New and Old Wars

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Recommended: Nature of conflicts after cold war

The era of old wars has been succeeded by a new kind of war consisting of the new wars. Basically, the phenomena of new wars is one that is described by civil or international wars that engage in low grade conflicts entailing innumerable transnational and multinational connections such that differences between local and global relationships, internal and external, and violence and oppression emanating from the war are intricate to sustain (Clausewitz, 2007, p. 13). In principle, new wars are synonymous to conventional warfare in which the contemporary conventional military armament and combat tactics are no longer utilized in open confrontation between interstate conflicts (Duffield, 2005, p. 25).
Many theorists have considered what used to define war and the contemporary worldviews on new wars. One of such thinkers is Mary Kaldor, who explicated the effects of globalization to war with three associated major changes including the need to claim identity, aversion from using battlefield tactics, and the change of war into an international crime, which has faltered the mechanics of funding wars (Kaldor, 2013, p. 4). In addition to Kaldor’s intuitions on war, Martin van Creveld from Israel among other theories supports the claims of new wars and the underlying changes from the traditional wars (Kaldor, 2005, p. 33). In his arguments, Martin van Creveld purports that it is a fact that there is a low-grade intensity on conflicts which characterize wars in the contemporary society (van Creveld, 2002, p. 4; Kaldor, 2013, p. 15). This intuition is becoming obsolete considering the thoughts brought forth by Kaldor, which assert that the Clausewitz understanding of today’s wars including the militarized conflicts are outdated.
Fundamental...

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...M. 2013. In Defence of New Wars, Stability 2 (1/4), pp.1-16.
Kinross, S. 2004. Clausewitz and Low-Intensity Conflicts. Journal of Strategic Studies, 27 (1), pp. 35-58.
Mansdorf, I. and Kedar, M. 2008. The Psychological Asymmetry of Islamist Warfare. Middle East Quarterly, 15 (2), pp. 37-44.
Nicolson, A. 2005. Men of Honor: Trafalgar and the making of the English Hero. New York: HarperCollins.
Thornton, R. 2007. Asymmetric Warfare: Threat and Response in the 21st Century. New York: Wiley.
Tomes, R., Natter, W., and Brister, P. 2011. Hybrid Warfare and Transnational Threats: Perspectives for an Era of Persistent Conflict. New York: CENSA. van Creveld, M. 2002. The Transformation of War Revisited. Small Wars and Insurgencies, 13 (2), pp. 3-15.
William, C. 2011. New Battlefields, Old Laws: Critical Debates on Asymmetric Warfare. Washington DC: Columbia University Press.

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