the new type of wars:
• The virtual disappearance of wars between states;
• The decline of all high intensity wars, involving more than a thousand battle deaths;
• The decline in the deadliness of war measured in terms of battle deaths;
• The increase in the duration and/or recurrence of wars; and
• The risk factor of proximity to other wars.
Chaotic ground war, or more technically, ‘militarized occupation’, continues to prevail in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and are globally-impacting. In Bosnia and Kosovo they are still rebuilding their devastated social infrastructure with limited support. In North Korea and the Taiwan Strait new tensions are developing. In sub-Saharan Africa conflict is endemic. In short, the application of massive intervention forces has not brought about a positive peace anywhere, and long-simmering conflicts are intensifying, such as that in the Kashmir region, wheretwo states have now developed weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, it also seems likely that new zones of military engagement will continue to emerge in the coming years. In the meantime, the world faces a global war called the War on Terror that has come to frame most existing conflicts whether they are local, regional or global. In Simon Cooper’s words, ‘a combination of political, economic and technological factors are leading towards a state where civilian populations are permanently militarized, where the gap between war and peace collapses, and where peace as a mode of being distinct in its own right seems impossible to constitute’ (James & Friedman, 2009, p. 31).
From out of the discussion, we can garner some simple conclusions: firstly, not all wars are globalizing, but modern wars tend to do so. Secondly, the new transnational wars of the contemporary period tend to occur in zones where there was previously a colonial order of authority as part of an earlier period of imperial globalization. Thirdly, while regional and localized wars in the past usually had limited impact beyond their immediate region – that is, except when great powers became involved – now they have increasingly come to have profound globalizing consequences. Fourthly, the process of globalization in relation to war is contradictory – one of a relative balance of forces, between centralizing and fragmenting tendencies caught in a web of global relations. And finally, with the War on Terror we face a new kind of global war based on globalized networked relations and a new kind of engagement that, at one level, transcends territorial and temporal containment (Modelski & Morgan, 2006).
To all the above we must add the intractability of religious-ethnic conflicts that mix with political and economic interests – as are the cases of the Kurd minority in Turkey, Iraq and Syria, Alawi minority in Syria and Christian Minorities in Middle East –that make the attempt to resolve the “roots” of the conflictual situations into an almost impossible task.
Therefore we should seek for possible solutions in the political, economic and military aspects that lie behind the ongoing conflicts. As a general observation, we could claim that higher levels of institutionalization may help to prevent conflicts and refugee migration. This means better functioning states, as well as regional and international organizations in the conflictive areas. One of the phenomena that is obvious to the observer of the last decades’ conflicts is that lower levels of governability or higher levels of state de-structuration or the disappearance of states - as has been the case in Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and certain African countries – produce political chaos, high levels of violence, economic impoverishment and massive waves of migrant-refugees. The reaction of all the interested parties – by this I mean the internal actors in each conflict and the regional and international communities - should be to strengthen existing states and to closely assist transitions from authoritarian rule to more democratic situations, taking special care of fostering viable models of national economies in countries affected by these kind of processes.
The other side to address according to the above models is what makes possible modern massive violence, globalized wars and terrorism, or what the means to be controlled are. Illegal capital movements that can finance wars are a classic case of lack of control. Drug production has financed internal violence and wars - and probably still do – in Lebanon, Colombia, Afghanistan, Myanmar and other places. Weapons trade - legal and illegal – feed violence and wars everywhere. All these suggest that in order to have less military clashes in the periphery, there is a serious need to strengthen intelligence and police work on the behalf of the central and richer countries in order to thereby avoid the phenomena that make war in the periphery possible.
The other feature about migration-refugee problems is that most of the people that flee a combination of war, violence and economic crisis, for a variety of reasons migrate to neighboring countries. Linguistic and cultural similarities, short distances from abandoned homes and easier communications and transport with the home countries, families and friends and fear of distance and long term migration are among the main causes of this kind of migration. In the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America, the target countries of this kind of refugees migration waves are not particularly different in terms of their level of development and available financial resources, than the countries of origin. Therefore, today we find a large majority of refugees from the countries in conflict (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, various African countries and Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) in their neighboring countries: Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iran, other African countries, Mexico and Costa Rica). The most developed Western Countries (USA, Canada, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and others) have received a large number of refugees, but proportionally to their resources and population, much fewer than poor neighboring countries in the vicinity of the areas of acute conflict. Leaving moral considerations aside and looking at raw political, economic and social capacities, the impact of these processes is one of starting a chain process of destabilization of the poorer and conflictive areas that, in the case of non-containment of the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Central Africa and Central America, could expand the waves of migration of refugees and destabilize developed Western countries.
Taking into consideration that the economic crisis beginning in 2009 has had a limiting impact in budgetary policies, the main practical question is where to find the resources to cope with the migration of refugees – be it nationally, regionally or internationally. The second set of questions concerns what to do about the conflicts themselves.
The first logical answer is to divert financial resources away from military spending, especially by reducing the acquisition of expensive conventional weaponry. The logic of this step is that they will not be of much use in future conflicts due to the changing nature of political and military relations into the 21st century. From another angle, the non-treatment of migration-refugee crises can generate a new type of conflict that will deeply affect the big spenders on military hardware. This kind of change implies profound reforms in military structures from the point of view of personnel, training and organization. We should remember that planning the wars of the future on the basis of experiences of the past may be a great mistake, especially in an era where the acceleration of changes is what marks the future.
The other military point is politically-agreed upon military intervention in order to placate violence and structuring political compromises. I am well aware that this sounds “imperialistic” – developed powers intervening in the less developed world – but since the financial and weapons sources that feed conflicts are tied to these powers, there seems to be no alternatives to the negotiation between them in order not to allow the continuation of conflicts. A political agreement between the relevant powers about Syria (Russia, USA, Iran Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the EU and others) could undoubtedly lower the level of violence, destruction, economic damage and, as a consequence, the number of migrant-refugees. It is very difficult to achieve, but not impossible, especially if we take into consideration the - at least declared – common denominator of the war “against terror.” It is true that long-term solutions have to do with the imperial divisions of the periphery areas that created modern nation-states highly heterogeneous from a religious,
