Is War Becoming Obsolete?: A Research Proposal
Since the Second World War, changes in the structure of international politics have been welcomed by scholars and students of the discipline alike with optimism and hope. Each change was envisaged as a turning point for international society, leading to greater cooperation and collective decision-making. However, hope has been followed by dismay, and in the place of amity, war has continued to seize international relations.
Looking at the end of the Second World War and, subsequently, the Cold War, we shall attempt to see if the hopes for a climate of cooperation were at all justified. In doing so, we shall take note of the changing nature of international politics, along with any changes to the nature of war during the second half of the 20th century. Here, particular attention must be directed towards the idea of nuclear deterrence. We shall look at the implications of deterrence, in order to establish whether the threat of war was indeed diminished through its operation. If so, we shall also explore whether nuclear deterrence can be applied as a more general formula to engender peace.
To evaluate the contemporary situation, however, we must arrive at a suitable working definition for war. We shall examine the existing standards and make suitable modifications to the same, if the purposes of this study so requires. Having decided the benchmark for war, we shall then proceed to look at the two most relevant theories of international relations – realism (more accurately, structural realism) and liberalism (the democratic peace thesis and neoliberal institutionalism) – to discern the conceptual understanding of war.
With the theoretical survey as our platform, we shall look into the post-Cold War international peace and security scenario, with particular reference to the genocide in Rwanda, the war in the Balkans, and the genocidal conflict in Darfur, as well as the conflict in Iraq. All of these instances represent grave failures for international cooperation, and they must be considered and explored in order to test whether the obsolescence of war is a reality or just wishful thinking. The reasons for these failures can show us in what meaningful ways the world can respond to similar situations in the future; even though opportunities may have been lost, there should – at least – be some critical perspectives gained.
Another important aspect of enquiry shall be the emergence of securitization as a theoretical concept in security studies. This school of thought seeks to broaden the agenda of security beyond the nation-state and military conflicts. An analysis of the overall framework of this new perspective may be able to throw light upon whether the scourge of war is slowly fading into the distance.
Catastrophic terrorism remains a key characteristic of international politics today. We live in the post-9/11 era, and the principal challenge to international peace and security is thought to be located in this threat. The looming threat of terrorism is sought to be answered by the Global War of Terror. We shall attempt to perform an appraisal of this ‘war’, in order to identify its merits and demerits. An effective response to terrorism is no doubt a necessity, but the present situation looks likely to raise the threats of war, rather than decreasing them.
To be sure, empirical evidence suggests that the threat (and intensity) of war has diminished. Our study shall attempt to test the facts available and accordingly validate or invalidate the seeming obsolescence of war.
Is War Becoming Obsolete?
The end of the Second World War and the fall of the Third Reich bore the promise of a new era for international society, one typified by cooperation and collective action, with the United Nations as its vanguard. Soon, however, the spirit of cooperation gave way to the throes of discord, as the world saw the unfolding of the Cold War, a hitherto unknown mode of conflict, between the United States (US) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (henceforth, NATO) in the west and the Soviet Union (USSR) and the Warsaw Pact countries in the east. This virulent animosity between rival superpowers – and rival ideologies – did not follow the pattern of territorial struggles of times past. The norms of international society had changed since 1945; international borders had become sacrosanct, along with the freedom and security of the citizens of the world. Even as the superpowers labored to land a telling blow in a bid to gain superiority, armed conflict between the two sides was neither formally declared, nor actively sought. In a world characterized by nuclear deterrence and bipolarity, the casket of war seemingly remained sealed shut.
All, however, was not as it appeared. While the defining quality of the post-Second World War world was the absence of war amongst the great powers (which included Great Britain, France and China, along with the US and the USSR), several smaller wars were fought – in theaters far removed from the Cold War melting pot of Europe – whether directly by, or under the influence of, the two superpowers. The long American involvement in Vietnam (from around 1963 to 1975), the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan (1978 to 1989), and support for bloody, protracted civil wars and coups across Africa, Latin America and Asia revealed that the specter of war was still present, only unraveling in a new fashion. The very fabric of the post-War international system was disturbed by the advent of the Cold War: the United Nations Security Council (henceforth, UNSC) lay divided and paralyzed by the enmity between the US and the USSR. The scourge of war had endured and the UN could do very little to rein it in.
By 1989, though, the complexion of world politics underwent another tumultuous change. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was felled, and even before the dust could settle, the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. With the Cold War over, global politics experienced what many called the “unipolar moment” with the US as the only remaining superpower. However, while scholars and analysts throughout the world ushered in another new era filled with the hope of international cooperation, the ensuing reality remained steadfastly different. Ethnic conflicts engulfed the Balkans, while civil strife and internal war plagued the very recesses of the African continent. Even with an empowered UNSC, the international society could do very little stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia or the genocide in Rwanda. If it was the lack of opportunity during the Cold War, it was the lack of experience and judiciousness in the post-Cold War era which imperiled collective efforts to stop wars and conflict situations around the world.
Soon after, catastrophic terrorism reared its ugly head. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, signaled to the world that the contours of armed conflict had changed permanently. The resulting American attack on Afghanistan – ruled by the Taliban, well known to be sympathizers of al Qaeda – served as a chilling reminder that wars were not a thing of the past: as international politics descended from the post-Cold War era to the post-9/11 era, the war in Iraq seemed only to confirm this lesson.
At this time, it is prudent to leave the historical narrative and consider the developments post-Second World War in a theoretical and conceptual context. The strategic history of the world took on a new course in 1945, with the US becoming the first country to develop the nuclear bomb. As the Soviets caught up in 1949, the nuclear balance of power ensured that neither of the two superpowers could gain the upper hand. While the ideological dimension of the Cold War is not of great interest to this study, the tactical elements of the conflict bear particular significance. The absence of great-power armed conflict during the Cold War, even in the face of open rivalry, was explained by a phenomenon unknown earlier to scholars of international relations: nuclear deterrence, through fears of mutually assured destruction (or MAD). According to Morgan, “[t]he essence of deterrence is that one party prevents another from doing something the first party does not want by threatening to harm the other party seriously if it does” (2003, p. 1). Due to the nuclear buildup since 1949, both sides projected a persuasive image of effective military capacity, strong enough to cause unacceptable damages to the other, and the threat of using nuclear weapons if attacked or provoked. This remained the logic of deterrence during the Cold War, which limited wars between great powers, though the balance of power seemed to rest on the edge of a knife.
Nuclear deterrence does not eliminate the threat of war altogether. Sometimes, it may enhance the same. While the lessons of the Cold War (in terms of deterrence) were that of stability, a similar situation located in a more geographically proximate region showed something completely different. In 1998, both India and Pakistan demonstrated their nuclear capabilities with several weapons tests. Given the nature of mutual hostility between these South Asian neighbors since the time of their independence from colonial rule, the nuclear tests of 1998 did more something different than locking them into a deterrent peace. Due to the newly established nuclear cover, the conventional threshold in South Asia was raised. The climate of hostility between India and Pakistan intensified, giving way to the Kargil War in the following year, the first such conflict in nearly three decades. Thus, when operative in smaller scales, nuclear weapons may increase the chances of conventional war. This, in fact, was a point made by the neo-realist Kenneth Waltz long back, when he argued that the proliferation of nuclear weapons would lead to smaller, more concentrated, wars (1959, p. 59).
Interestingly, Islamabad had initially tried to deny its involvement in Kargil, claiming that the infiltrators were not part of the Pakistani army, and that war in Kargil should instead be recognized as a non-war international armed conflict. Though this claim was shown to be false, and Pakistan itself performed a volte-face on such statements, it raises an important question for this discussion: what is the definition of war? As a standard practice, scholars of international relations use the threshold of 1,000 battle deaths as a qualification for acts of armed aggression involving two or more nation-states to count as wars (Small & Singer, 1982). However, as John Vasquez points out, it is not always easy to establish such formal criteria and still be faithful to the reality of events. The above definition of war is only valid if 1,000 battle deaths are sustained every year of fighting, and only if the political status of combatants can be expressly deduced (Vasquez, 1993, p. 27). In such circumstances, intrastate conflicts – such as the genocide in Rwanda which saw more than 800,000 dead – would not qualify as war. Hence, even though the number of inter-state wars could be shown to be declining, the information provides little comfort to victims of political violence whose states are too weak to protect them. Indeed, it might prove more useful to widen the above benchmark to include all armed conflicts where there is at least one government (or government supported combatants) are involved and the number of deaths exceed 1,000 in total.
Realism remains the most powerful and important theoretical tradition in international relations, and the core propositions of the theory would suggest that war would endure as long as we have an international society of states. The most common (and important) variant of realism is structural realism or neorealism, which maintains that that the international system is anarchical, i.e. without a central organizing mechanism, and populated by nation-states that are in permanent conflict with one another. Nation-states have lexical priority over all other institutions; the national interests of nation-states are defined in terms of power, and every state aims at the satisfaction of these interests, i.e. power maximisation. Thus, it is problematic for realist theory to account for the sharp decline in the number of armed conflicts over the last decade, as shown by the Human Security Report (Human Security Brief 2007, 2008, p. 6). Moreover, realism has no conclusive answer for internal wars (David, 1998) and neither does it account for change in the international system very well (Wohlforth, 1994). However, we must remember that the anarchical structure of the international system does not dictate the incidence or intensity of wars; it only catalyses the tendency of nation-states to give in to the act of war. For realism, war is perennial, and it shall continue to survive.
Kenneth Waltz, the chief proponent of neorealism, advanced a tripartite framework within which to study war. He provided three levels of analysis where the causes of war could be located. The first is in the minds of men (or more so, political leaders, authoritarian rulers, monarchs, etc.), the second in the nature of domestic politics (or the internal system of a country), and the third in the anarchical international order. He concluded by arguing that it was in the third level that the causes of war would most likely be located (Waltz, 1959).
The other dominant theoretical tradition is that of liberal internationalism, which has several variants, perhaps the most important of which are the democratic peace thesis and neoliberal institutionalism. Considering the former, proponents of the theory believe that democracies do not go to war with each other. Moreover, democracies are less likely to go to war than authoritarian governments, and once at war, democracies tend to fight harder (Dunne, 2001, p. 189). However, as Mansfield and Snyder point out, democracies – especially young democracies – are especially aggressive and more prone to waging war than their authoritarian counterparts (2005). Indeed, it was a democratic Pakistan which chose to go to war against a democratic India in 1999. The democratic peace thesis has a rich traditional heritage, going back to the thought of Immanuel Kant; yet, as a theory of war, it leaves a lot to be desired.
Neoliberal institutionalists, on the other hand, take a leaf out of the book of neorealists. They too believe in the anarchical structure of the international system and agree that nation-states remain the principal units of consideration. However, where neorealists see conflict as the result of anarchy, institutionalists see the potential for cooperation. As is semantically obvious, this branch of scholars believes in the possibility of collective action through international institutions and regimes. The key deterrent to war is the threat of collective action, which is the principle on which the United Nations functions. However, neoliberals envisage a variety of institutions at several levels, including regional and sub-regional. The transformation of the European Union (henceforth, EU) into a security community, the continuing expansion of the NATO, and even regional organizations like the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) bears testimony to the pragmatic feasibility of this theory in devising a system which could eradicate war. In fact, the 1991 Gulf War was a resounding success for collective security enthusiasts. Finally able to throw off the Cold War yoke, the UNSC was able to devise a plan of action invoking the spirit of the UN and involving all the great powers.
However, the war in Iraq in 2003 was a major setback for liberal institutionalists. The US went into the war without any express multilateral backing from the UN. It did have a cohort of supporters – aptly christened the “coalition of the willing” – but its motion to involve the UNSC was struck down by vetoes from three of the other four permanent members of the Council. Its lone backer was the United Kingdom, which remains a strong ally in the war in Iraq even today. However, the war which was started under the pretext of a perceived threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), soon turned into a struggle for liberating the people of Iraq from the devices of a tyrannical ruler. In truth, so significant finding of WMD was made in Iraq since the war started, and the agenda of aggression had to be realigned to justify the American presence in the Middle East. This collective failure indicated that international involvement by capable countries depended not on a set of universally accepted norms, but their political will. Over the last five years, the American offensive in Iraq has only deepened and become more complex.
If political will was important for the US’ initiation of the war in Iraq, the lack of the same perpetuated conflicts throughout the 1990s – most notably in the Balkans and in Rwanda – and it does so still, in present day Darfur. While the international community hemmed and hawed over possible measures to counteract security threats, hundreds and thousands of innocent people were losing their lives to ethnic cleansing and genocide. In Rwanda, amidst much political turmoil, the Arusha Accords of 1993 were signed to engender peace between the Hutus and the Tutsis, by way of a transitional government and the promise of fair elections. The Accords, however, left extremist Hutus displeased, and after a plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, and the president of Burundi was shot down over Kigali airport in April 1994, violence erupted as Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred in a systematic genocide. At the end of the fateful week, more than 800,000 lives had been taken, while the UN-mandated Assistance Mission in Rwanda watched as bystanders.
In Bosnia, after the Yugoslavian breakdown, the Serbs and Croats (encouraged by Serbia and Croatia, respectively) sought to create “ethnically homogeneous territories which would eventually become part of Serbia and Croatia, and to partition the ethnically mixed Bosnia-Herzegovina between a Serbian and a Croat part” (Kaldor, 1999, p. 33), by using the rhetoric of self-determination. Their ultimate aim, however, was the “ethnic cleansing” of the country and the usurpation of power. The Bosniacs prepared for war, which raged from 1992 till 1995, by which time more than 100,000 people had been killed. The worst case of ethnic cleansing came in July 1995, in the UN-declared safe haven of Srebrenica, before the international community finally decided to act. The Serbian forces entered, segregated the population, and killed more than 7000 men and boys, while many of the women were raped.
The formation of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in 1983 marked the beginning of a civil war in Sudan’s western region of Darfur. Since 2003, the Sudanese government has armed Arab militiamen called the Janjaweed – while, all the time, denying such allegations – which have systematically killed the (traditionally African) farming communities in Darfur. More than two million people are believed to be living in camps in Darfur, while many have crossed over to neighboring Chad to live in similar camps. Conservative estimates show at least 200,000 dead, either slaughtered by the Janjaweed, or succumbing to starvation and disease (Hagan and Palloni 2006). While the Janjaweed continue to rape, the international community has so far refrained from labeling this crisis as genocide, because of the lack of adequate data and conclusive evidence. Humanitarian agencies and aid workers warn, however, that this indecision could prove fatal for the hundreds of thousands of displaced African civilians.
As we can see from all of the above instances, a lack of political will can threaten the lives of innocents and embolden the aggressors. In fact, it has also been a lack of understanding of new types of conflicts than anything else which has proved to be the undoing of international commitments to maintain peace and security. For instance, in Bosnia, “…the international community fell into the [old] nationalist trap by taking on board and legitimizing the perception of the conflict that the nationalists wished to propagate” (Kaldor, p. 58).
It is also fruitful to consider a more recent theoretical shift in security studies called securitization, which has sought to widen the idea of security to the human and critical directions. By expanding the level of analysis beyond the nation-state (to include the international system, regional systems, states and individuals) across more sectors of security (political, environmental, societal and economic, apart from the military), this theoretical reformulation tries to dilute the traditional allegiance of the international security problem with the military (Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde, 1998). In this framework, the individual may become the most important referent of security. The Human Security Report vindicates some of the claims established by the securitization scholars: human insecurities have more diverse causes – including economic and environmental – and are manifest in newer kinds of challenges, like human trafficking and catastrophic terrorism. However, this neither negates the salience of the military to security calculations, nor provides any reason to believe that the scourge of war shall not endure as it has through the ages. Of course, one must agree to the empirical evidence which suggests that armed conflict has generally been on the decline this decade. But, a relative period of peace does not make war obsolete. In fact, for much of this decade, we have witnessed US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we need only recall Russia’s attack on Georgia (South Ossetia) in August 2008 to remind ourselves to be on our guard.
Finally, we must remind ourselves that we live in an age when international politics is defined by the Global War on Terror. As catastrophic terrorism grows deeper roots, the offensive against this plague is sought to be answered by a permanent state of war- (or war-like) preparedness. The movement which was started by the US in response to the 2001 terrorist attacks has only gained in momentum. A note of caution must be provided here: a “war” on terrorism may not be the most sensible response to develop (Haass, 2006, pp. 51-75). Wars have a fixed locale: say a battlefield, oceans, and the like. Terrorists, however, do not conform to such boundaries. Therefore, the extension of the analogy of a “war” on terror would make any civilian area a theater of war and armed conflict. Secondly, wars have a definitive end, which are mostly concessional. However, in the case of terrorism, such a connotation is invalid. A single terrorist leader may be brought to justice or a group terminated, but terrorism as an ideational quality cannot be removed through the acts of war. Thirdly, wars are costly, as the present war on terror is proving. Since there cannot be an end to this war, as established above, the perpetuation of the same shall lead to drained resources and cutbacks on welfare measures, leading to the degradation of the quality of human life, which was one of the reasons for starting the war. Thus, the war on terror is cyclical and self-reinforcing. However, such is the zeal for stopping terrorists in their tracks that policy-makers yield to violence in response to violence.
From the above discussion, it remains clear that the specter of war has not vanished, but has unraveled in a variety of different ways over the course of the last century. If the First and Second World Wars saw direct aggression and conflict among the great powers, the Cold War witnessed an indirect fight for supremacy between the superpowers of the US and the USSR. At the end of the Cold War, ethnic cleansing and genocide took up the mantle of war, and they were quickly joined by catastrophic terrorism. As the conflict in Iraq shows, modern day wars can be excessively bloody, long and expensive. Even though the norms of international society dictate that territorial battles cannot be fought, nation-states can always go to battle in the name of national interest. And in such cases, it is unlikely that any concert of powers can deter a capable state from fulfilling its aim. Thus, we can conclude by saying that war has not become obsolete; instead, its reality is absolute.
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