Page 293 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

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aCta
Colombia: post-modern conflict?

vALErIA roSATo

on the contemporary confLicts debate

In the last two decades we have seen a deep change in the international setting mainly
given by two historical events: the end of the bipolar system and the advance of the unstop-
pable globalization process. At the end of the Cold War, the initial optimism of some analysts
about the start of a new age of peace and the detente of international foreign policy was soon
denied by the explosion of many conflicts around the world .
1
Conflicts that ignited after the fall of the Berlin Wall were framed into a new interpreta-
tive tendency that clearly distinguished them from previous ones for two reasons: first, they
didn’t reenter into the frame of the ideological East-West clash; second, they were primarily
domestic conflicts. Undoubtedly war has experienced a deep transformation so as to call into
question the historical Clausewitzian model combined with the Modern Westfalian Sys-
2
tem of States for which the war was seen as the “continuation of politics by other means” .
3
Conflicts started around the world since the Nineties are predominantly internal and primar-
ily involve non-governmental actors. Regarding the systematic analysis on armed conflicts
conducted by the department of Peace and Conflict Research of the University of Uppsala
4
the progressive increase is clearly observable during the last two decades of domestic con-
flicts in comparison to intergovernmental ones. The last report concerning the 1989-2006
period shows that intergovernmental conflicts have passed from 2 in 1989 to 7 in 2006
5
while internal ones have passed from 38 to 89 and those internal and internationalized (that
is, those which at least one of the parts receives military support from other States) are passed
by 4 to 26.
One of the new and most important interpretative models inside the debate on contem-
porary conflicts was formulated in 1999 from Mary Kaldor . Analyzing the two wars in
6
Bosnia and Nagorno-Karabach, she elaborates the paradigm of the “new wars” whose pecu-
liarity, in comparison to the “old” ones, can be summarized in four aspects: purposes, sources
of financing, methods of fight and typology of fighters.
Considering the first aspect, that is the purposes, new wars would be based on an identity
mobilization, that is, on political claims founded on a particular identity (religious, national,

1 See Fukuyama F., The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992.
2 Van Creveld Martin, The transformation of war, New York, the Free Press, 1991.
3 Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, Berlin, Dümmlers Verlag, 1832.
4 Studies and databases elaborated by the research team of Peace and Conflict Research Department of Uppsa-
la University are available on the website http://www.pcr.uu.se/database/index.php
5 L. Harbom e P. Wallensteen, “Armed Conflict, 1989 – 2006” in Journal of Peace Research, 2007, V.44., No.
5, pp. 623-634.
6 Kaldor Mary, New and old Wars. Organized violence in a Global Era, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1999.