• Sonuç bulunamadı

CHAPTER 2: WOMEN AND CONFLICT

2.3. NEW WARS: CHANGES IN THE NATURE OF CONFLICT

In spite of the fact that security has had great importance throughout the history of nation-state, one of the biggest reasons why the debate between state security and human security is so intense is the emergence of the “new war” concept. The term of war, traditionally used to explain armed conflicts among two or more states, has continued to exist in almost every period of human history. However, with the dissolution of USSR, the bipolar system, which dominated the Cold War period, ended and the new world order began to be structured under the leadership of the Western world and the USA. The elements threating the security have been brought forward as ethnic or religious conflicts, weapons of mass destruction, international organized crime, human rights violations, environmental issues and terrorism, so states have

111 Ole Waever, “Insecurity, Security and Asecurity in the West European Non-War Community”, Adler, Emmanuel and Michael Barnett (eds.), Security Communities, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 48, 67.

112 Mohammed Nuruzzaman, “Paradigms In Conflict: The Contested Claims Of Human Security, Critical Theory and Feminism,” Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies

Association 41, no.3 (2006): 285.

begun to fight against these new threats. Therefore, traditional front battles, which had been dominant in the discipline until that time, were replaced by a new form of war.

The concept of “new war” that emerged due to the end of the Cold War and spread of globalization was first used in 1999 by Mary Kaldor.113 Kaldor, who defines traditional front battles as armed clashes that last in a certain time between states or military groups with the aim of conquering lands, claims new wars appear as a conflict generally in unsuccessful states by means of non-governmental actors and government networks.114 Based on Kaldor’s definition of new war, it is deduced that “There is a tendency in areas of new wars…for centralized authority to break down and be replaced by criminal networks, multiple armed authorities, corrupt practices, mindless local barbarity, population expulsions and an orchestrated politics of fear instead of civil security.”115 The three major developments that give rise to the concept of new war are described as loss of state control, the asymmetricization of war, and the autonomy of forms of violence.116 In this respect, the features that make new wars different from traditional wars can be listed in this way: Non-state actors are also involved in the conflicts, so it is in the form of a civil war rather than an inter-state war. The monopoly of using violence and force no longer belongs to only the states. There is an asymmetry or unequal power relations between the parties of conflicts. The finance of new wars is provided by the global economy, so that international organizations and multinational corporations, aiming to arise conflicts by taking advantage of the disorder and instability in the weak or failed states, sustain these wars financially in order to take the lead in the competition in the globalization process. These wars burst out because of cultural, ethnic or religious identity movements rather than political ideologies. One of the most significant features of new wars is that the distinction between soldiers and civilians is vague.117 Therefore, it becomes crucial to discuss the security issue all over in the discipline as the traditional wars that are based on territorial dominance between two or more states or military forces under the control of states, and in which the distinction between processes of

113 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, (Oxford: Polity Press, 1999).

114 Mary Kaldor, “The New War in Iraq”, Theoria, (April 2006): 1.

115 Christine Sylvester, “War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies

40, no.3 (2012): 488.

116 Herfried Münkler, The New Wars, (Polity: 2005): 14-15.

117 Herfried Münkler, “The Wars of the 21st Century,” IRRC 85, no. 849, (March 2003): 7-22.

conflict and peace are obvious, and the scope of wars is limited give its way to new wars.

With the emergence of new wars, the scope, extent and consequences of the wars also changed. While interstate wars had given its place to civil wars, global conflicts had come to an end and replaced with clashes among different ethnic, religious or cultural classes within the states. Consequently, the blocs formed among states in the global scale have been relatively ended and more regional or small scale blocks have emerged.

Nevertheless, as the wars coming out of states’ control and the loss of the importance of traditional interstate war rules, the weapons and strategies used in the wars have also begun to change. The restrictions and limits on using violence or the actions that are regarded as war crimes have been disregarded in civil wars. In civil wars, the actors engaged in combats are not only different states but also civilians living in the borders of the same states. For this reason, the distinction between soldiers and civilians has become uncertain.118

As a result of destroying state authority and stability, state governors become unable to fulfill their basic responsibilities and duties in case of outbreak of civil war. The most crucial one of these responsibilities and duties is to protect civilians from the violence of war. All people from children to elderly, from woman to man living within the state become the actors and accordingly potential victims of wars as a result of the inability to control violence and to separate civilians and soldiers. In conjunction with the improvements in war technology, the destruction and destroying power of war increased considerably in comparison with the past. Therefore, it led to the conclusion that “the nature of the violence is a key indicator of the new war.”119 As the control of violence had been managed by the terrorist and guerrilla groups rather than the state itself, target part of the society for this destruction had become the civilians. Not only the soldiers fighting in the fronts but also the civilians had been involved in the war. Moreover, civilians that get involved in the midst of the ethnic, religious or class conflicts had become the ones affected most by the negative impacts of the war.

118 Michael Dillon, “What makes the world dangerous?”, Global Politics. (Routledge, 2013): 547-566.

119 Kaldor, op.cit. (1999):10 quoted in Sylvester, op.cit. (2012): 488.

Eventually, the victims of today’s civil wars are civilians more than soldiers. Hence, the most defenseless ones among civilians are clearly children and women as UN Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict also points out that “the vast majority of casualties in today’s wars are among civilians, mostly women and children.”120 That the use of violence is detached from the monopoly of state along with the concept of new war makes innocent civilians target of the violence as barbarity and destructiveness of wars increase because from now on, not only soldiers but civilian populations have been got armed and engaged in wars, wars are fought for the sake of ethnic, religious, cultural or national values, the period of war has been extended, the line between wartime and peacetime has been vague and war technology has improved. Even though a certain definition of civil war cannot be made or every civil war has different dynamics, the common point of civil wars is the fact that civilians are affected by cruelty, atrocity and torture more than ever before.

As an expected result of such an increase in security threats for individuals with the concept of new war, the perspectives putting human security forward have begun to gain importance in the discipline. These theoretical perspectives, in which human is the focus of analyses, differentiate at identifying the factors threating security and determining what must be done to ensure security. At the Table-1 below, extended security concepts are explained according to different perspectives which are separated in terms of their security conceptions.

120 The United Nations, “Background Information on Sexual Violence used as a Tool of War.” Outreach Programme on the Rwanda Genocide and the United Nations, (Department of Public Information, April 2013). www.un.org/preventgenocide/Rwanda.

Security Concepts Indicated

(Security of whom?)

Values At Risk (Security of what?)

Source/Sources of Threat (Protection from whom/what?) National Security

(political, military aspect)

State Sovereignty,

territorial integrity

Other states, terrorism (non-state

actors) Societal Security

(social aspect)

Nations, Social groups

National unity, identity

(States) Nations, immigrants, foreign cultures

Human Security Individuals, humanity

Survival, quality of life

State, globalization, global environment issues, nature, terrorism

Environmental Security

Ecosystem Sustainability Humanity

Gender Security Gender relations, indigenous

peoples, minorities

Equality, identity, solidarity

Patriarchy, totalitarian/male-dominated institutions (governments,

religions, elites, culture), intolerance Table-1: Extended Security Concepts 121

According to the alternative theories, that oppose classical perspectives which conduct state-level security studies by taking state as the main actor and national security as the main issue, since states act as the actual source of insecurity instead of providing security, states must not be taken part in the center of the analyses. Whereas classical theories argue individuals feel safe only if states are secured, alternative theories challenge this mentality. This is because the state itself may constitute the security threat while it is expected to provider and protector of the security of its individuals.122 Therefore, considering the state as a threat to human security, individual-oriented studies must be conducted on in the discipline.

121 Hanss Günter Brauch, “Güvenliğin Yeniden Kavramsallaştırılması: Barış, Güvenlik, Kalkınma ve Çevre Kavramsal Dörtlüsü”, Uluslararası İlişkiler 5, no.18 (Summer 2008): 11

122 Fen Hampson, Jean Daudelin, John Hay, Todd Martin, and Holly Reid, The Madness in the Multitude:

Human Security and World Disorder, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): 4.

2.4. THE CONTRIBUTION OF FEMINIST IR THEORY: THE RELATION