Diverse Personal Encounters With Non State Armed Actors

According to Hedley Bull, war is “organized violence waged by sovereign states” which was the outcome of a “process of limitation or confinement of violence” via the ethical doctrine of just war theory. Clausewitz classified warfare as not just an act, but also a social institution for obtaining ulterior objectives (e.g. political) and strategic lines of command within and between states. He defined the social relationship between forces and the elements of war (rationality, chance and violence). Martin Shaw claims that contemporary warfare has completely evolved so that the “core of the new mode of warfare is a different general relationship between war fighting and the political, economic, and cultural-ideological domains.” (Nowaczynski, J. (2012, December). E-International Can

In A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Powers writes that the US is “extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil.” Powers’ comments are particularly relevant to U.S. policy during the turbulent 1990s and more recently in Syria when the U.S. policymakers chose not to deploy military capability to prevent mass atrocities. Since Powers’ seminal work, the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College (CGSC) located at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has taken on the challenge to educate military officers with 10 to 12 years of military experience in the prevention of and response to mass atrocities (MARO). My paper will discuss how international agreements such as the Responsibility to Protect, the Genocide

Marshall, (2000, p14), observed that protracted conflict ravages society and its supportive systems. In modern warfare, civilians are caught in the cross fire and invariably suffer the majority of war’s effects, mainly because in civil warfare situations, the entire society is the arena of armed conflict, and distinctions between combatant and non combatant are difficult to tell. And, in modern technological warfare, the societal infrastructure is itself a target. Refugees and internally displaced persons are a common result of violent and protracted conflict. Sorensen, (1998), observed that, it is, important to recognise that modern warfare often targets civilians and the institutions and structures that support them in their daily lives.

Conflict, whether between states or within states, is costly. Not only is the event itself costly but it is inefficient because oftentimes the same outcome could’ve been reached without conflict. Yet, conflict still occurs in the international system. If both parties knew what the outcome of a particular conflict would be, they could reach an agreement beforehand to avoid conflict’s high cost. However, predicting the future is not yet possible and so to address this issue, James Fearon developed a bargaining model of war that aims to explain why states so often fail to reach peaceful bargains. Building upon this rationalist explanation for war, Benjamin Valentino discusses the use of mass killing as a rational tool for leaders. Both arguments fail to take into account the individual experience – an experience driven and shaped by emotion. The events in Kosovo in the

In the post-cold war era, with the rise of globalisation and the interdependence of markets, one can observe the moribund decline of traditional inter-state conflicts and the rise of more complex intra-state conflicts. The reasons behind these conflicts are manifold but at the heart is arguably always a conflict of interest between two or more groups. The Uppsala Conflict Data Project (2016) defines armed

In 1994, in the song Survival of the Fittest, Prodigy of the group Mobb Deep famously said, “There’s a war going on outside, no man is safe from”. That rang true then as it does today, and will echo for centuries to come. Though, because of evolution, you have to wonder if war changed. Today’s wars and wars of the past may appear different at first glance, but once dissected, they have more in common than seen. All wars require reason and emotion. Also, depending on the size of the opposition, whether it be a country, state or non-state actor, it is evident the requirement of the government, the people, and some sort of military also need to be in aligned to support the cause. With that in mind, the Marine Corps has now conducted counterinsurgency operations in the Middle Eastern countries of Iraq and Afghanistan for over two decades. In that time, we have learned that war has changed to a hybrid treat better known as Irregular Warfare. The role the Marine Corps will play in the future

Keller (1997) discusses how internal civil wars rely on military support and arms from across borders. Analysts have long highlighted the relevance of “transboundary formations” that “link global regional, national, and local forces through structures, networks, and discourses that have wide-ranging impact, both benign and malign” (Callaghy, Kassimir & Latham 2001: 5). Non-state actors are able to consolidate their power through their interactions with the international and regional community (Bayart 1993). Mampilly (2011) argues that it is crucial to consider the impact of transnational actors on the behavior of rebel groups as it relates to civilian governance. These relations can bolster non-state actors, including armed groups (Guyer 1994; Ferguson & Gupta 2002). Zahar even argues that because insurgents view themselves as “independent political entities,” they “work to legitimize themselves by interacting with transnational actors” (2001: 60). Mampilly comments that transnational actors support rebel groups by providing them with resources that influence their ability and will to deal with civilian governance (2011: 89). Rebel groups incorporate these transnational actors into their governance systems in order to supplant or supplement their dependence on civilian support, and therefore, their own capacity to provide civilians with goods. And so in general, it is feasible to assume that help drawn from other states will have a damaging effect on civilian governance

However, this was an erroneous perspective that assumed the cause and effect relationship was “simple” and clearly understood. In reality, the problem was much more complicated and required additional expert analysis to fully understand the unique context of the human domain of the Iraqi insurgency. Only after US leaders and policy makers elicited expert advice on Iraqi insurgency, and the sociology of the Anbar Dulaym tribe, were they able to move the problem from complex to complicated, and change the strategy of the war. Ultimately, this new strategy would include working with and through partners previously excluded because of motive or historical relationships. This complicated, but effective model allowed the US to greatly reduce the insurgency in Iraq because we were able to work with expansive partner networks to achieve mutual

He believes “the deployment of indiscriminate violence against noncombatants went against the trends of continental warfare which saw combat as an activity led and managed by professional soldiers to achieve the more or less limited goals of sovereign nation-states”(21). Porch argues that supporters of counterinsurgency have embraced these specialized and more practical styles of warfare as “a refutation of modern, intellectual, more strategically sophisticated analytical and technological approach to warfare”(50). Porch believes that the modern doctrine of COIN “denies the interactive nature of conflict as manifest in the will, chance, and anger of conflicting parties as in the

Organizing Insurgency by Paul Staniland, introduces the question, “Do resources like diamonds, drugs, and state sponsors turn insurgent groups into thuggish people or do they help build a more disciplined organization?” The reason this question is asked is because in some cases it suggests that “resource wealth encourages the degeneration of armed groups into greed and criminality” and other evidence shows that “external sponsorship and criminal activity can help leaders build organizations in the face of state repression” (p.142). This question is being presented because with different insurgent groups like the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and the Hizbul Mujahidden, having very similar interactions with state sponsors, could have

In their work, Refugees and Forced Displacement, International Security, and Human Vulnerability, Edward Newman and Jan van Selm describe how mass and forced displacement of populations have been used as a weapon during conflict: “refugee flows are demonstrably a source of […international conflict] through causing instability in neighbouring countries, triggering intervention, and sometimes providing a basis for warrior communities within camps that can form the source for insurgency, resistance, and terrorist movements” (p. 5). It is Newman and van Salem’s mention of warrior communities within refugee camps that elucidate the potential security threat refugees may impose on states and/or individuals. This essay illustrates how the militarization of refugee camps by “warrior refugees” who recruit within the refugee community and exploit humanitarian aid, pose a significant security threat to the sending state, the humanitarian community, and refugees who are susceptible to being used as military weapons during a conflict (ibid.). It also uses the Rwanda case study to demonstrate how a receiving state that does not have the means and/or desire to police military leaders within refugee facilitates the security threat as well.

A recent press report by the Huffington Post "Put the 'Humanitarian ' back in Humanitarian interventions" outlined the concerns that external intervention is not the solution to ending violence. (Marshall, 2014) Humanitarian intervention has always been a contentious issue among International Organisations (IO) and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). They have moral obligations to help yet bounded by structural rigidities of the organisation and the self-interests of participating states . IO and NGOs such as the United Nations (UN) and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) are restricted by the challenge of trying to put together a divided international committee. This essay will discuss the moral and material limits of humanitarian intervention by IO and NGOs, relating to the interests of states involved, power of IOs and NGOs, their delay in responding to emergency situations and lastly limitations due to the sovereignty of states. International operations in Afghanistan, Rwanda, Kosovo and Somalia will serve as examples.

Old wars are the armed conflicts between states for lands, resources, national glory and so on due to the fact that military strength has been what state must possess to be present in the international community and to practice power upon other actors (Heywood, 2014, pp.: 239). These inter-state wars thus can be seen as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will” (Clausewitz, 2008, pp.: 75), which reached the pinnacle in the mid-twentieth century. Theoretically, these wars were highly organised, fought in uniforms and confined by law, such as The Geneva Convention and The Hague Convention introduced in the early twentieth century. However, “war made states, and vice versa” (Tilly, 1990), war has been changing its characters in

In order to test this hypothesis properly, multiple steps and measures needed to be taken to ensure that the data procured was not only accurate but also pertinent to the study. The first of these steps was to establish a standardized definition of what actually determines what is and what is not an intrastate war. As a result of many differing definitions of what constitutes a civil war, information was gathered from the Correlates of War organization. The organizations defines an intrastate conflict which, “must meet same definitional requirements of all wars in that the war must involve sustained combat, involving organized armed forces, resulting in a minimum of 1,000 battle-related combatant fatalities within a twelve month period,” (Sarkees). The researchers for the Correlates of War went further in their definition by providing the requirements that both sides must be organized and provide “resistance” to one another (Sarkees). This attempts to differentiate civil wars from other violent acts such as massacres, genocides, or coup d’états.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 altered the environment of international relations, as the world saw first hand the damage a non-state actor can inflict on a regional hegemon. While non-state actors have always existed, for example maritime pirates or private mercenaries, the events of 9/11 provided non-state actors, in the form of terrorist organizations, the platform needed to expand their influence. Despite the urgency posed by the rise of non-state actors, the field of international relations continues to use an interstate framework to analyze conflict. This is the natural result of a long history of state-centered analysis that came to formal fruition post-WWI and dominated through the Cold War. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this discipline remained intact. However, as most conflicts today involve non-state actors, such as terrorist organizations in the mountains of Afghanistan and pirates off the coast of Somalia, this state-centric framework is deteriorating.