Эротические рассказы

War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. Ariel I. AhramЧитать онлайн книгу.

War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa - Ariel I. Ahram


Скачать книгу
of comparison. First is the comparison between MENA and other regions, particularly in the developing world. Second is the comparison between MENA countries. Third is the comparison over time from the beginnings of the modern state system through mid-twentieth-century decolonization to the twenty-first century. MENA on the whole has followed global modes in most important respects. However, some countries within the region have been especially war prone. Moreover, the magnitude and impact of war have increased dramatically in MENA since the turn of the twenty-first century.

      The question “What is war?” is simultaneously ontological, conceptual, and methodological. Many analyses revert axiomatically to German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. But that only begs the question of what political ends war extends. Historian Jeremy Black parses between functional and cultural/ ideological elements in the definition of war. “Functionally, [war] is organized large-scale violence. Culturally and ideologically, it is the consequence of bellicosity.”3 In each of these domains there can be considerable variation, but the results are the same.

      Roughly coinciding with Iklé’s lament, social scientists in the 1970s launched the Correlates of War (CoW) project. Their aim was to remove the study of war from the sole purview of war-fighters and to address the study of war from a scientific perspective. Housed at the University of Michigan, researchers cataloged data on instances of conflict worldwide extending back to 1816. This was not an arbitrary cut-off point. The end of the Napoleonic wars is often cited as the beginning of the modern European state system. This fundamentally Euro-centric periodization was closely tied to the way the CoW researchers conceived of war itself. CoW was a product of the Cold War. Many of its researchers saw their role as finding ways to address US–Soviet tensions. The CoW definition favored large-scale war (with over 1,000 battle deaths) mostly conducted by the standing armies of powerful states. It was not that CoW researchers were unaware of internal (civil) conflicts. It was that they regarded these wars as less consequential to the global calculus of peace and conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.4

      In the 1990s, there was a push to expand definitions of what war was, why it happened, and what its effects were. Some argued that war had assumed entirely new features, with different kinds of antagonisms and involving different – often non-state – antagonists. Political scientist Mary Kaldor, for one, suggested that these “new wars” did not involve a contest of combatants’ political wills, as Clausewitz had suggested. Instead, the combatants treated war as an opportunity for commercial expansion, not political victory. As a result, war is self-perpetuating as actors reproduce political identity and seek to further narrow economic interests.5 For some analysts, these characteristics suggested that these contests were not war at all, but something different and apart. For others, though, there was little novel in these supposedly “new wars,” as profit and power had commingled in war for centuries.6

      In terms of organizational bases, such internal wars are highly variegated. Some internal wars involve two (or more) sides fielding more or less conventional military structures of roughly equal stature waging battles to control clearly demarcated territories. Some are more asymmetrical, with conventional and centralized state armies fighting against irregular forces that are loosely organized and militarily weak. These opposition forces are variously dubbed guerrillas, insurgents, or militias, or, less sympathetically, bandits and criminals. They rarely control much territory but wage a low-level campaign to disturb state control. Finally, in some circumstances both state forces and rebels are relatively weak or decentralized. The distinction between rebel fighter and state forces becomes less distinct, comporting with the “new wars” hypothesis about apolitical war.8 Additionally, internal wars often attract outside intervention, leading to distinctly “internationalized” dynamics in which foreign powers provide belligerents with economic, political, and military support.

      Over the last seven decades, MENA offers examples of interstate wars, internal wars, and internationalized civil wars. But not all of these types of conflicts were evident the whole of this time. They appeared in different times and places. Examining these intra-regional differences and comparing MENA to global trends is a useful entry point to assessing the peculiarities of violence in the region.


Скачать книгу

Яндекс.Метрика