sociology of new wars

8/11/2019 Sociology of New Wars

1/16


2/16

claims about (1) the unprecedented causes of recent violent conflicts, and (2)the qualitative transformation in the objectives and goals of these wars.

First, I briefly summarize the central tenants and the existing criticisms of thenew war paradigm. Second, I explore the sociological theories of new wars byidentifying their distinctive features and commonalities. The focus is in particu-lar on the causes and changing objectives of contemporary warfare. Finally, Iassess the explanatory strength of the new wars paradigm in sociology, arguingthat the paradigm fails on both accounts as current wars exhibit more similaritythan difference with conventional 19th and 20th century warfare. Instead of his-torically novel forms of violence, one encounters processes that have been devel-oping since the birth of the modern era. However, this is not to argue thatnothing has changed in the relationship between contemporary warfare andsociety. What has significantly changed is the social reliance on technology and,most of all, the social, geo-political and ideological context in which recent warsare fought.

The New Wars Paradigm

A variety of influential scholars from across a range of disciplines as diverse assecurity studies (Snow 1996; Duffield 2001), political economy (Collier 2000;Jung 2003), international relations (Gray 1997; Keen 1998) and political theory(Munkler 2004) have embraced the new wars paradigm. They all argue that vio-lent conflicts since the end of the 20th century are utterly different from theirpredecessors. The argument is that these new wars differ in terms of scope (civilrather than inter-state conflicts), methods, models of financing (external ratherthan internal), and are characterized by low intensity coupled with high levels ofbrutality and with the deliberate targeting of civilians. These wars are seen to be

on the increase, less restrained and more atrocious, hence dramatically increas-ing the number of civilians both killed and displaced. Furthermore, unlike theold wars these new violent conflicts are premised on different fighting tactics(terror and guerrilla actions instead of conventional battlefields), different mili-tary strategies (population control rather than capturing new territory), utilizedifferent combatants (private armies, criminal gangs and warlords instead of pro-fessional soldiers or conscripts), and are highly decentralized. The new wars arealso seen as chaotic since they blur traditional distinctions (legal vs. illegal, pri-vate vs. public, civilian vs. military, internal vs. external, and local vs. global).

While the research emanating from the new wars paradigm has proved highlybeneficial in highlighting some distinctive features of civil wars during the 1990s,

the subsequent cross-disciplinary empirical research has seriously challengedmany of its claims. First, although in recent times intra-state warfare has beenmore frequent than inter-state warfare, there is no causal relationship betweenthe two. Not only do some wars start off as civil wars and, if successful for thewarring side claiming independence, quickly become redefined as inter-statewars2 (from the American war of independence to the wars of Yugoslav succes-sion), but also many wars have elements of both, as most civil wars are foughtwith direct economic, political and military support from neighboring states andglobal powers. A typical example here is the so-called Second Congo War of19982003, which involved regional confrontation of eight states and over 25armed groups. However, much more damaging to the new war paradigm is thewell-documented fact that both civil and inter-state wars have been in declinesince the early 1990s (Gleditsch, Wallensteen, Eriksson, Sollenberg, and Strand

2As Kalyvas (2006:17) points out this semantic conflict of how to term particular wars is part of the war itself, as

the use of terms such as civil or inter-state war are deeply contested by the parties involved as they confer or deny

legitimacy to their actions.

98 The Sociology of New Wars


3/16

2002; Newman 2004; Harbom and Wallensteen 2005; Mack 2005). Thus, there isno evidence for the claimed proliferation of the new wars.

Second, there is no empirical foundation for the claim that recent conflictsare more violent either in terms of human casualties or levels of atrocity. As Laci-na and Gleditsch (2005) demonstrate, there has been a significant decline in thenumber of deaths in battle in recent wars. The post-WWII conflicts reached theirpeak in the early 1950s, with almost 700,000 deaths per year, while the 1990sand the beginning of this century have rarely witnessed wars accounting formore than 100,000 human casualties. Furthermore, the ratio of military and civil-ian deaths has not significantly changed in recent conflicts. The research of Me-lander, Oberg, and Hall (2007) and Sollenberg (2007) clearly shows that in mostrecent wars, as has also been the case historically, the civilianmilitary death ratiorarely exceeds 5050.3 As for the intensity of atrocities, Melander et al. (2007:33)have calculated that the post-Cold War era [is] significantly less atrocious thanthe Cold War era. Although there was some increase in population displace-ment during the early 1990s, the magnitude of violence against civilians is signifi-

cantly lower then in previous periods.Third, the uniqueness of the deliberate targeting of civilians and the use of

terrorist and guerrilla tactics is also questioned. Newman (2004:182) points outthat earlier civil conflicts such as those of the Mexican Revolution (19101920)and the Congo Free State (18861908) were typical examples of wars where civil-ians were the primary target of violence. With the exception of the Rwandangenocide,4 the new wars have never reached the enormity of civilian blood-shed registered in genocides of Herreros, Native Americans, Armenians or Jewsin the Holocaust. Similarly there is nothing new and exceptional in the relianceon terror threats and guerrilla warfare, as this was and remains an essential tacticof all civil warsold and new (Kalyvas 2001, 2006:83).

What is evident from this brief summary is that cross-disciplinary researchhas demonstrated serious weaknesses in the new wars paradigm. The criticshave successfully challenged claims about the novelty of means, methods, strate-gies, tactics and the level of brutality of the new wars. They have also con-vincingly demonstrated that recent conflicts do not significantly differ fromconventional warfare in terms of human casualties or the civilian involvementratio. However, what has rarely been challenged or carefully explored are themacro-structural causes and the alleged transformation of the central goals ofthe new warfare.5 Even if specialist studies are able to demonstrate empiricaluntenablilty of the new wars paradigm through meticulous quantitativeresearch, this still would not be enough to undermine the heuristic and inter-

pretative potential of the paradigm. As Kuhn (1962) rightly argues, paradigmsare conceptual worlds which allow us to think differently about the sameresearch problem. They are non-cumulative and as such often incommensura-ble with previous or existing knowledge claims. Rather than complementing orfalsifying each other paradigms provide competing understandings of reality,which if successful reduce the old paradigms to a special case of a new para-digm. Replacing one paradigm by another often requires a scientific revolution.

3For example the Bosnian war of 19921995 is singled out as a standard of the new war where civilian deaths

were highly disproportional to those of military. However, as the most recent data collection indicates (Tokaca

2007) the human casualties were not far off the standard 5050 ratio with a slight majority of casualties on the mili-

tary side (59% vs. 41%).4It is also highly debatable whether the Rwandan genocide of 1994 took place within or outside of war condi-

tions.5S. Kalyvas (2001) is a partial exception here as his analysis is also focused on the causes and motivation of

new wars. However, he only explores the arguments about the civil wars and does not engage with the high-tech

warfare. Furthermore, his study is distinctly oriented toward the micro level and largely ignores the analysis of the

macro structural causes and goals.

99Sinisa Malesevic


4/16

New paradigms are valuable as they open novel avenues of thinking, researchand analysis and question the established canons. Moreover, conceptual modelsand theoretical approaches cannot be rebuffed simply on how well they meetthe criteria of positivist science (Giddens 1976). All of this suggests that inorder to explore the causes and the central objectives of the new wars, onehas to engage with the stronger theoretical and explanatory models, that is,with the sociological articulations of the new wars paradigm. The focus of ananalysis should include both: how well the new wars paradigm works as a novelinterpretative frame and also how sound the empirical claims are on which thisnew interpretative frame is built.

The Sociology of New Warfare

Although war has been and remains a largely neglected topic of sociologicalresearch (Shaw 1984; Joas 2003; Wimmer and Min 2006), there have been a fewrecent conceptual, theoretical and empirical analyses most of which problematize

the nature of contemporary conflicts. Political sociologists such as Martin Shaw(2002, 2003, 2005) and Mary Kaldor (2001, 2007) and social theorists such asZygmunt Bauman (2001, 2002a,b) have been at the forefront of the new war par-adigm.6 They too see these violent conflicts as historically novel in terms ofmethods, strategies, tactics, and level of human sacrifice. However, their studiesalso differ from typical representatives of the new war paradigm in their focus onthe broader macro-sociological picture whereby the transformation in warfare isseen as a symptom of larger societal changes. The underlining causal factor inmost of these accounts is the transformative power of economic globalization.They distinguish between two typical forms that the new warfare takes: the para-sitic or predatory wars and the technologically advanced western forms of war-

fare. Predatory wars emerge in the context of rampant economic liberalizationwhich undermines already weakened states, thus resulting in their virtual col-lapse. It is on the ruins of these failed states that the new parasitic wars emerge.In other words, inability to compete at the global level weakens the states econ-omy and simultaneously its capacity to extract revenue, thus opening the door tosystematic corruption, criminality and consequently for the general privatizationof violence. State failure creates a new Hobbesian environment where armedwarlords control the remnants of state structures, and relying on foreign remit-tances and international aid invoke identity politics to spread terror among thosedeemed a threat to their religious or ethnic group.

The new technological advanced western wars have developed gradually but

most of all through the recent revolution in military affairs (RMA), with the mat-uration of new technologies and novel military systems relying heavily on airpower, the routinization of precision, and the ability to fight an adversary from adistance without suffering significant causalities. These wars too are seen asbeing principally linked to global forces of economic liberalization as they areused for opening up global markets and coercing opponents of the neo-liberalmodel of development.7

Hence Zygmunt Baumans (2000, 2002a,b) analysis of new wars is situatedin the context of a transition from the stable, solid, and for the most part regu-lated modern order, toward an unregulated and principally chaotic liquidmodernity. In his view, modernity was built on the Enlightenments ideas of an

6Obviously Bauman, Kaldor and Shaw are not the only new war theorists but their ideas have proved to be

the most influential in the contemporary sociological understandings of violent macro conflicts.7While much of the non-sociological literature on the new wars tends to treat these two forms of violent con-

flict (i.e., the predatory wars and high tech warfare) as highly distinct and even unrelated phenomena most

macro sociologists, including the authors discussed here, start from the proposition that they are deeply interlinked,

being a part of the same processes of globalization.



5/16

ordered totality, favoring the elimination of randomness and ambivalence, andthe privileging of compact territorial administrative organization. In contrast tothis, liquid modernity is extraterritorial, with the speed and mobility of globalcapital dissolving state borders as power shifts from the nation-state to global cor-porations. In this highly fluid world, as Bauman argues, most human beingsoperate as individualized consumers rather than citizens of their respective poli-ties. Such structural alteration generates two distinct but deeply interlinkedforms of new warfare: globalizing wars fought at a distance through technologi-cally advanced weaponry, and globalization-induced wars conducted in the voidleft by the collapse of the old state structures (Bauman 2001). These two types ofwar erupt in the empty space that separates the coordinated machinery of globalmarkets from the incoherent and disconnected forms of localized politics. As theera of liquid modernity advantages mobility over spatial control, the new warsare, in Baumans view, not aimed at territorial conquest or ideological conver-sion, as was the case with the conflicts of 19th and early 20th century. Insteadtheir goals stem from the economic logic of liquid modernity. The central goal

for globalizing wars becomes the abolition of state sovereignty or neutralizingits resistance potential to accommodate the integration and coordination of theaccelerated flow of global markets, whereas for the globalization-induced warfarethe aim is to reactively reassert the lost meaning of space (Bauman 2001:11).

The central argument is that liquid modernity generates new forms of insecu-rity, fear and treat that are extraterritorial and which cannot be contained orresolved within the framework of nation-states (Bauman 2000, 2006). Rather thespace within which conflict is staged is open and fluid, with adversaries in a stateof permanent mobility and with military coalitions floating and provisional. InBaumans (2002a:88, 2002b:9498) view the most common forms of fighting inthis unregulated environment of the global frontier-land are the reconnaissance

battles where soldiers are not ordered to capture the adversarys territory but toexplore the enemys determination and endurance, the resources the enemy cancommand and the speed with which such resources may be brought to thebattlefield. In other words the new wars are a hit and run affair. Furthermore,the new globalizing wars rely solely on the professional, well-trained armiesof technical experts whose individualized service is treated similarly to otherpaid occupations and who perform their tasks with detached professionalism.For Bauman (2001:27) the times of mass conscript armies are over and sois the time of ideological mobilization, patriotic ecstasies and dedication to thecause.

Martin Shaw (2000, 2005) shares the view that globalization has changed the

nature of warfare for good. He also links the two forms of war by seeing themnot as separate types but as asymmetrical products of the same globalizing ten-dencies, together transforming the entire mode of warfare from the industrial-ized total war of early 20th century into a global surveillance mode of warfare.As with Bauman, he argues that these new wars no longer require mass armiesor direct mass mobilization. Whereas total warfare had the capacity to domi-nate society: it could override market relations, suppress democratic politicsand capture media, global surveillance warfare is generally subordinate toeconomy, polity and culture (Shaw 2005:55). Although there are remnants ofthe industrialized total warfare in all of this, such as national-militarist (i.e.,Russia, China or India) and ethnic-nationalist states (i.e., some Balkan andAfrican states), with conscript armies and mass produced weapons, their actionsare nonetheless constrained by global forces and local elites committed tointegration into global markets and institutions (Shaw 2005:64). Shaw seesthe new mode of western warfare developing in reaction to degeneracy of the20th century Western way of war with its systematic killing of civilians and itsgenocidal projects (Shaw 2003). The new wars emerge as the logic of nuclear

101Sinisa Malesevic


6/16

proliferation weakened war-induced statism and economic liberalizationspread around the globe.

In this context, he concentrates primarily on the new western way of warfarewhere the central issue is the transfer of risk. Drawing in part on Ulrich Becks(1992, 1999) concept of risk society as an inescapable structural condition ofadvanced industrialization (Shaw 2005:97), he argues that risk exposure hasreplaced class as a central form of inequality in the late modern era and that thishas profound implications on the theory and practice of contemporary warfare.According to Shaw, these new risk transfer wars are waged by the most techno-logically advanced states which have undergone successful RMA such as the Uni-ted States and the United Kingdom. Here the key war aim seems to be tominimize life-risks to western military personnel and consequently minimizingelectoral and political risks to the state leadership, which is accomplished bytransferring these risks directly to the weaker enemy.8 From the Falklands war, tothe Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the ongoing Iraq war, the reliance on techno-logically sophisticated weapons helps create the systematic transfer of risks from

elected politicians to the military personnel and from them to the enemy com-batants and their civilians. When the choice is between (foreign) civilian livesand the lives of Western soldiers, the lives of soldiers are always prioritized. Themilitarism of new wars does not require direct popular mobilization, rather itaims to indirectly acquire passive support by relying on media as a neutralizer ofelectoral surveillance. In his view, the goals of new wars are rarely ideological ornationalist but are principally policy driven and instrumental, war is justifiedonly as a response to a manifest threat, that is when there is a plausible per-ceptions of risk to Western interests, norms and values (Shaw 2003:7172). Assuch new wars acquire electoral legitimacy only when they are limited, sanitized,quick fix affairs taking place in distant parts of the world.

Similarly to Bauman and Shaw, Mary Kaldor (2001, 2004, 2007) posits global-ization as a key cause of new wars. In her understanding globalization of the1980s and 1990s is a qualitatively new phenomenon that emerged as a conse-quence of the revolution in information technologies and dramatic improve-ments in communication and data-processing. This has revolutionized militarytechnology but even more importantly has produced a revolution in the socialrelations of warfare (Kaldor 2001:3). Although Kaldor also shares Baumansand Shaws belief that there are two dominant forms of new warfare, the focalpoint of her analysis are predatory wars rather than what she calls Americanhigh tech wars. These new wars arise as the autonomy of the state, especially itseconomy, is eroded by the global forces of economic neo-liberalism. As the reve-

nues of the weakened states decline so they experience gradual or total erosionof the monopoly of the legitimate use of coercion, with the result that the meansof violence is privatized and acquired by criminal warlords. Employing paramil-itaries and the remnants of collapsing state structures, they politicize cultural dif-ference and wage genocidal wars on civilians while at the same time acquiringpersonal wealth and maintaining a hold on power. As one of the pioneers of thisparadigm Kaldor articulates an exceptionally strong version of the new war thesiswhereby the recent violent conflicts differ in every respect from conventionalwarfarefrom their strategy, tactics, methods of fighting, the increased levels ofbloodshed, the chaotic nature of conflicts to rampant asymmetry in the civilmilitary ratio of human casualties. She also emphasizes that new wars are highly

8Y. Heng (2006) develops a similar argument by linking Becks concept of world risk society with the recent

international relations literature on the new wars. He contends that the new high tech wars are primarily con-

cerned with the management of globalized systematic risks. Seeing globalization as a key driver of global economic

and security developments Heng argues that recent Anglo-American wars, from Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq,

were all driven by a perceived globalization of risks (p. 7072).



7/16

decentralized, thrive on the availability of cheap light weaponry and are heavilydependent on the external financial resources such as Diaspora remittances andinternational humanitarian aid which often help create or reinforce the newglobalized war economy. Nevertheless, what is central to her argument is theview that new wars are fought for very different reasons than pervious conflicts.As she puts it: the goals of the new wars are about identity politics in contrastto the geo-political or ideological goals of earlier wars (Kaldor 2001:6). Accord-ing to Kaldor, identity politics differs from ideology as it makes power claimson the basis of mutually exclusive group labels rather than coherent systems ofideas. She views these label claims as parasitic and fragmentary, unlike the poli-tics of ideas which are open to all and therefore tend to be integrative, this typeof identity politics is inherently exclusive and therefore tends to fragmentation(Kaldor 2001:7). Just as Bauman she argues that geo-political motives play nopart as territory loses its previous significance. Instead the new wars tend towardthe expulsion of the civilian population: the aim is to control the populationby getting rid of everyone of a different identity (Kaldor 2001:8).

Between the Nation-State and Globalization

Sociological accounts of new wars provide a more potent and theoretically coher-ent understanding and interpretation of recent violent conflicts. Instead ofadopting a narrow and particularist view, abstracting recent wars from thebroader social and historical context, the sociological analyses successfully situatethese conflicts within macro structural changes. New wars do not emerge in asocial and historical vacuum but are integral to the wider transformations ofmodernity, and in particular to the worldwide expansion of globalization. Whatone encounters here is truly an attempt of paradigm shift in a classical Kuhnian

sense: to understand recent conflicts it is not enough to account for the precisefactual variations. Rather this paradigm shift entails new understandings of socialreality. In this context Bauman, Shaw and Kaldor engage more thoroughly withcentral questions such as: What are the social causes of new wars? And why andhow have the central goals of warfare changed? It is primarily in the answers tothese questions that one can assess the explanatory strength and weaknesses ofthe new war paradigm.

However, even if the earlier criticisms that center on tactics, strategy, humancasualties, financing or methods of fighting are completely discounted in favorof assessing the paradigm as a heuristic model on its own terms, the theory ofnew wars fails to convince.

First, linking recent wars so tightly to the forces of economic globalization is aform of structuralist economic reductionism which attributes too much power tomarket forces. Historically wars were initiated and fought for a variety of rea-sonsideological, geo-political, economic or ecologicaland have had originsin both human agency and social structure (Howard 1977; McNeill 1984; Keegan1993). This is as much the case with contemporary wars which are also depen-dent on historical contingencies and a confluence of different factors. Not allgroups, organizations and individuals involved directly or indirectly in these vio-lent conflicts are motivated by the maximization of economic resources (Smith2005; Gat 2006). Similarly the structural transformations in the world economydo not affect all states equally, some even not at all. This economistic argumentcannot explain why some states such as Somalia, Bosnia or Haiti found them-selves on the verge of collapse in the context of brutal civil wars, while otherseconomically much more undermined by global trade such as Argentina, Roma-nia or numerous African states have avoided excessive violent conflicts.

Furthermore, the perception that the expansion of liberalized markets auto-matically means less regulation and more chaotic arrangements is a common

103Sinisa Malesevic


8/16

misperception. As Steven Vogel (1996) documents well in his study of the eco-nomic reform patterns in telecommunications, finance, broadcasting, transportand utilities in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, France and Germany,freer markets have actually led to more administrative regulation. Liberalizationdoes not mean the loss of state autonomy. On the contrary most states combinethe opening up of markets with tighter re-regulation, in other words there isno logical contradiction between more competition and greater governmentcontrol (Vogel 1996:5). Hence we may live in liquid modernity but this is ahighly regulated environment. Consequently the milieu of contemporary wars isno more chaotic than that of their predecessors. Second, to establish a causallink between contemporary wars and growing economic liberalization one wouldhave to prove that the patterns and dynamics of world trade have dramaticallychanged, and that this change has affected transformations in warfare. However,both of these claims are untenable.

The argument that economic globalization is historically unprecedented phe-nomenon has been challenged by many historical sociologists. For example Paul

Hirst and Grahame Thompson (1999), Michael Mann (1997, 2003) and John A.Hall (2000, 2002) among others have demonstrated that the existing levels oftrade for North America, Japan and the European Union of 12% of their GDPare almost the same as the levels reached before World War I. Over 80% of theworlds total production remains traded within the borders of nation-states(Mann 2001). Most so-called transnational corporations are really national com-panies whose ownership, assets, sales, and profits remain within their own nationstates. They chiefly rely on the domestic human capital generated through theirown educational systems, existing national communications infrastructure and asubstantial deal of state protectionism for the externally vulnerable economicsectors (Carnoy 1993; Wade 1996). The technology is also mostly produced on

the national level while the overwhelming majority of companies remain tradedsolely on national stock markets. Rather than being global, world trade isdistinctly trilateral with the United States, Japan and Europe producing andconsuming more than 85% of world trade (Mann 1997; Hall 2000). In otherwords, contrary to the arguments of the new war paradigm, economic globaliza-tion does not diminish the influence of the nation-states. Instead it is the mostpowerful nation-states that are the backbone of world trade. As Mann (1997:48)puts it: capitalism retains a geo-economic order, dominated by the economiesof the advanced nation-states. Clusters of nation-states provide the stratificationorder of globalism. In addition nation-states remain in full control of theirpopulation as human beings are much less mobile than goods, money and

services and despite expansion of international law the nation-state preserves themonopoly of law over its territory9 (Hirst and Thompson 1999).The second claim is yet more problematic. Even if one disregards the fact that

there is no direct evidence that economic globalization causes an increase in vio-lent intra-state conflicts, (thus concentrating solely on the indirect influence), itis not difficult to show the obvious flaws in this argument. Not only does theresearch prove warfare in general (including civil wars) to be in decline, so thatif globalization has any effect this could only be interpreted as a factor thatdiminishes violence, but more importantly the privatization of violence hasexisted as much in the pre-global era as it does now. As Kalyvas (2006:333) andNewman (2004:183184) rightly point out, a similar pattern of chaotic warlord-ism, criminality and privatized violence was witnessed long before the currentera in, for example, the Greek civil war of 19431949, the Nigeria-Biafra civil

9As Hirst and Thompson (1999:277) conclude: nation-states as sources of the rule of law are essential prerequi-

sites for regulation through international law, and as overarching public powers they are essential to the survival of

pluralistic national societies with diversified forms of administration and community standards.



9/16

war, or the Congo Civil War of the early 1960s. Not only is it that the globalizedwar economy cannot explain more protracted conflicts such as those in Chech-nya, Sri Lanka, the Basque country or Indonesia, but even the conflicts that areseen to epitomize the new wars such as those in the Balkans, Horn of Africa orCaucasus in many respects predate or have developed outside of the forces ofeconomic liberalism. The origins of the Yugoslav wars of succession had very lit-tle if anything to do with the macro economic globalization. They started off notas economic, but as political conflicts, created in part by party elites attemptingto avoid genuine democratization through decentralization, and in part by theidiosyncratic federal structure of the communist state (Malesevic 2002, 2006:157184).

The view expressed by Bauman and Kaldor, that the new wars have lost geopo-litical significance as the era of space is over, and that territory has little mean-ing in the new globalized wars, is equally untenable. First, this argument isbuilt on an overstretched and stark comparison between early modern nation-states and latemodernpostmodern polities, where the former are depicted as

tightly bound, highly centralized and bureaucratic, in full control of their terri-tory, economy and population, whereas the latter are presented as the exactopposite. According to these authors, early modernity is associated exclusivelywith the economically and politically autarchic nation-states obsessed with territo-rial expansion, while the contemporary era is seen as one of global economicinterdependence and integration. However, as Tilly (1975), Downing (1992),Ertman (1997) and many other historical sociologists have shown, the post-West-phalian nation-states have emerged and developed in the context of two rivalforces: international trade and political and military competition. Rather thanbeing isolated autarchies, nation-states have grown in response to the changinggeo-political environment by tightening fiscal control and by extending citizen-

ship rights. Commercial developments and increased trade have strengthenedthe state capacity making it in this process a more powerful military machine. Inother words, transnational economic space is neither novel nor unconnected tothe birth of the nation-state. The administrative and territorial boundedness ofearly nation states had always more to do with the rulers projected ideal thanactual reality. In most respects the rise in infrastructural and surveillance powersis something more akin to contemporary nation-states as they have only recentlybeen able to fully police their borders, tax at sources, gather intelligence on allof its citizens, and successfully control their territories.

Furthermore, military might still remains the only reliable guarantor ofeconomic wellbeing in the long term as all three economic powerhousesthe

United States, the European Union and Japanhave developed and continueto economically prosper on the back of American military supremacy, which pro-vides geopolitical stability and security in the North. Although most northernstates have moved away from what Mann (1997) calls hard geopolitics to softgeopolitics, this is not the case for the rest of the world. Universal conscriptionis still the order of the day in the great majority of states with most of Africa,Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia (including the two super powers: Chinaand Russia) having compulsory military draft.10 Indeed it would be highly prema-ture, as the proponents of the new war paradigm claim, to see it as a thing ofthe past in the West either. Nearly all states reserve the right to reintroduce con-scription in the case of major war. Historically speaking we have been herebefore: the so-called long peace of 18701914 witnessed the dominance of simi-lar pacifist theories that saw economics replacing geo-politics. However, even ifthe militaries of most western and westernizing states have been reduced in size,

10Although the abolition of military draft has dramatically increased in the last two decades there are still only

32 states in the world without mandatory military service.

105Sinisa Malesevic


10/16

the states monopoly on the legitimate use of violence has been strengthenedeven further with the continuous expansion of police forces, surveillance appara-tuses and a variety of private and state controlled security agencies (Dandeker1990; Lyon 2001).

What has changed in the postcolonial era is not the alleged unimportance ofspace but the illegitimacy of territorial conquest. In fact space is now moreimportant than ever before as it is institutionalized and taken for granted bynearly everybody that state borders cannot be changed at will. As American sol-diers quickly realized when they initially placed the Star Spangled Banner onSaddam Husseins statue, and then had to promptly replace it with the Iraqi flag,one cannot legitimately capture the territory of another sovereign nation-state.This is a poignant reminder that the sovereignty of state territory remains sacredeven more than it was in the last two centuries. If late, or in Baumans words,liquid modernity is an era where one can transcend spacea view deeply con-tested herethis cannot happen through simplified globalist formulas of geog-raphy becoming history but only when territorial sovereignty becomes so

institutionalized, routinized and taken for granted that it becomes a matter ofhabitual practice as an unalienable right that few would dare to challenge. Theobvious sacredness of state territory is clearly evident from the Falkland episodewhen Britain went easily to war over some far away depopulated island, to theGulf war or Chechen wars and from still unresolved disputes between Russia andJapan over the Kuril Islands, Britain and Spain over Gibraltar, Greece and Tur-key over Cyprus and many uninhabited rocks of Aegean sea, etc. No state, demo-cratic or autocratic, huge or small, developed or underdeveloped will ever giveup lightly even a tiny stretch of its territory. And this leads us directly to the sec-ond issue of the supposedly changed goals of contemporary warfare.

The Objectives of Contemporary Wars

The proponents of the new wars paradigm are adamant that what sets contem-porary wars apart from their predecessors is the unequivocal transformation ofobjectives and goals. The new violent conflicts are no longer about ideology, ornationalism in particular, but about identity (Kaldor), the economic logic ofglobalization (Bauman) or perceptions of risk to Western interests and norms(Shaw). In their own words: nation-building coupled with patriotic mobiliza-tion has ceased to be the principal instrument of social integration and statesself-assertion (Bauman 2002a:84); in the context of globalization, ideologicalandor territorial cleavages of an earlier era have increasingly been supplanted

by an emerging cleavage between

cosmopolitanism, based on inclusive, univer-salist multicultural values, and the politics of particularist identities (Kaldor2001:6); and [it is] a specifically late-modern, Western perception that waris justified only as a response to a manifest threat (Shaw 2005:7172).

Kaldors stringent distinction between identity and ideology is untenable asthe discourse of identity is nearly always embedded in the rhetoric of a specificideology. In other words, claims to a particular or universal identity such asDanish, Muslim, manual worker, Pashtun or cosmopolitan are premised on thedistinctive political projects of what it means to be a particular Danish, Muslim,manual worker, Pashtun or a cosmopolitan individual. As there is never one wayof how somebody can be a member of a particular group, the identitarian lan-guage of collective solidarity is inherently political: it speaks in terms of culturalauthenticity but it acts through political projects (Brubaker 2004; Malesevic2006). The argument that, unlike ideology which espouses systematic ideas,identity is only about group labels does not stand. From Barthes (1993) andAlthusser (1994), we know too well that ideology works best through the hailingor interpolation of group labels, by caging individuals in particular identities.



11/16

More importantly, group labels can have popular resonance only if seen as inte-gral to a specific political project. There is no significant difference herebetween depicting citizens of todays Iraq as mutually exclusive Shia, Sunni andKurds and yesteryears socialist rhetoric of proletariat and bourgeoisie clinchedin an uncompromising class war. They both invoke group labels as a part of aconcrete ideological project to justify a specific political course of action,including warfare, and to mobilize popular support. Ethnic, religious, or nation-alist ideologies are grounded in systematic programmes just as much as theold ideologies of socialism, liberalism or conservatism. There is nosubstantial ontological difference between those political projects that aim atimplementing a blueprint of classless social order and those bent on setting upan ethno-nationally pure society. In other words there is no identity withoutideology and no ideology can successfully mobilize mass support withoutconstructing meaningful group labels.

The problem is that in Kaldors economistic view nationalism is never seen asan original generator of social action, but always a second order reality, a reac-

tive force to some other supposedly primary cause such as globalization (Kaldor2001:76, 7879). Analyzing the Bosnian war of 19921995 as the epitome of newwar, she argues that the central aims were not ideological or geo-political butidentity basedto ethnically cleanse a population of other identity. This viewconfuses means and ends since ethnic cleansing and genocide are rarely if everan end in themselves, but rather a means through which a particular ideologicalproject is implemented. The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was never a chaotic,decentralized and spontaneous reaction of local warlords. Instead as recentresearch clearly shows (Cekic et al. 1999; Oberschall 2000; Ron 2003) it was ahighly structured, well-organized, meticulously documented process that reliedon existing centralized state structures from the top political and military leader-

ship in Serbia and Croatia to the municipal executive committees, the mayorsoffice, local police and so-called crisis committees that acted as the principal toolof a euphemistically termed population exchange. In the Bosnian case just asin other recent wars, the old, geo-political and ideological motives predomi-nated, that is, the key goals were the capture of a particular territory in order toimplement distinct political goals by establishing a Greater Serbia and Croatia.The fact that the post World War II international order does not tolerate territo-rial conquests any more was one of the principal reasons that Yugoslav conflictwas externally seen as a throwback from the past, an irrational attachment to theprimordial labels rather than what it actually wasa seizing of land in orderto fulfill a specific ideological project. In this context as Kalyvas (2001), Newman

(2004) and Berdal (2003) rightly argue what has changed is not the nature ofwarfare itself but the Western perception of war.Similarly, Baumans view of liquid modernity as an era that transcends

bounded space, where global capital dominates nation-states, and where consum-erism overpowers nationalism is misplaced. The interests of global corporationscan sometimes overlap with the ideology and geo-political motives of powerfulstates but the two are not causally linked. The so-called globalizing wars arealmost exclusively fought by a single state, the United States of America, whichas any nation-state in modern history pursues its own geo-political and ideologi-cal goals. As Mann (2001, 2003) rightly emphasizes, unlike its military mightAmerican economic power is not hegemonic over its European and Japanese riv-als, as they are all backseat drivers of the contingencies and fluctuationsrooted in worldwide capitalist development. While the Gulf War of 1991 wasfought to restore the status quo, and thus potentially benefiting the furtherspread or dominance of Western based global corporations, all other globali-zing wars such as Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq were initiated and fought muchmore for ideological and geopolitical reasons than arising from the global

107Sinisa Malesevic


12/16

economic logic. Obviously neither the small and remote Serbia nor impover-ished and desolate Afghanistan were the ideal new markets worth fighting over.In both cases a central motive for war originated in the sense of woundednational pride (hence nationalism) that a superpower was attacked on its ownsoil (911) or that some petit autocrat dares to resist the will of the powerfulWestern states. Both of these wars were motivated and in fact have succeeded inachieving ideological conversion by managing to replace the rigid Taliban Isla-mists and the autocratic nationalists around Milosevic with more moderate politi-cal regimes. The motivation behind the Iraq war is perhaps more complicated asit also involved economic motives (the control of oil reserves) which could havebenefited global corporations, but even this motive had more to do with therequirements of a particular nation-state rooted in its ambition of geo-politicalcontrol of resources (and security) rather than in opening up new markets forthe global economy. Furthermore, the ideological motives loomed large as thewar was in part an attempt to implement a specific neo-conservative blueprint(including Rebuilding Americas Defenses and other proposals developed by

the highly influential think-tank the Project for the New American Century)(Mann 2003:3; Smith 2005:164). In all three cases the wars relied on strong pop-ular support. While in Kosovo and Afghanistan nationalism was supplementedwith the broader international humanitarian and just cause rhetoric, thusextending its national support base, the war in Iraq was politically divisive in theinternational arena, thus reinforcing, and having to rely almost exclusively on,U.S. nationalism. To put it simply, the aims of globalizing wars have not sub-stantially changed as ideology and geo-politics remain as important as ever.

Although Shaw provides a more compelling account that recognizes theimportance of territory and geo-politics, he too sees new wars as being subordi-nated to the economic and other global forces. In his account of risk transfer

the distinction between the western and non-western worlds and the correspond-ing forms of warfare is overstretched. Albeit that technological sophisticationand the dependence on precision targeting and air power are obviously histori-cal novelties, these are not global developments but rather something that sym-bolizes the strength of a particular nation-statethe United States of America.In his analysis of recent global surveillance wars nearly all conflicts, with theexception of the short, small and rather atypical Falklands war, were fought prin-cipally if not exclusively by the American military. In other words the transfer ofrisks is not that much of a western phenomenon (although it has some reso-nance in the United Kingdom and a few other European states) as it is a phe-nomenon of a distinct nation-statethe United States of America. In this sense

the United States is a true military empire as it is the only state that has a mili-tary presence in 153 countries of the world, that has the technical know-how,refueling facilities, laser guided missiles, carrier ships, etc. to impose its militaryhegemony throughout the world. As Mann (2001:6) puts it: No state wouldrationally seek war with the United States, and few could survive it this isAmerican, not Northern, military hegemony. It is not at the service of Northerneconomic imperialism. It is only at the service of interests defined by Americangovernments. This is important in the context of popular support, as Shawargues that Western global warfare no longer requires direct mass mobilization,preferring instead a media induced mobilization of passivity. However, this isanother case of chronocentrism as it attempts to generalize on the basis of avery short historical period. Whereas an enormous superpower such as theUnited States can rely on a professional army to fight small wars with relativelyfew casualties, paying little attention to internal dissent, the major wars withsubstantial casualties still require the same level of direct mobilization as before.Both Vietnam and the Iraq war illustrate this only all too well. To fight aprotracted large conflict even most powerful states would have to contemplate



13/16

reintroducing conscription and if necessary override economics, domesticpolitics and cultural life. The so-called war on terror clearly indicates howeconomy, polity and culture can easily become subordinated to war aims andhow nationalism can quickly transform into a virulent battle cry and crusadeagainst the other. The speed and congressional unanimity with which the PatriotAct was passed, with little if any popular dissent in the aftermath of 911, is apotent reminder of how quickly the nation-state can assume firm control oversociety. Hence it is not the perception of threat to western interests and valuesthat motivates public support, it is primarily the ideology of nationalism in all itsguises that secures popular mobilization and it is a geo-political logic thatdictates conduct of nation-states. The United States is no exception here; it isjust the largest and more powerful nation-state the world has known.

What Is Old and What Is New?

Despite its explanatory pitfalls, the sociology of new wars has opened up an

important area of research and has raised novel questions about the nature ofrecent violent conflicts. Most of all, these sociological accounts have placed thenew wars debate in the wider social and historical context thus attempting to linkthe changing forms of violence with the transformation of modernity. To arguethat the causes and objectives of contemporary warfare do not significantly differfrom their pre-global era predecessors does not automatically imply that nothinghas changed. On the contrary the historical setting of the post-World War IIworld has substantially transformed as the traditional geopolitical goals of nation-states such as territorial expansion, colonial domination, or imperial conquesthave lost their legitimacy, both at the national and especially at the internationallevel. This is even more the case with some of the principal normative ideologies

of the 20th century, such as state socialism, eugenics and scientific racism, fascistcorporatism or imperial civilizing mission. Contemporary warfare clearly emergesin a different historical milieu and as such its goals and aims are shaped andrestricted by these macro structural forces. Regardless of its military or economicmight, no state can legitimately invade territories of other states or treat the citi-zens of those states as culturally or racially inferior species. Furthermore, the rev-olution in military affairs is a novel development that allows a militarysuperpower such as the United States to rely extensively on the sophisticatedtechnology to put coercive pressure on some uncooperative governments and tofight small and medium range hit and run wars. However, neither one ofthese two new developments has substantially changed the causes and objectives

of warfare. While new technology has to some extent transformed the means offighting, such as minimizing military casualties by relying on the relative preci-sion of airpower and missile navigation in short and limited wars, it has not chan-ged the ends of warfare. Similarly the new social and historical context hasconstrained the actions of, particularly northern, nation-states by forcing them toadopt soft geo-politics of bargaining, enticement and occasional coercive pres-sure over hard geo-politics of spatial conquest, but it has not dented the oldmultiple causes of violent conflicts. Just as in the 19th and 20th centuries, warsare initiated and fought for economic, political but most of all for ideologicaland geopolitical reasons. An acceleration of economic globalization perhaps addsanother layer of complexity and constraint to the old ideological and geopolit-ical motives of nation-states, but it could not possible obliterate either thesemotives or the nation-states themselves. Not only is it that more extensiveeconomic integration requires more administrative state regulation, but also with-out the powerful nation-states that provide geopolitical stability, global economicexpansion and incorporation would evaporate in a HobbesianDarwinian worldof anarchic brutality.

109Sinisa Malesevic


14/16

Finally, the popular support on which modern conflicts have to build if theyare to have any chance of success is still largely derived from the same nationalistsources as before. Since the birth of modernity, in the French and American rev-olutions, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, nationalism became and remainsthe principal glue of legitimate rule (Gellner 1983; Smith 2003; Malesevic 2006,2007). Having powerful protean capacity nationalism is able to accommodatemodern political formations as diverse as liberal democracies, state socialistorders, contemporary monarchies, military juntas as well as the theocratic states.No state authority is likely to generate a significant support base without invok-ing the solidaristic images of our glorious nation. Even though nationalismhas become less virulent in the North when compared to the early 20th century,no political leader or political party can survive long in office if deemed to beinsufficiently patriotic. The fact that the aggressive, militarist and jingoisticnationalisms of the two World Wars have given way to their softer counterpartsdoes not suggest, as proponents of the new war paradigm argue, that nationalismas such is on the wane. Rather as the infrastructural capacities of modern nation-

states expand further the habitual character and routinized nature of its repro-duction make sure that the nation-centric view of the world is perpetually nor-malized and naturalized in the mass media, educational systems, the institutionsof high culture, the state administration systems, through outlets of popularculture, youth organizations, civil society groups and even Internet Web sites. Allof these make nationalism a powerful ideological force of everyday life, a forceavailable for swift mobilization in times of major conflict. As Billig (1995) poi-gnantly observes, banality does not equal lenience. On the contrary, in reproduc-ing state structures and institutions that possess immense armaments which canbe rapidly utilized, banal nationalism can easily and quickly be transformed intoa baby-faced killer.

References

Althusser, Louis. (1994) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investiga-tion). In Mapping Ideology, edited by S. Zizek. London: Verso, pp. 100140.

Barthes, Roland. (1993)Mythologies. London: Vintage.Bauman, Zygmunt. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.Bauman, Zygmunt. (2001) Wars of the Globalisation Era. European Journal of Social Theory

4(1): 1128.Bauman, Zygmunt. (2002a) Reconnaissance Wars of the Planetary Frontierland. Theory, Culture and

Society19(4): 8190.Bauman, Zygmunt. (2002b) Society Under Siege. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bauman, Zygmunt. (2006) Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity Press.Beck, Ulrich. (1992) Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.Beck, Ulrich. (1999) World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.Berdal, Mats. (2003) How New Are New Wars? Global Economic Change and the Study of Civil

Wars.Global Governance9(4): 477502.Billig, Michael. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.Brubaker, Rogers. (2004) Ethnicity Without Groups. Harvard: Harvard University Press.Carnoy, Martin. (1993) Multinationals in a Changing World Economy: Whiter the nation-state?

In The New Global Economy in the Information Age, edited by M. Carnoy. College Park: PennsylvaniaState University Press, pp. 4596.

Cekic, Smail et al. (1999) Srebrenica 1995: Dokumenti i svjedocenja I. Sarajevo: Institut za istrazivanjezlocina protiv covjecnosti i medjunarodnog prava.

Collier, Paul. (2000) Rebellion as a Quasi-Criminal Activity. Journal of Conflict Resolution 44(6):839853.

Dandeker, Christopher. (1990) Surveillance, Power and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.Downing, Brian. (1992) The Military Revolution and Political Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-

sity Press.



15/16

Duffield, Mark. (2001) Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merger of Development and Security.London: Zed.

Ertman, Thomas. (1997) Birth of the Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Fowles, Jib. (1974) Chronocentrism. Features6: 6568.Gat, Azar. (2006) War in Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gellner, Ernest. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.Giddens, Anthony. (1976) New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Hutchinson.Gleditsch, Nils Petter, Peter Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margareta Sollenberg, and

Havard Strand. (2002) Armed Conflict 1946-2001: A New Data Set. Journal of Peace Research39(5): 615637.

Gray, ChrisHables. (1997) Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict. New York: Guilford Press.Hall, John. (2000) Globalisation and Nationalism. Thesis Eleven63: 6379.Hall, John. (2002) A Disagreement About Difference. In Making Sense of Collectivity: Ethnicity, Nation-

alism and Globalisation, edited by S. Malesevic and M. Haugaard. London: Pluto, pp. 181194.Harbom, Lotta, and Peter Wallensteen. (2005) Armed Conflict and Its International Dimensions

19462004. Journal of Peace Research42(5): 623635.Heng, Yee-Kuang. (2006) The Transformation of War Debate: Through the Looking Glass of

Ulrich Becks World Risk Society. International Relations20(1): 6991.Hirst, Paul, and Grahame Thompson. (1999) Globalisation in Question. Cambridge: Polity Press.Howard, Michael. (1977) War in European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Joas, Hans. (2003) War and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.Jung, Dietrich. (2003) A Political Economy of Intra-State War: Confronting a Paradox. In Shadow

Globalization, Ethnic Conflicts and New Wars: A Political Economy of Intra-State War, edited by D. Jung.London: Routledge, pp. 926.

Kaldor, Mary. (2001) New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press.Kaldor, Mary. (2004) Nationalism and Globalisation. Nations and Nationalism10(1): 61177.Kaldor, Mary. (2007) Oil and Conflict: The Case of Nagorno Karabakh. In Oil Wars, edited by M.

Kaldor, T. Karl and Y. Said. London: Pluto, pp. 157183.Kaldor, Mary, and Basker Vashee. (eds) (1997) New Wars. London: Continuum.Kalyvas, Stathis. (2001) New and Old Civil Wars: A Valid Distinction? World Politics 54(1):

99118.Kalyvas, Stathis. (2006) The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Keegan, John. (1993) A History of Warfare. New York: Vintage.Keen, David. (1998) The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars. Adelphi Paper 320. Oxford: IISS.Kuhn, Thomas. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Lacina, Bethany, and Nills Petter Gleditsch. (2005) Monitoring Trends in Global Combat:

A New Dataset of Battle Deaths. European Journal of Population21(23): 145166.Lyon, David. (2001) Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. London: OUP.Mack, Andrew. (2005) Human Security Report. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Malesevic, Sinisa. (2002) Ideology, Legitimacy and the New State: Yugoslavia, Serbia and Croatia. London:

Frank Cass.Malesevic, Sinisa. (2006) Identity as Ideology: Understanding Ethnicity and Nationalism. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan.Malesevic, Sinisa. (2007) Between the Book and the New Sword: Gellner, Violence and Ideology.In Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought, edited by S. Malesevic and M. Haugaard. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 140167.

Mann, Michael. (1997) Has Globalisation Ended the Rise and Rise of the Nation-State? Review of International Political Economy4(3): 472496.

Mann, Michael. (2001) Globalisation and September 11. New Left Review12: 5172.Mann, Michael. (2003) Incoherent Empire. London: Verso.McNeill, William. (1984) The Pursuit of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Melander, Erik, Magnus Oberg, and Jonathan Hall. (2007) The New Wars debate Revisited:

An Empirical Evaluation of the Atrociousness of New Wars. Uppsala Peace Research Papers 9:142.

Munkler, Herfried. (2004) The New Wars. Cambridge: Polity.Newman, Edward. (2004) The New Wars Debate: A Historical Perspective Is Needed. Security Dia-

logue35(2): 173189.Oberschall, Anthony. (2000) The Manipulation of Ethnicity: From Ethnic Cooperation to

Violence and War in Yugoslavia.Ethnic and Racial Studies23(6): 9821001.

111Sinisa Malesevic


16/16

Peel, John. (1989) The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethno-genesis. In History and Ethnicity, edited byE. Tonkin, M. McDonald and M. Chapman. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 198215.

Ron, James. (2003) Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Shaw, Martin. (1984) War and Social Theory. In War, State and Society, edited by M. Shaw. London:

Macmillan, pp. 124.Shaw, Martin. (2000)The Theory of Global State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Shaw, Martin. (2002) Risk-transfer Militarism, Small Massacres and the Historic Legitimacy of War.

International Relations17(3): 343360.Shaw, Martin. (2003)War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society. Cambridge: Polity.Shaw, Martin. (2005) The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq. Cambridge:

Polity Press.Smith, Anthony. (2003) Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.Smith, Philip. (2005) Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press.Snow, Donald. (1996) Uncivil Wars: International Security and the New Internal Conflicts. Boulder:

Lynne Rienner.Sollenberg, Margareta. (2007) From Bullets to Ballots: Using the People as Arbitrators to Settle

Civil Wars. In Governance, Resources and Civil Conflict, edited by M. Oberg and S. Kaare. London:Routledge, pp. 178204.

Tilly, Charles. (ed.) (1975) The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press.

Tokaca, Mirsad. (2007) Istrazivacko-dokumentacijski centar: Od 91 do 95 u BiH ubijeno 97 tisucaljudi. Jutarnji List, 21 June 14: 3.

Vogel, Steven. (1996) Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Countries.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Wade, Robert. (1996) Globalisation and Its Limits: Reports of the Death of the National Economyare Greatly Exaggerated. In National Diversity and Global Capitalism, edited by S. Berger and R.Dore. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 6088.

Wimmer, Andreas, and Brian Min. (2006) From Empire to Nation-State: Explaining Wars in theModern World, 18162001. American Sociological Review71(6): 867897.


sociology of new wars

Documents