New War Theory

7/28/2019 New War Theory

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Martin Shaw

The contemporary mode of warfare?

Mary Kaldor?s theory of new wars

/Review essay from Review of International Political Economy, 7, 1,2000, 171-80. (See also comments on this essay by //ChristopherMcDowell/ /, onrelationship of international funders to mass displacement.)/

Contents: The theory of new wars ; Theunderstanding of ?old? warfare ;The absence of the larger context ;Genocidal war as the problem ;Bibliography

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Mary Kaldor and Basker Vashee, eds, _New Wars_, London: Pinter, 1997

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Mary Kaldor, Ulrich Albrecht and Genevive Schmder, eds, _The End

of Military Fordism_, London: Pinter, 1998

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Mary Kaldor, _New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era_,Cambridge: Polity, 1999

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These books provide the most comprehensive, illuminating analysis yet ofthe most widespread contemporary forms of war. They are informed by apolitical-economic approach - indeed they were presented at the 1998

_RIPE_-Sussex conference - and establish Mary Kaldor, long one of our

most important theorists of war, as the foremost authority on ?newwars?. Her core argument, outlined first in the introduction to _NewWars_, is developed considerably in _New and Old Wars_, the fulleststatement and principal basis of this discussion. (Discrepancies arisingfrom the less developed character of the earlier work will not beexplored, while the edited books will be referred to chiefly where thecontributions of other authors add to Kaldor?s argument.)

The theory of new wars

At the heart of the latest book, three chapters which stand out asparticularly original and reflect Kaldor?s unique qualifications.Chapter 3 is a case study of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in, on and for which

Kaldor has worked extensively both as activist and researcher; chapter 4examines the politics of ?new wars?, and chapter 5 the ?globalized wareconomy?. Although in some quarters Kaldor?s combination of roles isapparently seen as problematic, this work is its clearest possiblevindication. Her engagement with cosmopolitan political practice -chiefly in Bosnia but also in other European zones of war - not onlyenables Kaldor to produce the most incisive, balanced short critique ofthe Bosnian conflict, but also informs the more general analyses whichfollow.


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Against the grain of widespread assumptions that most wars of the 1990sare merely ?civil? wars produced by ?ethnic conflict?, or that what weare seeing is a simple ?privatisation? of violence, Kaldor clearlydemonstrates that Bosnia and other conflicts were political conflicts,involving state power as well as various ?private? forces, in which?identity politics? is a means by which political elites reproduce theirpower.

She shows how this is part of a new political economy of war, in which arange of new militaries - the decaying remnants of state armies,paramilitary groups (often financed by governments), self-defence units,mercenaries and international troops - engage in new forms of violence.These include systematic murder of ?others?, forcible populationexpulsion known as ethnic ?cleansing? (linked ironically to electorallegitimation), and rendering areas uninhabitable - all of which aregenocidal. It is estimated that 80 per cent of victims in current warsare civilians; over 80 per cent were military in wars earlier this century.

These forms of violence are reproduced through an ?extreme form ofglobalization? in which production collapses and armed forces aresustained via remittances, diaspora fund-raising, external governmentalassistance and the diversion of international humanitarian aid. Theglobal context is crucial to understanding this new political economy ofwar: globalized arms markets (analysed by Schmder in _Military

Fordism_), transnational ethnicities and internationalizedWestern-global interventions are all integral to new wars.

Unlike the classic modern war-economy of the total-war nation-state -which was mobilising and production-oriented - the new ?globalized? wareconomy is demobilising and parasitic: ?The new type of warfare is apredatory social condition.? It damages the economies of neighbouringregions as well as the zone of warfare itself, spreading refugees,identity-based politics and illegal trade. It creates ?badneighbourhoods? in world economy and society - regional clusters likethe Balkans, Caucasus, Horn of Africa, Central Africa, West Africa,Central Asia and of course Middle East.

The new warfare, Kaldor argues, is above all a political rather than amilitary challenge. It is about the breakdown of legitimacy, and we needa new cosmopolitan politics to reconstruct this in the zones of war.Cosmopolitanism here is a set of principles and a positive politicalvision, tied to the rule of law. Cosmopolitans are to be found withinthe local communities at the heart of the violence - particularly in?islands of civility? where identity politics has not taken full hold -as well as in the West. Genuine cosmopolitanism does not meannegotiating truces between warring ethno-nationalists but building uppluralist democratic politics.

Kaldor refocusses the categories through which we think about theinternational or Western role in zones of war. It is not a question of

intervention or non-intervention, humanitarian or otherwise: in theglobalized new wars, thinking based on ?inside? and ?outside? has lessmeaning. It should be, she argues, a question of cosmopolitanlaw-enforcement rather than peacekeeping or peace-enforcement, and ofreconstruction - understood in terms of political legitimacy as much aseconomic rebuilding - rather than humanitarian assistance (necessary asthat may be).

Kaldor offers us an understanding of some of the most troubling of allcontemporary phenomena - the deeply destructive, genocidal forms of


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violence which accompanied not only the break-ups of Yugoslavia and theSoviet Union but also the fragmentation of many states, especially inAfrica, since the end of the Cold War. The understanding is empiricallyrich - based on a broad comparative approach - analytically satisfyingand politically inspiring. It is complemented by the papers in the twoedited collections - especially _New Wars_, in which Alex de Waal onwarfare in Africa and Richard Falk on the United Nations andhumanitarian intervention make particularly interesting contributions.

The understanding of ?old? warfare

The problems of Kaldor?s account come in its articulation with thehistorical understanding of war in general and changes in war andpolitics as a whole in the current period. Clearly some will object thatnew wars are not so new; but even if most features are anticipated inearlier periods, Kaldor is right because the combination in new wars ishighly distinctive. Nevertheless it is clear that defining the noveltyprecisely is important, and Kaldor addresses this in Chapter 2, ?OldWars?, in _New and Old Wars_. Here modern war as a whole is defined asClausewitzian: tending towards the absolute; based on the trinity ofstate, army and people; and reaching its culmination in the decisivebattle. This war is seen as modern because it reflects the keydistinctions of modernity: between public and private, internal andexternal, economic and political, civil and military, combatant and

non-combatant.

Kaldor recognises the historicity of Clausewitz: its articulation ofNapoleonic-Wars experiences; its predating of the industrialisation ofwarfare, modern alliances and the codification of the laws of war. Inparticular, she recognises that ?Clausewitz could not possibly haveenvisaged the awesome combination of mass production, mass politics andmass communications when harnessed to mass production.? Thus the totalwars of the twentieth century went far beyond Clausewitz?s model. In thedevelopments of the Cold War period - nuclear weapons, the permanentstate of war without actual fighting (except by proxy), the allianceswith their pooling of states? monopolies of violence, the development oftransnational civil society - there was an ?erosion of the distinctions

between public and private, military and civil, internal and external?as well as of war and peace.

So far so good, although it is all rather brief - because designed toset off the detailed exploration of new war. It doesn?t, however, go farenough: and the limitations of the historical model proposed lead first,to an understatement of the contemporary problem of warfare and second,to a narrowing of the significance of the phenomenon of new wars: inparticular the relations to other contemporary forms of war (continuingpreparations for inter-state war) are left unclarified.

In a still seminal essay, Kaldor (1982a) proposed the concept of the?mode of warfare?. This was a development of Clausewitz?s insights (into

the totality of relations between war-preparation, war and battle as themoment of realisation) by analogy with the mode of production (in whichthe process of production culminates in realisation through exchange).Part of Kaldor?s reasoning in developing the idea of the mode of warfarewas to clarify its autonomous logic, and repudiate simple Marxistreductions of warfare to capitalism. In _The Baroque Arsenal,_ Kaldor(1982b) used the difference between the character of realisation inproduction and warfare to much effect. A looser expression of the sameidea was given by Giddens? (1985) idea of warfare as one of the four key?institutional clusters? of modernity.


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The issue here is the relationship between these modes (or clusters). Aradical answer was explicit in Edward Thompson?s (1982) proposal that weunderstand modern civilization as a whole as ?exterminism?. His polemic- now lost in the still unwritten history of the Second Cold War - madea deadly serious analytical point: that modern industrial societies,East and West, had been permeated by the logic of mass extermination.For Thompson, the danger was that this would culminate in the prospectof a mutual genocide which could end human history if not life on thisplanet.

It did not, in the 1980s, although the nuclear arms race had indeedbecome particularly dangerous. This was partly because of theunravelling of the political structures of the Cold War, from below aswell as above - the former also anticipated in Thompson?s writing andcampaigning. But despite the end of the Cold War, the logic of massextermination remained: the harnessing not only of industry, but ofpolitics and culture, to the purposes of mass killing. In a critique(Shaw, 1990) I tried to show that, although on the one hand Thompson?saccount contained some analytical as well as polemical excesses, on theother it was - ironically given his profession - insufficientlyhistorically underpinned.

If we trace the issue back, it becomes clear that from the

mid-nineteenth century, the institutions of warfare fed off industrialcapitalist society - creating (by late century) mass armies fed byconscription from increasingly disciplined workforces; militaristpolitics fed by mass parties and a mass-circulation press; as well asmass-produced weaponry in distinct state-protected military-industrialsectors (MacNeill, 1982). In turn, these processes led to powerful statemachines with capacities to mobilise economy and society for war. InKaldor?s (1982a) terms, the ?mode of warfare?, having fed off the ?modeof production?, came in turn to dominate and shape it - in statist wareconomies and statist politics, both totalitarian and Keynesian-reformist.

Thus total war was not just a type of war (so that we can judge how farparticular wars were total - 1939-45 more so than 1914-18, and so on)

but a _mode_ of warfare. It involved a particular relation to the modeof production, in which the latter was actually subordinated. Theexterminist character of this mode derived directly from this core,structural relation, which developed through the historical experienceof the two world wars and the Cold War (Shaw, 1988, 1991). Once economyand society had been incorporated directly into the supply side of war,as a ?home front?, then military logic (with the aid of aerialtechnology) transformed them into a part of the battlefield. The logicof the warfare-production relationship made first ?strategic? industriesand then whole urban populations into targets. By the time of Hamburg,Dresden and Tokyo, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki, war had becomegenocidal. Here was the (ir)rational historical kernel of Thompson?sconcept of exterminism.

Extermination was not, for the Allies, a goal in itself, but an intendedand desired consequence of the aim of Germany?s and Japan?s surrenders.It is a fine line, and it is all that separates Allied war policy fromAuschwitz, where extermination was an aim in and of itself. TheHolocaust has of course become an object of judgement and commemoration- of a violated people and of violated humanity in general - largelyoutside the understanding of war. Historically, however, it was aproduct of war: large Jewish populations came into Hitler?s grasp byconquest, and extermination was developed, applied and achieved through


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not just the methods of modernity (Bauman, 1991) but specifically thoseof modern war. The Nazi state waged a ?war against the Jews?(Davidowicz, 1985). The people were an enemy, as much as the moreconventional enemies, the other states.

When the victors of 1945 codified genocide in the 1948 Convention, theyidentified the peculiar horror of the Nazi extermination policy as thebasic model. For them, naturally, the line which separated it from theirown mass slaughters of civilians remained sacrosanct - the more so asfrom the 1950s the now-rival superpowers planned new depths ofdestruction, with _every_ city a target. And yet the meaning ofextermination, and (in a broader sense than the Convention?s) genocide,was now more deeply embedded in the idea of warfare than ever before: sothoroughly, indeed, that one might ask if it could ever really bedisentangled?

Much of the subsequent history of military planning, during and sincethe Cold War, can be seen as an attempt to avoid redundancy, to overcomethe self-defeating, mutually genocidal character of the dominantweaponry. Hence, ironically, the development of cruise missiles,designed first to be the more accurate delivery vehicles of a ?limitednuclear war? - for ?tactical? targetting of military and economic sites- and now become the means of ?punishing? the Iraqi regime through?clinical? destruction of its strategic sites.

The absence of the larger context

Kaldor?s new work says little about any of this. She argues that thetechnologically-driven ?revolution in military affairs? is not the?real? revolution in war: ?Beneath the spectacular displays are realwars, which, even in the case of the 1991 Iraq war in which hundreds andthousands of Kurds and Shiites died, are better explained in terms of myconception of new wars.? How this is so she does not explain, however,and the Iraqi wars of the 1990s are a disappointing omission from thedetailed analysis. It leaves open the question of how the (on thesurface) interstate Gulf war - and the larger phenomena of the UnitedStates? and other powers? continuing preparations for interstate war -

can be related to the ?new wars? concept.

There is here something of a mismatch between Kaldor?s and some othercontributions to _Military Fordism_, such as Schmder?s documentation ofthe continuing high levels, despite real reductions, of state militaryexpenditures, and Lovering?s of rapidly transforming European defenceindustries. Achcar (1998) has pointed out that the US retains anenormous military capacity, and suggests that the only way to makestrategic sense of it is to read the scenario of simultaneous warsagainst Iraq and North Korea as planning for simultaneous conflicts withRussia and China. Clearly, for all the downsizing, warfare for the bigstates is still about far more than managing new wars.

All this suggests an afterlife, even more surreal than the Cold Waritself, for what Kaldor (1990) termed the ?imaginary war?. The UnitedStates and NATO still plan to fight massive interstate wars, even thoughthe circumstances in which these wars could occur are now very difficultto envisage. Similarly, across the globe, state elites of all kindsmaintain historically very high levels of military expenditures anddangerous military capacity, although their awareness both ofinterdependence on the one hand and the limitations of military force onthe other are surely growing.


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One relation between the kind of war presupposed by these forces andexpenditures, and the new wars of which Kaldor writes, is surely to befound in the overwhelming US preference for airpower. No one lookingcarefully at new wars can fail to be struck by the inappropriateness ofaerial bombardment as the principal means of dealing with issues rangingfrom ethnic cleansing to terrorism and lack of cooperation with UNinspectors. Troops on the ground are universally understood to be a moreappropriate primary military response in many situations, and far morecompatible with the political and legal measures needed. In Bosnia,indeed, the US eventually succumbed to this logic in enforcing Dayton.

So why does the US reach repeatedly for air strikes, and what is thesignificance of this policy? (An early example, the US attack on Libya,was examined in Thompson and Kaldor, 1986.) In part they are gesturepolitics, a way of looking tough - often timed to align with domesticcrises - even if they achieve minimal real political results. In partbombing is a relatively cost-free way of attacking even significantstate militaries like Serbia?s or Iraq?s, minimising risks to Americanlives and hence administrations? political standing. But behind thesefactors is the whole mode of warfare derived from the Second World Warand Cold War, centred on technologically-driven mass slaughter. Thislives in on the hardware-centred ?armament culture? (Luckham, 1984) ofthe advanced modern militaries and the political elites who support them.

Although this dominant form of warfare is now not just imaginary butvirtual, the itch to _realise_ all those computer-gamed scenarios inreal explosions, immolating physical structures and if necessary livingbeings, is still powerful. Having invested such enormous resources inthe most sophisticated technologies of destruction, states like the USand UK are hardly going to admit that the legitimate scope of modernmilitaries should be limited to a glorified armed form of policing, insupport of international civil and legal power.

The key question here is, of course, whether there remains a genocidalcontent to late-modern airpower. Clearly with computer-aided targetting,advanced airforces can attack cities without causing colossal loss oflife. Even according to Iraqi sources, the death toll from the

Anglo-American attacks on Iraq in 1998 - in which more firepower wasused than during the 1991 attacks - resulted in fewer than 100 deaths:hardly genocidal? Even during the 1991 war, direct Iraqi civiliancasualties from coalition bombing were certainly far fewer than militarydeaths. However, not only did genocidal episodes (the charred Amiriyashelter) lurk within ?surgical? bombardment, but the destruction ofelectricity and sewage supplies certainly produced - as the coalitionclearly knew it would, and in that sense intended - far larger losses ofcivilian lives. In this sense civilian deaths were more than?collateral?, and the non-genocidal character of the air bombardment wasmore apparent than real.

Genocidal war as the problem

Even in contemporary, technologically-revolutionised uses of airpower,therefore, the exterminist implication lingers on, a limited expressionof its still-present larger danger. What separates Bush and Clinton fromSaddam Hussein and Milosevic is still the fine line which separatedRoosevelt and Truman from Hitler: mass killing as an intendedconsequence, rather than an end in itself. The difference is that whileWestern powers are looking for ways of limiting the genocidal effects -or at least appearance - of war, for the main protagonists of new warsgenocide is not just one end among several (as it was for Hitler) but


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the principal business of war.

Saddam and Milosevic are important links in the chain of contemporarywarfare which links the Pentagon with the machete-killers of Rwanda andthe weekend snipers of Serbia-Montenegro. Although Kaldor?s accountemphasises external state support for new warriors, by focussing onBosnia rather than Croatia in 1991 she underemphasises the role ofconventional state military forces, and indeed of Milosevic. Similarlythe general absence of Iraq loses from her account the state and leaderresponsible for initiating the two most important interstate wars of thelast twenty years together with the most repeated genocidal wars againstcivilian populations.

In short, Kaldor restricts the significance of new wars byover-emphasising their separation from continuing inter-state war, andby understating how far genocidal tendencies have come to dominate incontemporary war as a whole. Increasingly states (not only Serbia andIraq but also Russia in Chechnya, Israel in the West Bank and Lebanon)go to war because of uncertainty in their control over ?their?territory, and these wars are directed largely against civilian populations.

With the loss of Cold War narratives, particularly war as revolution,what is left is the logic of war as genocide. Although we need to becritical of the media construction of Saddam as Hitler, the main

difference is that he heads a third-tier state with uncertain controlover its own territory rather than a military superpower. But preciselyfor this reason, the threat his regime poses is principally to thepeople of Iraq and immediately surrounding states, and for this reasonhis wars have been particularly genocidal.

The reluctance to label recent wars as genocidal, compared to Hitler?s,mistakes the comparison. In the Nazi wars, the campaign against the Jewswas secondary to interstate conflict. Most of the German population werenot directly involved, if only because most victims of the Holocaustwere Jews in conquered eastern Europe, and relatively few Jews remainedin Germany itself (they were only one per cent of the population even in1933, concentrated in larger urban areas: half had fled by 1939).

In Bosnia, however, ethnic ?cleansing? was the principal aim of theSerbian (and Croatian) forces. Non-Serbs (and non-Croats) were a largeminorities if not majorities in the Serbian- (and Croatian-) controlledareas, and locally-raised militia, police and local authorities - aswell as many civilians - were involved directly in genocide. The latter,moreover, was double-edged: directed against ethnic groups _and_ pluralurban communities. In Rwanda, large numbers of the Hutu civilianpopulation as well as state, militia and public authorities weremobilised to murder their neighbours. There was an amateurish quality tothese genocides compared to the Nazis: but the recognition of Nazism inthe Omarska camp, or of the _Einsatzgruppen_ in the mass graves ofSrebrenica, was no mistake.

New wars, therefore, are genocidal wars. They carry the logic ofexterminism in total war to the point where war is genocide. Theyemphasise more than ever that in modernity, _war is the problem_. Thisconclusion enables us to pose the question of appropriate responses moreclearly. Recultivating ?the warrior?s honour?, for which Ignatieff(1997) has argued, can at best be a partial solution. Cosmopolitanlaw-enforcement, which Kaldor advocates, is an alternative to war, andthe kinds of military forces which it needs _are_ glorified policemen.Reconstructing local legitimacy, and indeed constructing global


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legitimacy, ultimately requires Western and other major states torepudiate war as a solution, and to dismantle their potentiallygenocidal military structures which provide a framework of legitimacyfor all the new warriors.

Theoretically, the problems which this poses for the social sciences arejust as large. If total war was a mode of warfare which dominated thecapitalist mode of production in mid-century, its mutation through theCold War and nuclear arms race (not to mention the ?revolution inmilitary affairs?) involves changed relations between war, economy andsociety (I began to analyse these, in Shaw, 1988, 1991). Kaldorintroduces the new war-economy as an ?extreme form of globalization?,but globalization itself is presented as external to war. In the endthis is unsatisfactory: globality can be traced to the contradictions oftotal war, and globalization results not only from the end of the ColdWar but from the loosening relationships of the war-machines and theeconomy (Shaw, 1999). These are the forces which are feeding back intonew wars.

Kaldor?s _New and Old Wars_ therefore does more than illuminate a newform of war. She helps us to re-open fundamental questions whichpolitical economy and social science may have thought they had leftbehind in 1989, but which are still central to our understanding ofmodern society.

Bibliography

Achcar, G. (1998) ?The Strategic Triad: The United States, Russia andChina?, _New Left Review_, 228, pp. 91-127

Bauman, Z. (1991) _Modernity and the Holocaust_, Oxford: Blackwell

Davidowicz, L. (1985) _The War against the Jews_, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Giddens, A. (1985) _The Nation-State and Violence_, Cambridge: Polity

Ignatieff, M. (1997), _The Warrior?s Honour_, Oxford: Blackwell

Kaldor, M. (1982a) ?Warfare and Capitalism?, in E.P. Thompson _et al._,_Exterminism and Cold War_, London: Verso, pp. 261-88

Kaldor, M. (1982b) _The Baroque Arsenal,_ London: Deutsch

Kaldor, M. (1990) _The Imaginary War_, Oxford: Blackwell

Luckham, R. (1984) ?Of Arms and Culture?, _Current Research on Peace andViolence_, VII, 1, pp. 1-64

MacNeill, W.H. (1982) _The Pursuit of Power_, Oxford: Blackwell

Shaw, M. (1988) _Dialectics of War: An Essay on the Social Theory of Warand Peace_, London: Pluto

Shaw, M. (1990) 'From Total War to Democratic Peace: exterminism andhistorical pacifism', in H. Kaye and K. McClelland, eds, _E. P.Thompson: Critical Debates,_ Cambridge: Polity, pp. 233-51

Thompson, E.P. (1982) ?Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage ofCivilization?, in Thompson _et al._, _Exterminism and Cold War_, London:Verso, pp. 1-34


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Thompson, E.P. and Kaldor, M., eds. (1986) _Mad Dogs: The US Attacks onLibya_, Harmondsworth: Penguin

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