The Global Sociology Blog

A) Wars

a) Old Wars

As the famous military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831) pointed out, war is a social activity – the infliction of physical violence – with specific norms and regulations. War implies social relationships developing in specific contexts. As Barkawi (2006:28) indicates, war shapes society and society shapes war. Different types of societies fight different types of war. In this section, we examine the new type of warfare characteristic of the global era in contrast with older types of warfare that characterized previous types of social structure.

Mary Kaldor (2001) provides a typology of old wars:

[Mary Kaldor’s Typology of Wars]

So, when Clausewitz defined war – structured armed conflict – he had in mind the interstate wars, that is, wars that appeared in the 19^th century between states whose national armies (either popular through draft or composed of professional servicemen) face each other on the battlefield. This conception had such an impact in our commonsense conception of war that we call interstate wars conventional wars. They have clear beginnings: either formal declaration of wars from one country to another, or a specific event/date which we can identify as the beginning of the war and clear ends usually marked by the signature of a peace treaty between the belligerents that is supposed to put resolve the political issue that triggered war in the first place. The two World Wars were extensions of this logic as they involved multiple states in different coalitions (such as the Allies against the Axis in World War II). And with World War II, and the following Cold War (1946-1990), the motivations, beyond political, became moral and ideological: good versus evil, democracies against Nazism/Fascism, or against communism. New wars emerged at the end of the Cold War.

b) New Wars

New wars are related to globalization and the end of the Cold War. New wars are also global as in transnational and they are a globalizing force. The Cold War was so named because of the existence of two superpowers (the United States and the USSR) with conflicting ideological views of the world and society. Both superpowers engaged in an arms race – each trying to “outgun” the other – that involved the development of weapons of mass destruction and of nuclear weaponry. Should one decide to attack the other, the result was Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The two superpowers also engaged in proxy wars – limited conflicts at the periphery of the world-system where each superpower takes sides. For instance, in Angola, the USSR supported the elected government whereas the United States supported the UNITA rebels. In Vietnam, the USSR supported the North Vietnamese whereas the United States supported the South Vietnamese. In such proxy wars, each superpower would fund, train, equip and arm its chosen side. In many cases, both superpowers often ended up supporting or help maintain in power corrupt and unsavory characters that would do their bidding but cared little for the needs of their populations. When the Cold War ended, in the early 1990s, with the demise of the USSR, the peripheral areas were left with corrupt dictators, political instability and widely available weaponry.

On the other hand, for countries in the core areas, the end of the Cold War was seen with optimism: risks of Mutually Assured Destruction receded; democracy would spread to formerly communist countries. The world would finally be at peace. Consequently, core countries decided to cash their “peace dividends” by reducing their armed forces and – since they no longer needed to fight proxy wars – to cut their funding and training to peripheral countries and support for puppet leaders. The results are still devastating.

i) Failed States

When the superpowers installed friendly leaders at the head of peripheral countries, their main concern was loyalty, not legitimacy nor respect for democracy and human rights. When they withdrew their support, they left behind many repressive governments and leaders without popular support, who were only concerned with preserving their power rather than conducting sensible policy. This combination of lack of popularity, economic failure and political repression created failed states – states that are unable to provide basic infrastructure and security to their people. One result has been the collapse of many states such as Sierra Leone and the explosion of ethnic conflicts, as in Yugoslavia. In the power vacuum that resulted from state implosion and collapse, different political actors stepped in and vied for power within their own countries or expanded conflicts beyond national borders, into other countries, thereby causing further state failure, in a pattern known as regionalization of conflicts – a conflict that starts in one country but overflows into the neighboring states. For instance, the US and French-supported dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko was overthrown in 1997 by rebel forces supported by the Tutsi-dominated governments of Rwanda and Uganda, as payback for Mobutu’s support for the Hutus Rwandans responsible for the 1994 genocide of Rwandan Tutsis. Similarly, the civil war in Sierra Leone was fueled by the support of dictator Charles Taylor of neighboring Liberia for the rebels. In other words, new wars have a tendency to cross borders and to expand regionally, creating entire areas of instability beyond single states.

ii) Privatization

In the chapter on politics and the government, we define the modern nation-state as the entity that provides citizens with a certain number of services paid for through taxation. This defines the public sector, as opposed to the private sectors where citizens and businesses engage in private transactions paid for with private funds. Among services provided by the public sector is internal security (provided by law enforcement) and external security (provided by the military) since the state is expected to have the monopoly over the use of force. When we examined economic globalization, we also noted that a general trend is privatization – the transfer of traditionally public sector responsibilities to the private sector. However, until recently, the provision of military capability was exempt from this trend. Since the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, private actors have been more and more involved in different aspects of warfare. On the war-waging side, national armies are no longer the major participants. Rather, they have been replaced by warlord militias, foreign fighters (such as Middle Eastern Jihadists fighting alongside the Bosnians in former Yugoslavia) and mercenaries, private military companies, citizens’ defense groups (such as villagers trying to protect themselves from warring parties), international troops (such as NATO troops, United Nations peacekeepers) and international organized crime organizations who provide the weaponry to keep wars going. New wars are also different in terms of privatization of victims. Typically, in conventional wars, the tendency is to fight battles but to spare civilians as much as possible. There is an entire body of international law (such as the Geneva Conventions) regarding the protection of civilians in times of warfare. As Mary Kaldor (2001: 100) indicates, that the beginning of the 20^th century, 85-90 per cent of casualties in war were military. By the late 1990s, the numbers were reversed: 80 per cent of casualties in wars are civilians. The conduct of new wars now involve avoiding direct battle and the deliberate targeting of civilian populations through massacres, ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, population displacement. In other words, new wars automatically generate humanitarian catastrophes that involve new private actors: humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) whose task is to alleviate the major humanitarian effects of war while remaining neutral. However, some of the most important private actors in new war are Private Military Firms (PMFs).

Private Military Firms are business organizations that, in many different contexts, provide different types of military services (from cooking services to American soldiers in Iraq to active participation on the battlefield) to a variety of consumers (such as governments, rebel groups, multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations, intergovernmental organizations, and drug cartels). The growth of the military industry, global in scope and activity, changes the norms of warfare and international relations.

(1) History

As P.W. Singer (2003) demonstrates, national armies are the product of the modern nation-state. Before modern times, the use of private armies, motivated by money and loyal to no single government, was the norm. This is why, to this day, the Vatican security is provided by Swiss guards (see picture), an ancestor of private security companies. Local feudal lords would hire their own armies to fight their battles in exchange for money and permission to loot enemy resources. Such private soldiers were mercenaries or privateers. And like the Swiss guards, they might share common ethnic background. It is only with the modern nation-state that national and citizens armies were created to defend the people or the nation.

However, private armies and mercenaries never truly disappeared. They merely went underground as they lost their legitimacy. It is during colonial times that companies such as the Dutch East India Company and the British South Africa Company found it useful to create their own private forces to enforce their monopolies over trade and their brutal labor control over natives so as to maximize profits through the massive extraction of minerals such as diamonds.

The official re-birth of mercenaries came during decolonization, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Colonial powers and foreign companies were reluctant to let go of their colonial possessions. They therefore used private mercenaries to undermine processes of self-determination among former colonies and the new national governments. They did so in different ways: in the Congo (to become Zaire), the Belgian company Union Miniere promoted the secession of the Katanga province, where most of its mines were located, by hiring mercenaries. The rebellion was ultimately crushed by UN forces in 1963 but it had created instability in the country and contributed to the assassination of the first elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and to the rise to power of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko who would rule Zaire with an iron fist until his death in 1997 (Mobutu overthrew the Lumumba government and turned Lumumba himself to Katangan secessionists who promptly murdered him).

In Angola, mercenaries were used to systematically undermine the elected government by funding and support the rebel group UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) in 1975. Support for UNITA came from at least two major sources: oil companies afraid of losing their concessions, the United States (who hoped to get rid of the Angolan government supported by the Soviet Union and covertly provided weapons) and the apartheid government in South Africa. The white South African government was growing concerned that, as more and more African countries became independent, it would find itself surrounded with black African governments sympathetic to demands for ending the apartheid regime from within South Africa. And being racist in ideology, the South African government would try its best to undermine black governments, already in place in its vicinity, and prove to the world that Africans were incapable of governing themselves (Drohan, 2004). It therefore funded mercenaries and rebels in Angola and other countries to blow up infrastructures, forcing the government to spend all their resources fighting these rebellions and reconstructing sabotaged installations essential to the functioning of the country. This was the strategy used in Angola. The UNITA rebellion ended in 2002 with the death of his leader Jonas Savimbi. However, as the activities of such rebels and the assistance they received from mercenaries became public knowledge and sometimes embarrassing scandals for western countries, their legitimacy declined.

These mercenary activities may have ended but they certainly created the conditions for the current instability in many African countries. As a result, as they discredited themselves, they helped pave the way for a more “respectable” security alternative: the Private Military Firms.

(2) Mercenaries v. PMFs

There are significant differences between mercenaries and PMFs. P.W. Singer (2003) lists their differences as follows:

[Characteristics of Mercenaries Groups]

On the other hand, PMFs have the following characteristics:

[Characteristics of Private Military Firms]

These differences explain why PMFs are much more efficient than mercenaries and also why PMFs value their public image as respectable professional companies and steer clear of the label “mercenaries” or “soldiers of fortune.” Zairean dictator Mobutu failed to notice this crucial difference when, trying to salvage what his decaying regime, he hired mercenaries – the “White Legion” composed of French right-wing radicals, Bosnian Serb veterans and Ukrainian pilots – that were promptly defeated by the rebels and precipitated the ultimate demise of Mobutu’s government in 1996. He might have had better luck had he hired a PMF, as the governments of Angola and Sierra Leone did when they were faced with defeat at the hands of rebels.

(3) Classification

According to P.W. Singer (2003), Private Military Firms can be classified in three categories based on the type of services they provide.

Military Provider Firms are the most controversial because they actually involve combat. Such companies often bring in full soldiers units, weaponry and all the necessary equipment to actually fight. The most notorious is the now-dissolved Executive Outcomes (EO). EO was founded in 1989 by a former member of the South African Defense Forces (SADF – the all-white South African military under apartheid) and it recruited mostly ex-SADF soldiers, especially after 1994 when the apartheid regime was dismantled and the SADF was considerably downsized and integrated. EO was dissolved in 1999 when the South African government passed an anti-mercenary law. During its decade of existence, EO provided its services to different clients, such as the governments of Angola and Sierra Leone as well as multinational corporations, such as the diamond giant DeBeers.

EO became involved in Angola in 1992 when the rebel group UNITA seized the country’s major oil fields and took control of the diamond areas. EO was hired specifically to retake these regions and succeeded (ironically, many EO employees used to be in the South African forces that had fought alongside UNITA after the 1975 independence of Angola). However, as soon as EO soldiers withdrew, UNITA retook these areas. The Angolan government then secured a multimillion dollars contract with EO to completely eradicate UNITA. Since the Angolan government was strapped for funds, monies were provided by oil companies, such as the Canadian Ranger Oil in exchange for oil concessions from the government. Again, EO’s success forced UNITA to negotiate a peace accord – the Lusaka Protocol – with the government in 1994 but insisted that EO had to leave Angola in exchange for disarming. EO’s contract was terminated in 1995 and a UN Peacekeeping force took over to enforce the Protocol. The war continued until the death of UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi in 2002 but the rebel group was never able to regain the upper hand. There is no question that EO’s involvement was central in the final defeat of UNITA.

EO’s other major activities took place in Sierra Leone soon after the end of its contract in Angola. Sierra Leone, a country of incredible diamond wealth, got its independence from Great Britain in 1961 and was ruled by the corrupt regime of Siaka Stevens who died in 1988. Stevens’ governance made Sierra Leone the poorest country in the world in spite of its wealth in minerals. In 1991, fighting began when the rebel group Revolutionary United Front (RUF) – composed of exiled opponents to the government – crossed the border from neighboring Liberia. The RUF is now famous for its gruesome brutality: decapitations, amputations of limbs and kidnapping of children to fill its ranks became its trademark. Unfortunately for Stevens, over the years, fearful of a military coup, he had systematically weakened its army so that the Sierra Leone armed forces provided little resistance to the RUF. By 1995, the rebels were ready to take the capital, Freetown. As the international community refused to intervene, the government turned to EO. Of course, the government could not afford EO’s services, so, diamond and other extraction companies agreed to foot the bill in exchange for mining concessions. It took only 9 days for EO to defeat the RUF and to start training the Sierra Leone armed forces. In 1996, Sierra Leone was able to hold multiparty elections. Peace accords were signed in 1999, EO withdrew and a peacekeeping force was deployed to complete the stabilization of the country after a bloody conflict that killed tens of thousands and displaced more than a million people and left countless mutilated. The peacekeepers withdrew in 2005. Foday Sanko, the RUF leader, admitted that were it not for EO, he would have succeeded in overthrowing the government.

Military Consultant Firms, such as Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) and Dyncorp International, provide advisory and training services but do not directly participate in fighting. MPRI is the most notorious firm in this category. It often contracts with the US military. For instance, it manages the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) in more than 200 universities. Since it heavily recruits among retired US officers, its operations often match the goals of the US foreign policy. This has been illustrated in the Balkans where MPRI gained its notoriety, although it has operations worldwide. In the early 1990s, Yugoslavia exploded in nationalist conflicts after decades of communist rule. The Serbs dominated the Yugoslav armed forces, so, when the Republic of Croatia declared its independence, its military capability was mediocre. However, Croatia could not appeal to the international community as the UN had established an embargo on arms, personnel and training in the entire area. In 1994, MPRI was contracted by Croatia to turn its army into a professional force capable of defeating the Serbs. This training was so successful that within months, the Croatian army had reconquered its entire territory. This offensive became the turning point of the war. Soon after, the Serbs agreed to a ceasefire and later to the Dayton Agreement that ended the conflict in November 1995. However, there are strong suspicions that MPRI services violated UN regulations.

Following its success with the Croatian military, MPRI was contracted by the Bosnian government to reorganize and train its military forces as well in May 1996. The difference with the Croatian situation was the Bosnian deal was paid for Islamic countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei, United Arab Emirates and Malaysia) as Bosnia is considered a Muslim country. MPRI is seen as a controversial company (Singer, 2003) because it seems to be the private arm of the US government, going where the US military is not allowed to go and limiting the political risks to any US administration.

Military Support Firms provide all services related to logistics such as transportation, camp operation and maintenance, construction of temporary or permanent facilities, food services, laundry, and mail delivery. The most notorious military support firm is Brown & Root Services (BRS), a subsidiary of Halliburton. BRS follows the US military in practically all its operations, from Somalia to Kosovo to Iraq. The defining trait of such companies is that they do not participate in military activities of any sorts. They provide all behind the scenes logistics.

iii) Economics of New Wars

According to the Clausewitzian conception, conventional wars are politics by other means. New wars are a way of life with their own economics. As Herfried Munkler (2005) shows, new wars are cheap because they are fought not with expensive state-of-the-art high-tech weaponry; they are fought with light weapons, such as AK-47s and landmines. The world is awash with such weapons because, even though Western countries downsized their military at the end of the Cold War, production of weapons has been increasing. In addition, when the USSR disappeared in the early 1990s, a lot of its light weapons arsenal disappeared and found its way in different peripheral countries now engaged in internal conflicts (a fact dramatically illustrated by the opening scene of the movie “The Lord of War”).

New wars are also cheap because of the availability of people to turn into soldiers. Many peripheral countries have large numbers of young men whose only social prospect is to affiliate themselves with a warlord who will provide them with an income (mostly in the form of looting and plundering) and respect at the point of an AK-47. And because the weaponry used in new wars is light and simple, children can be recruited (see below) and there is no need to extensive training.

And finally, new wars are cheap because there are new sources of funding available: subsidies from other states (such as Cuban subsidies to Angola), international corporations (such as Ranger Oil in Angola), wealthy exile communities (such as the exile Tamil community for Sri Lanka), international aid (Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Bosnia), income from natural resources (such as the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone), illegal goods (such as the FARC rebel group growing coca in Colombia).

In addition to being cheap, new wars are profitable for some people, mostly warlords who become partly politicians and partly entrepreneurs. For them, war is a profitable business, so why would they want peace? This is why new wars are long, last over many years and turn into a way of life for the participants: for instance, Sierra Leone (1991-2005), Angola (1975-2002), Mozambique (1975-1992), Sri Lanka (1983-ongoing), and Colombia (late 1940s – ongoing).

New wars are particularly profitable when warlords can connect to the global economy. For instance, the Sierra Leone rebel group Revolutionary United Front’s main strategy was to control diamond mines in order to get funding for weapons. Similarly, the Angolan rebel group UNITA would try to control oil installations and pipelines. The more a country has natural resources that have value on the global marketplace, the more likely it is that a new war will explode there. As Munkler (2005) shows, connection to the global economy, far from promoting peace – as many globalists would have it – actually increases the probability of internal conflict as well as their length. As long as parties to a new war can plug into the global economy, through the legal sale of natural resources or the illegal production of narcotics, it guarantees a major source of income that will keep the war going and enrich warlords. If such sources of revenue are not available, then kidnapping (in the case of the rebel FARC in Colombia who kidnaps approximately 3,000 people each year) or forced prostitution into Western European brothels (in the case of former Yugoslavia) can generate the necessary capital needed to keep fighting.

Finally, new wars are profitable because warlords understand the way the Western media function. Any new war does not consist of specific battles where opposing armies face off. In new wars, battles are avoided and civilians are the major casualties. In other worlds, new wars generate massacres and high numbers of refugees. Warlords know that, at a certain point, Western countries will face pressure from public opinion to send at least humanitarian relief for the displaced civilian populations. According to Munkler, warlords integrate international aid in their planning and logistics. Refugee camps set up by the United Nations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) become sources of income for warring parties. For instance, the refugee camps set up in the Democratic Republic of Congo were used as base camps but the defeated Hutus responsible for the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda and from which they could safely launch attacks into Rwanda to destabilize the newly-installed governments. This ended up causing Rwanda and Uganda to finally launch their own raids against the camps, a move unpopular with western governments, unaware that the camps were used as shelters by those responsible for the genocide. Similarly, the Congolese military would launch raids into the camps to steal supplies and resell them on the local market. In Bosnia, both sides in the conflict would try to control UN convoy routes so that they could collect “custom taxes” (to seize a share of the supplies) in exchange for safe passage.

As Munkler (2005) demonstrates, new wars reflect global economic mechanisms: profits are privatized and costs are socialized, which contributes to the great profitability of new wars. Profits are privatized in the sense that only the warlords and their entourage benefit from the war. Societies as a whole pay a heavy price in new wars. In a country engulfed in such conflict, the civilian population is mistreated usually by all parties to the war. The Sierra Leonean RUF is infamous for the mutilations (cutting off limbs and lips) it inflicted on villagers who refused to join its ranks or suspected to be government informants. As large segments of the population ends in refugee camps or dead, the economy is bound to collapse and whatever natural resources could be used to generate monies for society are in the hands of warlords. Families are broken up and whatever political organizations remained finally disappears. New wars leave entire societies dependent upon international aid, creating conditions of neo-colonialism.

New wars therefore enrich a few people (warlords and their entourage, dealers, smugglers and various middlemen who provide weapons) but leave societies exhausted and devastated, and, often, uninhabitable (as when belligerents leave millions of landmines behind once a conflict is over). Such private economic benefits are the main motivators for new wars and their duration. Religious, ethnic or nationalistic arguments may be used to justify the conflict but, as Munkler (2005) emphasizes, new wars continue because they are a profitable way of life in the context of failed states in interaction with the global economy.

iv) Child Soldiers

Reliable sources estimate that there are around 300,000 child soldiers worldwide (just under 10% of all combatants), fighting for various groups, mostly non-state organizations, such as paramilitary units, or rebel organizations. The most widespread use of child soldiers is in Africa where approximately 100,000 children, as young as nine, are involved in various conflicts, although most child soldiers are between 14 and 18. According to P.W. Singer (2005), 68% of recently ended conflict had child soldiers and more than 40% of armed organizations around the world use child soldiers. Children are an integral part of new wars, both as victims and as participants. As we just saw, children make low-cost soldiers as large numbers of children in peripheral countries are the primary losers of economic globalization: impoverished, uneducated, marginalized, and with non-existent socioeconomic prospects or chances of improvement, especially in failed states – what P.W. Singer (2005) call a “lost generation”. There is therefore a very large pool of labor all the easier to exploit by warlords as many may be AIDS orphans, especially in Africa. In addition to their sheer numbers, children are present in new wars because the weaponry has become smaller, lighter, easier to use, deadlier and cheaper. Because child soldiers and light weapons are so cheap, they are perfectly adapted to new wars motivated principally by private profits and they make war and violence more likely.

How are children recruited and how do they become soldiers? Child soldiers are usually subjected to forced recruitment through abduction: according to Singer (2005), the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) of Uganda determines how many children it needs and sends out a raiding party to meet its quota whereas the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elaam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka has computer databases of the population (McDougall, 2006). Children are usually selected based on their size and ability to carry weapons. Recruitment is not random, it is carefully planned: for instance, boarding schools and orphanages are frequent targets as large numbers of children are in the same place and out-of-touch with their parents. Street children are also easy targets. Children who volunteer to serve for armed forces do so usually to improve their economic situation and, in the case of young boys, to gain the respect they get through carrying a weapon. Being member of armed forces becomes not only a source of income and economic security but also a source of prestige and honor.

The process of resocialization that turns children into soldiers has already been examined in our chapter on socialization. However, once trained and indoctrinated, children make fierce soldiers willing to commit atrocities. Children make daring soldiers because they tend to be less aware of danger and less afraid of death. Their training has rendered them both fearful and devoted to their leaders. Such traits are accentuated by the use of drugs and alcohol. This explains that the main tactical deployment of children is simply to send wave after wave of child soldiers against an enemy position.

P.W. Singer identifies several major consequences to having children in wars:

With large numbers of children, practically any organization can be turned into an army, which increases the risk of more and longer war and state failure. For instance, the LRA has only 200 core members, but an armed force of 14,000 made in large part of children. Children soldiers also make wars almost impossible to end because it is so easy to get new recruits and they are largely disposable. As Singer (2005:98): “Children make wars easier to start and harder to end.” Children soldiers also increase the level of atrocities against civilians committed in war: child soldiers tend not to take prisoners and do not have the moral inhibitions that adults or professional soldiers may have. Also, when children are present, ideologies play even less a role in new wars: greed and exercise of power through violence become the dominant motivation. Finally, children soldiers make societies harder to rebuild as their socialization into new wars make them prone to violence and lacking in moral socialization, not to mention the fact that most of them suffer from various forms traumas.

v) Sexual Violence

If civilians constitute the main victims of new wars, women and girls have been particularly targeted in patterns of sexual violence – violence exercised again one gender, usually women. As Munkler (2005) shows, sexual violence is an integral part of new wars, especially in the context of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing leads to the destruction of a reviled ethnic group’s cultural heritage and possessions, but it also involves the massacres of males and the massive rapes of women and girls (as was especially the case in Rwanda and Bosnia). In Bosnia, Serb paramilitary groups established rape camps as part of their strategy. As Munkler describes, sexual violence, as a strategy, is aimed at demoralizing the enemy by “polluting” the women and making sure they got pregnant, which is why, in Bosnia, rapes would take place in the presence of male relatives, in a process of humiliation and emasculation. In rural areas, where traditional beliefs are still strong, pregnancies resulting from rape contribute to the dislocation of traditional social order and family ties.

In this sense, new wars are heavily gendered in that boys are more easily recruited when they feel their masculinity threatened by the lack of social and economic prospects. Being a soldier is a way of reestablishing one’s masculine position in society. On the other hand, women and girls are primary victims of new wars as their rape is the sexual violence through which masculine status is regained.

Globalization may make the world more interconnected but it does not make it more stable or more secure. Globalization is a source of tensions and gives new configurations to old threats.