Category Archives: Armed Conflicts

One of the interesting aspects of the decline of armed conflict in recent decades is the geographical shrinkage in the area of the world affected by actual shooting wars in progress. This pattern continues with the most recent war to end, in the Philippines, at the far eastern end of the zone of conflict stretching from west and central Africa to south Asia.

The war likely to end next is Burma [Myanmar]. The government there has taken substantial steps toward democracy after decades of authoritarian military rule (including massacres of protesters more than once). Around Burma’s borders are ethnic groups who carried on armed conflict with the government. All the major groups have now reached cease-fires except one, the Kachin in the north next to China. Their war had been suspended for 17 years under an earlier cease-fire that broke down in 2011. (Note: peacekeepers help maintain cease-fires, but the Kachin conflict had none.) A recent government offensive greatly weakened the Kachin position, and now the sides seem close to reaching a cease-fire, according to a report from last week’s negotiations. The next round of talks are to take place before April 10. Both China and the United States would like Burma’s wars to end comprehensively; China could send refugees home, and would gain economically from Burma’s development, and the United States wants a successful transition to democracy there. In the past month, only “sporadic” clashes have taken place, and if a cease-fire agreement is reached I will take Burma off my list of wars in progress.

I had thought the next war to end would be far west of the arc of conflict, the last real outlier geographically — Colombia. It is the last war in the western hemisphere, the last remnant from a bygone era when most of Latin America was up in flames with leftist armed insurgencies, rightist militias, and great-power meddling. What remains today, in Colombia, is a weak guerrilla force sustained by cocaine revenues and losing its recent battles with the government. Peace talks are underway, and one of these months Colombia might reach a cease-fire. Until then, they fight while they talk.

The East Asian peace has been noted as a key component of the world’s overall pattern of declining violence.  The end of wars in the Philippines and (potentially) Burma would extend that peace southwest, with favorable implications for ending the little war in southern Thailand.  (Then, on to India, where small-scale Maoist insurgencies continue.)

Wars begin with a bang and end with a whimper, at least the media attention paid to them does. Cease-fire agreements that could end longstanding wars in places like the Philippines, Burma, and Colombia may seem like small potatoes compared with the outbreak of a new war. But the shrinkage of the world’s zone of war is a big deal, expanding whole regions of the world where a new norm of not fighting active wars is gaining traction.

 

I’ve updated my “wars in progress” list (here) for use in my textbook update (Goldstein/Pevehouse International Relations, 10th edition update for 2013-2014).

There were no major changes in the state of the world’s wars. Syria became more lethal, with some tens of thousands killed last year. The Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia each saw flareups of fighting that have since abated somewhat. But Afghanistan became somewhat less violent, and Iraq remains far less violent than five years ago.

I added Mali to the list of wars in progress. Although the major French intervention succeeded quickly, there will probably be ongoing fighting for quite a while in the north of Mali.

I removed the Philippines from the list, as no regular fighting is taking place there anymore.  The government is still hunting down a few terrorists in remote places.

Several scary episodes of interstate skirmishing — actual military clashes between regular state armies — have taken place in recent years. These have occurred in India-Pakistan (most recently), Sudan-South Sudan, Cambodia-Thailand, North Korea-South Korea, and Israel-Lebanon, among others. In each case, although several people were killed, the situation did not escalate and some kind of cease-fire was restored. Even in a tense standoff such as Sudan and South Sudan, if there is a generally successful cease-fire and occasional breaches of it do not escalate to open fighting, the war is not “in progress” and not on my list.

In the big picture, the Uppsala world battle-deaths estimates remain at historic-low levels for the 11th year (since 2002, with 2012 being not recorded in the Uppsala data yet but certainly not that different from 2011). The levels of war deaths worldwide in each of the past 11 years are  lower than in any year since the 1950s. (America, however, had its decade of war during the world’s decade of peace, but is now joining the trend.) Will 2013 continue this decade of peace or bring new large-scale wars?

There has been some change in the world’s wars and armed conflicts – notably Syria is now on the list – so it’s a good time for a summary of the world’s wars. In the aggregate, the world remains in a sustained lull in armed conflict, with fewer, smaller, and more localized wars than in the past. But in the past year some have gotten better, some worse.

The world’s biggest war is the fight of regular state armies against armed Islamist militant groups in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. This biggest war is far smaller than Vietnam was, and also considerably smaller than the recent Iraq War in terms of both military and civilian casualties. The war is winding down for the United States over the next year and a half, but the overall prospects in both Afghanistan and western Pakistan are unclear. We can hope that President Obama is right that a new day is dawning for the Afghans. The poor country has been at war more or less continuously since the Soviet invasion 33 years ago. Yet the problem of armed Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with all its complexities and shifting alliances, seems no closer to solution overall than it was years ago.

Somalia is the second place in the world where fighting is taking place on a daily basis between armed forces that each control territory. After decades of civil war, with most of the country controlled by the Islamist militant group al Shabab, the official government with military clout from the African Union has finally extended its reach from a few blocks of the capital to encompass all of the capital, Mogadishu. Kenya’s armed forces entered Somalia from the south, and Ethiopia’s from the west, to push Shabab out of Somali territory. The capital is currently enjoying a resurgence. In the north, however, two autonomous regions, Somaliland and Puntland, add to Somalia’s unresolved problems (but are not at war).

In southern Sudan, the Sudanese government has for months been fighting rebels in South Kordofan and Blue Nile provinces who sided with the South Sudan side during the long civil war. The government appears to be committing war crimes against the populations there. Recently the regular armies of Sudan and South Sudan have been skirmishing along the border, though this has died down somewhat in the last week. Sporadic fighting still takes place in Darfur in the west of Sudan, where earlier war crimes led to an indictment of Sudan’s current president by the International Criminal Court. So Sudan has been seeing persistent armed conflict, though at the moment the fighting is small-scale and intermittent. There is a big danger of a big war between regular state armies, and the Security Council has told both sides to knock it off.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo currently a sizable militia that had theoretically integrated into the national army has recently split off and is fighting against the national army in the Wild East of the country, near Rwanda and Uganda. The leader of that militia is under indictment by the International Criminal Court. That conflict has escalated to active fighting, but it hasn’t gone on for long yet. Outbreaks like this have been taking place in eastern Congo (where elements of the genocide perpetrators from Rwanda still are holed up) for the past decade as the rest of the country has maintained a fragile but durable peace. Like Sudan, the fighting is low-level but persistent.

Syria is the fifth serious armed conflict at the moment. As the Free Syrian Army (FSA) gains strength and holds neighborhoods, the situation more and more resembles a civil war, though it’s still unclear what direction the country will go in. Most of the deaths to date appear to be from government violence against civilians, though the number attributable to fighting between the government and FSA is growing.

So these are the five places where sizable armed forces are actively fighting each other on a daily basis — Afghanistan/Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, eastern Congo, and Syria.

 

In a number of other countries, lower-level fighting takes places, at smaller scale and not as regularly. I count the following small but somewhat consequential armed conflicts on my “wars in progress” list:

Iraq (including Sunni-Shi’ite conflicts internally and Turkey’s battles with Kurdish guerrillas based in northern Iraq)

Yemen (Islamist militants hold territory in the south, plus a different conflict in the north)

India (government vs. Maoists, though one major group is now in a cease fire)

Colombia (long guerrilla war running out of steam),

Burma (or Myanmar, where one long-running ethnic conflict has a cease-fire but others continue)

Philippines (occasional fighting on remote islands to track down terrorists)

Thailand (some fighting with Islamist rebels in far south).

Nigeria (fighting sporadic in delta oil region but becoming more regular with Islamists in north)

Israel-Palestine (world’s longest-running armed conflict; low-level but persistent violence)

 

The Uppsala/PRIO data maintained in Sweden and Norway define wars and armed conflicts somewhat differently than I do, going down to lower levels of violence. They include both Russia (occasional terrorist attacks in the Islamic south near Chechnya) and Algeria (remnants of a nasty civil war with Islamists a decade ago). The Uppsala/PRIO data also include “global al Qaeda” as a war. The data also count conflicts with fewer than 100 battle deaths in a year, which generally do not make my list. They include the hunt for Joseph Kony in central Africa, and conflicts in Tajikistan, Iran, Mauritania, Ethiopia, and Peru. (Uppsala peace researchers writing in SIPRI Yearbook 2011 listed 15 “major armed conflicts” in 2010, close to my total “wars in progress” but not entirely overlapping.)

In addition, I had Libya on the list last year but have since dropped it, although fighting among town-based militias still occurs from time to time. To me it’s not organized enough to call a war, but you can argue it. There was also a war in Mali earlier this year where armed rebels who had fought for Gaddafi in Libya took over the north part of the country. It seems likely that fighting will start up again when the government recovers from an ill-advised coup and gets an African Union force together, but meanwhile there is a stable cease-fire and it’s not a war in progress in my view.

So that’s the world of armed conflict today:  Five small wars, nine smaller and more sporadic armed conflicts, several other borderline cases where intergroup violence bubbles up on occasion, and several more with casualty levels below 100 deaths/year.

 

I’ve been keeping a list of wars in my textbook International Relations for 20 years. The first edition showed 26 wars in progress worldwide in 1992, including some especially large and brutal ones such as in Angola, the former Yugoslavia, and Sri Lanka. The latest edition had 13 wars as of January 2012, and I’ve since added Syria for 14 total.

I’ve been pretty consistent in defining wars over time, and the decline in number by half does accurately reflect the peaceful trend of the past twenty years. Also the geographical shrinkage of the world’s war zone is evident in the changing map of wars in progress. Wars 20 years ago were dispersed, with 3 in Latin America, 2 in Europe, 2 in the former Soviet republics, 3 in the Middle East, 8 in Africa, 4 in South Asia, and 4 in Southeast Asia. Today’s map shows one war in Latin America (Colombia, quickly dwindling), none in Europe or the former Soviet republics, and all the rest packed along a single arc from Democratic Congo to Iraq and Afghanistan to Burma (and thinning out into small conflicts in Thailand and the Philippines). Warfare is literally shrinking across the face of the earth.

Sometimes the tone of political discourse implies that the world is awash in wars, violence is out of control across the world and getting worse and worse. If you look at the reality of wars today, as this post has, the picture is quite the opposite. The number of wars of the size and intensity known for most of history is now zero. Only a handful with ongoing serious fighting are taking place, and the list of even smaller armed conflicts barely makes it into double digits. Of the world’s 7 billion people, the number living in war zones is on the order of 100 million. You can quibble with the details, but clearly something like 98 percent of human beings are living in regions of peace today.

North Korea is reportedly preparing for its third nuclear test. Here’s why I’m not worried about it.

My reaction is not dictated by complacence about nuclear proliferation, which I consider about the most serious problem there is in the field of war and peace. North Korea’s ability to master nuclear weapons technology and share it with others for a price is a serious danger. Also, I worry about the North Korean regime in general since it is unpredictable, bellicose, and prone to acts of aggression — like sinking a South Korean warship two years ago, killing 46.

But let’s put a third nuclear test in perspective. First of all, it’s anomalous and just marks North Korea as a rogue, outlier state (as if we needed further evidence). That’s because the north’s two (about to be three?) nuclear tests are the only nuclear explosions set off in the current century, 11+ years. Even though the USA hasn’t ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the treaty might as well be in effect in terms of behavior. Nobody is testing anymore. Except North Korea.

The first nuclear test in 2006 did not surprise me. North Korea had operated a nuclear reactor and extracted plutonium, reportedly enough for something like 8-10 bombs. But would the bomb design work? One thing about dictators is that they’re somewhat paranoid about the people who work for them, so I can imagine Kim Jong Il wanting to know if the thing worked. They tested one and it fizzled. So the second test in 2009 was also not a surprise. They had to see if they’d corrected whatever was wrong. They had, and the explosion had a force about equivalent to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

Since then, since North Korea had destroyed its reactor during one of the peace deals, it’s plutonium supply has been quite limited, and western governments would be happy to see it used up in tests, leaving a smaller arsenal each time.

Then it turned out North Korea had a separate program to enrich uranium for a bomb. They showed it off to a U.S. scientist in 2010, and he was impressed. But here’s the thing: Getting plutonium is easy but making a plutonium bomb is quite difficult, whereas getting enriched uranium is hard but making it into a bomb is easy. So having mastered a plutonium bomb, the North Koreans hardly need to test a uranium bomb to know it will work, if they have the uranium. As a matter of fact, when the United States invented atomic bombs in 1945, it tested the first plutonium bomb in New Mexico and dropped the second one on Nagasaki. U.S. leaders dropped the first uranium bomb on Hiroshima  without testing it. They knew it would work.

And North Korea knows their uranium bomb will work. So either they test it just for show, or they test another plutonium bomb while reducing their plutonium stockpile (albeit developing a smaller weapon more ready to mount on missiles). Either way, who cares?  It’s sabre-rattling.

As for long-range missiles, North Korea definitely broke agreements including UN Security Council resolutions when it test-fired one recently. But the test failed, as have previous ones. It still moves their program forward to test a missile and have it crash (lessons learned), but it’s not exactly a clear and present danger to the USA.

North Korea’s real threat is not its nuclear or missile programs but its artillery massed within range of Seoul. In the first hours of a new Korean War, the south’s capital would be flattened. However, in the next few days the north would be overwhelmed, invaded, and its regime overthrown. The new young leader Kim Jong Un would probably be dead. Dictators don’t like that. So it just seems very improbable that the north would go beyond smallish provocations and slip into a real war.

The international community should not freak out about the north’s behavior, especially if there is a nuclear test soon. Nobody will die in that test, it won’t lead to a war, and it’s irrelevant to the real problem of proliferation. Six-party talks on resolving the North Korean nuclear problem are still the best hope, and we should be probing whether, beneath the bluster, the new leader may want to play Let’s Make a Deal.