The Political Geography of Conflict : Civil Wars in the Hegemonic Shadow

Abstract

The attack by the United States on Iraq in March 2003 was atypical of contemporary conflicts. While the attempt to kill Saddam Hussein on March 19 marked the opening of hostilities and was broadcast worldwide instantaneously, a much more destructive conflict that had raged for five years in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continued to receive hardly any notice. The war to depose the Hussein regime resulted in fewer than 12,000 dead (122 U.S. and U.K. troops, 6,000–7,000 civilians, and about 5,000 Iraqi military casualties). The civil wars in the Congo (formerly Zaire) since 1998 have resulted in 3.1 to 4.7 million dead, with 250,000 killed in the fighting near Bunia (eastern Congo) in 2002–2003. Conflict directly caused 300,000 deaths worldwide in 2000, more than half of them in Africa. Conflict directly accounts for 0.5% of all global deaths; the indirect effects are significantly larger. These gruesome comparative statistics on casualties illustrate well the main themes of this chapter about post–Cold War conflicts. First, contemporary wars are disproportionately civil conflicts; only a handful of interstate wars have occurred in the last decade. Second, the United States has been disproportionately involved in both interstate and civil wars, either directly by attacking another country (Panama in 1989, Iraq in 1991, Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003) or indirectly by supporting governments that are under pressure from rebels (e.g., Haiti, Pakistan, Colombia, Israel, Turkey, the Philippines, Macedonia, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia). Third, civil wars are lasting longer than ever before; the average length is now eight years. Fourth, civil wars are much more destructive of life and property than interstate wars, partly because international structures and rules are either unavailable or ignored. More mechanisms exist to resolve interstate disputes. Fifth, overwhelming U.S. military power and a growing disparity with its opponents have resulted increasingly in asymmetric use of force and “risk-transfer wars.” Tiny U.S. casualties stand in sharp contrast to large numbers of civilian and military deaths in the countries under attack. The gap is expected to grow as U.S. military expenditures soon equal those of all other countries combined and new high-tech weaponry is rushed into production.

“A Foras, Out”: Youth antimilitarism engagement in Sardinia

“…In many cases, islands have a history of colonisation or are still considered to be colonies (Lutz, 2009). The literature has focused on US military bases around the world, highlighting post-Cold War geopolitical strategies (Johnson, 2004;O'Loughlin, 2005) as new forms of imperialism and colonisation (Gerson, 2009;Noenoe, 2004) accompanied by economic power strategies (Vine, 2009). In this context, the study of civil-military relations can concern resistance, protests and collective actions (McCaffrey, 2002) led by autochthones and sometimes supported by transnational networks.…”

Resources, violence and the telluric geographies of small wars

“…And they tend to treat the territories of small wars as homogeneous (O’Lear and Diehl, 2007). In other words, these models ignore the geography of violence in small wars, which includes: the spatial dynamics of warfare, fighting, exploitation and coercion; the differentiations of ‘opportunities' and economic incentives across different resource types and actor categories; the time-space dynamics of accumulation and protection and their effects on small war dynamics and the transnational dimensions of small wars and insurgent financing (Ballentine and Sherman, 2003; Buhaug, 2007; Dalby, 2007; Flint, 2005; Gregory and Pred, 2007; Korf and Engeler, 2007; Le Billon, 2007; O’Lear and Diehl, 2007; O’Loughlin, 2005; O’Loughlin and Raleigh, 2007).…”

“…Although this research field (‘ethnicity, natural resources and violent civil conduct’) has been identified by the Times Higher Education in 2009 as one of the top 10 research fronts in the social sciences (Wrigley and Overman, 2010: 5, Table 4), it has remained a rather marginal field within the study of the geographies of war and peace. 3 John O’Loughlin (2005) reminds us that these types of war have often occurred in a ‘hegemonic shadow’ and scholarly attention among geographers has mainly focused on the ‘hot wars' (Flint, 2005: 3) that occurred after 9/11. Only more recently have some contributions started to attend to the geography of ‘resource violence’ - to the spatialities and temporalities of resource exploitation and their entanglements with violent conflict.…”

“…In Colin Flint’s edited volume on The Geography of War and Peace (2005), only few contributions engage explicitly with this debate, e.g. Le Billon (2005b) and, to some extent, O’Loughlin (2005).…”