Chapter 4 Understanding contemporary conflict Flashcards
(42 cards)
What are Azar’s three concepts of the new type of conflict?
- a tendency to understand conflict through forming groups of internal and external dimensions.
- prevailing frameworks of analysis often had been based on the functional differentiation of conflict aspects and divided into levels of analysis
- A tendency to focus on overt and violent conflict while ignoring non-violent conflict, termination of violent acts often equal with the state of peace.
What are the PSC four clusters of variables identified as preconditions for their transformation to high levels of intensity?
- Communal content, the most useful unit of analysis is the identity group.
- deprivation of human needs as the underlying source of PSC, needs are ontological and non-negotiable.
- In a world in which the state has the authority to govern and use force to regulate society and protect citizens. social conflict tends to be characterized by incompetent, fragile and authoritarian governments that fail to satisfy basic human needs.
- International linkages, particularly political-economic relations of economic dependency within the international economic system.
What does Azar link the disjunction between state and society in many parts of the world to?
A colonial legacy that artificially imposed European ideas of territorial statehood on groups.
What are the three groups of process dynamics determinants according to Azar?
Communal actions and strategies, state actions and strategies and Built-in mechanisms of conflict.
What entails the determinant Communal actions and strategies?
the various processes of identity-group formation, organisation and mobilisation. the emergence and nature of leadership, the choice of political goals and the scope and nature of externalities.
What entails the determinant state actions and strategies?
with governing individuals and elites theoretically facing an array of policy choices running from political accommodation to coercive repression or instrumental co-option.
What entails the Built in mechanisms of conflict determinant of Azar?
Various self-reinforcing built-in mechanisms of conflict exhaustively studies by conflict resolution analysts once the spiral of conflict escalation is triggered.
What is the contemporary transnational conflict framework?
Not a theory of conflict but an analytic structure where the main theoretical insights and controversies can be locates.
What is Transnational conflict?
An extension of protracted social conflict that takes account of the global changes that have occurred since the end of the cold war and the regonalization of conflict that has resulted.
What are transnational connectors?
Flows of people, capital, weapons, criminal networks, money and ideas.
Which three other levels in addition to global, regional and local level make up contemporary transnational conflict?
State level, Identity group level and elite/individual level.
What are two influential alternative ways of characterizing prevailing forms of contemporary conflict?
- The greed versus grievance debate refuting Azar’s idea that social conflict is rooted in the individual and communal needs of identity groups
- the analysis of contemporary conflict based on the distinction between old wars and new wars.
What is Fearon and Laitin’s argument about civil war?
Civil wars are caused by opportunities that favour insurgencies instead of by grievance.
What is the best way to break the cycle of violence driven by political exclusion and economic inequality ?
By involving groups that have been marginalised by giving them a real stake in their country’s future.
Why is the element of greed and grievance not good enough to characterize contemporary conflict?
Because even though they are present throughout transnational conflict it is not sufficiently inclusive or distinct to characterize patterns of contemporary conflict as a whole
Why is the distinction between old and new wars not enough to characterize contemporary conflict?
Not sufficient to capture the wider lineaments of the emergent post-cold war conflict scene.
What is the North-South economic divide?
The locus for the powerful international political economy analysis which argues that new wars in the third world are not symptomatic of local failures in governance but is product of the distortions of late capitalism.
What can conflict resolution and post-war reconstruction concerns of liberal governance be seen as?
riot control, end of a spectrum encompassing a broad range of global poor relief activities.
What has happened with global ideological contestation in the post cold war world?
more prominent, vastly increased capacity for recruitment and radicalization offered by the communications revolution.
What does the transnational flow consist of (transnational connectors)
- people(migrants, refugees, diaspora, radicalized jihadis)
- resources
- corporate investments (may unbalance and exploit indigenous economies)
- weapons (light and heavy weapons possible proliferation of chemical, nuclear material)
- criminals and terrorist networks (whether or not abetted by governments)
- Images, ideas and movements conveyed by the explosively expanding connector of the global social media.
What does complex regional conflict systems entail?
the idea of overlapping complex regional conflict systems, this is a development of the earlier work on regional security complexes. A spectrum (1980) ranging from regions in turmoil through security regimes to pluralistic security communities.
What is the main thrust of regional analysis today?
To incorporate all of the complex information within the wider analysis of transnational conflict in general despite these differences because of the myriad transnational connectors that link and shape them.
At which level is the critical struggle of conflict usually played out?
At the state level.
most conflict parties are in the end driven to compete for state control if they want to reach which goals?
Institute revolutionary programmes (revolution/ideology conflict), safeguard communal needs(identity/secession conflicts) or secure factional interests (economic/resource conflict)
