War since 1945 (Contemporary Worlds)

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Let us wish you a happy birthday! Day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Month January February March April May June July August September October November December Year Africa also saw many inter-state disputes about borders, most of which had been drawn by Europeans and Americans in the 20th century. Several wars, both before and after the supposed divide, were wars of secession, in which parts of states, often richer in minerals than the rest of the state, aspired to independence.

These included the long-standing conflicts between Somalia and Ethiopia over Ogaden, and the attempt of Biafra to achieve independence from Nigeria in estimated to have cost the lives of up to a million Ibos who were mainly starved to death.

There was no profound difference underlying the causes of Eritrean secession from Ethiopia in , which was followed by bloody border conflicts in with some of the most extensive tank battles since the Second World War. All these conflicts had a pronounced quality of ethnic antagonism, most stunningly shown in the Rwandan civil war of In Asia, too, the genocidal or democidal element was overwhelmingly present during the Cold War, quantified by the peerless research of Rudolph Rummel.

And the death figures of the second half of the 20th century are, if at all, not much lower than those incurred during the two world wars, another stunning fact that puts an end to any comforting notion of a Long Peace. The groups defined as enemies to be fought, persecuted or exterminated, might be identified as such on real or imputed ethnic, ideological or religious grounds.

List of civil wars

The ethnic element is almost always present in conflicts in Africa and many conflicts in Asia, from the oppression of Muslim Kurds as an ethnic minority by the three Muslim, but ethnically very different states in which they live, to the occupation of partly Christian, partly animist East Timor by the military of Muslim Indonesia. The religious pattern is found in Nigeria, where the Christian Ibos tried to establish their own state with Biafra, where the north is Islamic and in tension with the non-Islamic, non-Sharia south.

However many other factors are invoked, from economic to ideological, reli-gion has been the dividing line in the Northern Ireland conflict a conflict of such low intensity compared with the others mentioned here that one hardly dares mention it in this overview. Focusing on political structures, one also finds a pattern of state-creation wars and wars of contested statehood including secession, or the wrestling of several groups to dominate within such a state , along the lines identified by Johannes Burkhardt for the Thirty Years War in Europe.

Examples of state-creation wars are not only the wars of anti-colonial independence, such as that of Algeria against France, or Mozambique, Guinea and Angola against Portugal ending in their respective independence in and , the insurrections in Rhodesia in the following years against white rule ending in independence of Zimbabwe in The second half of the 20th century was not a period of peace for most parts of the world outside Europe; indeed, if anything, after human fatality through organised violence dramatically increased in Africa, large parts of Asia, and Latin America.

As they focused on the prospect of a Third World War, a war they imagined to be total, of the greatest possible magnitude global and highest possible intensity nuclear , they tended to think of anything short of this as limited, local, and of low intensity. The Korean and Vietnam Wars were thus seen by Western commentators as local wars, and the dearth of pitched battles during most of the Vietnam War made them describe it as a low intensity conflict, even though it certainly was not a low intensity conflict for the Vietnamese.

Moreover, classical definitions of war were utterly state-centric, as the state alone was defined as having the right to exercise violence, and thus monopolised it.

Since the 17th century, war was waged in Europe within increasingly defined legal contexts, included formal declarations of war, armistices and peace treaties. Precisely because Western notions of a just war and legitimate recourse to violence were increasingly circumscribed by international and state law, warring groups in the more recent past have tended to shun formal declarations of war and adherence to both ius ad bellum and ius in bello.

It applied not only to the end of the Cold War, but to most of the 20th century, and particularly to most armed conflicts between organised groups of human beings, vulgo , wars, which have taken place since Guerrilla and counterinsurgency are certainly the main forms of war in most of the instances of real wars since that we have listed above.

Earlier examples of such heterogeneous forces go back to the Spanish Civil War and beyond. However, there seems to be a rising tendency of criminal trade that both feeds war and feeds off war. Drugs enter into it, as do arms, but also human beings, and it is here that criminal economies need the social instability and the chaos or poverty of war zones to obtain fresh supplies of victims.

Nor were they primarily a function of state systems, international relations, international regimes which have been at the centre of so much literature on diplomatic history and international relations.

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Economic issues certainly played an important part, but probably more in the form of abject poverty and indeed mass starvation or competition for vital water, rather than the cunning machinations of military-industrial complexes or great power economic expansionism carried out under the guise of development aid. This should lead us to refocus our attention on the actual dynamics of war, the breakdown of the taboo of killing in societies which otherwise recognise this taboo - for indeed, respect for this taboo is the mainstay of any society. No longer mesmerised by the arcane mental arabesques of nuclear strategy, deterrence theories, concepts of crisis management, arms control, military balances and game theory, about which scores of books have been written but which now gather dust, we should recast our research agenda.

A subject of continuing interest is one which was studied extensively during the Cold War, namely the role of armed forces in any society, but especially in politically and economically unstable societies. The armed forces are central to almost all conflicts since because these combine the worlds of violence and killing on the one hand, and of the disciplining of violence on the other.

Armed forces train those who later use force, they organise them, they are themselves regularly involved in civil wars, and they are the chief instrument of power in any regime.

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The many military coups in Latin America during the Cold War attracted the attention of notable American political scientists. It is not long since Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey were governed by military dictatorships or at least ones that enjoyed military support, a feature characteristic also of Southeast Asia.

It is appalling that so little research has been done in social and biological anthropology on human violence since the s, when Martin Nettleship, R. Within the research agenda which so clearly exists in these disciplines, one would do well to focus both on violent clashes between groups of equals and on the breakdown of the taboo of killing the weak and unprotected.

The former case is endemic in most societies, usually involves young males, and ranges from the disciplined form of violence in sports via hooliganism to warrior societies, where adulthood at least for males is associated with being warriors, having gone to war. The killing of the weak and unprotected, by contrast, has grown significantly over the last years. Mary Kaldor claims that at the beginning of the 20th century, the ratio of military to civilian deaths in war was 8: While the taboo has also been broken in most human societies, this normally happens only in individual cases, is considered a crime, or accepted only after rites of dispensation sacrificial rites, or trials in combination with elaborate rituals.

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