Page 297 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

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women not cultivating the fields in many zones of the country and in this way rebels tried
to stop the flow of desertion of the young people that wanted to go back to their villages to
continue the job in the fields.
According to Black and Kalyvas the clear distinction between political and ideological
wars preceding the end of the bipolar system and the new, depolized and criminal wars,
derives from an inadequate analysis of the historical evolution of the various conflicts and
the lack of suitable conceptual categories. All the criticisms directed to the paradigm of the
“new” wars show its weak points and propose to elaborate an approach able to achieve the
complexity of the phenomenon under consideration. The different labels generally used to
describe contemporary conflicts, (“ethnic”, “identitarian”, “religious”, “predatory”, “funda-
mentalist”), surely help us to realize important and new aspects but, at the same time, they
risk to produce undeserved simplifications. Declassing new conflicts as new forms of “sense-
less” violence, not only conducts us to elaborate on incorrect analysis, but also to create
insufficient exit strategies for the different crises.
Therefore, we can revalue the clausewitzian model, contending that the war is the “con-
tinuation of politics by other means,” also for current conflicts. The intent would not be
to ignore the radical transformations that war has undergone in the course of time, as the
indisputable development of military technology and the deep changes of global society;
contrarily it would intend to recognize its extreme complexity.
In the recent debate, an interpretation that seems very useful in understanding present
conflicts is that formulated by Duffield. He underlines, as Kaldor does, some new aspects of
conflicts due to the new international context (the end of the Cold War and process of global-
ization), but also highlights above all the rationality that base all projects and actions of the
armed actors. Thus, his position contrasts with those readings that consider the new forms of
violence as private, criminal and apolitical.
Then, the question at hand is, if it is possible to read the long Colombian conflict through
the categories formulated by the “new wars” model, or must we consider it a sui generis
conflict as to avoid any sort of simplifications? Is it possible to define Colombian conflict
as a post-modern conflict? We will try to prove that the answer is affirmative explaining in
advance what is meant by the post-modern term.
The meaning of post-modern conflict used here is that formulated by Mark Duffield,
21
it underlines the deep changes of the social structures and the political economy wherein the
so-called “post-modern” conflicts are developed. However, he elaborates an interpretative
model passing the limited explanations of the conflicts based on exclusivism, barbarity or
greed and he puts the attention on the process of economic globalization that characterizes
the post-Cold War period. His principal criticism concerns the diffused crises interpreta-
tion of poor countries conflicts through evolutionary and teleological concepts, according to
which these countries would be living in a critical and transitional phase toward an inevitable
liberal-democratic order. A similar reading does not consider the processes of exclusion pro-
voked by globalization and accordingly does not understand the specific political dynamics
developed in these countries. In these countries in fact, according to Duffield, we assist to the

21 Duffield Mark, “Postmodern Conflict. Warlors, Post-Adjustment States and Private Protection” in Civil
Wars, Spring 1998, 1 (1), pp. 65-102.