The New Wars: On the Return of a Historical Model

Abstract

The article is devoted to the development of the theory of “new wars.” The author maintains that the system for regulating war developed after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) has ceased to function under current conditions. The structural changes introduced in the new wars are: 1) re-commercialization of military violence, which once again turns war into an instrument for advancing certain (not necessarily political) interests; 2) merging military and criminal violence as warlords and their entourages make their living by profiting from war and forge alliances with international crime; 3) using strategic asymmetries in which the party with inferior power does not try to capture territory and win recognition by the state, but instead uses the expansion of the war (in space and time) to obtain advantages. The author analyses the Westphalian conception of sovereignty in which war and peace are understood as equally valid states for political aggregates. The transition from one to the another comes through an exercise of the will of the sovereign, whose right to wage war (jus ad bellum) is not limited to external campaigns (as the power of the Emperor or the Pope was in the Middle Ages). However, as war became accepted as a state monopoly, there was a codification of the rules of conducting it (jus in bello) that resulted in the adoption of the Geneva and Hague Conventions. The author also analyses the Thirty Years’ War as a typological model which differs from the Westphalian type by not being governed by a unitary regulatory system. The extraordinary duration and brutality of this type of conflict comes from blurring the boundaries between war and peace and between inter-state and civil war. The characteristic features of this non-Westphalian historical model are found in some modern wars, especially in the Middle East. The author develops this analogy and recommends using historical experience in order to prevent the conflicts in the Middle East in from merging into a single devastating war.