Counting Wars

Excerpted from "external pageArmed Conflict: Trends and Drivers,call_made" Introduction and Chapter 1

The kind of war focused on here is intrastate, politically-driven, armed conflict. Intrastate armed conflict is but one manifestation of organized armed violence and violent crime (others include inter-state war, terrorism, organized crime, gang violence, murder, suicide). Intrastate war is not necessarily the most destructive form of violence as measured in direct deaths (for example, annual global traffic deaths are about 10 times higher than combat deaths in wars;[1] murders and suicides also exceed direct war deaths annually), and it is certainly not the only violence that requires an urgent and more effective response. Nevertheless, armed conflict warrants special attention because it is in many ways unique in its humanitarian and political/social/economic consequences.[2] Entrenched or ongoing armed conflict (many of today’s civil wars are decades old), accompanied by periodic mass atrocities, produces devastatingly persistent conditions of humanitarian crisis, chronic underdevelopment, and extreme political distortion – the consequences of which are literally incalculable, but which are at the same time vividly apparent in the fate of the people who endure them. Ending intrastate armed conflict, and preventing it where it threatens, is in each of its locales essential to furthering economic development and accountable governance, and thus to meeting basic human needs.

Counting wars: The nature and trends in armed conflict

While war[3] and its consequences are eminently recognizable, defining war is not straight forward. Because contemporary intra-state wars are not declared, and because in most cases they do not follow from a clear or official decision to go to war, it is often not at all obvious whether a country is in fact “at war.” Thus, any effort to count wars, and thus discern trends, must obviously include the application of some reasonably objective, measurable criteria for determining when a war begins and when it ends. The point of counting wars, after having defined them according to particular and necessarily arbitrary criteria, is not to determine which conflicts “make the cut” and thus imply that only those warrant diplomatic are conflict resolution attention. The point is to consider trends and patterns in order to inform peacebuilding efforts.

Since 1987 Project Ploughshares has tracked global armed conflicts for an annual Armed Conflicts Report,[4] defining[5] armed conflict on the basis of three key characteristics:[6]

· It is a political conflict,

· It involves armed combat by the armed forces of a state or the forces of one or more armed faction seeking a political end,

· at least 1,000 people have been killed directly by the fighting during the course of the conflict and there are at least 25 combat deaths annually (thus, an armed conflict is added to the annual list of current armed conflicts in the year in which the death toll reaches the threshold of 1,000, but the starting date of the armed conflict is shown as the year in which the first combat deaths included in the count of 1,000 or more occurred).[7]

An armed conflict is deemed to have ended if there has been a formal ceasefire or peace agreement and, following which, there are fewer than 25 combat deaths per year; or, in the absence of a formal cease-fire, a conflict is deemed to have ended after two years of such dormancy (in which fewer than 25 combat deaths per year have occurred).

The Human Security Report uses a definition of state-based armed conflict, as developed by Uppsala University’s Department of Peace and Conflict Research in which one of the warring parties is the government of a state and in which there are more than 25 reported battle deaths in the calendar year. This means that certain politically-rooted identity conflicts are not included (such as pastoralist wars in Africa) because government forces are not usually involved. It also means that more war beginnings and endings are recorded (which in turn results in a higher recidivism rate than does the PP methodology).[8] A “major armed conflict” in the Human Security Report definition is one in which cumulative deaths have reached 1,000. A “war” is an armed conflict in which there are 1,000 battle deaths each year.

It is critically important to understand that the use of these necessarily arbitrary numerical criteria for defining war is strictly an attempt to develop a reasonably consistent way of looking at trends. It is certainly not for the purpose of deciding which conflicts warrant urgent attention – i.e. the point is not to ignore a conflict with 999 deaths, but engage when it’s 1001. Of course, an incident in South Sudan that produces 200 deaths and drives 20,000 people from their homes is an armed conflict that should and has focused attention on efforts toward stability there. The way it is handled statistically and is categorized by the research community has nothing to do with how it should be handled by the diplomatic and peacebuilding communities.

While there are important variations in definitions of politically-based armed conflicts, there is broad agreement on the post- World War II trend – a steady climb in conflicts throughout the final decades of the Cold War and into the early post-Cold War years, followed by a fairly steady decline to the present. Current levels are now well below the peak reached toward the end of the last Century.[9]

SIPRI reviews the pattern of major armed conflict from 2000-2009 and finds a decline in the number of conflicts over the decade – there had been a 25 percent reduction by mid-decade, but after that there was a slight increase again toward the end of the decade.[10]

According to the Ploughshares definition and tabulations, in 1987, there were 37 wars taking place on the territories of 34 states – Indonesia, the Philippines, and Iran were each the scene of two separate armed conflicts. There was a spike in conflicts in the mid-1990s related to the end of the Cold War, in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, followed by a steady decline to 28 wars in 2010 on the territories of 24 countries – with the Philippines and Sudan both the scene of two separate wars, while Indian territory hosted three such conflicts.[11]

One-third of the conflicts that were underway in 1987 are still active today – testifying to the longevity of contemporary war. Of the current 28 conflicts, only six are less than a decade old. Six have been underway for more than three decades, seven more for more than two decades, and another nine for more than one decade.

One prominent feature of contemporary armed conflicts is that the fighting is intermittent and involves widely varying levels of intensity. Afghanistan and Iraq experience persistent and ongoing armed clashes and attacks. Rwanda went from political tension to unprecedented levels of violence and back down again in a very short period of time. The wars in the Philippines and Burundi are examples of ongoing but relatively low-level conflicts, with annual combat deaths often below 100 – but, of course, with political, economic, and social disruption well out of proportion to the intensity of action on their actual battlefields.

Armed conflicts are also prone to mass atrocities – mass killings are defined in a Stanley Foundation report as a minimum of 5,000 civilians killed intentionally. While about one-third mass atrocity “episodes” since 1945 have taken place outside of armed conflict, since the end of the Cold the proportion has dropped to about 15 per cent, and most of these were in the context of recent armed conflict. The report thus concludes that: “There is clearly a strong correlation between mass atrocities and armed conflict, one that has increased since the late Cold War. Armed conflict provides an enabling context for most atrocities. This lends support to the view that preventing armed conflict strengthens efforts to prevent mass atrocities.”14 Most contemporary armed conflicts do not produce mass atrocities, but the overwhelming majority of mass atrocities take place in the context of armed conflict, suggesting that prevention of mass atrocities must necessarily focus on preventing armed conflict.

The definition of “political conflict” obviously cannot be technically precise. The distinction between political and criminal violence, however, is significant and discernable, even though the trend in current intrastate armed conflicts is to increasingly obscure that distinction. It is common, for example, for armed bands or factions, as well as some government forces, to take advantage of the “fog of war” to engage in criminal activity (e.g., theft, looting, extortion). In some instances these activities are pursued in order to fund political/military campaigns, but frequently they are also pursued for the personal enrichment of the leadership and the general livelihood of the fighting forces. All of these activities, for example, were present among both state and non-state forces in the Sudanese north-south civil war, but it was still clear that the fundamental conflict in Sudan was a political one that contested the future shape and governance of the country.

At the same time, there are clear instances in which escalating violence that is clearly criminal becomes so extensive that it takes on significant political overtones and complications. The Mexican drug “war” is perhaps the most prominent case in point. The fundamental dispute is clearly not political – it is an extreme case of organized crime – but the impact on the country and on Mexico’s relations with its neighbors, especially the US, is such that it engages government at the highest level, as well as the armed forces of Mexico. While Mexico has actively militarized the response to the drug cartels, at least in part, say some analysts, for political reasons,[12] the conflict nevertheless remains fundamentally a law-enforcement challenge.

The involvement of Mexico’s armed forces is thus really an example of military aid to the civil authority. This rising violence obviously reflects a weak state capacity to control it and thus has elements of state failure,[13] but, again, the resulting violence or armed combat are generally not a response to grievance and are not guided by a political program or a set of politically motivated or defined combat objectives. Effective progress toward containing or ending the sway of drug cartels requires national and international action, but it is also the case that organized crime has long had international dimensions and has involved full-out armed combat.

These characterizations and distinctions are not entirely satisfactory, but they are an attempt at consistency. The Mexican drug “war,” therefore, has to date not been included in the Ploughshares list of current armed conflicts (even though the number of deaths in the Mexican violence is of course well over the threshold of 1,000 combat deaths). On the other hand, other conflicts that present a major law enforcement challenge are included if they involve a communal or political response to failed state structures – for example communal violence in Kenya.

SIPRI suggests there is a case for looking at political armed conflict and criminal violence together, because it encourages “a more active integration of the study of organized crime, especially transnational, and criminal violence into the broader analysis of collective organized armed violence.” But, at the same time, SIPRI concludes in its review that “the main global trends in armed conflict and other forms of organized political violence display different dynamics to those shown by global trends in criminal violence.” While there is sometimes a high degree of collusion between transnational criminal and politico-military non-state actors in some conflict-affected regions, it is much less in others. “Even where highly profitable and transnational forms of organized crime emerge in unstable, conflict-torn countries, such as piracy off the Somali coast, this may not have direct links with an armed insurgency.”[14]

So SIPRI emphasizes that both political armed conflict and high levels of criminal violence “are manifestations of the same weakness, dysfunction or absence of state structures.” Protracted armed conflict contributes to the further entrenchment of organized crime – and the latter can be addressed only when armed conflict is finally resolved and some basic elements of law and order are restored. Thus, “finding political solutions to armed conflicts should take priority in the most complex and protracted conflict settings, as it is the sine qua non for rebuilding or extending functional state capacity and thus essential for effectively tackling organized crime.”[15]

Criminal violence thus remains distinct from the armed conflict of war. Analysts at the Berghof Centre for Conflict Management are right to argue that, “however much insurgency and criminality overlap in today’s conflicts, they are not the same.” Criminal organizations employ violence in the pursuit of profit, not in pursuit of a political program. And while groups engaged in politically driven combat sometimes, even often, pursue criminal activities for economic gain, the more basic objective of such groups, and the basic point of the violence they pursue, is still in pursuit of military and political goals.[16] The point is not to argue that criminal violence is less consequential, rather it is to recognize it as a distinct phenomenon with distinct remedies.

Global terrorism is also not an armed conflict; terrorism is a tactic used in many armed conflicts or wars in very specific locations and settings. The term “war on terror” was used by Washington at one time to signal an overall strategy for countering or preventing anti-western acts of terror in many parts of the world. Such acts, whether by governments or non-state groups, are one of the tactics employed in war, and inasmuch as such terrorist acts involved deliberate attacks on civilians and are designed to intimidate or spread a sense of terror throughout the broader civilian population, they are by definition violations of the laws of war. Such violations are nevertheless a ubiquitous presence in modern warfare: suicide bombers in Afghanistan, rapes in the DRC, rocket attacks on Israeli residential communities, US airborne attacks on residential homes (on the basis of unreliable intelligence reports of the presence of suspected Al Qaeda or Taliban leaders), or Israel’s attack on a civilian ship in international waters – the list of examples is practically endless. Put another way, the laws of war are among the earliest casualties of contemporary warfare.

Types of war

A relatively simple typology of armed conflict relies on four basic categories: international or inter-state war, plus three overlapping types of intrastate war (state control, state formation, and state failure) – see Appendix.[17] Of the 81 wars that occurred during the last 24 years (28 of which are still ongoing – at the end of 2009), 51 per cent included state control objectives, 35 per cent included state formation objectives, 25 per cent reflected failed state conditions, and eleven per cent were inter-state wars. In SIPRI’s review of conflicts in the last decade it found that about 75 percent were over “governmental power” and about 25 percent over territorial issues.[18]

In Africa there are currently armed conflicts in 11 states. In six of these there is fighting for what is essentially control of the state, or part of it (Algeria, Burundi, Chad, DRC, Somalia, Sudan), but eight also include failed state conflicts – that is, more localized conflict that is focused neither on overthrowing the current government nor in reshaping the state but is rooted in the state’s lack of capacity to maintain order and mediate local disputes (Chad, DRC, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria. Somalia, Sudan, Uganda). Notably, only three of Africa’s current wars can be said to be about state formation. This is noteworthy because Africa has typically been regarded as a continent carved up into states with boundaries to suit imperial interests rather than local coherence, with the assumption that this colonial legacy is behind much of its enduring conflict. But in fact only Ethiopia (which faces a small, for the moment, rebellion from its Ogaden Somali population seeking greater autonomy) and Sudan (which is in the process of dividing into two states) are engaged in armed conflicts in which the opposition has an explicit aim of redefining the state. The conflict in Somalia also includes state formation elements – the northern part of the country has since 1991 functioned as an independent state (Somaliland) – though it is not internationally recognized as a state. Other areas, such as Puntland in the north east, also function autonomously and it is not clear how these quasi-separatist states will link to Somalia as a whole once the fighting ends.

How wars end

The Human Security Report, using Uppsala University data, notes that conflicts end by peace agreements, by ceasefire, by military victory, or by other means or circumstances – with most, 64 percent, ending by these “other” means (that is, conflicts simply go dormant). The high proportion that end in this way may be due largely to the fact that by its definition a conflict begins with 25 combat deaths – so this high “other” category to some extent simply reflects the fact that conflicts are sporadic. Many new conflicts begin as a result of the low 25 deaths threshold, but when they go dormant they are deemed to have ended. That would also explain the recidivism rate of 44 percent in the 1990s. The data used is heavily tilted toward very low intensity conflicts – in fact they make this point. Thus peace agreements account for less than a quarter of conflict terminations in the Human Security Report analysis.

The Ploughshares data show that of the 64 wars that ended during the past 24 years, just over half, 52 percent, ended through negotiated settlements, and 22 percent essentially dissolved (roughly equivalent to the “other” category above). This does not mean that what happened on the battlefield was not a significant factor in shaping the outcomes of those that ended in negotiations. Military force certainly influenced or even determined the nature of eventual settlements – for example, in many cases rebel groups would never have gained a place at a negotiating table without an armed campaign. But, in the end, in these instances there was not a decisive conclusion reached on the battlefield. Rather negotiators took over and found a political conclusion.

Then in 22 (34 percent) of the cases the fighting essentially dissolved – the conflicts became dormant but without a formal resolution. The conflicts themselves were not resolved, but the fighting gradually dissipated. One might argue these were really military defeats of insurgencies, but in wars that simply gradually dissolve the issue remains unresolved as communities involved seek other remedies. In northern Ghana, for example, fighting flared in the late 1990s over local land issues, exacerbated by Muslim/Non-Muslim differences, but the fighting died down and ended without anyone being defeated or anyone signing a peace accord. Both the Government and NGOs did subsequently pursue conflict resolution processes that may have been instrumental in preventing recurrences. In Guinea fighting by the Revolutionary United Front was supported by Liberia, but as conflicts in both Liberia and Sierra Leone subsided so did support for RUF rebels, leading to a gradual decline and the conflict went dormant. Similarly, Indonesian disputes in West Papua and Molucca gradually ebbed without a decisive conclusion either on the battlefield or at the negotiating table.

In about 15 percent of the wars that ended, the outcomes largely decided on the battlefield (e.g. overthrow of Mengistu in Ethiopia, Georgia in 1996, Kosovo, Iraq/Kuwait, Iraq and the Shia revolt).That modern armed conflicts are only rarely decided unambiguously on the battlefield is confirmed by other studies – notably by the 2010 Yearbook on Peace Processes at Spain’s School for a Culture of Peace, and by the Rand Corporation’s study, How Terrorist Groups End. The Spanish study reports annually and most recently looked at 82 armed conflicts since the 1990s, 52 of which had ended by the end of 2009. Of these, seven, or 14 per cent were settled through a military victory, 28 (54 per cent) ended through formal peace agreements, and 17 (33 per cent) were dormant but without a formal resolution.[19] The Rand study looked at 648 terrorist groups that existed between 1968 and 2006. The focus was not on specific conflicts and how they ended, but on the duration of non-state groups engaged in terrorist acts. In 43 per cent of the cases the groups transitioned to a political process, while 40 per cent were terminated through police and intelligence work. Ten per cent of the groups ended by achieving their aims, and in seven per cent of the cases the groups were terminated through military action.[20]

Appendix

Inter-State Wars

An inter-state war is a war between two or more states and for purposes of the Ploughshares reporting must also meet the 1,000 combat death criterion. Russia’s intervention in Georgia in 2008, for example, was clearly an international conflict, but it was not included as an armed conflict or war because the threshold of 1,000 combat deaths was not crossed. International wars, though rare, are not yet banished from history: in addition to the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq there was the Eritrea-Ethiopia war in the 1998-2000, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 1990s, Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the US/international invasion of Iraq and Kuwait in response in the 1990s, Israel in Lebanon in 2006.

Just as the distinction between political and criminal violence is often obscured in modern warfare, so too is the distinction between inter-state and intra-state violence. Inter-state wars, though international, are frequently fought on the territory of just one of the states in the conflict – that being the case in the 2001-2002 US-led attack on Afghanistan, and the 2003 US-led attack on Iraq. On the other hand, it is obviously also the case that virtually all civil or intra-state wars include extensive international involvement. Once again, the issue is the nature of the political conflict. For example, while the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began as international conflicts (both countries were invaded by international coalitions led by the United States), the basic conflict in each country is now essentially internal. International involvement is obviously central to both, but they are not now inter-state wars. Both wars were identified initially as international wars, but are now shown as intra-state wars. International forces in each case are formally present to aid the national government or to aid one side in a civil or intrastate war. The war in the DRC is another civil war with heavy international involvement. No civil war is fought without international involvement or without there being extensive regional implications.

Intra-state wars

There are three basic types of intra-state conflicts.

State Control Wars: These obviously centre on struggles for control of the governing apparatus of the state. State control struggles have typically been driven by ideologically defined revolutionary movements, decolonization campaigns, or simply as the means by which power is transferred from one set of elites to another. In some instances, communal and/or ethnic interests are central to the fight to transfer power, in other instances religion becomes a defining feature of the conflict, and in others the differences are more ideological.

State Formation Wars: These centre on the form or shape of the state itself and generally involve particular regions of a country fighting for a greater measure of autonomy or for outright secession – or, as in southern Sudan, for the right to decide in a fair and binding referendum whether or not to secede.

Failed State Wars typically involve spreading domestic chaos and armed violence, sometimes brought on by persistent and debilitating state control and/or state formation wars. Failed state wars are thus conflicts in which the armed conflict is neither about state control nor state formation, but about more local issues and disputes involving violence in the absence of effective government control. The primary failure is in the lack of capacity, or sometimes will, to provide minimal human security to groups of citizens. Pastoralist wars in Africa are often in this category. Pastoralist communities in East Africa, for example, usually live well beyond the reach of the state. There are virtually no state security services or institutions present and no political means of mediating disputes over access to grazing lands and water or to settle disputes related to cattle raiding. Communities come into conflict and, with access to small arms, there is an almost inevitable escalation of violence – it is political violence (and clearly distinct from criminal violence and organized crime), but it is violence over local issues and none of the parties has state control or state formation objectives. In southern Sudan, the decades long, largely north-south, civil war led to failed state conflicts between and within major ethnic communities due in large part to the complete absence of the rule of law.

Hybrid Wars

The term “hybrid warfare” is sometimes used to refer the multidimensional nature of warfare – traditional national security issues combine with new threats from new, non-state actors (including ethnic and religious communities) engaging a wide range of technologies and tactics. In that sense it also seems appropriate to refer to “hybrid wars” to indicate the presence of more than one type of armed conflict within a country. As just noted, the north-south war in Sudan was essentially a state formation conflict, but the absence of the rule of law over most of the south also led to more localized failed state conflicts. The violence in the DRC, for example, is about control of the government, but there are also localized violent clashes that are based on local ethnic or territorial disputes – hence the war in DRC is part state control and part failed state conflict. In the Philippines the resistance of the New People’s Army is a state control conflict, but the secessionist campaign of rebels in Mindanao is a state formation conflict. [That totals more than 100 percent because 12 of the conflicts (15 per cent) involved a combination of types.]

[1] For 2009 estimates see: http://www.photius.com/rankings/road_traffic_deaths_country_rankings_2009.html.

[2] Namsuk Kim and Pedro Conceicao, “The Economic Crisis, Violent Conflict, and Human Development,” UNDP Office of Development Studies, May 2009. http://www.undp.org/developmentstudies/docs/hd_conflict_2009.pdf

[3] The term “war,” as used here, is interchangeable with “armed conflict,” as defined in the text.

[4] Available on the Project Ploughshares website at: http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/ACRText/ACR-TitlePage.html. Hard copies of the annual Armed Conflicts Map are also available from Project Ploughshares.

[5] Project Ploughshares, http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/ACRText/ACR-DefinitionArmedConflict.htm.

[6] The Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University defines Armed Conflicts as follows: “A conflict, both state-based and non-state, is deemed to be active if there are at least 25 battle-related deaths per calendar year in one of the conflict’s dyads. …A one-sided actor is deemed to be active if an organized group incurs at least 25 deliberate killings of civilians in a year.” Uppsala Conflict Date Program – http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP/index.htm). Summaries of conflict trends are published in the yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (for the most recent report, in the 2010 yearbook, see Appendix 2A: Patterns of major armed conflicts, 2000–2009 – by Lotta Harbon and Peter Wallensteen; http://www.sipri.org/yearbook/2010/02/02A).

[7] This is essentially the SIPRI/Uppsala definition of “major armed conflict.” SIPRI/Uppsala define a “major war” as one in which there are 1,000 combat deaths each year. A “minor armed conflict” is one in which there are at least 25 battle-related deaths each year.

[8] Human Security Report 2009/2010, Part III: Trends in Human Insecurity. http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-Part3-TrendsInHumanInsecurity.pdf

[9] Human Security Report 2009/2010, Part III: Trends in Human Insecurity. http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-Part3-TrendsInHumanInsecurity.pdf

[10] SIPRI, p. 61.

[11] That overall decline of some 25 percent in the number of active armed conflicts since the end of the Cold War masks a dynamic quarter century of combat. While the 24-year period of Ploughshares tracking opened with 37 conflicts in 1987, 44 new conflicts were added. Of those 81 conflicts, 58 ended, but in 11 of those cases (a recidivism rate of just under 20 per cent ) the peace didn’t last and war resumed. Then, of the 11 resumed wars, six subsequently ended. All told, the planet thus hosted a total of 92 armed conflicts or wars during the last quarter century. Of those 64 have ended, leaving 28 current wars.

[12] Alexis Okeowo, “Mexico’s Drug Fiasco,” The Atlantic, February 2010. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/02/mexico-s-drug-fiasco/7942/.

[13] Bill Whitaker, “Mexico's Drug War Adopts Al Qaeda Tactics: Car Bombs, Mass Killings Part of Increasing Violence Related to Drug Cartels,” CBS News, 23 July 2010. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/23/eveningnews/main6707471.shtml.

[14] SIPRI, pp. 37, 59, 60.

[15] SIPRI, p. 60, 37.

[16] Karen Ballentine and Heiko Nitzschke, “The Political Economy of Civil War and Conflict Transformation,” Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management. 2005.

http://www.berghof-handbook.net/documents/publications/dialogue3_ballentine_nitzschke.pdf.

pp. 4-5.

[17] These types were drawn from the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Sweden’s UppsalaUniversity, although it does not now use them. http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP/data_and_publications/definitions_all.htm.

[18] SIPRI. P. 61.

[19] Vicenc Fisas, 2010 Yearbook on Peace Processes, School for a Culture of Peace, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 2010, pp. 13-14. http://escolapau.uab.cat/img/programas/procesos/10anuarii.pdf.

[20] Seth G. Jones and Martin C. Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons For Countering Al Qa’ida, Rand Corporation, 2008, Summary, pp. xiii-xiv. http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9351/index1.html.