This is a very extensive summary for the Core Module International Relations from 2023 in light if the final exam from University of Amsterdam (from Lecture 11 to 16). Here I provide a summary and notes from the readings, lectures and my tutorial group presentations to provide a more in depth analy...
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS READINGS AND LECTURES SUMMARY: PREPARATION FOR THE
FINAL EXAM
Lecture 11 Readings: Multi-Level Politics of War:
Kaldor, M. (2013). New and old wars: Organised violence in a global era:
WAR: new wars involve a blurring of the distinctions between war (usually defined
as violence between states or organized political groups for political motives),
organized crime (violence undertaken by privately organized groups for private
purposes, usually financial gain) and large-scale violations of human rights
(violence undertaken by states or politically organized groups against individuals)
Globalization is a convenient catch-all to describe the various changes that
characterize the contemporary period and have influenced the character of war.
share the view that there has been a revolution in military affairs, but it is a
revolution in the social relations of warfare, not in technology
It is often argued that the new wars are a consequence of the end of the Cold War;
they reflect a power vacuum which is typical of transition periods in world affairs.
It is undoubtedly true that the consequences of the end of the Cold War – the
availability of surplus arms, the discrediting of socialist ideologies, the
disintegration of totalitarian empires, the withdrawal of superpower support to
client regimes
The impact of globalization is visible in many of the new wars. The global presence
in these wars can include international reporters, mercenary troops and military
advisers, and diaspora volunteers as well as a veritable ‘army’ of international
agencies ranging from non-governmental organization
The goals of the new wars are about identity politics in contrast to the geo-political
or ideological goals of earlier wars.
among the global class are members of transnational networks based on exclusivist
identity, while at the local level there are many courageous individuals who refuse
the politics of particularism
In one sense, all wars involve a clash of identities. earlier identities were linked
either to a notion of state interest or to some forward-looking project ideas about
how society should be organized. (Page 11 follow up later)
In guerrilla warfare, territory is captured through political control of the population
rather than through military advance, and battles are avoided as far as possible. The
new warfare also tends to avoid battle and to control territory through political
control of the population, but whereas guerrilla warfare, at least in theory as
articulated by Mao Tse-tung or Che Guevara, aimed to capture ‘hearts and minds’,
the new warfare borrows from counter-insurgency techniques of destabilization
aimed at sowing ‘fear and hatred’.
The aim is to control the population by getting rid of everyone of a different identity
(and indeed of a different opinion) and by instilling terror. Hence the strategic goal
of these wars is to mobilize extremist politics based on fear and hatred.
This often involves population expulsion through various means such as mass
killing and forcible resettlement, as well as a range of political, psychological and
economic techniques of intimidation. This is why all these wars are characterized
, by high levels of refugees and displaced persons, and why most violence is directed
against civilians
. The new war economies are decentralized. Participation in the war is low and
unemployment is extremely high. Moreover, these economies are heavily
dependent on external resources. In these wars, domestic production declines
dramatically because of global competition, physical destruction or interruptions to
normal trade, as does tax revenue. In these circumstances, the fighting units finance
themselves through plunder, hostage-taking and the black market or through
external assistance. The latter can take the following forms: remittances from the
diaspora, ‘taxation’ of humanitarian assistance, support from neighbouring
governments, or illegal trade in arms, drugs or valuable commodities such as oil or
diamonds or human trafficking
All of these sources can only be sustained through continued violence so that a war
logic is built into the functioning of the economy
Rousseau consistently argued that war was directed as much against subjects as
against other states
The Ontology of “Political Violence”: Action and Identity in Civil Wars (Kalyvas):
I discuss several conceptual problems raised by current understandings of political
violence
Hobbesian in inspiration, stressing an ontology of civil wars characterized by the
breakdown of authority and subsequent anarchy
The impersonal and abstract enmity that Carl Schmitt thought was the essential
feature of politics6 echoes Rousseau’s perception of war, not as “man to man” but as
“state to state.” Individuals, claimed Rousseau, were only enemies by accident, and
then only as soldiers.7 In contrast to the Hobbesian thesis, which prioritizes the
private sphere at the exclusion of the political, the Schmittian one stresses the
fundamentally political nature of civil wars and their attendant processes; it informs
interpretations of traditional “ideological” or “revolutionary” civil wars,
: civil wars are not binary conflicts but complex and ambiguous processes that foster
an apparently massive, though variable, mix of identities and actions—to such a
degree as to be defined by that mix. Put otherwise, the widely observed ambiguity
is fundamental rather than incidental to civil wars, a matter of structure rather than
noise.
Is it correct to describe and analyze all violence in civil wars as “political violence”?
, In short, ambiguity is endemic to civil wars;17 this turns their characterization into
a quest for an ever-deeper “real” nature, presumably hidden underneath misleading
facades—an exercise akin to uncovering Russian dolls. Thus, it is often argued that
religious wars are really about class, or class wars are really about ethnicity, or
ethnic wars are only about greed and looting, and so on. The difficulty of
characterizing civil wars is a conceptual problem rather than one of measurement.
Clan rivalries in Chinese villages shaped peasant decisions about whether to side
with or against the Communists during the civil war there. Peter Seybolt’s analysis
of the Chinese Civil War during the Japanese occupation uncovers a similar
disjunction between center and periphery: “Many of the battles fought among
Chinese had little to do with collaboration or resistance. They were struggles for
power and economic spoils that pit central authorities against local authorities; local
authorities against each other, bandits against merchants and landlords, secret
societies against bandits, Guomindang members against Communists, and so on.”
Several theoretical implications follow from an understanding of civil wars
informed by the dynamics of local cleavages. Identity labels should be handled with
caution: actors in civil war cannot be treated as if they were unitary. Labels coined
at the center may be misleading when generalized down to the local level;
Many detailed descriptions of violence suggest the presence of considerable local
input and initiative in the production of violence. Rather than being imposed upon
communities by outsiders, this evidence suggests, violence often (but not always)
grows from within communities even when it is executed by outsiders; it is, in other
words, often intimate.
To summarize, the interaction between supralocal and local actors, and the private
and public spheres, is hinted at by various works, but is left untheorized. Below, I
outline the missing theoretical account.
Actors at the center are assumed to be linked with action on the ground via the well-
known mechanism of cleavage. This implies various underlying microfoundations,
most notably centralized organization, common preferences, fear, or coordination
around focal points. This paper introduces another microfoundation linking center
and periphery: alliance.
We may, then, want to think of cleavage as a symbolic formation that simplifies,
streamlines, and incorporates a bewildering variety of local conflicts—a view
compatible with the way outside observers, like historians, rely on a “master
narrative” as a means of “emplotment,” to tell a straight compelling story out of
many complex ones.
Fazal, T. M., & Poast, P. (2019). War is not over:
The notion that war is in terminal decline is based, at its core, on two insights. First,
far fewer people die in battle nowadays than in the past, both in absolute terms and
as a percentage of the world population.
To begin with, relying on body counts to determine if armed conflict is decreasing is
highly problematic. Dramatic improvements in military medicine have lowered the
risk of dying in battle by leaps and bounds, even in high-intensity fighting. For
centuries, the ratio of those wounded to those killed in battle held steady at three to
one; the wounded-to-killed ratio for the U.S. military today is closer to ten to one.
Many other militaries have seen similar increases, meaning that today’s soldiers are
far more likely to wind up injured than dead.
, as sanitation has improved, so has the survivability of war. The health of soldiers
also skews battle deaths, since ill soldiers are more likely to die in battle than
healthier soldiers. And military units fighting at their full complement will have
higher survival rates than those decimated by disease.
In addition, rebel groups often have external supporters who provide them with
casualty-reducing equipment. (The United Kingdom, for example, shipped body
armor to the insurgent Free Syrian Army at the start of the Syrian civil war.) As a
result, even databases that include civil wars and use a much lower fatality
threshold than COW, such as the widely referenced database of the Uppsala Conflict
Data Program, may end up giving the erroneous impression that civil wars have
become less prevalent when in fact they have become less lethal.
World Wars I and II have severely skewed our sense of what war is.
As the sociologist Johan Galtung has argued, true peace, or “positive peace,” must
also contain elements of active engagement and cooperation, and although
globalization since the end of the Cold War has linked disparate communities
together, there have also been setbacks. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall,
there were fewer than ten border walls in the world. Today, there are over 70, from
the fortified U.S.-Mexican border to the fences separating Hungary and Serbia and
those between Botswana and Zimbabwe.
Above all, overconfidence about the decline of war may lead states to underestimate
how dangerously and quickly any clashes can escalate, with potentially disastrous
consequences.
MULTI LEVEL OF POLITICS AND WAR:
IR AS MULTILEVEL: WHAT IS IT?
SUPRANATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL POLITICS:
- UN Security council, EU
- NATO
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
- International Civil Society, INGOs, Social Movements
NATIONAL POLITICS
- Elections
- Control of arms/ weapons
SUBNATIONAL POLITICS
- Provincial
- City governments
REGIONAL POLITICS
- EU
- Asia-Pacific
- The Americas
- African Union
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