Anything new or more of the same? Wars and military interventions in the international system, 1946-2003

Global Society

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 25-46

  Chojnacki, Sven ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MILITARY APPLICATION; POLITICAL CONFLICT; WAR;

EID: 30944447493     PISSN: 13600826     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13600820500405442     Document Type: Article

References (150)

1. I thank Wolf-Dieter Eberwein for helpful comments and Nils Metternich for his research assistance. The author also wishes to thank the 'Berlin Research Group on the Scientific Study of War' (Berliner Forschungsgruppe Krieg, FORK) for discussions. This study is part of the project "New Forms of Violence in the International System" and received funding from the 'German Peace Research Foundation' (Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung, DSF).
2. Deutsch, KarlW., "Introduction", in Quincy Wright, A Study of War, 2nd Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
3. See Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms. International and Civil Wars, 1816-1980 (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982)
4. John A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
5. Nils Petter Gleditsch, Peter Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margareta Sollenberg, and Havard Strand. "Armed Conflict 1946-2001: A new dataset", Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 39, No. 5 (2002), pp. 615-637.
6. See Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime", in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169-191
7. David Keen, "Incentives and Disincentives for Violence", in Mats Berdal and David M. Malone (eds.), Greed and Grievances. Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), pp. 19-41.
8. Mary Kaldor, New and OldWars. Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
9. Kalevi J. Holsti, The State,War, and the State ofWar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
10. Mark Duffield, Global Governance and New Wars. The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001).
11. Michael Brzoska, "'New Wars' Discourse in Germany", Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2004), pp. 107-117.
12. Jeffrey Pickering, "Give me Shelter. Reexamining Military Intervention and the Monadic Democratic Peace", International Interactions, Vol. 28 (2002), p. 294.
13. Vasquez, The War Puzzle, op. cit., p. 59.
14. Gleditsch et al., op. cit.
15. Monty G. Marshal and Ted Robert Gurr, Peace and Conflict 2003. A Global Survey of Armed Conflict, Self-Determination Movements, and Democracy (College Park, MD: CIDCM, 2003).
16. Jack S. Levy and Thomas C. Walker, Martin S. Edwards, "Continuity and Change in the Evolution of Warfare", in Maoz, Zeev and Azar Gat (eds.), War in a Changing World (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 15-48
17. Meredith Reid Sarkees, Frank Whelon Wayman, and J. David Singer, "Inter-State, Intra-State, and Extra-State Wars: A Comprehensive Look at Their Distribution over Time, 1816-1997", International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 47 (2003), pp. 49-70.
18. Ibid., p. 61
19. see also Gleditsch, op. cit.
20. Marshall and Gurr, op. cit.
21. Sarkees et al., "Inter-State, Intra-State, and Extra-State Wars: A Comprehensive Look at Their Distribution over Time, 1816-1997", op. cit., p. 65.
22. James D. Fearon, and David D. Laitin, "Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war", American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (2003), p. 75.
23. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, Nicholas Sambanis, "On the Duration of Civil War", Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2003), pp. 253-273.
24. The durable or recurring conflicts in Sudan, Angola, Myanmar, or Colombia are paradigmatic for this.
25. James D. Fearon, "Why some civil wars last so much longer than others?", Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2004), pp. 275-301.
26. Edmund Cairns, A Safer Future: Reducing the Human Costs of War (Oxford: Oxfam Publications, 1997)
27. Paul Collier, Lani Elliot, Håvard Hegre, Anke Hoeffler,Marta Reynal-Querol, and Nicholas Sambanis, Breaking the Conflict Trap. Civil War and Development Policy (Washington, DC.: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003a) p. 17
28. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War, op. cit., p 37
29. Kaldor, New and Old Wars. Organized Violence in a Global Era, op. cit., p. 100.
30. Mary Kaldor, "New Types of Conflict", in Ruth Stanley (ed.), Gewalt und Konflikt in einer globalisierten Welt (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001), pp. 24-50
31. Bernhard Zangl and Michael Zürn, Frieden und Krieg. Sicherheit in der nationalen und postnationalen Konstellation [Peace and War. Security in the National and Post-National Constellation] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 183.
32. William Eckhardt, "Civilian Deaths in Wartime", Bulletin of Peace Proposals, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1989), p. 90.
33. Edward Newman, "The 'New Wars' Debate: A Historical Perspective is Needed", Security Dialogue, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2004), p. 181.
34. Benjamin Valentino and Paul Huth, Dylan Balch-Lindsay, "Draining the Sea: Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare", International Organization, Vol. 58 (2004), pp. 375-407.
35. See Newman, op. cit.
36. With respect to African civil wars, Jean-Paul Azam and Anke Hoeffler, "Violence Against Civilians in Civil Wars: Looting or Terror", Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2002), pp. 461-485, have analysed a two-step game-theoretic model that supports the hypothesis that violence against civilians is motivated by military objectives, namely to terrorise civilian populations and to trigger migration.
37. Collier et al., Breaking the Conflict Trap. Civil War and Development Policy, op. cit., p. 18 and pp. 35ff;
38. UNHCR, The State of the World's Refugees: In Search of Solutions, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 276-280.
39. Ibid., p. 282.
40. See Mikael Eriksson and Peter Wallensteen, Margareta Sollenberg, "Armed Conflict, 1989-2002", Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 40, No. 5 (2003), pp. 593-607.
41. Collier et al., Breaking the Conflict Trap. Civil War and Development Policy, op. cit., p. 40.
42. Levy et al., op. cit., p. 17.
43. These were the Second and Third GulfWar (1991, 2003), the Kargil war between India and Pakistan (1999), and the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea (1998-2000).
44. A "militarized interstate dispute" is defined as a set of interactions between states involving explicit threats to resort to military force, displays of military force or actual uses of military force Charles S. Gochman and Zeev Maoz, "Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816-1976. Procedures, Patterns, and Insights", Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 28. No. 4 (1984), pp. 585-616
45. Daniel M. Jones, Stuart S. Bremer, and David J. Singer, "Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1812-1992, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1996), pp. 163-213.
46. Jones et al., op. cit., p. 184.
47. Gochman and Maoz, cit. op.: P. 594.
48. On the basis of the MID data, it can also be shown that several dyads such as Greece-Turkey or India-Pakistan have over decades been involved in enduring or strategic rivalries (see, among others, Paul Diehl and Gray Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000);
49. William Thompson, "Identifying rivals and rivalries in world politics", International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4 (2001), pp. 557-587
50. John A. Vasquez, "Distinguishing Rivals That Go to aposWar from Those That Do Not, A Quantitative Comparative Case Study of the Two Paths to War", International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4 (1996), pp. 531-558.
51. See, among others, Errol A. Henderson, Democracy and War. The End of an Illusion? (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002);
52. Harald Müller, "The Antinomy of Democratic Peace", Paper prepared for Presentation at the ECPR Meeting in Marburg, Germany, September 2003 (forthcoming in International Politics).
53. Mark Peceny, and Jeffrey Pickering, "Military Interventions, Peacekeeping, and the Promotion of Democracy", Paper prepared for the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, LA, March 24-27, 2002.
54. Zangl and Zürn, op. cit., p. 195.
55. Jeffrey Pickering, op. cit.
56. Edward Rhodes, "The Imperial Logic of Bush's Liberal Agenda", Survival, Vol. 45, No. 1 (2003), pp. 131-154.
57. Small and Singer, op. cit.
58. Gleditsch et al., cit. op.
59. see, critically, Wolf-Dieter Eberwein, and Sven Chojnacki 2001: Scientific Necessity and Political Utility. A Comparison of Data on Violent Conflicts, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin P 01-304.
60. Gleditsch et al., op. cit.
61. Small and Singer, op. cit.
62. The UCDP for its part has not generally questioned this basic principle and applied it itself in a modified form (Gleditsch et al., cit. op.; Harvard Strand, Lars Wilhelmsen, and Nils Petter, Armed Conflict Dataset Codebook, Version 1.1, 2002.
63. Small and Singer, op. cit., pp. 203-222.
64. Meredith Reid Sarkees and J. David Singer, "Armed Conflict & Future: A Master Typology?", Paper prepared for presentation at the conference "Identifying Wars: Systemic Conflict Research and its Utility in Conflict Resolution and Prevention", 8-9 June 2001, Uppsala, Sweden.
65. Ibid., p. 15
66. Sarkees et al., op. cit., p. 60.
67. The COW sub-categories of extra-state wars are a) "state vs. independent non-state actor" and b) "state vs. dependent non-state actor" (Sarkees and Singer, op. cit., p. 26).
68. Ibid., p. 24.
69. See Ibid.
70. Vasquez, The War Puzzle, op. cit.
71. This problem also exists with a view to UCDP which ties armed conflicts by definition to the distinction between those over territory and those over authority. On the one hand, the logic and benefit of this inclusion in a definition of armed conflict and war is questionable. On the other hand, the restriction to two "contested incompatibilities" is unsatisfactory and, moreover, unjustifiable theoretically. In its present form, the issue-area-related coding rule leads to the awkward situation that a number of wars reported by COW are missing in the Uppsala data collection (among others Nigeria 1980/81 and Jordan 1970). Moreover, it unnecessarily restricts the openness of this definition for further changes in the types of issues.
72. See, similarly, Sarkees and Singer, op. cit.
73. This definition of sub-state wars also allows for the registration of some critical cases which by now were allocated to other categories or completely fell outside registration altogether. This applies not only to events after the end of the Cold War, but to developments after World War II in general (e.g. Lebanon, Afghanistan).
74. See Nicholas Sambanis, "A Note on the Death Threshold in Coding Civil War Events", Unpublished Paper (2001).
75. See Nicholas Sambanis, "What is Civil War? Conceptual and empirical complexities of an operational definition", Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 48, No. 6 (2004), pp. 814-858 for an extended discussion.
76. See Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear. An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era (2nd edn.) (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991);
77. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War, op. cit.
78. David Carment, "Assessing state failure: Implications for theory and policy", Third World Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2003), pp. 407-427.
79. The revised State Failure Problem Set dataset has been compiled at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), University of Maryland, under the direction of Monty G. Marshall. It encompasses four distinct types of state failure events (Revolutionary Wars, Ethnic Wars, Adverse Regime Changes, and Genocides or Politicides) and offers clues on annual magnitude scales concerning patterns of organized violence in failed or collapsed states (i.e. failure of state authority, number of rebel combatants or activists, annual number of fatalities related to fighting, portion of country affected by fighting). For the State Failure Problem Set dataset and spreadsheets see .
80. Pickering, op. cit., p. 294.
81. Few authors empirically and systematically address the problem of military intervention, exceptions being Herbert K. Tillema, "Escalation and International War in the Nuclear Age, Foreign Overt Military Interventions, 1945-1988", Paper presented at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, March 19-23, 1991
82. Pickering, op. cit.,
83. Peceny and Pickering, op. cit.
84. Patrick M. Regan, Civil Wars and Foreign Powers. Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
85. Gleditsch et al., op. cit.
86. The dataset and the coding manual will be made available: or .
87. Eberwein and Chojnacki, op. cit.
88. Ibid., p. 27. The following projects were included in the data analysis: Correlates of War Project, Uppsala Conflict Data Project, Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kriegsursachenforschung (AKUF) at the University of Hamburg (Germany), the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research (HIIK) and the State Failure Problem Set.
89. This conceptual definition of war refers to Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society, A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 184
90. Jack S. Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975, op. cit., pp. 51-53,
91. Levy et al., op. cit., p. 16
92. Vasquez, The War Puzzle, op. cit., pp. 21-29).
93. Small and Singer, op. cit., pp. 39-43
94. Sarkees et al., op. cit., p. 58
95. see also Gleditsch et al., op. cit., p. 619.
96. See Pickering, op. cit., p. 301.
97. See Small and Singer, op. cit.
98. Paul Collier and Hoeffler, "Data Issues in the Study of Conflict", Paper prepared for the Conference on 'Data Collection on Armed Conflict'", Uppsala, 8-9 June 2001.
99. Sambanis, op. cit., p. 2.
100. UCDP offers an approach for this in that it differentiates between three phases of intensity: Minor armed conflicts ("at least 25 battle related deaths per year and fewer than 1,000 deaths during the course of conflict"), intermediate armed conflicts ("at least 25 deaths per year and an accumulated total of at least 1,000 deaths, but fewer than 1,000 per year"), and wars ("at least 1,000 battle-related deaths per year"). This does not, however, solve all problems but even gives rise to new ones because the intermediate category is essentially a "fake". Thus, conflicts with identical death tolls in a given year were recorded as either minor armed conflicts or as intermediate armed conflict, dependent of whether or not the threshold of 1,000 deaths was surpassed for the whole period of conflict. And because, in principle, only two thresholds were set, precise determinations with a view to changes in intensity are possible only to a limited extent (see Collier and Hoeffler, op. cit., p. 6).
101. Small and Singer, op. cit., p. 55.
102. Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, "International Peacebuilding: ATheoretical and Quantitative Analysis", American Political Science Review, Vol. 94, No. 4 (2000), pp. 779-801
103. Fearon and Laitin, op. cit.
104. Fearon, op. cit.
105. Small and Singer, op. cit., p. 55.
106. Jeffrey Herbst, "Economic Incentives, Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa", Journal of African Economies, Vol. 9, No. 3 (2000), pp. 270-294
107. Newman, op. cit.
108. For recording annual figures of victims, the following data sets were used: The State Failure Problem Set, the Uppsala Conflict Database, the Armed Conflict Database from the International Institutes for Strategic Studies (IISS), the Armed Conflict Report from the Project Ploughshares, Keesing's Record of World Events and the Archiv der Gegenwart.
109. In a first step, the author has generated a candidate database and isolated critical cases on the basis of a comparative analysis of available data sets. Next, these cases were scrutinised and categorised by the Berlin Research Group on the Scientific Study of War (FORK), In addition, qualitative analyses conducted by the research project "New Forms of Violence in the International System" were used to record intra-state and non-state wars and to identify differentiating characteristics.
110. See Pickering, op. cit., p. 301.
111. James N. Rosenau, "Intervention as Scientific Concept", Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 22 (1968), p. 167
112. Regan, op. cit., p. 9.
113. However, sub-state wars do not break out in all instances where the monopoly of violence is fragile and rebel groups exert regional power. Thus, for example, the situation in Colombia displays a number of factors in line with the concept of 'new' wars (paramilitary groups, growing importance of economic motives, restriction of the range of the state's monopoly of violence), but the conflict situation continues to be characterised by conflicts between the government and clearly structured rebel organisations.
114. William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, Lynne Rienner: 1998);
115. Duffield, op. cit.
116. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War, op. cit., p. 36.
117. Kaldor, New and Old Wars. Organized Violence in a Global Era, op. cit. The extent to which the civilian population can be affected is exemplified by the war in Sierra Leone where competing militia sought revenge for each military victory or defeat by slaughtering civilians.
118. Duffield, op. cit.
119. Gleditsch et al., op. cit., p. 623.
120. Sven Chojnacki, Democratic Wars and Military Interventions, 1946-2002. The Monadic Level Reconsidered, in Lothar Brock, Anna Geis and Harald Müller (eds.), Democratic Wars. Looking at the Dark Side of the Democratic Peace (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
121. The reasons for the increasing significance of PSAs (or Private Military Firms, PMFs) which take on military or consultative functions in wars are, first, the incapacity of numerous states to perform security functions effectively; second, technological changes in warfare which increase demand for highly qualified expertise in terms of counselling, executive or logistic functions; and third, the emergence of a private global market for highly qualified military officials and weaponry systems after the end of the Cold War (David Shearer, "Private Armies and Military Intervention", Adelphi Paper 316, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998);
122. Peter W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003);
123. James Larry Taulbee, "Governing the Use of Force: Modern Conflict and the Privatization of Violence". Paper Prepared for the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association 24-27 March 2002, New Orleans.
124. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, op. cit.
125. Kaldor, New and Old Wars. Organized Violence in a Global Era, op. cit.
126. Münkler 2003 op. cit.
127. Kalyvas, op. cit.
128. Henderson and Singer, op. cit.
129. Sarkees and Singer, op. cit., p. 25.
130. See, for example, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, "Domestic Politics and International Relations", International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2002), pp. 1-9.
131. Tilly, op. cit.
132. Duffield, op. cit.
133. Fearon and Laitin, op. cit.
134. Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States, Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
135. Reno, op. cit.
136. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War, op. cit.
137. Georg Sørensen, "War and State-Making. Why Doesn't It Work in the Third World?", Security Dialogue, Vol. 32, No. 3 (2001), pp. 341-354.
138. Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
139. Jackson, op. cit.
140. Scott Pegg, De Facto States in the International System, Working Paper No. 21 (The University of British Columbia: Institute of International Relations, 1998).
141. Reno, op. cit.
142. Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (Washington: World Peace Foundation, 2003)
143. Hans-Henrik Holm and Georg Søorensen, "International Relations Theory in a World of Variation", in H.-H Holm and George Søorensen (eds.), Whose World Order? Uneven Globalization and the End of the Cold War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 192ff;
144. Newman, op. cit., pp. 186-187)
145. See, for example, Pickering, op. cit.
146. Rhodes, op. cit.
147. Pickering, op. cit.,
148. Henderson, op. cit.
149. Bruce Russett 1993. "Why democratic peace?", in Bruce Russett (ed.), Grasping the democratic peace: Principles for a post-cold-war world (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
150. Eberwein and Chojnacki, op. cit., p. 1.