Neither War nor Peace: “New Wars” and Armed Violence as State Failure

Neither War nor Peace: “New Wars” and Armed Violence as State Failure 

     In this paper, we will primarily focus on the advent of "new wars" paradigm and then try to make a link between theses conflicts and failed states.

But first, a brief summary of the text corpus:

     In the first text, Malešević criticizes the new war paradigm which defends the idea of violents conflicts since 1990s are different than others before. For him, the only new fact is that conquests and invasion are forbidden. More precisely, causes of war are the same than before such as economic, political and mainly ideological and geopolitical. However, the new war paradigm brings news perspectives in the field of research with the sociological and historical causes of the changing forms of violence.

   In the second text, for Sørensen, war makes states in the way you need state's features to prepare war. With this postulate, why in the Third World with theses numerous conflicts, this is not happening like it happened for the european states? For him, there are three claims. The first is that wars are differents. The second is the drag of political and economic interests of stronger states on weakers. The third and last is the domestic preconditions and the habilities of leaders.

     Figueroa Helland and Borg in the third text, make a criticism of state failure discourses. They demonstrate that it is a eurocentric conception of state. Groups become violent because they need to have the monopoly of violence. Thus, violence is no more a consequence of failed state but a desire of state and reach it. They also demonstrate that a breakdown of a state is not necessary negative and there is a crisis of the concept of state.

     There was and still an intellectual confrontation to demonstrate if the nature of violent conflicts are new. Conflicts between states are less and less existent. The mains methodologicals approaches of international relations focused on state level, the understandings of news actors such as terrorist groups or fighting groups within a state need news tools. Here, emerges the new wars paradigm. It is a response of the Clausewitz point of view of war.
The claim is conflicts are news since the end of the 20th century in term of scope, model of financing, level of intensity and atrocities, fight tactics, military strategy, types of combattant or the decentralized aspect. The sociological approach of Shaw, Keilor and Bauman point out two news types of war which are the western technological advanced and the parasitic/predatory. The latter emerges in the context of failed state.
The aims are differents too. In the "old" wars, the main aim is to seize a territory while in "new wars", the goals can be economic benefits, ethinical reasons, foreign intervention, ressources, international recognition, etc.  It is also a combined internal and international conflict because of the globalisation.
Moreover, since the World War II, the perception of violence changed. The legitimate violence became internal when in international stage, conflicts must be resolved by peaceful means. According to Sørensen and Malešević, the main novelty is the new structural norms in which nowadays conquests or invasion are forbidden. In the light of recent development, we can contradict this claim with the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014. This new is also about globalisation which  put economic factors as a key to understandand modern conflicts.

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