tion—globalization is seen as succeeding a world of nation-states. By contrast, ‘globalization’
can be taken as referring to the ‘thick’ set of mutually constitutive international relations out
of which apparently discrete entities such as nation-states are produced, reproduced and
transformed. War and its related social and cultural processes are significant components of
this field of mutually constitutive relations.
Globalization, Liberalism and Force
Between 1989 and the strikes of 11 September 2001, globalization was very closely associated
with a hegemonic neoliberal ideology known as ‘globalism’ (Steger, 2002). The basic claims
were that the intensification of international trade and investment had reached a point at
which national economies were dissolving into a ‘global economy determined by world
market forces’ and that the only viable public policy was one that continued to deregulate
trade, investment and capital movements while dismantling the social welfare state (Hirst
and Thompson, 1999, p. xii). While the globalists focused on the utilitarian calculus of
increased wealth promised by ‘globalization’, the period after the Cold War also saw the
re-invigoration of other strands of liberal thinking. For classical liberals, free trade abroad as
well as liberal governance at home boded well for another, potentially greater benefit than
wealth: peace.
For Adam Smith, the most important consequence of the rise of commerce and manufacturing
was that they introduced order and good government, which created the conditions for liberty
and security ‘among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual
state of war with their neighbors’ (1993 [1776], p. 260). Agitating for an end to the Corn Laws in
1843, Richard Cobden held that bringing down barriers to trade also brought down barriers
between nations, ‘those barriers behind which nestle the feelings of pride, revenge, hatred
and jealousy . . . feelings which nourish the poison of war and conquest’ (quoted in Howard,
1987, p. 43). A very similar logic is at work in President G.W. Bush’s call for a US – Middle
East free trade zone in the wake of the US conquest of Iraq which, he argued, would ‘drain
the bitterness’ from the region and increase US security. ‘Over time, the expansion of liberty
throughout the world is the best guarantee of security throughout the world. Freedom is the
way to peace.’
2
A variety of mechanisms were proposed through which liberalism would end war. Ever since
Smith’s critique of mercantilism, it was hoped prospects of increased profit through free trade
would overcome the desire for outright conquest. For Immanuel Kant, peace was to come
about through the territorial spread of republican governance and rule of law (1983 [1796]).
With the end of the Cold War, the pacifying promises of a resurgent liberalism found new
voices. For Francis Fukuyama (1992), liberal democracy met both the material and ideal needs
of humans, and hence promised an end to the history of great ideological struggles and its
wars. Political scientists in the United States constructed a statistical law to the effect that
liberal democracies did not fight wars with other democracies, a proposition used by President
Clinton and others to justify ‘exporting democracy’ (Russett, 1993; cf. Barkawi and Laffey, 1999).
Hopes for a new world politics fostered by the collapse of the Soviet bloc represented a return
to well-worn liberal themes. Unsurprisingly, these hopes betrayed some of the same tensions and
blind spots with respect to war and force that characterize liberal thought. For classical liberal-
ism, wars were essentially atavistic, ‘the relics of a dying age that had not yet been illuminated
by the dawn of the Enlightenment’ (Joas, 2003, p. 30) As ‘Reform’ and ‘Progress’ overcame
Locating War and Culture in Globalization Studies 157
despots and the warrior castes of the aristocracy, and free trade fuelled prosperity, wars civil and
foreign would pass into history. Easily obscured from view in this vision of a pacific liberal mod-
ernity is the role of force in making liberal the illiberal as well as specifically liberal tendencies
to war, that is, those tendencies to war generated in a world being made liberal and modern in
diverse and important ways (on liberal modernity, see Latham, 1997, chap. 1).
In particular, European imperial expansion, which involved widespread use of force, was fun-
damental to the creation of the modern international economy. Imperialism set in train modern-
ization processes which generated, and continue to generate, social and political tensions which
often take violent form. Creating and maintaining a free trading word required repeated and sus-
tained use of force. While most often this took the form of Western military intervention in the
non-European world, Anglo-American victories in the two world wars were vital as well. Geno-
cides of aboriginal peoples were a significant dimension of these processes. These forceful pro-
cesses provide the essential social, political and cultural context of modern globalizations; it is in
and through these processes that the world as a whole was joined together in recognizably
modern form.
While liberalism, in so far as it characterizes world politics, owes important debts to coloni-
alism, genocide and total war, the categories of liberal thought are not well-suited to analysis of
imperialism, force and war. Yet these categories are pervasive in elite, scholarly and popular
discussion of world politics, especially but not only during the period after 1989, and no
where more so than in popular, media and elite discussions of ‘globalization’. In many ways,
particularly as regards the contemporary international economy and the international legitima-
tion of the use of force, liberal categories largely set the terms in which debate is conducted, or at
least they did so prior to the war on terror. Many thinkers have argued in different ways that
liberal thought obscures and elides critical aspects of the operation of power and force in
world politics (e.g. Carr, 1939; Schmitt, 1996 [1932]). To the extent, then, that discourses of
globalization reflect and embody liberal categories, similar obfuscations are likely to occur.
In particular, there is an apparent difficulty, even among staunch critics, to see the forceful foun-
dations that made possible a free trading world; and, second, a long-standing resistance to recog-
nizing the central dependence of capitalist economies, at home and abroad, on state regulation,
ultimately backed up by ‘legitimate’ force. In order to locate war and culture in globalizing
processes, these histories must be recovered.
In discussing aspects of European expansion, two of the earliest critics of economic globali-
zation wrote: ‘The cheap prices of [the bourgeoisie’s] commodities are the heavy artillery with
which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces “the barbarians” intensely obstinate
hatred of foreigners to capitulate.’ It was apparently with metaphorical heavy artillery that the
bourgeoisie created ‘a world after its own image’ (Marx and Engels, 1967 [1888], p. 224). To be
sure, Marx and Engels were acutely cognizant of the ‘structural violence’ associated with capi-
talist development, but force and war have their own logics which must be attended to. They
perhaps had the first Opium War (1839 – 1842) in mind. In the decisive campaign of that conflict,
some 25 Royal Navy ships of the line, 14 steamers and nine transports carrying 10,000 troops
were required, a considerable expeditionary force for the time (Porch, 2001, 73). The defeated
Chinese state was forced to sign a number of unequal treaties with the British and other Euro-
pean powers which sought to facilitate the expansion and deepening of circuits of merchant
capital (Cain and Hopkins, 2002, pp. 362 – 8). In turn, the Europeans sought afterwards to
support a now more pliant Chinese government against internal uprisings generated in part by
the increased presence of the Europeans and their products. Such resistance required repeated
applications of force over the following decades, sometimes directly by the Europeans
158 T. Barkawi
themselves and sometimes by the armies of their Chinese clients, advised and supported by
Europeans, a far different consequence of the growth of manufacturing and commerce than
Adam Smith imagined.
The tendency to see free trade as a kind of non-violent imperialism is nonetheless particularly
strong (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953). In discussing the developing American imperial role,
Reinhold Niebuhr remarked in 1931 in an article entitled ‘Awkward Imperialists’ that ‘we are
the first empire of the world to establish our sway without legions. Our legions are dollars’
(quoted in Reynolds, 2002, p. 245). In 1931, American marines were fighting Augusto
Sandino in Nicaragua and ruling Haiti and US troops were also in the Philippines and China.
At the same time, the Roosevelt administration was putting in place the system in Central
America by which US influence was exercised through authoritarian clients and their security
forces, trained, supplied and advised by the United States, a system whose long and violent
history lasted to the 1980s (La Feber, 1984, pp. 78 – 83). The repression of leftists and other
popular forces made possible the neoliberal Central America of the 1990s. Even so, despite
70 more years of widespread military intervention since Niebuhr’s remarks, much of it designed
to establish and defend regimes considered friendly to the ‘free world’ and open to the inter-
national economy, Prime Minister Mahathir was still telling his compatriots at the first South
Summit in April 2000 that ‘capital is the new gunship of the rich’ (quoted in Harper, 2002,
p. 141). These remarks were made in Cuba, the site of repeated US military and covert interven-
tions. More recently, the six aircraft-carrier battlegroups used in the invasion of Iraq are a remin-
der that as important as finance capital is, warships still play a role in attempts to export
‘democracy’ and maintain the capitalist world economy.
This brief discussion of liberalism, imperialism and force is intended only to provide an idea
of the foundational role and long and on-going history of military intervention in processes of
capitalist expansion, as well as some of the ways in which this history has been obfuscated.
What points can be drawn from this discussion in respect of much of the literature on contem-
porary economic globalization, the ideology of globalism and the location of war and culture in
globalizing processes? First, it draws attention to the historically variable, international politi-
cal – military structures required to expand and maintain ‘free trade’. These structures involve
state regulation, with both local and international elements, and historically have depended
on repeated use of force (again, both local and international) to crush resistances. Economic
globalization, it turns out, is a political project, one that makes use of force as well as other
instrumentalities (Gray, 2002).
Coercive power is only one, albeit essential, element of processes of political globalization
through which economic globalization is made possible. As Leo Panitch (1996), William
Robinson (1996) and Martin Shaw (2000) have argued in different ways, the state is not under-
mined or overwhelmed by globalization, but transformed by it, and as such becomes a critical
agent of globalization, a formulation which applies as much to the Chinese state after 1842 as it
does to the Canadian state after signing NAFTA. Local states are re-fashioned to facilitate
capital and, in the contemporary world, an overarching ‘international state’—a messy agglom-
eration of state-like institutions such as the WTO—regulates the system as a whole. The
concepts and history needed to assess these political and military dimensions of contemporary
globalization are simply absent in neoliberal readings, which focuses on the undermining or
curtailing of the role of the state. Locating war and related cultural phenomena in processes
of globalization requires attending to these political-military structures.
The second point to be made from the discussion of imperialism relates to specifically liberal
and modern tendencies to war. China’s troubled history after the Opium War is evidence that
Locating War and Culture in Globalization Studies 159
opening markets, and the modernization processes set in train by European expansion, are gene-
rative of social and political tensions which frequently issue in violent rebellion and war. A
‘national history’ of these events in China might dwell on the long series of rebellions against
the Manchu dynasty, its successors and the European presence which ultimately culminated
in the victory of the Communist Party. Such a national history could well miss the fact that
from the Opium War, there was an intensified intertwining of Chinese, European and later
American histories (e.g. Cohen, 1985; cf. Duara, 1997; Karl, 2002). Elements of this complex
and multifaceted process are easily grasped, such as the ways in which exporting Indian
opium to China righted a balance of payments problem that resulted from European imports
of Chinese tea and spices.
More relevant here are the ways in which this intertwined history continued to be generative
of violent conflict and its related cultural processes for China and the metropole. The People’s
Republic of China played a major role in the Asian land wars of the Cold War, wars that
involved Britain, France and the United States and which had more or less major domestic poli-
tical, social and cultural ramifications in each of those countries. The ‘loss of China’ holds a
special place in the domestic US political and social history of the Cold War, helping to
spawn McCarthyism. With Chinese intervention in the Korean War, the media fracas surround-
ing the US POWs from that war who voluntarily remained in the PRC afterwards, and the film
The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer 1962) among others, China came to play a
role in US Cold War popular culture as well (Carruthers, 1998a; 1998b).
These examples begin to suggest just where war and culture might be found in processes of
globalization. Crucially, any solely national history of one or another country would likely miss
the interactive, interconnected worldwide dynamics through which violent conflict is generated
and its effects proliferated. Attending to the political – military not only enriches understandings
of globalizing processes but also enables new perspectives on the relations between war, society
and international relations. Equally, the interconnections between strategic and cultural histories
apparent in the consequences of the PRC’s Cold War role for American society, or in the effects
of the Vietnam conflict on American culture, suggests that the academic separation of cultural
and strategic studies is misconceived, and that the globalization concept offers one way to over-
come it (Barkawi, 2004).
This turn to the idea of worldwide dynamics, multi-dimensional in nature—economic, politi-
cal, military, cultural, social—requires refiguring our understanding of ‘globalization’. Neolib-
eral readings of globalization cannot conceive either the political and military dimensions of
contemporary economic globalization or its imperial foundations. The histories of worldwide
‘free trade’ are nonetheless an essential context for locating war and culture in processes of glo-
balization. But in order to adequately analyze such processes, a more multi-dimensional concept
of globalization is necessary.
Globalization, Constitutive Circuits and War
A critical grasp of contemporary neoliberal globalization involves the history of European
imperialism and the multi-dimensionality of the forms of interconnection between core and
periphery that resulted. Moving beyond economic globalization, scholars developed
approaches which capture relations of transregional interconnectedness in all their diversity.
Specific formulations vary with author and discipline but broadly speaking this literature
deploys a notion of globalization as interconnection across borders, ‘a stretching of social, poli-
tical and economic activities across frontiers such that events, decisions and activities in one
160 T. Barkawi
region of the world can come to have significance for individuals and communities in distant
regions of the globe’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 15). These approaches make possible the analysis of
globalizing processes in different historical eras as well as of non-Eurocentric globalizations
(Hopkins, 2002).
Nonetheless most efforts along these lines retain a strongly presentist focus. In particular, they
rely explicitly or implicitly on a narrative which associates globalization with developments in
modern communications technologies and the compression of time and space (e.g. Appadurai,
1996; Castells, 2000). It is the relatively recent intensification of the circulation of people, goods
and ideas around the world that produces ‘globalization’. Globalization is something that hap-
pened to a world composed of relatively discrete, separate entities, or at the least to a world of
entities not previously connected in equivalent ways.
It is beyond question that recent developments in communications technologies have given
contemporary globalizing processes a velocity and character different from those of other
eras. However, it is important not to conflate the attributes of globalizing processes at one
point in history with the concept of globalization as such. Globalization is often used to refer
to relations of interconnection, as in ‘complex connectivity’. These relations are seen, in
diverse ways, as profoundly transformative of the societies involved. This idea of interconnec-
tion is frequently bound up, more or less immediately, with an additional thesis, concerning the
dependence of these processes on modern communications. So for example, John Tomlinson
writes: ‘globalization [is] an empirical condition of the modern world: what I shall call
complex connectivity. By this I mean that globalization refers to the rapidly developing and
ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize modern
social life’ (1999, pp. 1 – 2). Interconnection is articulated, via ‘rapidly developing’ and ‘ever-
densening’, to modern communications technologies.
The approach to globalization favored here takes the first aspect of these definitions—inter-
connections—and goes one step further. If globalization is transformative, it is also constitutive.
However, the second aspect, the dependence of globalization on modern communications, is
called into question. This is not to deny that modern communications are crucial to the nature
of contemporary globalization. Rather, what is challenged is the idea that globalization as
such is dependent upon these technologies. If globalization is about constitutive interconnection
between peoples, locales and political entities in world politics, does such connection require jet
travel and satellite TV?
Consider C.L.R. James’ account of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution,
The Black Jacobins (1994 [1938]). James lays out the complex inter-relations between the
Haitian and French Revolutions: ‘James was interested in the political, economic and intellec-
tual aspects of this cross-over: how events in both locations affected each other, shaped what
happened and defined what was possible’ (Hall, 2002, p. 9). The title of James’s study alone
is indicative of the intertwined developments and hybrid identity constructions involved. This
‘stretching’ of social relations occurred by means of sailing vessels, matching in form Held
et al.’s definition of the metaphor. Following in James’ footsteps, there is now a very large lit-
erature tracing out the mutual constitution of metropole and colony in the era of European
imperialism (e.g. Cooper and Stoler, 1997; Hall, 2000; Wolf, 1997). While much of this litera-
ture does not explicitly invoke the globalization concept, its themes of multi-dimensional trans-
regional interconnectedness, hybrid cultures and common histories are very similar to the claims
made for contemporary globalizing processes by cultural theorists. The hybrid identities of
the denizens of Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’ (1993) were in process long before near-
instantaneous inter-continental electronic communications.
Locating War and Culture in Globalization Studies 161
The literature on imperial interconnections can conceptually clarify that on contemporary
globalization. The key claim is that metropole and colony cannot be understood one without
the other, they comprise a ‘single analytic field’ (Cooper and Stoler, 1997, p. 4). ‘What we
now call Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia were constructed together in the midst of a
relationship, at once economic and cultural, military and political’ (Drayton, 2002, p. 103).
The relations of interconnection are theorized as constitutive relations, whether one is looking
at European society, economic power, military power, political thought, or culture and identity
(e.g. Echenberg, 1991; Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004; Jahn, 2000; Wolf, 1997). Gilroy does
not conceive the history of black slavery as the property only of Afro-Caribbeans, or African-
Americans or even of Africans alone, for this history ‘has a great bearing on ideas of what
the West was and is today’ (Gilroy, 1993, p. 45). Frantz Fanon put the point succinctly,
‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third World’ (1967, p. 81). And vice versa, it must be
added. Apparently discrete entities in world politics—such as colonies, states and national
societies—are produced out of fields of mutually constitutive relations. In a roundabout way,
the debate in and around globalization and empire has led to a fully fledged conception of
the ‘international’, as a dense field of relations, as the wider social context productive of the
communities and other entities that populate world politics.
The essence of the claim here is that ‘globalization’ be taken as a general term referring to
relations of interconnection and mutual constitution in world politics. It is in this loose sense
that the term is often used in globalization studies. As such, it is potentially applicable to any
era in history, not just the contemporary one. Excellent examples of globalization can be
found in the periodic eruptions of nomadic soldiers in Africa and Eurasia from the ancient
world through to the eighteenth century. The armies of Alexander the Great and Attila the
Hun were ‘genuine agents of global change’, creating new political entities and commercial
links while destroying or disrupting old ones (Bayly, 2002, p. 57). Certainly this kind of
‘warrior globalization’ is very different from the contemporary version, but it does involve trans-
regional relations of interconnection, transformation and constitution. Such historical globaliza-
tions, however, are not truly ‘global’ in scope. A rough and ready definition of globalization as
connection and constitution serves well for the discussion of war immediately below but in the
conclusion of this section, Roland Robertson’s (1992) critique of such an expansive view of glo-
balization will be considered.
If globalization refers to international relations of connection and constitution, war is a sig-
nificant dimension of these relations. A promising place to begin is with the ‘war and
society’ approach (e.g. Bond, 1998; Howard, 1976). The core idea here refers to the ways in
which wars are shaped by the societies which wage them, and how societies are shaped by
the wars they wage. The character of a war is shaped by its larger social context and in turn
war reacts back on its social context. For example, new forms of mass involvement in politics
enabled Revolutionary and later Napoleonic France to mobilize very large armies. Social and
political developments shaped the character of the Napoleonic wars, but the reverse is also
true. Ancien régime states were forced to make adaptations to compete with France. Clausewitz
captures the interactive dynamics: ‘Since Bonaparte, then, war, first among the French and sub-
sequently among their enemies, again became the concern of the people as a whole . . . War,
untrammeled by any conventional restraints, had broken loose in all its elemental fury’
(1976, pp. 592 – 3).
Underlying Clausewitz’s analysis is the idea that war is generative; it operates on the larger
social context, transforming it in diverse ways, in a dialectic between war and society. Addition-
ally, war is interactive. Adequate histories require tackling all the sides to get a sense of how
162 T. Barkawi
and why events developed as they did. ‘War contains a host of interactions’ (Clausewitz, 1976,
p. 582). War conjoins the societies involved in constitutive circuits.
3
Wars develop and take
shape as an intertwined history. As this is a general property of war any number of examples
can be cited.
Before doing so some objections and caveats require attention. One objection to re-labeling
the history of war ‘globalization’ is that it amounts to just that, a re-labeling of well-known
events. The globalization concept is doing no valid theoretic work, it is simply redescribing
the social processes of warfare. While there is superficial truth in this claim, it is wrong. Globa-
lization draws our attention centrally and specifically to the domain of interconnection, to inter-
active processes and their consequences. Studies of war by historians, political scientists and
others do not generally foreground this dimension, although neither is it entirely overlooked.
A second issue is that major war between great powers is productive of new international
orders, as Philip Bobbitt has recently argued (2002). Military victories combined with conse-
quent developments in international law and international organization regulate the affairs of
states (see also Schmitt, 2003 [1950]). This line of analysis is a very important one to pursue,
especially as regards developments during and after the Second World War which laid the
basis for the ‘international state’ and contemporary forms of economic and political globaliza-
tion. This is not, however, what is at stake in this essay, which focuses on the constitutive prop-
erties of interconnections occasioned by war, a more general and different theoretic claim.
Finally, many of the examples used below refer to wars between core and periphery, that is
between powers located in the global North and those in the South, or to imperial aspects of
great power war. This is partly reflective of the interests of the author but also of much of the
globalization literature, which has focused on relations between North and South. More impor-
tantly, such examples draw attention to how wartime interconnections between powerful and
apparently insignificant, weak countries can have major consequences, both for the societies
involved and beyond.
Perhaps nowhere is this feature of such wars more evident than in American involvement in
Indochina. The Tet offensive in early 1968 is just one route into this intertwined, interconnected
history. The offensive occurred three years after the introduction of American ground combat
forces into South Vietnam, during which the United States had claimed steady progress. Follow-
ing rosy predictions of light at the end of the tunnel, Tet came as a rude shock to the American
public. Public trust in the veracity and authority of the US government was shaken in ways
which were never fully recouped. The irony was that, in strictly military terms, the Tet offensive
was a serious defeat for the Vietnamese communist forces.
After the war the Vietnamese commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, commented with benefit
of hindsight that with Tet ‘we wanted to carry the war into the families of America’ (quoted in
Karnow, 1984, p. 557). Via the medium of the war, Giap and his forces reached out and exer-
cised a constitutive role in US society and politics. In turn, the altered social and political land-
scape in the United States reacted back on the war, as US commanders were obliged to move
with renewed intensity towards ‘Vietnamizing’ the war and seeking an exit for US forces. Con-
stitutive circuits ran in and through the societies at war, conjoining them and shaping develop-
ments on the home fronts and at the war front. These circuits spiraled out in time and space as
well, extending far beyond the war and even the combatant societies. The importance of the
Vietnam experience for American politics, society and culture in the last quarter of the twentieth
century is difficult to overestimate. The extent, diversity and significances of Vietnam War-
related cultural phenomena in US society are quite extraordinary (e.g. Bates, 1996; Jeffords,
1989). Vietnam was also a searing experience for the US national security establishment.
Locating War and Culture in Globalization Studies 163
‘Lessons’ were learned which shaped future US force projection, and hence the character
of future wars. The strategy adopted to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait was an embodiment of
the Vietnam-derived Powell/Weinberger doctrine. A different application of the lessons
of Vietnam shaped US involvement in Bosnia and Serbia (Ó Tuathail, 1996, chap. 6). ‘You
don’t want to be Lyndon Johnson’, one of President Bill Clinton’s advisors told him, ‘sacrificing
your potential for doing good on the domestic front by a destructive, never-ending foreign
involvement’ (quoted in Morris, 1997, p. 245).
The choice of Vietnam to illustrate the international relations of connection and constitution
set in motion by war might be seen to work against the idea that globalization is not dependent on
modern communications technologies, given the emphasis on television news and other forms of
modern visual culture in accounts of US involvement in Indochina and its consequences. Cer-
tainly, the media are crucial to understanding representations of the Vietnam War in US
society. However, contemporary communications technologies are not necessary to the consti-
tutive circuits connecting war and society. Julius Caesar and his legionnaires returned in 50 BC
from their conquest of Gaul abroad to put an end to the Roman Republic at home, as the ‘very
success of imperial expansion had thrown the social and political order at home into crisis’
(Keegan, 1993, p. 273). Benjamin Disraeli came to power in 1874 promising imperial adven-
tures, an electoral strategy that appealed to the newly enlarged British electorate. Despite the
absence of television news, his government collapsed in 1880, in part due to William Glad-
stone’s denunciations of the Afghan and Zulu wars: ‘Remember the rights of the savage!’ Glad-
stone told his audiences (quoted in Porch, 2001, pp. 41 – 2). Lyndon Johnson was neither the first
nor the last leader of a powerful metropolitan state to suffer from military imbroglios in appar-
ently insignificant countries, as Gladstone himself was to discover in the Sudan in 1885 and the
Italian prime minister Francesco Crispi a decade later, upon the near-annihilation of an Italian
army by the Ethiopians at Adowa in 1896.
To sum up the analysis of the essay so far, ‘globalization’ is popularly understood as a primar-
ily economic and economistic process through which a global economy has come into being.
Such understandings overlook the role of politics and force in creating an economically globali-
zed world. Attention to the role of force in opening markets draws attention not only to its foun-
dational role in expanding free trade but to diverse and significant feedback loops set in train by
the exercise of military power, in and through which metropole and periphery are conjoined by
war and its consequences. War and its cultural effects are here located in processes of economic
globalization. In order to address these effects directly, however, a multi-dimensional approach
to the globalization concept is required. This involves refiguring it as a term which refers to the
international as a socially ‘thick’ space, as consisting of fields of mutually constitutive relations
riven through with relations of hierarchy and domination. So refigured, it can be seen that war is
an important element of these fields of relations, a form of interconnection with constitutive
effects for the parties to the conflict and beyond. The example of the United States in
Vietnam was used not only to show the interactive effects of war on the societies involved—-
constitutive circuits—but also to gesture towards the effects of the Vietnam War on later uses
of force, and thus how that war continues to exercise a constitutive role in world politics.
At this point, a concern needs to be raised regarding the mutation of globalization into
‘international relations of connection and constitution’, as it would seem that the ‘global’ in glo-
balization is being neglected. There is slippage between the idea of ‘transregional interconnect-
edness’ and a truly global stretching of social relations. At what scale should international
processes of mutual constitution be considered under the rubric of globalization? Interestingly
enough, the most obvious candidate for a global globalization, the global economy, is simply
164 T. Barkawi
not global. Contemporary trade, investment and financial flows are heavily concentrated in
Japan, Western Europe and North America (Hirst and Thompson, 1999, chap. 4). Equally, argu-
ments that the world is becoming a single cultural and social setting, or ‘global unicity’, in the
strong sense of common global society or culture are overdrawn (e.g. Ohmae, 1994). Globaliza-
tions, it would seem, have always been partial in terms of scale and consequences. However, it is
arguable that a genuinely global image of the world came about as a result of European explora-
tion, imperial expansion and associated cartography. It became possible to imagine the world as
a single place in new ways, even if there was not a single world culture. These developments
allow a different approach to the idea of global unicity and processes of globalization, of the
kind that Roland Robertson (1992) has developed.
Robertson’s argument is that relatively long term processes of time/space compression have
increasingly made the global the frame of reference for human thought and action. It is in large
measure on this cultural basis that he argues ‘globalization’ should be distinguished from mere
transregional interconnectedness, of the kind found in the ancient world (Robertson, 1992, pp.
182 – 3). Societies and cultures became globally ‘contextualized’, reflexively comparing their
own ways to others, a process Robertson calls ‘relativization’ (Robertson, 1992, pp. 26 – 9;
Turner, 1994, p. 111). Japanese modernizers in the late nineteenth century, for example, were
acutely aware of other models of modernization; while in the second half of the twentieth
century, for a time, Japan itself became a model of economic development for others (Robertson,
1992, pp. 85 – 96). Different ways of organizing politics, society and economy are assessed rela-
tive to one another, as people become reflexively aware of alternatives and their potential global
consequences. Globalization does not necessarily produce global sameness but rather reflexive
awareness of one’s location in globalizing processes as well as of one’s prospects relative to
others.
For Robertson, the compression of the world can lead to ‘an exacerbation of collisions
between civilizational, societal and communal narratives’ (1992, p. 141). Robertson here
maps out possibilities for a theory of contemporary globalization and conflict, which locates
ethnic assertion and violence within, rather than against, globalizing processes (see Appadurai,
1996, chaps 7 – 8 for an elaboration). Contemporary efforts to assert a local, ‘traditional’ identity
in the face of the global are thus an aspect of globalization, not a countervailing trend. ‘Acting
(and thinking) globally is increasingly necessary in order make the very notion of locality viable’
(Robertson, 1992, p. 172). The desire for a local identity, the search for a home, are themselves
globally diffused ideas that arise from awareness of difference and in reaction to modernization
and rationalization processes. Moreover, time/space compression, and other consequences of
modernity, in particular the possibility of the destruction of humanity through nuclear war,
global warming or some other apocalyptic scenario, increases concern with the fate of humanity.
‘Globality—defined in the immediate context as consciousness of the (problem of) the world as
a single place—appears increasingly to permeate the affairs of all societies and multitudes of
people across the world’ (Robertson, 1992, p. 132). But for Robertson, to be conscious of the
world as a single place does not mean that there is a shared response to the problems posed,
or even a shared analysis as to what those problems might be.
Robertson has produced a sophisticated and subtle position on globalization, which this brief
overview does not do justice to. Globalization in his terms is a specific, multi-dimensional his-
torical process, which is genuinely global, tied very closely to the rise and expansion of the
West, and which he dates from the early fifteenth century (Robertson, 1992, p. 58). It stands
in some degree of opposition to the looser conception used above, which refers more generally
to the ways in which localities and entities in world politics are produced and reproduced in
Locating War and Culture in Globalization Studies 165
and through mutually constitutive relations with one another. However, in the final section
below, Robertson’s emphasis on consciousness of the world as a whole will be taken seriously.
What is the place of warfare in the evolution and intensification of this consciousness?
War, the Military and Consciousness of the World
Cultural frameworks and understandings produced in and through war and military service are
integral to the ways in which people experience their everyday lives and situate their localities in
the wider world. These war-related structures of meaning naturally take different form across
time and space. Because of the prevailing view that globalization is corrosive of the nation-
state and national identity, there is a tendency to overlook the relational character of nationalism
as well as the value of cultural approaches to globalization in illuminating it. Nationalists
contextualize their nation in a world of other nations, some threatening, some friendly. As a
consequence, in a world organized on ‘national – international’ lines (Robertson, 1992, p. 154;
Shaw, 2000, chap. 2), comparison of relative military power is a basic form of awareness of
other societies in the global field, at elite and popular levels.
That is, ‘relativization’ in Robertson’s terms has a powerful military dimension. Consider for
example the Royal Navy’s ‘two power standard’ in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the
idea that it had to be equal or superior to the combined forces of the next two largest navies
(McNeill, 1982, p. 275). After the Cold War, the US military developed a similar notion, that
it had to be able to fight two regional wars at the same time. In both the UK and the United
States powerful popular cultures of nationalist militarism undergirded military
preparedness.
As David Campbell (1992) argues, the representation of foreign danger is a key moment in
national identity construction and transformation. The point here is that the outside world is
inherent in these nationalist projects, that forms of cultural interconnection can be as productive
of national chauvinism as they are of cultural hybridity. Campbell (in his classic Writing Secu-
rity [1992]), and Cultural Studies more generally (e.g. Renda, 2001), tend to focus only on one
nation, typically the United States, and how representations of the foreign play a role in identity
construction. What is lost here is the interactive nature of these processes. Cultural represen-
tations of, say, Vietnam, in the United States are related to events there and the actions of the
Vietnamese, such as the Tet offensive. Hence the context of these representations is in fact inter-
national or global, yet this is easily lost in nationally focused studies, where the outside world too
easily is seen as merely the figment of national imaginations (cf. Barkawi, 2004). War, con-
sciousness of the wider world, and the interactive processes that follow, are inherent in ‘national’
cultural phenomena.
To be sure, war and the military play important roles in national constructions of self and
other. But some mention should be made of a different form of military consciousness of the
world that involves border crossings and hybridity. Commentators and critics of contemporary
globalization often note that worldwide travel is still very much an elite occupation, with the
exception of certain forms of tourism (Tomlinson, 1999, pp. 8 – 9). But commoners have long
traveled the world as soldiers. Alexander the Great’s army marched through Persia to India
and came back with new ideas that transformed the Mediterranean world. British regiments
served the world over during the empire, while European colonial forces frequently served
outside their homelands. Contemporary Americans may travel abroad much less than
Europeans, but their military is based around the world. There is an entire history of military
‘traveling cultures’ overlooked by globalization studies.
166 T. Barkawi
As James Clifford (1997) argues, travelers encounter cultural difference which can lead to
reassessments of home. Just one example indicative of the richness as well as significance of
military traveling cultures comes from Indian soldiers serving on the Western Front in the
First World War. They drew comparisons between Europe and India, seeing their homeland
as backward and, especially, impoverished and they identified the differences they thought
were holding India back, such as excessive spending on rituals, arranged and child marriages,
and poor education (Omissi, 1999, p. 19). ‘When I look at Europe, I bewail the lot of India’,
one wrote home (Omissi, 1999, letter 448). The contrast between the social roles of Indian
and European women was striking to Indian soldiers, especially in wartime Europe where
women were filling jobs vacated by men at the front. One sent home the picture of an American
female aviator: ‘I want you to study it and see what the women of Europe and America are
doing . . . The advancement of India lies in the hands of the women’ (Omissi, 1999, letter 654).
Robertson suggests that as people become aware of the wider world they compare places to
one another, critiquing them and assessing their chances for survival and flourishing in an inter-
connected world. How does India match up to Europe, Indian soldiers were driven to ask.
Wounded Indians in hospital were particularly surprised that European nurses cleared away
the contents of their bedpans, a task reserved for very low caste servants in India. Such
simple novelties could draw attention to the role of caste in structuring relations in India to
acute observers. In many respects, British rule in India rested on the maintenance of traditional
religious ideas, illiteracy and caste division. Ideas about popular education, overcoming super-
stition, and Indian social and economic development could easily lead to a critique of British
rule and anti-colonial consciousness of the kind much in evidence in interwar Indian indepen-
dence politics. Travel and circulation helps generates this ‘relativization’ and comparison,
working to make India a different place. At the same time, Indian soldiers were crucial to the
allied victory in the First World War. Both are excellent examples of connection and constitution
in and through war.
A final area where cultural frameworks derived from or influenced by war and the military
play an often overlooked role is in consciousness of the world as a whole. Examples include
‘North – South’ constructions of global politics as well as conceptions of ‘globality’, conceiving
the world as a single place, as in universalist discourses of human rights or ideas about humanity
sharing a common fate. The Second World War assumes particular significance here. The world-
wide character of the war meant that it was in part experienced as a common calamity (Shaw,
2000, p. 116). It gave rise to the UN system and other international institutions. It also was a
significant spur to the further development of international humanitarian law and the global
human rights regime. Aspects of the Cold War, in particular the nuclear arms race with its
attendant possibility of the destruction of humanity, also increased concern with the global as
the space of a shared fate, and did so in ways directly derived from war and military
preparedness.
Given the significance of North – South constructions of the world in globalization debates, it
is worth briefly considering some of the imaginative work war has done here. The ‘West’ travels
under two names in contemporary world politics, one which plays on the West as liberal and
democratic, as in the ‘Western democracies’, and one which refers to the vast concentrations
of wealth and power found in the West, as in the ‘global North’ (Lewis and Wigen, 1997,
p. 6). When economic matters are spoken of, ‘North’ is generally invoked. When matters of
culture, war and peace, or human rights and liberation are spoken of, the ‘West’ is more com-
monly used. The image of the West as an enlightened but militarized and muscular liberator
recoups the reality of the global North as economic exploiter, as a site of mass consumption
Locating War and Culture in Globalization Studies 167
in a world of horrifying need. There is thus a significant and under-remarked military dimension
of Orientalism. Representations of Western military action in the extra-European world over-
whelmingly invoke various historical incarnations of ‘humanitarian wars’, wars which seek to
liberate and civilize. War plays an important role in the slippage between ‘North’ and ‘West’,
one more indication of its significance for imagined geographies of global politics.
No matter how ‘globalization’ is constructed, as economic globalization, as transregional
interconnectedness, or as consciousness of the global, war and the military play far more import-
ant roles than extant studies of globalization indicate. In a sense, this is a specific instance of a
more general problem. While matters military are of enormous significance for politics and
society, past and present, most scholars in the humanities and social sciences know very little
about armies and war. Specialists in these latter topics return the favor. With important excep-
tions, studies of military affairs are most often conducted in isolation from their relation to, and
significance for, wider social and political context. Even prior to the blind spots of a liberal
worldview, this dialogue of the deaf produced the structural conditions in the academy for paci-
fied forms of globalization studies.
By mapping out where war and the military intersect with globalization studies, this essay has
sought to lay the basis not just for studies of military globalization or of war as a form of inter-
connection or even of how globalization is productive of conflict. Rather, what is needed is an
assessment of the ways in which war is centrally implicated in processes of globalization. While
Shaw’s call for a ‘war-centred social theory’ perhaps overstates the case, his basic point is that
war is a central determinant of social and political relations (1988, p. 28). To the extent this is
true of globalization, then any adequate account of globalization cannot attend to economic or
cultural or social dimensions without also taking into account war. War and armed conflict very
often have been the leading edge of transregional interconnectedness. Maintaining such inter-
connection in the face of resistance has often required repeated use of force, while the circulation
of people, goods and ideas in world politics has often taken military form. All of this suggests
that war needs to be taken far more seriously in globalization studies.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Susan Carruthers, Tina Chen, Stefan Elbe, Theo Farrell, Mark Laffey and two anon-
ymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article.
Notes
1 As in the last National Security Strategy produced by the Clinton administration, A National Security Strategy for a
Global Age, available at khttp://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/nss/nss_dec2000_contents.html, accessed
12 August 2004.
2 President G.W. Bush, Commencement Address, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina,
9 May 2003, available at khttp://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05l, accessed 10 May 2003.
3 The term ‘constitutive circuits’ is taken from Brighton (2004).
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170 T. Barkawi
The Sociology of New Wars? Assessing the
Causes and Objectives of Contemporary
Violent Conflicts
Siniša Malešević
National University of Ireland
The recent accounts of the new war paradigm have been thoroughly
scrutinized in a variety of disciplines from security studies and interna-
tional relations to political economy. The general trend is to focus on
the scope, methods, tactics, strategies, forms of war, and ⁄ or the level of
atrocity. However, there has been little sustained attempt to assess struc-
tural causes and the arguments about the changing aims of contempo-
rary warfare. This paper provides a critical analysis of the macro
sociological accounts of the new war paradigm with a spotlight on the
purpose and causes of the recent wars. The author argues that despite
the development of elaborate models, the sociology of contemporary
warfare rests on shaky foundations and hence fails to convince. Rather
than witnessing a dramatic shift in the causes and objectives of contem-
porary violent conflict, one encounters a significant transformation in
the social and historical context in which these wars are waged.
Any dramatic historical change is bound to challenge the existing sociological
comprehension of reality. Ultimately this can lead to the articulation of new ana-
lytical models and new conceptual apparatuses devised to come to terms with
these unprecedented changes.1 Social transformations of any magnitude necessi-
tate new interpretative horizons and new explanatory paradigms. However,
macro sociologists rarely encounter such unique, earth-shattering historical
moments of rupture. As most longue duree research clearly shows, the trajectories
of human development are usually shaped by and measured in centuries and
millennia rather than decades and years. Hence it is hard to assess whether the
times we live in constitute such a rare and historically transformative episode.
Although the collapse of communism, the end of a bipolar world, economic
globalization and the spectacular rise of religiously framed violence are obviously
good candidates, there is no certainty that 24th century historical sociology will
judge them as momentous events and processes in the way we are prone to do
now. Not only that we tend toward chrono-centrism (Fowles 1974), and what
Peel (1989) calls ‘‘blocking presentism,’’ that is, an overemphasis on the present
events and our own depiction of the past, but we are not immune to the present-
ist interpretation of the future either. This paper attempts to critically engage
with one such research paradigm that claims fundamental historical novelty—the
theory of new wars. More specifically, my focus is on the highly influential but
rarely scrutinized macro sociological accounts of the new war paradigm and their
1I am thankful to Kevin Ryan and the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on the earlier draft
of this paper.
� 2008 International Studies Association.
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ , UK .
International Political Sociology (2008) 2, 97–112
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claims about (1) the unprecedented causes of recent violent conflicts, and (2)
the qualitative transformation in the objectives and goals of these wars.
First, I briefly summarize the central tenants and the existing criticisms of the
new war paradigm. Second, I explore the sociological theories of new wars by
identifying their distinctive features and commonalities. The focus is in particu-
lar on the causes and changing objectives of contemporary warfare. Finally, I
assess the explanatory strength of the new wars paradigm in sociology, arguing
that the paradigm fails on both accounts as current wars exhibit more similarity
than difference with conventional 19th and 20th century warfare. Instead of his-
torically novel forms of violence, one encounters processes that have been devel-
oping since the birth of the modern era. However, this is not to argue that
nothing has changed in the relationship between contemporary warfare and
society. What has significantly changed is the social reliance on technology and,
most of all, the social, geo-political and ideological context in which recent wars
are fought.
The New Wars Paradigm
A variety of influential scholars from across a range of disciplines as diverse as
security studies (Snow 1996; Duffield 2001), political economy (Collier 2000;
Jung 2003), international relations (Gray 1997; Keen 1998) and political theory
(Munkler 2004) have embraced the new wars paradigm. They all argue that vio-
lent conflicts since the end of the 20th century are utterly different from their
predecessors. The argument is that these new wars differ in terms of scope (civil
rather than inter-state conflicts), methods, models of financing (external rather
than internal), and are characterized by low intensity coupled with high levels of
brutality and with the deliberate targeting of civilians. These wars are seen to be
on the increase, less restrained and more atrocious, hence dramatically increas-
ing the number of civilians both killed and displaced. Furthermore, unlike the
‘‘old wars’’ these new violent conflicts are premised on different fighting tactics
(terror and guerrilla actions instead of conventional battlefields), different mili-
tary strategies (population control rather than capturing new territory), utilize
different combatants (private armies, criminal gangs and warlords instead of pro-
fessional soldiers or conscripts), and are highly decentralized. The new wars are
also seen as chaotic since they blur traditional distinctions (legal vs. illegal, pri-
vate vs. public, civilian vs. military, internal vs. external, and local vs. global).
While the research emanating from the new wars paradigm has proved highly
beneficial in highlighting some distinctive features of civil wars during the 1990s,
the subsequent cross-disciplinary empirical research has seriously challenged
many of its claims. First, although in recent times intra-state warfare has been
more frequent than inter-state warfare, there is no causal relationship between
the two. Not only do some wars start off as civil wars and, if successful for the
warring side claiming independence, quickly become redefined as inter-state
wars2 (from the American war of independence to the wars of Yugoslav succes-
sion), but also many wars have elements of both, as most civil wars are fought
with direct economic, political and military support from neighboring states and
global powers. A typical example here is the so-called Second Congo War of
1998–2003, which involved regional confrontation of eight states and over 25
armed groups. However, much more damaging to the new war paradigm is the
well-documented fact that both civil and inter-state wars have been in decline
since the early 1990s (Gleditsch, Wallensteen, Eriksson, Sollenberg, and Strand
2As Kalyvas (2006:17) points out this semantic conflict of how to term particular wars is part of the war itself, as
the use of terms such as civil or inter-state war are deeply contested by the parties involved as they confer or deny
legitimacy to their actions.
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2002; Newman 2004; Harbom and Wallensteen 2005; Mack 2005). Thus, there is
no evidence for the claimed proliferation of the ‘‘new’’ wars.
Second, there is no empirical foundation for the claim that recent conflicts
are more violent either in terms of human casualties or levels of atrocity. As Laci-
na and Gleditsch (2005) demonstrate, there has been a significant decline in the
number of deaths in battle in recent wars. The post-WWII conflicts reached their
peak in the early 1950s, with almost 700,000 deaths per year, while the 1990s
and the beginning of this century have rarely witnessed wars accounting for
more than 100,000 human casualties. Furthermore, the ratio of military and civil-
ian deaths has not significantly changed in recent conflicts. The research of Me-
lander, Oberg, and Hall (2007) and Sollenberg (2007) clearly shows that in most
recent wars, as has also been the case historically, the civilian ⁄ military death ratio
rarely exceeds 50 ⁄ 50.3 As for the intensity of atrocities, Melander et al. (2007:33)
have calculated that ‘‘the post-Cold War era [is] significantly less atrocious than
the Cold War era.’’ Although there was some increase in population displace-
ment during the early 1990s, the magnitude of violence against civilians is signifi-
cantly lower then in previous periods.
Third, the uniqueness of the deliberate targeting of civilians and the use of
terrorist and guerrilla tactics is also questioned. Newman (2004:182) points out
that earlier civil conflicts such as those of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920)
and the Congo Free State (1886–1908) were typical examples of wars where civil-
ians were the primary target of violence. With the exception of the Rwandan
genocide,4 the ‘‘new wars’’ have never reached the enormity of civilian blood-
shed registered in genocides of Herreros, Native Americans, Armenians or Jews
in the Holocaust. Similarly there is nothing new and exceptional in the reliance
on terror threats and guerrilla warfare, as this was and remains an essential tactic
of all civil wars—old and new (Kalyvas 2001, 2006:83).
What is evident from this brief summary is that cross-disciplinary research
has demonstrated serious weaknesses in the new wars paradigm. The critics
have successfully challenged claims about the novelty of means, methods, strate-
gies, tactics and the level of brutality of the ‘‘new wars.’’ They have also con-
vincingly demonstrated that recent conflicts do not significantly differ from
conventional warfare in terms of human casualties or the civilian involvement
ratio. However, what has rarely been challenged or carefully explored are the
macro-structural causes and the alleged transformation of the central goals of
the ‘‘new’’ warfare.5 Even if specialist studies are able to demonstrate empirical
untenablilty of the new wars paradigm through meticulous quantitative
research, this still would not be enough to undermine the heuristic and inter-
pretative potential of the paradigm. As Kuhn (1962) rightly argues, paradigms
are conceptual worlds which allow us to think differently about the same
research problem. They are non-cumulative and as such often incommensura-
ble with previous or existing knowledge claims. Rather than complementing or
falsifying each other paradigms provide competing understandings of reality,
which if successful reduce the old paradigms to a special case of a new para-
digm. Replacing one paradigm by another often requires a scientific revolution.
3For example the Bosnian war of 1992–1995 is singled out as a standard of the new war where civilian deaths
were highly disproportional to those of military. However, as the most recent data collection indicates (Tokaca
2007) the human casualties were not far off the standard 50 ⁄ 50 ratio with a slight majority of casualties on the mili-
tary side (59% vs. 41%).
4It is also highly debatable whether the Rwandan genocide of 1994 took place within or outside of war condi-
tions.
5S. Kalyvas (2001) is a partial exception here as his analysis is also focused on the causes and motivation of
‘‘new wars.’’ However, he only explores the arguments about the civil wars and does not engage with the high-tech
warfare. Furthermore, his study is distinctly oriented toward the micro level and largely ignores the analysis of the
macro structural causes and goals.
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New paradigms are valuable as they open novel avenues of thinking, research
and analysis and question the established canons. Moreover, conceptual models
and theoretical approaches cannot be rebuffed simply on how well they meet
the criteria of positivist science (Giddens 1976). All of this suggests that in
order to explore the causes and the central objectives of the ‘‘new’’ wars, one
has to engage with the stronger theoretical and explanatory models, that is,
with the sociological articulations of the new wars paradigm. The focus of an
analysis should include both: how well the new wars paradigm works as a novel
interpretative frame and also how sound the empirical claims are on which this
new interpretative frame is built.
The Sociology of New Warfare
Although war has been and remains a largely neglected topic of sociological
research (Shaw 1984; Joas 2003; Wimmer and Min 2006), there have been a few
recent conceptual, theoretical and empirical analyses most of which problematize
the nature of contemporary conflicts. Political sociologists such as Martin Shaw
(2002, 2003, 2005) and Mary Kaldor (2001, 2007) and social theorists such as
Zygmunt Bauman (2001, 2002a,b) have been at the forefront of the new war par-
adigm.6 They too see these violent conflicts as historically novel in terms of
methods, strategies, tactics, and level of human sacrifice. However, their studies
also differ from typical representatives of the new war paradigm in their focus on
the broader macro-sociological picture whereby the transformation in warfare is
seen as a symptom of larger societal changes. The underlining causal factor in
most of these accounts is the transformative power of economic globalization.
They distinguish between two typical forms that the new warfare takes: the para-
sitic or predatory wars and the technologically advanced western forms of war-
fare. Predatory wars emerge in the context of rampant economic liberalization
which undermines already weakened states, thus resulting in their virtual col-
lapse. It is on the ruins of these failed states that the new parasitic wars emerge.
In other words, inability to compete at the global level weakens the state’s econ-
omy and simultaneously its capacity to extract revenue, thus opening the door to
systematic corruption, criminality and consequently for the general privatization
of violence. State failure creates a new Hobbesian environment where armed
warlords control the remnants of state structures, and relying on foreign remit-
tances and international aid invoke identity politics to spread terror among those
deemed a threat to their religious or ethnic group.
The new technological advanced western wars have developed gradually but
most of all through the recent revolution in military affairs (RMA), with the mat-
uration of new technologies and novel military systems relying heavily on air
power, the routinization of precision, and the ability to fight an adversary from a
distance without suffering significant causalities. These wars too are seen as
being principally linked to global forces of economic liberalization as they are
used for opening up global markets and coercing opponents of the neo-liberal
model of development.7
Hence Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000, 2002a,b) analysis of ‘‘new’’ wars is situated
in the context of a transition from the stable, solid, and for the most part regu-
lated modern order, toward an unregulated and principally chaotic ‘‘liquid
modernity.’’ In his view, modernity was built on the Enlightenment’s ideas of an
6Obviously Bauman, Kaldor and Shaw are not the only ‘‘new war’’ theorists but their ideas have proved to be
the most influential in the contemporary sociological understandings of violent macro conflicts.
7While much of the non-sociological literature on the ‘‘new wars’’ tends to treat these two forms of violent con-
flict (i.e., ‘‘the predatory wars’’ and ‘‘high tech warfare’’) as highly distinct and even unrelated phenomena most
macro sociologists, including the authors discussed here, start from the proposition that they are deeply interlinked,
being a part of the same processes of globalization.
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ordered totality, favoring the elimination of randomness and ambivalence, and
the privileging of compact territorial administrative organization. In contrast to
this, liquid modernity is extraterritorial, with the speed and mobility of global
capital dissolving state borders as power shifts from the nation-state to global cor-
porations. In this highly fluid world, as Bauman argues, most human beings
operate as individualized consumers rather than citizens of their respective poli-
ties. Such structural alteration generates two distinct but deeply interlinked
forms of new warfare: globalizing wars fought at a distance through technologi-
cally advanced weaponry, and globalization-induced wars conducted in the void
left by the collapse of the old state structures (Bauman 2001). These two types of
war erupt in the empty space that separates the coordinated machinery of global
markets from the incoherent and disconnected forms of localized politics. As the
era of liquid modernity advantages mobility over spatial control, the new wars
are, in Bauman’s view, not aimed at territorial conquest or ideological conver-
sion, as was the case with the conflicts of 19th and early 20th century. Instead
their goals stem from the economic logic of liquid modernity. The central goal
for globalizing wars becomes ‘‘the abolition of state sovereignty or neutralizing
its resistance potential’’ to accommodate the integration and coordination of the
accelerated flow of global markets, whereas for the globalization-induced warfare
the aim is to reactively ‘‘reassert the lost meaning of space’’ (Bauman 2001:11).
The central argument is that liquid modernity generates new forms of insecu-
rity, fear and treat that are extraterritorial and which cannot be contained or
resolved within the framework of nation-states (Bauman 2000, 2006). Rather the
space within which conflict is staged is open and fluid, with adversaries in a state
of permanent mobility and with military coalitions floating and provisional. In
Bauman’s (2002a:88, 2002b:94–98) view the most common forms of fighting in
this unregulated environment of the global frontier-land are the reconnaissance
battles where soldiers are not ordered to capture the adversary’s territory but ‘‘to
explore the enemy’s determination and endurance, the resources the enemy can
command and the speed with which such resources may be brought to the
battlefield.’’ In other words the new wars are a hit and run affair. Furthermore,
the new globalizing wars rely solely on the professional, well-trained armies
of technical experts whose individualized service is treated similarly to other
paid occupations and who perform their tasks with detached professionalism.
For Bauman (2001:27) ‘‘the times of mass conscript armies are over and so
is the time of ideological mobilization, patriotic ecstasies and ‘dedication to the
cause.’’’
Martin Shaw (2000, 2005) shares the view that globalization has changed the
nature of warfare for good. He also links the two forms of war by seeing them
not as separate types but as asymmetrical products of the same globalizing ten-
dencies, together transforming the entire mode of warfare from the industrial-
ized total war of early 20th century into a global surveillance mode of warfare.
As with Bauman, he argues that these new wars no longer require mass armies
or direct mass mobilization. Whereas ‘‘total warfare had the capacity to domi-
nate society: it could override market relations, suppress democratic politics
and capture media,’’ global surveillance warfare is ‘‘generally subordinate to
economy, polity and culture’’ (Shaw 2005:55). Although there are remnants of
the industrialized total warfare in all of this, such as ‘‘national-militarist’’ (i.e.,
Russia, China or India) and ‘‘ethnic-nationalist’’ states (i.e., some Balkan and
African states), with conscript armies and mass produced weapons, their actions
are nonetheless constrained by global forces and local elites committed to
‘‘integration into global markets and institutions’’ (Shaw 2005:64). Shaw sees
the new mode of western warfare developing in reaction to ‘‘degeneracy of the
20th century Western way of war’’ with its systematic killing of civilians and its
genocidal projects (Shaw 2003). The new wars emerge as the logic of nuclear
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proliferation weakened ‘‘war-induced statism’’ and economic liberalization
spread around the globe.
In this context, he concentrates primarily on the ‘‘new western way of warfare’’
where the central issue is the transfer of risk. Drawing in part on Ulrich Beck’s
(1992, 1999) concept of risk society as ‘‘an inescapable structural condition of
advanced industrialization’’ (Shaw 2005:97), he argues that risk exposure has
replaced class as a central form of inequality in the late modern era and that this
has profound implications on the theory and practice of contemporary warfare.
According to Shaw, these new risk transfer wars are waged by the most techno-
logically advanced states which have undergone successful RMA such as the Uni-
ted States and the United Kingdom. Here the key war aim seems to be to
minimize life-risks to western military personnel and consequently minimizing
electoral and political risks to the state leadership, which is accomplished by
transferring these risks directly to the weaker enemy.8 From the Falklands war, to
the Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the ongoing Iraq war, the reliance on techno-
logically sophisticated weapons helps create the systematic transfer of risks from
elected politicians to the military personnel and from them to the enemy com-
batants and their civilians. When the choice is between (foreign) civilian lives
and the lives of Western soldiers, the lives of soldiers are always prioritized. The
militarism of new wars does not require direct popular mobilization, rather it
aims to indirectly acquire passive support by relying on media as a neutralizer of
electoral surveillance. In his view, the goals of new wars are rarely ideological or
nationalist but are principally policy driven and instrumental, ‘‘war is justified
only as a response to a manifest threat,’’ that is when there is a ‘‘plausible per-
ceptions of risk to Western interests, norms and values’’ (Shaw 2003:71–72). As
such new wars acquire electoral legitimacy only when they are limited, sanitized,
quick fix affairs taking place in distant parts of the world.
Similarly to Bauman and Shaw, Mary Kaldor (2001, 2004, 2007) posits global-
ization as a key cause of new wars. In her understanding ‘‘globalization of the
1980s and 1990s is a qualitatively new phenomenon’’ that emerged as ‘‘a conse-
quence of the revolution in information technologies and dramatic improve-
ments in communication and data-processing.’’ This has revolutionized military
technology but even more importantly has produced ‘‘a revolution in the social
relations of warfare’’ (Kaldor 2001:3). Although Kaldor also shares Bauman’s
and Shaw’s belief that there are two dominant forms of new warfare, the focal
point of her analysis are predatory wars rather than what she calls ‘‘American
high tech wars.’’ These new wars arise as the autonomy of the state, especially its
economy, is eroded by the global forces of economic neo-liberalism. As the reve-
nues of the weakened states decline so they experience gradual or total erosion
of the monopoly of the legitimate use of coercion, with the result that the means
of violence is privatized and acquired by criminal warlords. Employing paramil-
itaries and the remnants of collapsing state structures, they politicize cultural dif-
ference and wage genocidal wars on civilians while at the same time acquiring
personal wealth and maintaining a hold on power. As one of the pioneers of this
paradigm Kaldor articulates an exceptionally strong version of the new war thesis
whereby the recent violent conflicts differ in every respect from conventional
warfare—from their strategy, tactics, methods of fighting, the increased levels of
bloodshed, the chaotic nature of conflicts to rampant asymmetry in the civil ⁄
military ratio of human casualties. She also emphasizes that new wars are highly
8Y. Heng (2006) develops a similar argument by linking Beck’s concept of ‘‘world risk society’’ with the recent
international relations literature on the ‘‘new wars.’’ He contends that the new ‘‘high tech’’ wars are primarily con-
cerned with the management of globalized systematic risks. Seeing globalization as a key driver of global economic
and security developments Heng argues that recent ‘‘Anglo-American’’ wars, from Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq,
were all ‘‘driven by a perceived globalization of risks’’ (p. 70–72).
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decentralized, thrive on the availability of cheap light weaponry and are heavily
dependent on the external financial resources such as Diaspora remittances and
international humanitarian aid which often help create or reinforce the new
globalized war economy. Nevertheless, what is central to her argument is the
view that new wars are fought for very different reasons than pervious conflicts.
As she puts it: ‘‘the goals of the new wars are about identity politics in contrast
to the geo-political or ideological goals of earlier wars’’ (Kaldor 2001:6). Accord-
ing to Kaldor, ‘‘identity politics’’ differs from ideology as it makes power claims
on the basis of mutually exclusive group labels rather than coherent systems of
ideas. She views these label claims as parasitic and fragmentary, ‘‘unlike the poli-
tics of ideas which are open to all and therefore tend to be integrative, this type
of identity politics is inherently exclusive and therefore tends to fragmentation’’
(Kaldor 2001:7). Just as Bauman she argues that geo-political motives play no
part as territory loses its previous significance. Instead the new wars tend toward
the expulsion of the civilian population: ‘‘the aim is to control the population
by getting rid of everyone of a different identity’’ (Kaldor 2001:8).
Between the Nation-State and Globalization
Sociological accounts of new wars provide a more potent and theoretically coher-
ent understanding and interpretation of recent violent conflicts. Instead of
adopting a narrow and particularist view, abstracting recent wars from the
broader social and historical context, the sociological analyses successfully situate
these conflicts within macro structural changes. New wars do not emerge in a
social and historical vacuum but are integral to the wider transformations of
modernity, and in particular to the worldwide expansion of globalization. What
one encounters here is truly an attempt of paradigm shift in a classical Kuhnian
sense: to understand recent conflicts it is not enough to account for the precise
factual variations. Rather this paradigm shift entails new understandings of social
reality. In this context Bauman, Shaw and Kaldor engage more thoroughly with
central questions such as: What are the social causes of new wars? And why and
how have the central goals of warfare changed? It is primarily in the answers to
these questions that one can assess the explanatory strength and weaknesses of
the new war paradigm.
However, even if the earlier criticisms that center on tactics, strategy, human
casualties, financing or methods of fighting are completely discounted in favor
of assessing the paradigm as a heuristic model on its own terms, the theory of
new wars fails to convince.
First, linking recent wars so tightly to the forces of economic globalization is a
form of structuralist economic reductionism which attributes too much power to
market forces. Historically wars were initiated and fought for a variety of rea-
sons—ideological, geo-political, economic or ecological—and have had origins
in both human agency and social structure (Howard 1977; McNeill 1984; Keegan
1993). This is as much the case with contemporary wars which are also depen-
dent on historical contingencies and a confluence of different factors. Not all
groups, organizations and individuals involved directly or indirectly in these vio-
lent conflicts are motivated by the maximization of economic resources (Smith
2005; Gat 2006). Similarly the structural transformations in the world economy
do not affect all states equally, some even not at all. This economistic argument
cannot explain why some states such as Somalia, Bosnia or Haiti found them-
selves on the verge of collapse in the context of brutal civil wars, while others
economically much more undermined by global trade such as Argentina, Roma-
nia or numerous African states have avoided excessive violent conflicts.
Furthermore, the perception that the expansion of liberalized markets auto-
matically means less regulation and more chaotic arrangements is a common
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misperception. As Steven Vogel (1996) documents well in his study of the eco-
nomic reform patterns in telecommunications, finance, broadcasting, transport
and utilities in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, France and Germany,
freer markets have actually led to more administrative regulation. Liberalization
does not mean the loss of state autonomy. On the contrary most states combine
the opening up of markets with tighter re-regulation, in other words ‘‘there is
no logical contradiction between more competition and greater government
control’’ (Vogel 1996:5). Hence we may live in liquid modernity but this is a
highly regulated environment. Consequently the milieu of contemporary wars is
no more chaotic than that of their predecessors. Second, to establish a causal
link between contemporary wars and growing economic liberalization one would
have to prove that the patterns and dynamics of world trade have dramatically
changed, and that this change has affected transformations in warfare. However,
both of these claims are untenable.
The argument that economic globalization is historically unprecedented phe-
nomenon has been challenged by many historical sociologists. For example Paul
Hirst and Grahame Thompson (1999), Michael Mann (1997, 2003) and John A.
Hall (2000, 2002) among others have demonstrated that the existing levels of
trade for North America, Japan and the European Union of 12% of their GDP
are almost the same as the levels reached before World War I. Over 80% of the
world’s total production remains traded within the borders of nation-states
(Mann 2001). Most so-called transnational corporations are really national com-
panies whose ownership, assets, sales, and profits remain within their own nation
states. They chiefly rely on the domestic human capital generated through their
own educational systems, existing national communications infrastructure and a
substantial deal of state protectionism for the externally vulnerable economic
sectors (Carnoy 1993; Wade 1996). The technology is also mostly produced on
the national level while the overwhelming majority of companies remain traded
solely on national stock markets. Rather than being global, world trade is
distinctly ‘‘trilateral’’ with the United States, Japan and Europe producing and
consuming more than 85% of world trade (Mann 1997; Hall 2000). In other
words, contrary to the arguments of the new war paradigm, economic globaliza-
tion does not diminish the influence of the nation-states. Instead it is the most
powerful nation-states that are the backbone of world trade. As Mann (1997:48)
puts it: ‘‘capitalism retains a geo-economic order, dominated by the economies
of the advanced nation-states. Clusters of nation-states provide the stratification
order of globalism.’’ In addition nation-states remain in full control of their
population as human beings are much less mobile than goods, money and
services and despite expansion of international law the nation-state preserves the
monopoly of law over its territory9 (Hirst and Thompson 1999).
The second claim is yet more problematic. Even if one disregards the fact that
there is no direct evidence that economic globalization causes an increase in vio-
lent intra-state conflicts, (thus concentrating solely on the indirect influence), it
is not difficult to show the obvious flaws in this argument. Not only does the
research prove warfare in general (including civil wars) to be in decline, so that
if globalization has any effect this could only be interpreted as a factor that
diminishes violence, but more importantly the privatization of violence has
existed as much in the pre-global era as it does now. As Kalyvas (2006:333) and
Newman (2004:183–184) rightly point out, a similar pattern of chaotic warlord-
ism, criminality and privatized violence was witnessed long before the current
era in, for example, the Greek civil war of 1943–1949, the Nigeria-Biafra civil
9As Hirst and Thompson (1999:277) conclude: ‘‘nation-states as sources of the rule of law are essential prerequi-
sites for regulation through international law, and as overarching public powers they are essential to the survival of
pluralistic ‘‘national’’ societies with diversified forms of administration and community standards.’’
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war, or the Congo Civil War of the early 1960s. Not only is it that the ‘‘globalized
war economy’’ cannot explain more protracted conflicts such as those in Chech-
nya, Sri Lanka, the Basque country or Indonesia, but even the conflicts that are
seen to epitomize the new wars such as those in the Balkans, Horn of Africa or
Caucasus in many respects predate or have developed outside of the forces of
economic liberalism. The origins of the Yugoslav wars of succession had very lit-
tle if anything to do with the macro economic globalization. They started off not
as economic, but as political conflicts, created in part by party elites attempting
to avoid genuine democratization through decentralization, and in part by the
idiosyncratic federal structure of the communist state (Malešević 2002, 2006:157–
184).
The view expressed by Bauman and Kaldor, that the new wars have lost geopo-
litical significance as ‘‘the era of space’’ is over, and that territory has little mean-
ing in the new globalized wars, is equally untenable. First, this argument is
built on an overstretched and stark comparison between early modern nation-
states and latemodern ⁄ postmodern polities, where the former are depicted as
tightly bound, highly centralized and bureaucratic, in full control of their terri-
tory, economy and population, whereas the latter are presented as the exact
opposite. According to these authors, early modernity is associated exclusively
with the economically and politically autarchic nation-states obsessed with territo-
rial expansion, while the contemporary era is seen as one of global economic
interdependence and integration. However, as Tilly (1975), Downing (1992),
Ertman (1997) and many other historical sociologists have shown, the post-West-
phalian nation-states have emerged and developed in the context of two rival
forces: international trade and political and military competition. Rather than
being isolated autarchies, nation-states have grown in response to the changing
geo-political environment by tightening fiscal control and by extending citizen-
ship rights. Commercial developments and increased trade have strengthened
the state capacity making it in this process a more powerful military machine. In
other words, transnational economic space is neither novel nor unconnected to
the birth of the nation-state. The administrative and territorial boundedness of
early nation states had always more to do with the rulers projected ideal than
actual reality. In most respects the rise in infrastructural and surveillance powers
is something more akin to contemporary nation-states as they have only recently
been able to fully police their borders, tax at sources, gather intelligence on all
of its citizens, and successfully control their territories.
Furthermore, military might still remains the only reliable guarantor of
economic wellbeing in the long term as all three economic powerhouses—the
United States, the European Union and Japan—have developed and continue
to economically prosper on the back of American military supremacy, which pro-
vides geopolitical stability and security in the North. Although most northern
states have moved away from what Mann (1997) calls ‘‘hard geopolitics’’ to ‘‘soft
geopolitics,’’ this is not the case for the rest of the world. Universal conscription
is still the order of the day in the great majority of states with most of Africa,
Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia (including the two super powers: China
and Russia) having compulsory military draft.10 Indeed it would be highly prema-
ture, as the proponents of the new war paradigm claim, to see it as a thing of
the past in the West either. Nearly all states reserve the right to reintroduce con-
scription in the case of major war. Historically speaking we have been here
before: the so-called long peace of 1870–1914 witnessed the dominance of simi-
lar pacifist theories that saw economics replacing geo-politics. However, even if
the militaries of most western and westernizing states have been reduced in size,
10Although the abolition of military draft has dramatically increased in the last two decades there are still only
32 states in the world without mandatory military service.
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the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence has been strengthened
even further with the continuous expansion of police forces, surveillance appara-
tuses and a variety of private and state controlled security agencies (Dandeker
1990; Lyon 2001).
What has changed in the postcolonial era is not the alleged unimportance of
space but the illegitimacy of territorial conquest. In fact space is now more
important than ever before as it is institutionalized and taken for granted by
nearly everybody that state borders cannot be changed at will. As American sol-
diers quickly realized when they initially placed the Star Spangled Banner on
Saddam Hussein’s statue, and then had to promptly replace it with the Iraqi flag,
one cannot legitimately capture the territory of another sovereign nation-state.
This is a poignant reminder that the sovereignty of state territory remains sacred
even more than it was in the last two centuries. If late, or in Bauman’s words,
liquid modernity is an era where one can transcend space—a view deeply con-
tested here—this cannot happen through simplified globalist formulas of ‘‘geog-
raphy becoming history’’ but only when territorial sovereignty becomes so
institutionalized, routinized and taken for granted that it becomes a matter of
habitual practice as an unalienable right that few would dare to challenge. The
obvious sacredness of state territory is clearly evident from the Falkland episode
when Britain went easily to war over some far away depopulated island, to the
Gulf war or Chechen wars and from still unresolved disputes between Russia and
Japan over the Kuril Islands, Britain and Spain over Gibraltar, Greece and Tur-
key over Cyprus and many uninhabited rocks of Aegean sea, etc. No state, demo-
cratic or autocratic, huge or small, developed or underdeveloped will ever give
up lightly even a tiny stretch of its territory. And this leads us directly to the sec-
ond issue of the supposedly changed goals of contemporary warfare.
The Objectives of Contemporary Wars
The proponents of the new wars paradigm are adamant that what sets contem-
porary wars apart from their predecessors is the unequivocal transformation of
objectives and goals. The new violent conflicts are no longer about ideology, or
nationalism in particular, but about identity (Kaldor), the economic logic of
globalization (Bauman) or perceptions of risk to Western interests and norms
(Shaw). In their own words: ‘‘nation-building coupled with patriotic mobiliza-
tion has ceased to be the principal instrument of social integration and states’
self-assertion’’ (Bauman 2002a:84); ‘‘in the context of globalization, ideological
and ⁄ or territorial cleavages of an earlier era have increasingly been supplanted
by an emerging cleavage between…cosmopolitanism, based on inclusive, univer-
salist multicultural values, and the politics of particularist identities’’ (Kaldor
2001:6); and [it is] ‘‘a specifically late-modern, Western perception’’ that ‘‘war
is justified only as a response to a manifest threat’’ (Shaw 2005:71–72).
Kaldor’s stringent distinction between identity and ideology is untenable as
the discourse of identity is nearly always embedded in the rhetoric of a specific
ideology. In other words, claims to a particular or universal identity such as
Danish, Muslim, manual worker, Pashtun or cosmopolitan are premised on the
distinctive political projects of what it means to be a particular Danish, Muslim,
manual worker, Pashtun or a cosmopolitan individual. As there is never one way
of how somebody can be a member of a particular group, the identitarian lan-
guage of collective solidarity is inherently political: it speaks in terms of cultural
authenticity but it acts through political projects (Brubaker 2004; Malešević
2006). The argument that, unlike ideology which espouses systematic ideas,
identity is only about group labels does not stand. From Barthes (1993) and
Althusser (1994), we know too well that ideology works best through the hailing
or interpolation of group labels, by caging individuals in particular ‘‘identities.’’
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More importantly, group labels can have popular resonance only if seen as inte-
gral to a specific political project. There is no significant difference here
between depicting citizens of today’s Iraq as mutually exclusive Shia, Sunni and
Kurds and yesteryears’ socialist rhetoric of proletariat and bourgeoisie clinched
in an uncompromising class war. They both invoke group labels as a part of a
concrete ideological project to justify a specific political course of action,
including warfare, and to mobilize popular support. Ethnic, religious, or nation-
alist ideologies are grounded in systematic programmes just as much as the
‘‘old’’ ideologies of socialism, liberalism or conservatism. There is no
substantial ontological difference between those political projects that aim at
implementing a blueprint of classless social order and those bent on setting up
an ethno-nationally pure society. In other words there is no identity without
ideology and no ideology can successfully mobilize mass support without
constructing meaningful group labels.
The problem is that in Kaldor’s economistic view nationalism is never seen as
an original generator of social action, but always a second order reality, a reac-
tive force to some other supposedly primary cause such as globalization (Kaldor
2001:76, 78–79). Analyzing the Bosnian war of 1992–1995 as the epitome of new
war, she argues that the central aims were not ideological or geo-political but
identity based—to ethnically cleanse a population of ‘‘other identity.’’ This view
confuses means and ends since ethnic cleansing and genocide are rarely if ever
an end in themselves, but rather a means through which a particular ideological
project is implemented. The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was never a chaotic,
decentralized and spontaneous reaction of local warlords. Instead as recent
research clearly shows (Cekić et al. 1999; Oberschall 2000; Ron 2003) it was a
highly structured, well-organized, meticulously documented process that relied
on existing centralized state structures from the top political and military leader-
ship in Serbia and Croatia to the municipal executive committees, the mayor’s
office, local police and so-called crisis committees that acted as the principal tool
of a euphemistically termed ‘‘population exchange.’’ In the Bosnian case just as
in other recent wars, the ‘‘old,’’ geo-political and ideological motives predomi-
nated, that is, the key goals were the capture of a particular territory in order to
implement distinct political goals by establishing a Greater Serbia and Croatia.
The fact that the post World War II international order does not tolerate territo-
rial conquests any more was one of the principal reasons that Yugoslav conflict
was externally seen as a throwback from the past, an irrational attachment to the
primordial ‘‘labels’’ rather than what it actually was—a seizing of land in order
to fulfill a specific ideological project. In this context as Kalyvas (2001), Newman
(2004) and Berdal (2003) rightly argue what has changed is not the nature of
warfare itself but the Western perception of war.
Similarly, Bauman’s view of liquid modernity as an era that transcends
bounded space, where global capital dominates nation-states, and where consum-
erism overpowers nationalism is misplaced. The interests of global corporations
can sometimes overlap with the ideology and geo-political motives of powerful
states but the two are not causally linked. The so-called ‘‘globalizing’’ wars are
almost exclusively fought by a single state, the United States of America, which
as any nation-state in modern history pursues its own geo-political and ideologi-
cal goals. As Mann (2001, 2003) rightly emphasizes, unlike its military might
American economic power is not hegemonic over its European and Japanese riv-
als, as they are all ‘‘backseat drivers’’ of the contingencies and fluctuations
rooted in worldwide capitalist development. While the Gulf War of 1991 was
fought to restore the status quo, and thus potentially benefiting the further
spread or dominance of Western based global corporations, all other ‘‘globali-
zing’’ wars such as Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq were initiated and fought much
more for ideological and geopolitical reasons than arising from the global
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economic logic. Obviously neither the small and remote Serbia nor impover-
ished and desolate Afghanistan were the ideal new markets worth fighting over.
In both cases a central motive for war originated in the sense of wounded
national pride (hence nationalism) that a superpower was attacked on its own
soil (9 ⁄ 11) or that some petit autocrat dares to resist the will of the powerful
Western states. Both of these wars were motivated and in fact have succeeded in
achieving ideological conversion by managing to replace the rigid Taliban Isla-
mists and the autocratic nationalists around Milošević with more moderate politi-
cal regimes. The motivation behind the Iraq war is perhaps more complicated as
it also involved economic motives (the control of oil reserves) which could have
benefited global corporations, but even this motive had more to do with the
requirements of a particular nation-state rooted in its ambition of geo-political
control of resources (and security) rather than in opening up new markets for
the global economy. Furthermore, the ideological motives loomed large as the
war was in part an attempt to implement a specific neo-conservative blueprint
(including ‘‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’’ and other proposals developed by
the highly influential think-tank the Project for the New American Century)
(Mann 2003:3; Smith 2005:164). In all three cases the wars relied on strong pop-
ular support. While in Kosovo and Afghanistan nationalism was supplemented
with the broader international ‘‘humanitarian’’ and ‘‘just cause’’ rhetoric, thus
extending its national support base, the war in Iraq was politically divisive in the
international arena, thus reinforcing, and having to rely almost exclusively on,
U.S. nationalism. To put it simply, the aims of ‘‘globalizing’’ wars have not sub-
stantially changed as ideology and geo-politics remain as important as ever.
Although Shaw provides a more compelling account that recognizes the
importance of territory and geo-politics, he too sees new wars as being subordi-
nated to the economic and other global forces. In his account of risk transfer
the distinction between the western and non-western worlds and the correspond-
ing forms of warfare is overstretched. Albeit that technological sophistication
and the dependence on precision targeting and air power are obviously histori-
cal novelties, these are not global developments but rather something that sym-
bolizes the strength of a particular nation-state—the United States of America.
In his analysis of recent ‘‘global surveillance wars’’ nearly all conflicts, with the
exception of the short, small and rather atypical Falklands war, were fought prin-
cipally if not exclusively by the American military. In other words the transfer of
risks is not that much of a western phenomenon (although it has some reso-
nance in the United Kingdom and a few other European states) as it is a phe-
nomenon of a distinct nation-state—the United States of America. In this sense
the United States is a true military empire as it is the only state that has a mili-
tary presence in 153 countries of the world, that has the technical know-how,
refueling facilities, laser guided missiles, carrier ships, etc. to impose its military
hegemony throughout the world. As Mann (2001:6) puts it: ‘‘No state would
rationally seek war with the United States, and few could survive it… this is
American, not Northern, military hegemony. It is not at the service of Northern
economic imperialism. It is only at the service of interests defined by American
governments.’’ This is important in the context of popular support, as Shaw
argues that Western global warfare no longer requires direct mass mobilization,
preferring instead a media induced mobilization of passivity. However, this is
another case of ‘‘chronocentrism’’ as it attempts to generalize on the basis of a
very short historical period. Whereas an enormous superpower such as the
United States can rely on a professional army to fight small wars with relatively
few casualties, paying little attention to internal dissent, the major wars with
substantial casualties still require the same level of direct mobilization as before.
Both Vietnam and the Iraq war illustrate this only all too well. To fight a
protracted large conflict even most powerful states would have to contemplate
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reintroducing conscription and if necessary override economics, domestic
politics and cultural life. The so-called ‘‘war on terror’’ clearly indicates how
economy, polity and culture can easily become subordinated to war aims and
how nationalism can quickly transform into a virulent battle cry and crusade
against the other. The speed and congressional unanimity with which the Patriot
Act was passed, with little if any popular dissent in the aftermath of 9 ⁄ 11, is a
potent reminder of how quickly the nation-state can assume firm control over
society. Hence it is not the perception of threat to ‘‘western interests and values’’
that motivates public support, it is primarily the ideology of nationalism in all its
guises that secures popular mobilization and it is a geo-political logic that
dictates conduct of nation-states. The United States is no exception here; it is
just the largest and more powerful nation-state the world has known.
What Is Old and What Is New?
Despite its explanatory pitfalls, the sociology of ‘‘new wars’’ has opened up an
important area of research and has raised novel questions about the nature of
recent violent conflicts. Most of all, these sociological accounts have placed the
new wars debate in the wider social and historical context thus attempting to link
the changing forms of violence with the transformation of modernity. To argue
that the causes and objectives of contemporary warfare do not significantly differ
from their pre-global era predecessors does not automatically imply that nothing
has changed. On the contrary the historical setting of the post-World War II
world has substantially transformed as the traditional geopolitical goals of nation-
states such as territorial expansion, colonial domination, or imperial conquest
have lost their legitimacy, both at the national and especially at the international
level. This is even more the case with some of the principal normative ideologies
of the 20th century, such as state socialism, eugenics and scientific racism, fascist
corporatism or imperial civilizing mission. Contemporary warfare clearly emerges
in a different historical milieu and as such its goals and aims are shaped and
restricted by these macro structural forces. Regardless of its military or economic
might, no state can legitimately invade territories of other states or treat the citi-
zens of those states as culturally or racially inferior species. Furthermore, the rev-
olution in military affairs is a novel development that allows a military
superpower such as the United States to rely extensively on the sophisticated
technology to put coercive pressure on some uncooperative governments and to
fight small and medium range ‘‘hit and run’’ wars. However, neither one of
these two new developments has substantially changed the causes and objectives
of warfare. While new technology has to some extent transformed the means of
fighting, such as minimizing military casualties by relying on the relative preci-
sion of airpower and missile navigation in short and limited wars, it has not chan-
ged the ends of warfare. Similarly the new social and historical context has
constrained the actions of, particularly northern, nation-states by forcing them to
adopt soft geo-politics of bargaining, enticement and occasional coercive pres-
sure over hard geo-politics of spatial conquest, but it has not dented the ‘‘old’’
multiple causes of violent conflicts. Just as in the 19th and 20th centuries, wars
are initiated and fought for economic, political but most of all for ideological
and geopolitical reasons. An acceleration of economic globalization perhaps adds
another layer of complexity and constraint to the ‘‘old’’ ideological and geopolit-
ical motives of nation-states, but it could not possible obliterate either these
motives or the nation-states themselves. Not only is it that more extensive
economic integration requires more administrative state regulation, but also with-
out the powerful nation-states that provide geopolitical stability, global economic
expansion and incorporation would evaporate in a Hobbesian ⁄ Darwinian world
of anarchic brutality.
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Finally, the popular support on which modern conflicts have to build if they
are to have any chance of success is still largely derived from the same nationalist
sources as before. Since the birth of modernity, in the French and American rev-
olutions, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, nationalism became and remains
the principal glue of legitimate rule (Gellner 1983; Smith 2003; Malešević 2006,
2007). Having powerful protean capacity nationalism is able to accommodate
modern political formations as diverse as liberal democracies, state socialist
orders, contemporary monarchies, military juntas as well as the theocratic states.
No state authority is likely to generate a significant support base without invok-
ing the solidaristic images of ‘‘our glorious nation.’’ Even though nationalism
has become less virulent in the North when compared to the early 20th century,
no political leader or political party can survive long in office if deemed to be
insufficiently patriotic. The fact that the aggressive, militarist and jingoistic
nationalisms of the two World Wars have given way to their softer counterparts
does not suggest, as proponents of the new war paradigm argue, that nationalism
as such is on the wane. Rather as the infrastructural capacities of modern nation-
states expand further the habitual character and routinized nature of its repro-
duction make sure that the nation-centric view of the world is perpetually nor-
malized and naturalized in the mass media, educational systems, the institutions
of ‘‘high’’ culture, the state administration systems, through outlets of popular
culture, youth organizations, civil society groups and even Internet Web sites. All
of these make nationalism a powerful ideological force of everyday life, a force
available for swift mobilization in times of major conflict. As Billig (1995) poi-
gnantly observes, banality does not equal lenience. On the contrary, in reproduc-
ing state structures and institutions that possess immense armaments which can
be rapidly utilized, banal nationalism can easily and quickly be transformed into
a baby-faced killer.
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