How "New" are "New Wars"? Global Economic Change and the Study of Civil war.

Attempts to comprehend, through empirical inquiry and philosophical reflection, the likely effects of deeper, seemingly unstoppable processes of socioeconomic change on patterns of violent conflict within and across societies are not new. Indeed, the relationship between the momentous transformations wrought by industrialization and the longterm prospects for war and peace was a prominent theme of political and sociological thought in nineteenth-century Europe. In a celebrated lecture, delivered at the London School of Economics in 1957, Raymond Aron observed how thinkers such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, both profoundly conscious of "living in a period of transition," had been prepared to make prophecies about the future of war "whose boldness and dogmatism astound us." (1) By the time Aron himself came to reflect on the subject, the horrors of two world wars and the terrifying prospect of another even more destructive conflict ensured that "long-range historical predictions" were decidedly out of fashion. Instead, the Cold War came to be marked by an acute concern with the present; a concern that shaped and, in important respects, also distorted thinking about war and peace. The latter was true in particular for the study of civil or intrastate wars, wars whose local sources and regional dynamic were often overshadowed by a preoccupation with the central strategic balance and the competition for influence between East and West. The end of the Cold War, then, involved more than just a release from the balance of terror. It also had a liberating impact on the study of conflict, causing a "strong feeling of living in a period of transition" to again permeate much of the writings and debates about sources of war and peace in the international system. While the emergence of industrial society had preoccupied an earlier generation of thinkers, "globalization" has, to many, assumed a similar role of describing the sense that we are living through a period of universal, far-reaching, and irreversible changes.