Continuing the discussion started by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Professor Mary Kaldor of the LSE explains her view of New and Old Wars.

I do think we’re in the midst of what might be called a paradigm shift in the nature of conflict and the nature of war.  Some of you may have seen Rupert Smith’s new book, The Utility of Force, where he talks about the shift from industrial war to what he calls war amongst the peoples.

Now, my term is rather more feeble: I talk about the shift from Old Wars to New Wars, and I thought it might be useful for me to say a few words about the characteristics of both, and then something about what this means for changing policy.

What I mean by Old Wars are really wars between states, fought by the military in uniform where the decisive encounter is battle. And that's typically World War I, World War II and the Cold War. And that's, in a way, what we think of as war, that's our image of what war is.

I used the term New Wars because I couldn't think of a better term. A lot of people do say they're civil wars or intra-state wars, but actually I think they're more different than that.

I think, in fact, that most of the conflicts in the world today are both internal and external, both global and local. Is the war in Iraq a war between Iraq and America, or between different bits of Iraq? What's the role of Iran and Syria? Bosnia was particularly a case where those people who didn't want to intervene said it was a Yugoslav war, whereas those people who did want to intervene said it was a war between Bosnia and Serbia and Croatia; and actually the key issue in Bosnia was not whether the Bosnian Muslims were being killed by Yugoslavs or Serbs; the key issue was the terrible human rights violations that were taking place.

So I've used the word New Wars. Let me give you a few of the characteristics of New Wars.

New Wars 
The first is that New Wars are fought by both state and non-state actors. They are fought by remnants of the regular army, paramilitary groups, warlords, criminal gangs, private security companies. They're all involved together in networks in these New Wars.

The second characteristic (and here I think I'd put it slightly different from Jeremy, although I suspect we're talking about the same thing) is that whereas Old Wars were fought either for state interests or for ideology – capitalism versus socialism, democracy versus fascism – New Wars tend to be fought for identity, and for a very narrow view of identity: for the idea that because you are a Muslim or a Sunni or a Shiite or a Serb, you have a right to the state on the basis of your identity.

It's not about how you practise your religion. Sometimes it's about what language you speak. It's more about having rights to power on the basis of identity. And actually, these identities are not necessarily very local, although they think in backward terms; they are very much a product of globalisation and they're often very transnational. They use all the tools of globalisation - internet, mobile phones, videos - to link with diasporas in the United States, and in the Gulf, so they're transnational identities as well.

Targeting civilians
Now a third characteristic, and the most important characteristic of New Wars, is that the primary victims of New Wars are civilians. That for me is what makes New Wars new. And I think it really has to do with the logic of war and the changing nature of weaponry. I think Old Wars have simply become too destructive to be fought. And I think you can see how New Wars evolved out of the destructiveness of Old Wars, through revolutionary warfare, to low intensity warfare, all of which tried to get around the problem of conventional military force, and to control territory in different ways.

I think it's not that territory isn't important, but instead of saying that we're going to win territory by military means, what the new warriors do is say we're going to win territory by political means. And whereas revolutionaries said we're going to win it by winning hearts and minds, we're going to control territory by promising people socialism – that was the revolutionary idea – we're going to wear down our enemy by attrition; that's too difficult for the new warriors.

The new warriors try to control territory on the basis of identity and they try to mobilise identity through territory, through spreading fear and hatred, through getting rid of people with a different identity, through getting rid of people with cosmopolitan ideas. So that even if there isn't a kind of ideology of identity before, it exists afterwards. People learn to hate each other.

And the techniques which are common in new wars - genocide, ethnic cleansing, population displacement, massive violations of human rights, systematic rape – those kinds of things are no longer the side effects of wars, they're the central methodology of war. And that for me is what makes New Wars so different.

And interestingly enough, if you look at conventional responses to war, they end up doing the same thing, even if it's not deliberate.

Counter-insurgency efforts end up killing civilians because you can't distinguish the insurgents from the civilians, because the civilians aren't protected. I just came back from Lebanon: when the Israelis were bombing southern Lebanon, they regarded every single person south of the Litani river as a member of Hezbollah. If you look at Grozny, huge population displacement - in fact, population displacement as a technique - began as a result of counter-insurgency, not as deliberate ethnic cleansing.

It's fascinating if you look at the statistics on Iraq, actually the majority of attacks are still against Coalition forces, despite the growth in sectarian warfare. The vast majority of casualties are civilians.

Criminality 
And the final characteristic of New Wars is that New Wars in a way epitomise the underside of globalisation, and the new kind of criminalised economy that is typical of globalisation but is particularly characteristic of New Wars. And the reason, and this is again in contrast to Old Wars, is that New Wars are linked to state weakness: they are associated with areas where there has been a decline in taxation, a decline in public spending, unlike Old Wars which actually tended to mobilise taxation, to increase public spending, to employ people in the war effort.

And the result is that in order to finance their activities, the new warriors get involved in all kinds of illegal activities. They loot and pillage, they tax 'humanitarian assistance', they depend on diaspora support, they get involved in illegal smuggling, they set up check points where they exchange necessities for assets like televisions or cows. And the result is that they set up an economy that actually depends on violence, and create a kind of vested interest in continuing violence. 

There are some scholars who say the motives for the New Wars are economic. In my view, you can't really distinguish between economic and political motives. There are fanatics who use illegal methods to finance their fanatic causes, and there are criminals who find the umbrella of war, and the umbrella of a nationalist or religious cause, is a good umbrella under which to carry out kidnapping and other types of activities for money.

Difficult to end, difficult to contain 
So the implication I think of these characteristics is first of all, unlike Old Wars, New Wars are very difficult to end. They result in more fear and hatred, and they set up a criminalised economy in which there are people with a vested interest in violence. And so the things that led to the war in the first place – a weak state, conflict about identity – are actually made far worse by the conflict. And that's why we've seen successive conflicts in Africa.

And the second thing is that the New Wars are very difficult to contain. They spread. They spread through refugees, displaced persons, they spread through the viruses of nationalism and religious fundamentalism, they spread through transnational criminal activities. And so you have these clusters of wars in Central Asia, now in the Middle East, in West Africa, that are incredibly difficult to deal with without dealing with them in a regional way.

So what does that imply about how we act? Well, I've got a lot to say, but we don't have much time. I've increasingly been using the term 'human security' to express the idea that our basic concern is to strengthen security by protecting individuals and civilians on the ground, rather than our borders. And we've been arguing very much that the European Union ought to adopt a human security approach as part of a broader UN approach.

And I think key to any alternative approach is how do we establish a legitimate political authority. It need not necessarily be the state; it might be an international protectorate, it might be a local municipality. The key to dealing both with the hatred and with the criminality is establishing some kind of legitimate political authority. And we need capability to be able to do that. I think we do need the capabilities, we do need the soldiers, but we need the soldiers working with police and civilians in new ways. We also need new approaches to reconstruction that need to be integrated with what we do on the security front.

But in so far as we are using soldiers and policemen, it is very different either from war-fighting, which was what we did in the past, or peace-keeping which was between the sides. Neither of those were able to deal with the problems of public security, the problems of human rights violations, that I've discussed.

Law enforcement, not fighting? 
And I think what we need to do is something much more akin to law enforcement but in a more robust way. If you're using soldiers, the aim of soldiers is to protect civilians, not to defeat an enemy. The first and foremost task is to protect people from the terrible things that are happening to them. And linked to that, the first and foremost task is not to win a victory, but to create a political space where people can establish a legitimate authority.

And while these sound easy, they're actually very difficult to achieve. Paradoxically, the British have been very good at this, and I think part of it has been our experience in Northern Ireland. That we've actually learned, whatever were the mistakes, we've learned a little bit about how to do that. But of course I think in Iraq we've been overwhelmed by other strategies. I was going to talk about Iraq but I don't have time. And in Afghanistan likewise. And I do think we need to take a hold of that. 

I think we also need to see this as the centrepiece of our defence policy. I think the big problem at the moment is that we still see our defence policy primarily in Old War terms, and these kinds of activities as an 'add-on'. And the result is that we go on spending on things like Trident or the Eurofighter, instead of seeing this as the priority. And I do believe it's the priority, even if you're talking about big issues like nuclear proliferation, because the danger is in the kind of instability that we're talking about, which could involve weapons of mass destruction, and could lead to terrorism. This is the central problem that we face.

I think what we really need is to reorient our defence policy around the human security approach, rather than around a national security approach or a defence of borders approach.

This talk, to be read alongside 'The Changing Nature of Conflict (1)' by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, was delivered at the inaugura lmeeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues, on 6 February 2007 in Westminster, and transcribed by wendy Conway Lamb.  The recording can be heard here.