Ending Wars

Feargal Cochrane

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745645179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Many books have been written about war, but few have focused on how wars can be brought to an end. Wars are rarely inevitable however and this book is aimed at understanding how violent conflicts can be brought to a close through intervention, mediation and political negotiation.

The simple premise underlying the book is that wars between states and wars within states are generally fought by rational people for particular political goals or perceived interests. War is better understood as a methodology rather than an ideology. When the context, issues and actors in these armed conflicts change then it is often possible to control, or even transform such violence.

By bringing together a number of existing debates from peace and conflict research as well as scholars of international relations, the book examines the dynamic forces that lie behind the ending of wars and how these have changed over time. Examples are drawn from a wide range of armed conflicts to analyse the efforts that have been made to move from War-War to Jaw-Jaw, or more typically Jaw-War. Efforts at third-party intervention, mediation and political negotiation across a range of conflict zones from Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa are discussed in full. Neither idealistic nor fatalistic, this book is a must-read for all students of international politics and security studies.

CHAPTER ONE

The Changing Nature of War

Through much of history, war has been the norm rather than the exception in relations among nations.

Joseph Nye¹

All of us are familiar with the concept of war and are aware of the heavy cost it brings in terms of death, injury and destruction to the world in which we live. As the journalist Robert Fisk has eloquently remarked, ‘[W]ar is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.’² While most readers of this book will thankfully not have been exposed to the full horrors of warfare, we all have at least a working knowledge of some of the larger-scale ‘hegemonic’ wars that have been documented through recent human history and know something of their causal factors and how these violent conflagrations were eventually brought to an end. However, much less attention has been paid to the fact that wars have been evolving and mutating in three inter-connecting ways: firstly, in how they are conducted; secondly, in terms of the people affected by them; and, thirdly, in the challenges and opportunities this presents for bringing wars to an end.

Violent conflict in the twenty-first century is a different phenomenon to its ancient relation, described by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC, or more recent examples such as World Wars I and II during the twentieth century. Contemporary conflicts are often mobile and fluid, with complex arrays of direct and indirect actors and uncertain timelines. As a consequence, decisions about why to go to war, when to go to war, whom to go to war with, how to engage in battle and when to stop are more complicated now than they were in the past. It is important to account for and understand the changing nature of warfare, as this is directly connected to how such conflicts can be brought to an end in today’s world.

What is War?

Before discussing how the practice of war has changed, it is sensible to provide some definition about how war is understood. This book prefers an inclusive definition of armed conflict that treats war as an issue of scale, rather than as an inherently different form of physical violence. War, therefore, is defined here as being a period of organized violence between at least two parties, who may come from transnational, state or sub-state sources. As the impact on the victim remains the same (death, injury, displacement), little effort is made here to distinguish between levels of legitimate authority in the act of violence. As Quincy Wright has remarked in his classic analysis A Study of War: ‘[W]ar is only one of many abnormal legal situations. It is but one of numerous conflict procedures. It is only an extreme case of group attitudes. It is only a very large-scale resort to violence.’³

Categorizations of violence can easily lead to justifications of it for the purposes of national defence or in pursuit of that increasingly hollow phrase within international affairs, ‘international peace and security’. Thus, acts of violence up to and including acts of war committed by states are easily deemed to be acts of ‘reasonable force’, while those committed by paramilitary factions are categorized as ‘acts of terrorism’. However, it is important to ensure that arithmetic categories do not become moral ones and that violence from undeclared wars gets its share of attention alongside the violence authorized/legitimized by the state and powerful international institutions.⁴ To focus on large-scale war at the expense of undeclared or smaller-scale (but more numerous) conflicts within states would risk taking an unnecessarily state-centric view of violent conflict in the contemporary world. Worse still, to engage in the binary logic of state-driven ‘force’ versus non-state-based ‘terror’ is of little comfort to those who experience and suffer such violence in their lives.

While many commentators (and perpetrators) agree that war is horrific, painful and costly in human and economic terms, there remains a belief that states (and their elite actors) can be absolved from the responsibility and guilt of the act of killing if such violence is organized along certain lines, or if it is sanctioned by a ‘legitimate’ authority. As a consequence, the treatment of war is not limited in this book to inter-state conflict, or to a particular threshold of casualties, but is taken to include intra-state and sub-state conflict of the type highlighted in the post-9/11 era, with the global war on terror. The purpose here is to extend the analysis of warfare outside the boundaries of the international state system and focus on wars within states rather than on wars between them. This framing is more appropriate to the conflicts of the twenty-first century and facilitates an integrated discussion of the important roles played by state, sub-state and transnational actors in both the conduct and termination of warfare.

Several different approaches have been taken by conflict researchers in order to define, categorize and quantify warfare, most of which attempt to analyse the patterns and frequency of armed conflict over time. While plenty of information has been collected to define, map and quantify the intensity of armed conflict, its power as an explanatory tool is less certain. As Dennis Sandole points out, ‘[N]ot only do we not know much, if anything, about the sources of influence on decisions to go to war, but what we think we know could be challenged by other (contradictory) findings.’⁵ One of the central reasons for the debate surrounding the limits of war, the precise figures that surround its frequency and intensity, and whether its causal factors can be understood and controlled relates to the varied methodologies that have been used to gather such information. However, another more fundamental issue is pertinent here, namely that armed conflict is not a closed system that lends itself easily to quantification. The edges of measurement in the gathering (and interpretation) of these data are often blurred and subject to different techniques. These different methodologies can produce alarming variations in assessments of war frequency and intensity and diverse interpretations about what these figures mean for future trends in armed conflict and possible strategies that might be pursued for ending it.⁶

The Social Meaning of War

While quantitative researchers have spent some time defining what wars are,⁷ less attention has been given to the changing meaning of war as a social descriptor of armed conflict. In the past, the act of war was indelibly connected to statehood, and decisions about going to war, the conduct during war and when to end the conflict were taken by the elite political and military groups within states. This, together with the organization of the international political system which recognized the rights of states, served to connect the concept of ‘war’ with the legitimacy of states, and to render the act of warfare as being, on certain occasions, ‘just’. The use of armed conflict from non-state sources, on the other hand, has generally been regarded as unwarranted and illegitimate ‘terrorism’ (e.g. the Tamil Tigers, the Provisional IRA and, of course, Al-Qaeda) or the more recently coined ‘insurgency’, to describe the actions of various groups of militant Sunni nationalists in Iraq. This is not to say that the actions of paramilitary groups have not been deadly and to deny that many people have been (and continue to be) killed or injured in horrifying ways by such groups. However, as Fred Halliday has pointed out, ‘[T]he great mass of criminal activities against civilians and others are carried out not by rebel groups, but by states.’⁸ It might also be argued that not all of this death and destruction is carried out by states that we might describe as being ‘rogue’, ‘weak’, ‘collapsed’ or otherwise dysfunctional regimes within the neo-liberal paradigm of ‘good governance’.

The ending of the Cold War witnessed the curious phenomenon of the ‘democratic peace’ and its close associate, ‘humanitarian war’. These are at the heart of the distinction between war as being a regrettable but essential and even reasonable social phenomenon, on the one hand, and war as unnecessary and pernicious, on the other. Advocates of the ‘democratic peace’ advance the neo-liberal view that international peace and security can only be achieved through the promotion of the values and structures of Western democracy and liberal market reform. The logic goes that as democracies do not wage war on other democracies, then the world will be a safer place when the values and practices of democratization are extended from the Global North to the Global South. One of the leading thinkers behind democratic peace theory is Michael Doyle, who argues that, for all of their flaws, inconsistencies and selfish motivations, liberal states have the capacity to tame the anarchic nature of the international system and produce greater peace and stability. ‘Even though liberal states have become involved in numerous wars with nonliberal states, constitutionally secure liberal states have yet to engage in war with one another. . . . A liberal zone of peace, a pacific union, has been maintained and has expanded despite numerous particular conflicts of economic and strategic interest.’⁹ Todd Landman outlines the case for the democratic peace in the following summary of academic literature on the subject.

In the international sphere, the very large literature on the democratic peace has shown that since the late 1800s pairs of democracies (i.e. dyads) do not go to war with one another . . . . Some commentators have argued that this empirical finding is the closest thing to a law that political science has established . . . . Further research argues that democracies are less conflict-prone than non-democracies . . . and that democratizing countries that have well-managed transitions are less likely to be engaged in interstate warfare . . . .¹⁰

Critics of this view would argue that while democratic states might have demonstrated a reluctance to go to war with one another, they seemed more enthusiastic about going to war with those whom they felt did not live up to their standards of governance. In fact, those at the policy end of the democratic peace have been zealous – even evangelical – in their desire to bring war to a host of countries in the developing world. As the 2005 Human Security Report suggests, ‘[T]he UK, France, the US and the Soviet Union/Russia top the list of countries involved in international wars in the last 60 years.’¹¹

In his challenging book At War’s End, Roland Paris makes an important distinction which he claims advocates of the democratic peace model fail fully to appreciate. ‘Although well-established market democracies may be more peaceful in their internal and international affairs than non-democracies, the policy of promoting democracy necessarily involves transforming a state into a market democracy.’¹² For Paris, it is not so much the pursuit of democratic norms and market liberalization that is the problem, but rather the means of getting there that creates the difficulty. This transition, often forced at an unreasonable pace within societies still dealing with the trauma of war, is likely to exacerbate rather than end conflict in the region. David Keen, writing about the role of international financial institutions and their promotion of liberal market reforms in Sierra Leone, remarks that

one can certainly point to many western countries with relatively free markets where democracy is well established and where the risk of war (or at least internal war) seems minimal. However, an apparent correlation between (relatively) free markets, democracy, and peace within developed countries tells us little about how less fortunate countries might best arrive at this enviable state of affairs.¹³

Roger Mac Ginty has critiqued what he terms the hegemonic dominance of democratic peace theory, and points out that ‘correlation is not the same as causation. . . . The precise reasons for the seeming association between democratic states and warlessness are unclear and are likely to reside in such a complex matrix of reasons (enduring alliances and patterns of trade, etc.) that it is difficult to promote one war-resisting factor such as democracy above others.’¹⁴

The assumptions behind the democratic peace have even led some to extrapolate beyond the bounds of reason. The New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman, for instance, famously expounded the ‘Golden Arches Theory’ in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree.¹⁵ This theory put forward the notion that no two countries with a McDonald’s restaurant have ever gone to war with one another and that most of their franchises are in democratic states. Thus to follow the theory through, the more McDonald’s outlets there are around the world, the fewer wars there will be (though perhaps the more deaths from obesity). The one problem with the Golden Arches Theory, of course, is that it is super-sized nonsense(e.g. the fact that Panama had a McDonald’s did not prevent a US invasion in 1989). However, if nothing else, it illustrates the hegemony of democratic peace theory within contemporary Western discourse as a way of bringing wars to an end.

Justice in War

The argument put forward in this book is that the state does not have any superior moral authority compared to non-state actors when it comes to using violence for political purposes, even if it claims the legal authority to do so. The modern nation-state was, of course, carved out of violent conflict, and so should be circumspect about staking any claims in the area of political morality. While the state certainly has the ability to deliver death on a massive scale and has demonstrated its capacity to do so for many centuries, we no longer live in a Hobbesian world where the sovereign is granted tyrannical powers, including those of life or death, in return for delivering stability and order to anarchic communities. The belief that there is a ‘legitimate authority’ for killing has been an integral element of Just War Theory (JWT) for many centuries, but is frequently in the eye of the beholder, or the mob, and has been used by everyone from Oliver Cromwell to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to argue that society will be improved through the use of regrettable, but necessary, acts of violence. While states have and will continue to use violence in pursuit of various political, economic and ideological ends, they should not boast about it or try to justify it. More importantly perhaps, we as citizens of these states should not encourage it.

Assessments about the legitimacy of war will vary depending on the context involved and the political perspectives of those engaged in such debates; the point here is that the rules for the use of violent force have been changing in subtle but important ways since the end of the twentieth century. There are several areas where this can be observed, which intersect with modern readings of classical JWT. As Stephen Chan has suggested, the concept of the just war has become embedded within the transnational foundations of the international system, such as the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter, which ‘give the modern world its universal laws of war’.¹⁶

Several of the main pillars of JWT remain central to the justification of armed conflict today, but have mutated in interesting ways since the concept was devised by St Augustine in the fourth/fifth century and refined by St Thomas Aquinas in the twelfth century, Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century and Michael Walzer in the twentieth.¹⁷ Three of the traditional tenets of JWT (having a ‘legitimate authority’; possessing a ‘just cause’ for going to war; and avoiding the direct targeting of civilians in the activity of war) illustrate both the elasticity of the theory and the way it has managed to encompass not only the logic of real...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Changing Nature of War
• 2 Third-Party Intervention
• 3 Negotiation or Victory?
• 4 Resistance to the Peace
• 5 Ending the Global War on Terror
• 6 Reconciliation and Rebuilding
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index