International Political Sociology (2008) 2, 97112

The Sociology of New Wars? Assessing the Causes and Objectives of Contemporary Violent Conicts
a Males evic Sinis National University of Ireland
The recent accounts of the new war paradigm have been thoroughly scrutinized in a variety of disciplines from security studies and international relations to political economy. The general trend is to focus on the scope, methods, tactics, strategies, forms of war, and or the level of atrocity. However, there has been little sustained attempt to assess structural causes and the arguments about the changing aims of contemporary warfare. This paper provides a critical analysis of the macro sociological accounts of the new war paradigm with a spotlight on the purpose and causes of the recent wars. The author argues that despite the development of elaborate models, the sociology of contemporary warfare rests on shaky foundations and hence fails to convince. Rather than witnessing a dramatic shift in the causes and objectives of contemporary violent conict, one encounters a signicant transformation in the social and historical context in which these wars are waged.

Any dramatic historical change is bound to challenge the existing sociological comprehension of reality. Ultimately this can lead to the articulation of new analytical models and new conceptual apparatuses devised to come to terms with these unprecedented changes.1 Social transformations of any magnitude necessitate new interpretative horizons and new explanatory paradigms. However, macro sociologists rarely encounter such unique, earth-shattering historical moments of rupture. As most longue duree research clearly shows, the trajectories of human development are usually shaped by and measured in centuries and millennia rather than decades and years. Hence it is hard to assess whether the times we live in constitute such a rare and historically transformative episode. Although the collapse of communism, the end of a bipolar world, economic globalization and the spectacular rise of religiously framed violence are obviously good candidates, there is no certainty that 24th century historical sociology will judge them as momentous events and processes in the way we are prone to do now. Not only that we tend toward chrono-centrism (Fowles 1974), and what Peel (1989) calls blocking presentism, that is, an overemphasis on the present events and our own depiction of the past, but we are not immune to the presentist interpretation of the future either. This paper attempts to critically engage with one such research paradigm that claims fundamental historical noveltythe theory of new wars. More specically, my focus is on the highly inuential but rarely scrutinized macro sociological accounts of the new war paradigm and their
1 I am thankful to Kevin Ryan and the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on the earlier draft of this paper.

2008 International Studies Association. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ , UK .

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claims about (1) the unprecedented causes of recent violent conicts, and (2) the qualitative transformation in the objectives and goals of these wars. First, I briey summarize the central tenants and the existing criticisms of the new war paradigm. Second, I explore the sociological theories of new wars by identifying their distinctive features and commonalities. The focus is in particular on the causes and changing objectives of contemporary warfare. Finally, I assess the explanatory strength of the new wars paradigm in sociology, arguing that the paradigm fails on both accounts as current wars exhibit more similarity than difference with conventional 19th and 20th century warfare. Instead of historically novel forms of violence, one encounters processes that have been developing since the birth of the modern era. However, this is not to argue that nothing has changed in the relationship between contemporary warfare and society. What has signicantly changed is the social reliance on technology and, most of all, the social, geo-political and ideological context in which recent wars are fought. The New Wars Paradigm A variety of inuential scholars from across a range of disciplines as diverse as security studies (Snow 1996; Dufeld 2001), political economy (Collier 2000; Jung 2003), international relations (Gray 1997; Keen 1998) and political theory (Munkler 2004) have embraced the new wars paradigm. They all argue that violent conicts since the end of the 20th century are utterly different from their predecessors. The argument is that these new wars differ in terms of scope (civil rather than inter-state conicts), methods, models of nancing (external rather than internal), and are characterized by low intensity coupled with high levels of brutality and with the deliberate targeting of civilians. These wars are seen to be on the increase, less restrained and more atrocious, hence dramatically increasing the number of civilians both killed and displaced. Furthermore, unlike the old wars these new violent conicts are premised on different ghting tactics (terror and guerrilla actions instead of conventional battleelds), different military strategies (population control rather than capturing new territory), utilize different combatants (private armies, criminal gangs and warlords instead of professional soldiers or conscripts), and are highly decentralized. The new wars are also seen as chaotic since they blur traditional distinctions (legal vs. illegal, private vs. public, civilian vs. military, internal vs. external, and local vs. global). While the research emanating from the new wars paradigm has proved highly benecial in highlighting some distinctive features of civil wars during the 1990s, the subsequent cross-disciplinary empirical research has seriously challenged many of its claims. First, although in recent times intra-state warfare has been more frequent than inter-state warfare, there is no causal relationship between the two. Not only do some wars start off as civil wars and, if successful for the warring side claiming independence, quickly become redened as inter-state wars2 (from the American war of independence to the wars of Yugoslav succession), but also many wars have elements of both, as most civil wars are fought with direct economic, political and military support from neighboring states and global powers. A typical example here is the so-called Second Congo War of 19982003, which involved regional confrontation of eight states and over 25 armed groups. However, much more damaging to the new war paradigm is the well-documented fact that both civil and inter-state wars have been in decline since the early 1990s (Gleditsch, Wallensteen, Eriksson, Sollenberg, and Strand
2 As Kalyvas (2006:17) points out this semantic conict of how to term particular wars is part of the war itself, as the use of terms such as civil or inter-state war are deeply contested by the parties involved as they confer or deny legitimacy to their actions.

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2002; Newman 2004; Harbom and Wallensteen 2005; Mack 2005). Thus, there is no evidence for the claimed proliferation of the new wars. Second, there is no empirical foundation for the claim that recent conicts are more violent either in terms of human casualties or levels of atrocity. As Lacina and Gleditsch (2005) demonstrate, there has been a signicant decline in the number of deaths in battle in recent wars. The post-WWII conicts reached their peak in the early 1950s, with almost 700,000 deaths per year, while the 1990s and the beginning of this century have rarely witnessed wars accounting for more than 100,000 human casualties. Furthermore, the ratio of military and civilian deaths has not signicantly changed in recent conicts. The research of Melander, Oberg, and Hall (2007) and Sollenberg (2007) clearly shows that in most recent wars, as has also been the case historically, the civilian military death ratio rarely exceeds 50 50.3 As for the intensity of atrocities, Melander et al. (2007:33) have calculated that the post-Cold War era [is] signicantly less atrocious than the Cold War era. Although there was some increase in population displacement during the early 1990s, the magnitude of violence against civilians is signicantly lower then in previous periods. Third, the uniqueness of the deliberate targeting of civilians and the use of terrorist and guerrilla tactics is also questioned. Newman (2004:182) points out that earlier civil conicts such as those of the Mexican Revolution (19101920) and the Congo Free State (18861908) were typical examples of wars where civilians were the primary target of violence. With the exception of the Rwandan genocide,4 the new wars have never reached the enormity of civilian bloodshed registered in genocides of Herreros, Native Americans, Armenians or Jews in the Holocaust. Similarly there is nothing new and exceptional in the reliance on terror threats and guerrilla warfare, as this was and remains an essential tactic of all civil warsold and new (Kalyvas 2001, 2006:83). What is evident from this brief summary is that cross-disciplinary research has demonstrated serious weaknesses in the new wars paradigm. The critics have successfully challenged claims about the novelty of means, methods, strategies, tactics and the level of brutality of the new wars. They have also convincingly demonstrated that recent conicts do not signicantly differ from conventional warfare in terms of human casualties or the civilian involvement ratio. However, what has rarely been challenged or carefully explored are the macro-structural causes and the alleged transformation of the central goals of the new warfare.5 Even if specialist studies are able to demonstrate empirical untenablilty of the new wars paradigm through meticulous quantitative research, this still would not be enough to undermine the heuristic and interpretative potential of the paradigm. As Kuhn (1962) rightly argues, paradigms are conceptual worlds which allow us to think differently about the same research problem. They are non-cumulative and as such often incommensurable with previous or existing knowledge claims. Rather than complementing or falsifying each other paradigms provide competing understandings of reality, which if successful reduce the old paradigms to a special case of a new paradigm. Replacing one paradigm by another often requires a scientic revolution.
3 For example the Bosnian war of 19921995 is singled out as a standard of the new war where civilian deaths were highly disproportional to those of military. However, as the most recent data collection indicates (Tokaca 2007) the human casualties were not far off the standard 50 50 ratio with a slight majority of casualties on the military side (59% vs. 41%). 4 It is also highly debatable whether the Rwandan genocide of 1994 took place within or outside of war conditions. 5 S. Kalyvas (2001) is a partial exception here as his analysis is also focused on the causes and motivation of new wars. However, he only explores the arguments about the civil wars and does not engage with the high-tech warfare. Furthermore, his study is distinctly oriented toward the micro level and largely ignores the analysis of the macro structural causes and goals.

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New paradigms are valuable as they open novel avenues of thinking, research and analysis and question the established canons. Moreover, conceptual models and theoretical approaches cannot be rebuffed simply on how well they meet the criteria of positivist science (Giddens 1976). All of this suggests that in order to explore the causes and the central objectives of the new wars, one has to engage with the stronger theoretical and explanatory models, that is, with the sociological articulations of the new wars paradigm. The focus of an analysis should include both: how well the new wars paradigm works as a novel interpretative frame and also how sound the empirical claims are on which this new interpretative frame is built. The Sociology of New Warfare Although war has been and remains a largely neglected topic of sociological research (Shaw 1984; Joas 2003; Wimmer and Min 2006), there have been a few recent conceptual, theoretical and empirical analyses most of which problematize the nature of contemporary conicts. Political sociologists such as Martin Shaw (2002, 2003, 2005) and Mary Kaldor (2001, 2007) and social theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman (2001, 2002a,b) have been at the forefront of the new war paradigm.6 They too see these violent conicts as historically novel in terms of methods, strategies, tactics, and level of human sacrice. However, their studies also differ from typical representatives of the new war paradigm in their focus on the broader macro-sociological picture whereby the transformation in warfare is seen as a symptom of larger societal changes. The underlining causal factor in most of these accounts is the transformative power of economic globalization. They distinguish between two typical forms that the new warfare takes: the parasitic or predatory wars and the technologically advanced western forms of warfare. Predatory wars emerge in the context of rampant economic liberalization which undermines already weakened states, thus resulting in their virtual collapse. It is on the ruins of these failed states that the new parasitic wars emerge. In other words, inability to compete at the global level weakens the states economy and simultaneously its capacity to extract revenue, thus opening the door to systematic corruption, criminality and consequently for the general privatization of violence. State failure creates a new Hobbesian environment where armed warlords control the remnants of state structures, and relying on foreign remittances and international aid invoke identity politics to spread terror among those deemed a threat to their religious or ethnic group. The new technological advanced western wars have developed gradually but most of all through the recent revolution in military affairs (RMA), with the maturation of new technologies and novel military systems relying heavily on air power, the routinization of precision, and the ability to ght an adversary from a distance without suffering signicant causalities. These wars too are seen as being principally linked to global forces of economic liberalization as they are used for opening up global markets and coercing opponents of the neo-liberal model of development.7 Hence Zygmunt Baumans (2000, 2002a,b) analysis of new wars is situated in the context of a transition from the stable, solid, and for the most part regulated modern order, toward an unregulated and principally chaotic liquid modernity. In his view, modernity was built on the Enlightenments ideas of an
6 Obviously Bauman, Kaldor and Shaw are not the only new war theorists but their ideas have proved to be the most inuential in the contemporary sociological understandings of violent macro conicts. 7 While much of the non-sociological literature on the new wars tends to treat these two forms of violent conict (i.e., the predatory wars and high tech warfare) as highly distinct and even unrelated phenomena most macro sociologists, including the authors discussed here, start from the proposition that they are deeply interlinked, being a part of the same processes of globalization.

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ordered totality, favoring the elimination of randomness and ambivalence, and the privileging of compact territorial administrative organization. In contrast to this, liquid modernity is extraterritorial, with the speed and mobility of global capital dissolving state borders as power shifts from the nation-state to global corporations. In this highly uid world, as Bauman argues, most human beings operate as individualized consumers rather than citizens of their respective polities. Such structural alteration generates two distinct but deeply interlinked forms of new warfare: globalizing wars fought at a distance through technologically advanced weaponry, and globalization-induced wars conducted in the void left by the collapse of the old state structures (Bauman 2001). These two types of war erupt in the empty space that separates the coordinated machinery of global markets from the incoherent and disconnected forms of localized politics. As the era of liquid modernity advantages mobility over spatial control, the new wars are, in Baumans view, not aimed at territorial conquest or ideological conversion, as was the case with the conicts of 19th and early 20th century. Instead their goals stem from the economic logic of liquid modernity. The central goal for globalizing wars becomes the abolition of state sovereignty or neutralizing its resistance potential to accommodate the integration and coordination of the accelerated ow of global markets, whereas for the globalization-induced warfare the aim is to reactively reassert the lost meaning of space (Bauman 2001:11). The central argument is that liquid modernity generates new forms of insecurity, fear and treat that are extraterritorial and which cannot be contained or resolved within the framework of nation-states (Bauman 2000, 2006). Rather the space within which conict is staged is open and uid, with adversaries in a state of permanent mobility and with military coalitions oating and provisional. In Baumans (2002a:88, 2002b:9498) view the most common forms of ghting in this unregulated environment of the global frontier-land are the reconnaissance battles where soldiers are not ordered to capture the adversarys territory but to explore the enemys determination and endurance, the resources the enemy can command and the speed with which such resources may be brought to the battleeld. In other words the new wars are a hit and run affair. Furthermore, the new globalizing wars rely solely on the professional, well-trained armies of technical experts whose individualized service is treated similarly to other paid occupations and who perform their tasks with detached professionalism. For Bauman (2001:27) the times of mass conscript armies are over and so is the time of ideological mobilization, patriotic ecstasies and dedication to the cause. Martin Shaw (2000, 2005) shares the view that globalization has changed the nature of warfare for good. He also links the two forms of war by seeing them not as separate types but as asymmetrical products of the same globalizing tendencies, together transforming the entire mode of warfare from the industrialized total war of early 20th century into a global surveillance mode of warfare. As with Bauman, he argues that these new wars no longer require mass armies or direct mass mobilization. Whereas total warfare had the capacity to dominate society: it could override market relations, suppress democratic politics and capture media, global surveillance warfare is generally subordinate to economy, polity and culture (Shaw 2005:55). Although there are remnants of the industrialized total warfare in all of this, such as national-militarist (i.e., Russia, China or India) and ethnic-nationalist states (i.e., some Balkan and African states), with conscript armies and mass produced weapons, their actions are nonetheless constrained by global forces and local elites committed to integration into global markets and institutions (Shaw 2005:64). Shaw sees the new mode of western warfare developing in reaction to degeneracy of the 20th century Western way of war with its systematic killing of civilians and its genocidal projects (Shaw 2003). The new wars emerge as the logic of nuclear

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proliferation weakened war-induced statism and economic liberalization spread around the globe. In this context, he concentrates primarily on the new western way of warfare where the central issue is the transfer of risk. Drawing in part on Ulrich Becks (1992, 1999) concept of risk society as an inescapable structural condition of advanced industrialization (Shaw 2005:97), he argues that risk exposure has replaced class as a central form of inequality in the late modern era and that this has profound implications on the theory and practice of contemporary warfare. According to Shaw, these new risk transfer wars are waged by the most technologically advanced states which have undergone successful RMA such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Here the key war aim seems to be to minimize life-risks to western military personnel and consequently minimizing electoral and political risks to the state leadership, which is accomplished by transferring these risks directly to the weaker enemy.8 From the Falklands war, to the Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the ongoing Iraq war, the reliance on technologically sophisticated weapons helps create the systematic transfer of risks from elected politicians to the military personnel and from them to the enemy combatants and their civilians. When the choice is between (foreign) civilian lives and the lives of Western soldiers, the lives of soldiers are always prioritized. The militarism of new wars does not require direct popular mobilization, rather it aims to indirectly acquire passive support by relying on media as a neutralizer of electoral surveillance. In his view, the goals of new wars are rarely ideological or nationalist but are principally policy driven and instrumental, war is justied only as a response to a manifest threat, that is when there is a plausible perceptions of risk to Western interests, norms and values (Shaw 2003:7172). As such new wars acquire electoral legitimacy only when they are limited, sanitized, quick x affairs taking place in distant parts of the world. Similarly to Bauman and Shaw, Mary Kaldor (2001, 2004, 2007) posits globalization as a key cause of new wars. In her understanding globalization of the 1980s and 1990s is a qualitatively new phenomenon that emerged as a consequence of the revolution in information technologies and dramatic improvements in communication and data-processing. This has revolutionized military technology but even more importantly has produced a revolution in the social relations of warfare (Kaldor 2001:3). Although Kaldor also shares Baumans and Shaws belief that there are two dominant forms of new warfare, the focal point of her analysis are predatory wars rather than what she calls American high tech wars. These new wars arise as the autonomy of the state, especially its economy, is eroded by the global forces of economic neo-liberalism. As the revenues of the weakened states decline so they experience gradual or total erosion of the monopoly of the legitimate use of coercion, with the result that the means of violence is privatized and acquired by criminal warlords. Employing paramilitaries and the remnants of collapsing state structures, they politicize cultural difference and wage genocidal wars on civilians while at the same time acquiring personal wealth and maintaining a hold on power. As one of the pioneers of this paradigm Kaldor articulates an exceptionally strong version of the new war thesis whereby the recent violent conicts differ in every respect from conventional warfarefrom their strategy, tactics, methods of ghting, the increased levels of bloodshed, the chaotic nature of conicts to rampant asymmetry in the civil military ratio of human casualties. She also emphasizes that new wars are highly
8 Y. Heng (2006) develops a similar argument by linking Becks concept of world risk society with the recent international relations literature on the new wars. He contends that the new high tech wars are primarily concerned with the management of globalized systematic risks. Seeing globalization as a key driver of global economic and security developments Heng argues that recent Anglo-American wars, from Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq, were all driven by a perceived globalization of risks (p. 7072).

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decentralized, thrive on the availability of cheap light weaponry and are heavily dependent on the external nancial resources such as Diaspora remittances and international humanitarian aid which often help create or reinforce the new globalized war economy. Nevertheless, what is central to her argument is the view that new wars are fought for very different reasons than pervious conicts. As she puts it: the goals of the new wars are about identity politics in contrast to the geo-political or ideological goals of earlier wars (Kaldor 2001:6). According to Kaldor, identity politics differs from ideology as it makes power claims on the basis of mutually exclusive group labels rather than coherent systems of ideas. She views these label claims as parasitic and fragmentary, unlike the politics of ideas which are open to all and therefore tend to be integrative, this type of identity politics is inherently exclusive and therefore tends to fragmentation (Kaldor 2001:7). Just as Bauman she argues that geo-political motives play no part as territory loses its previous signicance. Instead the new wars tend toward the expulsion of the civilian population: the aim is to control the population by getting rid of everyone of a different identity (Kaldor 2001:8). Between the Nation-State and Globalization Sociological accounts of new wars provide a more potent and theoretically coherent understanding and interpretation of recent violent conicts. Instead of adopting a narrow and particularist view, abstracting recent wars from the broader social and historical context, the sociological analyses successfully situate these conicts within macro structural changes. New wars do not emerge in a social and historical vacuum but are integral to the wider transformations of modernity, and in particular to the worldwide expansion of globalization. What one encounters here is truly an attempt of paradigm shift in a classical Kuhnian sense: to understand recent conicts it is not enough to account for the precise factual variations. Rather this paradigm shift entails new understandings of social reality. In this context Bauman, Shaw and Kaldor engage more thoroughly with central questions such as: What are the social causes of new wars? And why and how have the central goals of warfare changed? It is primarily in the answers to these questions that one can assess the explanatory strength and weaknesses of the new war paradigm. However, even if the earlier criticisms that center on tactics, strategy, human casualties, nancing or methods of ghting are completely discounted in favor of assessing the paradigm as a heuristic model on its own terms, the theory of new wars fails to convince. First, linking recent wars so tightly to the forces of economic globalization is a form of structuralist economic reductionism which attributes too much power to market forces. Historically wars were initiated and fought for a variety of reasonsideological, geo-political, economic or ecologicaland have had origins in both human agency and social structure (Howard 1977; McNeill 1984; Keegan 1993). This is as much the case with contemporary wars which are also dependent on historical contingencies and a conuence of different factors. Not all groups, organizations and individuals involved directly or indirectly in these violent conicts are motivated by the maximization of economic resources (Smith 2005; Gat 2006). Similarly the structural transformations in the world economy do not affect all states equally, some even not at all. This economistic argument cannot explain why some states such as Somalia, Bosnia or Haiti found themselves on the verge of collapse in the context of brutal civil wars, while others economically much more undermined by global trade such as Argentina, Romania or numerous African states have avoided excessive violent conicts. Furthermore, the perception that the expansion of liberalized markets automatically means less regulation and more chaotic arrangements is a common

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misperception. As Steven Vogel (1996) documents well in his study of the economic reform patterns in telecommunications, nance, broadcasting, transport and utilities in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, France and Germany, freer markets have actually led to more administrative regulation. Liberalization does not mean the loss of state autonomy. On the contrary most states combine the opening up of markets with tighter re-regulation, in other words there is no logical contradiction between more competition and greater government control (Vogel 1996:5). Hence we may live in liquid modernity but this is a highly regulated environment. Consequently the milieu of contemporary wars is no more chaotic than that of their predecessors. Second, to establish a causal link between contemporary wars and growing economic liberalization one would have to prove that the patterns and dynamics of world trade have dramatically changed, and that this change has affected transformations in warfare. However, both of these claims are untenable. The argument that economic globalization is historically unprecedented phenomenon has been challenged by many historical sociologists. For example Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson (1999), Michael Mann (1997, 2003) and John A. Hall (2000, 2002) among others have demonstrated that the existing levels of trade for North America, Japan and the European Union of 12% of their GDP are almost the same as the levels reached before World War I. Over 80% of the worlds total production remains traded within the borders of nation-states (Mann 2001). Most so-called transnational corporations are really national companies whose ownership, assets, sales, and prots remain within their own nation states. They chiey rely on the domestic human capital generated through their own educational systems, existing national communications infrastructure and a substantial deal of state protectionism for the externally vulnerable economic sectors (Carnoy 1993; Wade 1996). The technology is also mostly produced on the national level while the overwhelming majority of companies remain traded solely on national stock markets. Rather than being global, world trade is distinctly trilateral with the United States, Japan and Europe producing and consuming more than 85% of world trade (Mann 1997; Hall 2000). In other words, contrary to the arguments of the new war paradigm, economic globalization does not diminish the inuence of the nation-states. Instead it is the most powerful nation-states that are the backbone of world trade. As Mann (1997:48) puts it: capitalism retains a geo-economic order, dominated by the economies of the advanced nation-states. Clusters of nation-states provide the stratication order of globalism. In addition nation-states remain in full control of their population as human beings are much less mobile than goods, money and services and despite expansion of international law the nation-state preserves the monopoly of law over its territory9 (Hirst and Thompson 1999). The second claim is yet more problematic. Even if one disregards the fact that there is no direct evidence that economic globalization causes an increase in violent intra-state conicts, (thus concentrating solely on the indirect inuence), it is not difcult to show the obvious aws in this argument. Not only does the research prove warfare in general (including civil wars) to be in decline, so that if globalization has any effect this could only be interpreted as a factor that diminishes violence, but more importantly the privatization of violence has existed as much in the pre-global era as it does now. As Kalyvas (2006:333) and Newman (2004:183184) rightly point out, a similar pattern of chaotic warlordism, criminality and privatized violence was witnessed long before the current era in, for example, the Greek civil war of 19431949, the Nigeria-Biafra civil
9 As Hirst and Thompson (1999:277) conclude: nation-states as sources of the rule of law are essential prerequisites for regulation through international law, and as overarching public powers they are essential to the survival of pluralistic national societies with diversied forms of administration and community standards.

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war, or the Congo Civil War of the early 1960s. Not only is it that the globalized war economy cannot explain more protracted conicts such as those in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, the Basque country or Indonesia, but even the conicts that are seen to epitomize the new wars such as those in the Balkans, Horn of Africa or Caucasus in many respects predate or have developed outside of the forces of economic liberalism. The origins of the Yugoslav wars of succession had very little if anything to do with the macro economic globalization. They started off not as economic, but as political conicts, created in part by party elites attempting to avoid genuine democratization through decentralization, and in part by the idiosyncratic federal structure of the communist state (Males evic 2002, 2006:157 184). The view expressed by Bauman and Kaldor, that the new wars have lost geopolitical signicance as the era of space is over, and that territory has little meaning in the new globalized wars, is equally untenable. First, this argument is built on an overstretched and stark comparison between early modern nationstates and latemodern postmodern polities, where the former are depicted as tightly bound, highly centralized and bureaucratic, in full control of their territory, economy and population, whereas the latter are presented as the exact opposite. According to these authors, early modernity is associated exclusively with the economically and politically autarchic nation-states obsessed with territorial expansion, while the contemporary era is seen as one of global economic interdependence and integration. However, as Tilly (1975), Downing (1992), Ertman (1997) and many other historical sociologists have shown, the post-Westphalian nation-states have emerged and developed in the context of two rival forces: international trade and political and military competition. Rather than being isolated autarchies, nation-states have grown in response to the changing geo-political environment by tightening scal control and by extending citizenship rights. Commercial developments and increased trade have strengthened the state capacity making it in this process a more powerful military machine. In other words, transnational economic space is neither novel nor unconnected to the birth of the nation-state. The administrative and territorial boundedness of early nation states had always more to do with the rulers projected ideal than actual reality. In most respects the rise in infrastructural and surveillance powers is something more akin to contemporary nation-states as they have only recently been able to fully police their borders, tax at sources, gather intelligence on all of its citizens, and successfully control their territories. Furthermore, military might still remains the only reliable guarantor of economic wellbeing in the long term as all three economic powerhousesthe United States, the European Union and Japanhave developed and continue to economically prosper on the back of American military supremacy, which provides geopolitical stability and security in the North. Although most northern states have moved away from what Mann (1997) calls hard geopolitics to soft geopolitics, this is not the case for the rest of the world. Universal conscription is still the order of the day in the great majority of states with most of Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia (including the two super powers: China and Russia) having compulsory military draft.10 Indeed it would be highly premature, as the proponents of the new war paradigm claim, to see it as a thing of the past in the West either. Nearly all states reserve the right to reintroduce conscription in the case of major war. Historically speaking we have been here before: the so-called long peace of 18701914 witnessed the dominance of similar pacist theories that saw economics replacing geo-politics. However, even if the militaries of most western and westernizing states have been reduced in size,
10 Although the abolition of military draft has dramatically increased in the last two decades there are still only 32 states in the world without mandatory military service.

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the states monopoly on the legitimate use of violence has been strengthened even further with the continuous expansion of police forces, surveillance apparatuses and a variety of private and state controlled security agencies (Dandeker 1990; Lyon 2001). What has changed in the postcolonial era is not the alleged unimportance of space but the illegitimacy of territorial conquest. In fact space is now more important than ever before as it is institutionalized and taken for granted by nearly everybody that state borders cannot be changed at will. As American soldiers quickly realized when they initially placed the Star Spangled Banner on Saddam Husseins statue, and then had to promptly replace it with the Iraqi ag, one cannot legitimately capture the territory of another sovereign nation-state. This is a poignant reminder that the sovereignty of state territory remains sacred even more than it was in the last two centuries. If late, or in Baumans words, liquid modernity is an era where one can transcend spacea view deeply contested herethis cannot happen through simplied globalist formulas of geography becoming history but only when territorial sovereignty becomes so institutionalized, routinized and taken for granted that it becomes a matter of habitual practice as an unalienable right that few would dare to challenge. The obvious sacredness of state territory is clearly evident from the Falkland episode when Britain went easily to war over some far away depopulated island, to the Gulf war or Chechen wars and from still unresolved disputes between Russia and Japan over the Kuril Islands, Britain and Spain over Gibraltar, Greece and Turkey over Cyprus and many uninhabited rocks of Aegean sea, etc. No state, democratic or autocratic, huge or small, developed or underdeveloped will ever give up lightly even a tiny stretch of its territory. And this leads us directly to the second issue of the supposedly changed goals of contemporary warfare. The Objectives of Contemporary Wars The proponents of the new wars paradigm are adamant that what sets contemporary wars apart from their predecessors is the unequivocal transformation of objectives and goals. The new violent conicts are no longer about ideology, or nationalism in particular, but about identity (Kaldor), the economic logic of globalization (Bauman) or perceptions of risk to Western interests and norms (Shaw). In their own words: nation-building coupled with patriotic mobilization has ceased to be the principal instrument of social integration and states self-assertion (Bauman 2002a:84); in the context of globalization, ideological and or territorial cleavages of an earlier era have increasingly been supplanted by an emerging cleavage betweencosmopolitanism, based on inclusive, universalist multicultural values, and the politics of particularist identities (Kaldor 2001:6); and [it is] a specically late-modern, Western perception that war is justied only as a response to a manifest threat (Shaw 2005:7172). Kaldors stringent distinction between identity and ideology is untenable as the discourse of identity is nearly always embedded in the rhetoric of a specic ideology. In other words, claims to a particular or universal identity such as Danish, Muslim, manual worker, Pashtun or cosmopolitan are premised on the distinctive political projects of what it means to be a particular Danish, Muslim, manual worker, Pashtun or a cosmopolitan individual. As there is never one way of how somebody can be a member of a particular group, the identitarian language of collective solidarity is inherently political: it speaks in terms of cultural authenticity but it acts through political projects (Brubaker 2004; Males evic 2006). The argument that, unlike ideology which espouses systematic ideas, identity is only about group labels does not stand. From Barthes (1993) and Althusser (1994), we know too well that ideology works best through the hailing or interpolation of group labels, by caging individuals in particular identities.

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More importantly, group labels can have popular resonance only if seen as integral to a specic political project. There is no signicant difference here between depicting citizens of todays Iraq as mutually exclusive Shia, Sunni and Kurds and yesteryears socialist rhetoric of proletariat and bourgeoisie clinched in an uncompromising class war. They both invoke group labels as a part of a concrete ideological project to justify a specic political course of action, including warfare, and to mobilize popular support. Ethnic, religious, or nationalist ideologies are grounded in systematic programmes just as much as the old ideologies of socialism, liberalism or conservatism. There is no substantial ontological difference between those political projects that aim at implementing a blueprint of classless social order and those bent on setting up an ethno-nationally pure society. In other words there is no identity without ideology and no ideology can successfully mobilize mass support without constructing meaningful group labels. The problem is that in Kaldors economistic view nationalism is never seen as an original generator of social action, but always a second order reality, a reactive force to some other supposedly primary cause such as globalization (Kaldor 2001:76, 7879). Analyzing the Bosnian war of 19921995 as the epitome of new war, she argues that the central aims were not ideological or geo-political but identity basedto ethnically cleanse a population of other identity. This view confuses means and ends since ethnic cleansing and genocide are rarely if ever an end in themselves, but rather a means through which a particular ideological project is implemented. The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was never a chaotic, decentralized and spontaneous reaction of local warlords. Instead as recent research clearly shows (Cekic et al. 1999; Oberschall 2000; Ron 2003) it was a highly structured, well-organized, meticulously documented process that relied on existing centralized state structures from the top political and military leadership in Serbia and Croatia to the municipal executive committees, the mayors ofce, local police and so-called crisis committees that acted as the principal tool of a euphemistically termed population exchange. In the Bosnian case just as in other recent wars, the old, geo-political and ideological motives predominated, that is, the key goals were the capture of a particular territory in order to implement distinct political goals by establishing a Greater Serbia and Croatia. The fact that the post World War II international order does not tolerate territorial conquests any more was one of the principal reasons that Yugoslav conict was externally seen as a throwback from the past, an irrational attachment to the primordial labels rather than what it actually wasa seizing of land in order to fulll a specic ideological project. In this context as Kalyvas (2001), Newman (2004) and Berdal (2003) rightly argue what has changed is not the nature of warfare itself but the Western perception of war. Similarly, Baumans view of liquid modernity as an era that transcends bounded space, where global capital dominates nation-states, and where consumerism overpowers nationalism is misplaced. The interests of global corporations can sometimes overlap with the ideology and geo-political motives of powerful states but the two are not causally linked. The so-called globalizing wars are almost exclusively fought by a single state, the United States of America, which as any nation-state in modern history pursues its own geo-political and ideological goals. As Mann (2001, 2003) rightly emphasizes, unlike its military might American economic power is not hegemonic over its European and Japanese rivals, as they are all backseat drivers of the contingencies and uctuations rooted in worldwide capitalist development. While the Gulf War of 1991 was fought to restore the status quo, and thus potentially beneting the further spread or dominance of Western based global corporations, all other globalizing wars such as Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq were initiated and fought much more for ideological and geopolitical reasons than arising from the global

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economic logic. Obviously neither the small and remote Serbia nor impoverished and desolate Afghanistan were the ideal new markets worth ghting over. In both cases a central motive for war originated in the sense of wounded national pride (hence nationalism) that a superpower was attacked on its own soil (9 11) or that some petit autocrat dares to resist the will of the powerful Western states. Both of these wars were motivated and in fact have succeeded in achieving ideological conversion by managing to replace the rigid Taliban Islamists and the autocratic nationalists around Milos evic with more moderate political regimes. The motivation behind the Iraq war is perhaps more complicated as it also involved economic motives (the control of oil reserves) which could have beneted global corporations, but even this motive had more to do with the requirements of a particular nation-state rooted in its ambition of geo-political control of resources (and security) rather than in opening up new markets for the global economy. Furthermore, the ideological motives loomed large as the war was in part an attempt to implement a specic neo-conservative blueprint (including Rebuilding Americas Defenses and other proposals developed by the highly inuential think-tank the Project for the New American Century) (Mann 2003:3; Smith 2005:164). In all three cases the wars relied on strong popular support. While in Kosovo and Afghanistan nationalism was supplemented with the broader international humanitarian and just cause rhetoric, thus extending its national support base, the war in Iraq was politically divisive in the international arena, thus reinforcing, and having to rely almost exclusively on, U.S. nationalism. To put it simply, the aims of globalizing wars have not substantially changed as ideology and geo-politics remain as important as ever. Although Shaw provides a more compelling account that recognizes the importance of territory and geo-politics, he too sees new wars as being subordinated to the economic and other global forces. In his account of risk transfer the distinction between the western and non-western worlds and the corresponding forms of warfare is overstretched. Albeit that technological sophistication and the dependence on precision targeting and air power are obviously historical novelties, these are not global developments but rather something that symbolizes the strength of a particular nation-statethe United States of America. In his analysis of recent global surveillance wars nearly all conicts, with the exception of the short, small and rather atypical Falklands war, were fought principally if not exclusively by the American military. In other words the transfer of risks is not that much of a western phenomenon (although it has some resonance in the United Kingdom and a few other European states) as it is a phenomenon of a distinct nation-statethe United States of America. In this sense the United States is a true military empire as it is the only state that has a military presence in 153 countries of the world, that has the technical know-how, refueling facilities, laser guided missiles, carrier ships, etc. to impose its military hegemony throughout the world. As Mann (2001:6) puts it: No state would rationally seek war with the United States, and few could survive it this is American, not Northern, military hegemony. It is not at the service of Northern economic imperialism. It is only at the service of interests dened by American governments. This is important in the context of popular support, as Shaw argues that Western global warfare no longer requires direct mass mobilization, preferring instead a media induced mobilization of passivity. However, this is another case of chronocentrism as it attempts to generalize on the basis of a very short historical period. Whereas an enormous superpower such as the United States can rely on a professional army to ght small wars with relatively few casualties, paying little attention to internal dissent, the major wars with substantial casualties still require the same level of direct mobilization as before. Both Vietnam and the Iraq war illustrate this only all too well. To ght a protracted large conict even most powerful states would have to contemplate

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reintroducing conscription and if necessary override economics, domestic politics and cultural life. The so-called war on terror clearly indicates how economy, polity and culture can easily become subordinated to war aims and how nationalism can quickly transform into a virulent battle cry and crusade against the other. The speed and congressional unanimity with which the Patriot Act was passed, with little if any popular dissent in the aftermath of 9 11, is a potent reminder of how quickly the nation-state can assume rm control over society. Hence it is not the perception of threat to western interests and values that motivates public support, it is primarily the ideology of nationalism in all its guises that secures popular mobilization and it is a geo-political logic that dictates conduct of nation-states. The United States is no exception here; it is just the largest and more powerful nation-state the world has known. What Is Old and What Is New? Despite its explanatory pitfalls, the sociology of new wars has opened up an important area of research and has raised novel questions about the nature of recent violent conicts. Most of all, these sociological accounts have placed the new wars debate in the wider social and historical context thus attempting to link the changing forms of violence with the transformation of modernity. To argue that the causes and objectives of contemporary warfare do not signicantly differ from their pre-global era predecessors does not automatically imply that nothing has changed. On the contrary the historical setting of the post-World War II world has substantially transformed as the traditional geopolitical goals of nationstates such as territorial expansion, colonial domination, or imperial conquest have lost their legitimacy, both at the national and especially at the international level. This is even more the case with some of the principal normative ideologies of the 20th century, such as state socialism, eugenics and scientic racism, fascist corporatism or imperial civilizing mission. Contemporary warfare clearly emerges in a different historical milieu and as such its goals and aims are shaped and restricted by these macro structural forces. Regardless of its military or economic might, no state can legitimately invade territories of other states or treat the citizens of those states as culturally or racially inferior species. Furthermore, the revolution in military affairs is a novel development that allows a military superpower such as the United States to rely extensively on the sophisticated technology to put coercive pressure on some uncooperative governments and to ght small and medium range hit and run wars. However, neither one of these two new developments has substantially changed the causes and objectives of warfare. While new technology has to some extent transformed the means of ghting, such as minimizing military casualties by relying on the relative precision of airpower and missile navigation in short and limited wars, it has not changed the ends of warfare. Similarly the new social and historical context has constrained the actions of, particularly northern, nation-states by forcing them to adopt soft geo-politics of bargaining, enticement and occasional coercive pressure over hard geo-politics of spatial conquest, but it has not dented the old multiple causes of violent conicts. Just as in the 19th and 20th centuries, wars are initiated and fought for economic, political but most of all for ideological and geopolitical reasons. An acceleration of economic globalization perhaps adds another layer of complexity and constraint to the old ideological and geopolitical motives of nation-states, but it could not possible obliterate either these motives or the nation-states themselves. Not only is it that more extensive economic integration requires more administrative state regulation, but also without the powerful nation-states that provide geopolitical stability, global economic expansion and incorporation would evaporate in a Hobbesian Darwinian world of anarchic brutality.

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Finally, the popular support on which modern conicts have to build if they are to have any chance of success is still largely derived from the same nationalist sources as before. Since the birth of modernity, in the French and American revolutions, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, nationalism became and remains the principal glue of legitimate rule (Gellner 1983; Smith 2003; Males evic 2006, 2007). Having powerful protean capacity nationalism is able to accommodate modern political formations as diverse as liberal democracies, state socialist orders, contemporary monarchies, military juntas as well as the theocratic states. No state authority is likely to generate a signicant support base without invoking the solidaristic images of our glorious nation. Even though nationalism has become less virulent in the North when compared to the early 20th century, no political leader or political party can survive long in ofce if deemed to be insufciently patriotic. The fact that the aggressive, militarist and jingoistic nationalisms of the two World Wars have given way to their softer counterparts does not suggest, as proponents of the new war paradigm argue, that nationalism as such is on the wane. Rather as the infrastructural capacities of modern nationstates expand further the habitual character and routinized nature of its reproduction make sure that the nation-centric view of the world is perpetually normalized and naturalized in the mass media, educational systems, the institutions of high culture, the state administration systems, through outlets of popular culture, youth organizations, civil society groups and even Internet Web sites. All of these make nationalism a powerful ideological force of everyday life, a force available for swift mobilization in times of major conict. As Billig (1995) poignantly observes, banality does not equal lenience. On the contrary, in reproducing state structures and institutions that possess immense armaments which can be rapidly utilized, banal nationalism can easily and quickly be transformed into a baby-faced killer. References
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