According to popular expectations in 1989, once the decolonization process and the Cold War were over, peace should reign. The two main problems of the post-World War II era had been resolved: colonial peoples were free, and so were the subjects of communist rule. This was to be the dawn of a “new world order.”

Declarations of such an order following the American-sponsored coalition victory over Iraq in 1991 were soon met with skepticism and occasionally with sarcasms such as “the new world disorder.” There seemed to be a yawning gap between the hopes of the early post-Cold War era and the realities of continued carnage after 1991. The dilemmas of weak and failed states continued to spawn shocking statistics of lives lost and long lines of refugees fleeing to safe havens. Students of the Cold War, most of whom had been bedazzled by the intricacies of deterrence theory, deployment doctrines, and the introduction of new technologies capable of incinerating millions, discovered that wars of the third kind were ubiquitous in certain areas of the world and that the intellectual tools of Cold War era strategic studies were not particularly relevant to understanding them.

Decolonization and the collapse of communism solved only two problems – foreign and/or one-party rule. But gaining freedom is not the same as building viable states based on tolerant communities.

The war in ex-Yugoslavia brought to academic consciousness the factor of ethnicity in international relations. The most common understanding was that the Cold War had kept a lid on primordial ethnic hostilities, and that with its passing, old animosities were re-emerging.

War has been the major focus of international relations studies for the past three centuries. As the immense and growing literature on the subject attests, it is a problem of continuing interest. Claims of a “new world order” notwithstanding, wars continue to make headlines and become inscribed on the agenda of the United Nations and regional organizations. The moral, legal, human, and strategic character of these conflicts command no less attention today than previously. Yet, our understanding of contemporary wars is not well served by older analytical approaches. War today is not the same phenomenon it was in the eighteenth century, or even in the 1930s. It has different sources and takes on significantly different characteristics.

My previous study, Peace and war: armed conflict and international order, 1648–1989 (1991) looked backward to examine the sources of war in the modern states system. It also explored the various devices and contrivances diplomats and statesmen organized to reduce the incidence and destruction of violent interstate conflicts. The present study, in contrast, inquires into contemporary and future wars: their sources and essential characteristics.

Wars today are less a problem of the relations between states than a problem within states. But it is not chronic to all states. New and weak states are the primary locale of present and future wars. Thus, war as a problem that commanded the attention of experts in strategy and international relations is now becoming a problem better addressed by students of the state creation and sustenance processes.

We can understand contemporary wars best if we explore the birth of states and how they have come to be governed.

In classical and modern political thought, the state is the creation of some sort of community. In contract theories, for example, individuals band together to create a state in order to terminate life in a state of nature. In Hobbes's version, the contract is between individuals of the community and the Leviathan. In Rawls's modern version, individuals hidden behind a “veil of ignorance” congregate to create a just society and its governing apparatus.

From the perspective of this study, two interesting facts stand out in these accounts of state-creation. First, the authors do not bother to define who are members of the community. The community, as suggested in chapter 3, is assumed rather than made problematic. Second, in the act of state-creation, only members of the community are involved. Members of other communities – representatives of foreign states – have no role.

Contract metaphors for understanding the state-creation process after 1945 are inappropriate because the two assumptions, above, are incorrect. In post-1945 states, community cannot be assumed. It is the most problematic aspect of all new states, for most of them contain not a single community, but many. Nor was the act of state-creation primarily between members of a single community, or between those individuals and a Leviathan. Outside communities in the form of the metropolitan powers and the United Nations played significant and often crucial roles in laying the foundations of post-1945 states. Hobbes, Locke, and others wrote at a time when states remained relatively isolated. This condition did not prevail after World War II.

Wars of the third kind have numerous unique qualities. Their histories vary, as do their outcomes – defeat of insurgents in Malaya, victory in Algeria, stalemate in Kashmir and the Sudan – but they have a common source: the definition of a legitimate political community and the search for statehood. The mystiques of statehood and “nationality” drive today's wars, just as balances of power, successions, searches for hegemony, and rivalry over colonies drove most eighteenth-century wars. The end of the Cold War has not brought a “new world order” because that rivalry was largely irrelevant to a much more fundamental historical process, the definition and determination of legitimate community from imperial to other forms, and the transformation of a heterogeneity of political organizations into a single format, the modern state. To understand why we will continue to have wars of the third kind in future years, we need to have a better understanding, first, of the origins, the drive for, and forms of political community and statehood and, second, of the difficulties facing many new states.

The process of state-formation in Europe has become an area of increased research by historical sociologists and political scientists during the past several decades. We now have a reasonably rich literature that generalizes across many eras and locales and develops a variety of perspectives (cf. Tilly 1990; Hall 1986; Rasler and Thompson 1989; Ruggie 1993).

State-creation in the former colonial areas, and to a different degree in some of the former Soviet republics since 1991, has taken patterns and trajectories significantly different from those of Europe since the fifteenth century. In the latter, there was a lengthy historical project to give political meaning to the geographical expressions called France, Germany, Sweden, and the like. The consequence of wars, centralization, taxes, and the provision of services was to create a form of political organization called the state.

The original purposes of colonialism, in contrast, never included state-making. European overseas conquests after the fifteenth century had nothing in common with the state-consolidation projects of Louis XIV, Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, or Bismarck. Imperialism was driven by a variety of purposes: trade, slavery, exploitation of resources, “civilizing” the barbarians, religious conversion to Christianity, ending the Arab slave trade (late nineteenth century), securing strategic territories, and emulation: if the British were expanding in Africa, the Germans had to do the same in order to maintain their status as a great power. Colonialism was as much a product of European external rivalries as of domestic imperatives. Conspicuously absent from this non-exhaustive list of the purposes of colonialism is any state-making project. Whether the colonialism of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, or its late nineteenth-century counterpart, the colonial leaders, encompassing the military, government officials, colonial societies, political parties, and the churches, never assumed that some day the subjugated peoples should or could create a state form of political organization.

In the conventional international relations literature, states are primarily characterized in terms of power, that is, in their capacity to achieve and defend their purposes either through persuasion or coercion and, if necessary, to defeat their adversaries in war. Histories of international politics as well as their theoretical renderings in neorealism thus concentrate on the activities of the “powers” which are usually defined as the great powers of a particular era. There is a strong correlation between the status of a great power and its immediately available military resources. The concept of a “power” thus traditionally has been linked closely to the phenomenon of war.

But war in the second half of the twentieth century has not been predominantly a great power activity. As the tables in chapter 2 demonstrate, most war since 1945 has occurred in the Middle East, Africa, Central America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, and more recently in the Balkans and the Central Asian former Soviet republics. If war is the topic of contemporary analysis, then academic analysts' long love affair with the great powers will have to change. Since 1945, the great powers have primarily responded to the problem of war in and between weak states. They have not themselves been the sources of war, as they had been between the seventeenth century and 1945. To study war, then, the new focus will have to be on states other than the “powers.” Theories of international relations will have to veer away from Rousseau's insights and recognize that anarchy within states rather than between states is the fundamental condition that explains the prevalence of war since 1945.

In 1740, using a trumped-up claim to territorial title, Frederick the Great invaded Austrian Empress Maria Theresa's domains in Silesia. The war lasted two years, which was typical of the times. The Seven Years War (1756–63) earned that title because combat lasted substantially longer than the norm of the eighteenth century. In the first half of the twentieth century, most wars were fought by the organized armed forces of two or more states, and decisive victories were usually achieved within two years of the inauguration of hostilities. The Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), the Italian campaign in Libya in 1911, the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the Soviet–Polish War of 1920–2, and the Soviet war against Finland, 1939–40, among others, lasted less than two years, some only several months. Wars during the eighteenth century on average lasted only one year (Levy 1983; Tilly 1990: 72).

Wars were not only relatively brief. Reflecting the Clausewitzian concept of war, they had a regular sequence from beginning to end. There was an initial crisis where diplomatic negotiations could not reconcile the incompatible foreign policy or defense requirements of the states concerned. An ultimatum or an incident – often staged by the aggressor – then led to a formal declaration of war. We know the exact dates that eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century wars commenced. Following the declarations of war, armed combat led either to stalemate or, more often, to a decisive military defeat in a single battle or a short series of battles. The defeated party then agreed to a formal armistice and sued for peace.

What to do? If the diagnosis of future wars of the third kind is essentially correct, then the solution to the problem lies predominantly within states themselves. Weak states must become stronger, and those on the trajectory of failure must turn themselves around. The only other possibility is to develop an alternative to the state, or at least to the state as it has been so far conceived and institutionalized in practice. This would mean, in effect, to reverse the long historical process of political homogenization. But this is a hypothetical subject that needs separate treatment. The more immediate solution is to strengthen existing states.

This is eminently simple in theory and extremely difficult in practice because of the state-strength dilemma. Students of international relations are not, in any case, particularly well equipped to provide advice. Development analysts with vision and sensitivity, as well as comparative politics analysts have no doubt more to offer. Most important is the knowledge gained by those who have succeeded in transforming colonial entities into states on the trajectory of strength.

The fundamental problem is the state-strength dilemma: many of the steps governments take to strengthen the state and to enhance vertical and horizontal legitimacy bring about unintended consequences that actually undermine the coherence of the state. The dilemmas are numerous; some examples are worth underlining.

A standard post-1989 policy solution has been “democratization.” Through the mechanism of regular elections and the institutionalization of political parties, many have argued, both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of legitimacy will be strengthened.

Regions comprised primarily of weak states are zones of wars of the third kind. The etiology of these wars resides primarily within states that lack vertical and horizontal legitimacy. Many of these domestic wars cannot be contained within their frontiers, however. They become internationalized in various ways, sometimes leading to war between two or more states. Weak states are found predominantly in that vast area often inappropriately called the Third World, in the Balkans, and in some of the former Soviet republics. Does South America belong in any of these categories? Many people have so designated it. But the figures in table 2.1 show that South America has a unique profile of war. Like the other areas, it has seen a relatively high incidence of internal wars; but there have been no wars of secession. And, completely at odds with the other areas, there has been no war between South American states since 1941. South America is an intriguing anomaly. Is the war pattern of this region related to the weak state phenomenon? How can we explain the anomaly?

South America constitutes a distinct international system. It is linked to other systems, particularly to Central America and North America, but it contains its own unique properties and dynamics. G. Pope Atkins (1990: 1) defines it as an “international political subsystem” A prominent scholar of South American history (Burr 1965: 3, 28, 57) has chronicled its early years as a “continental system.” Barry Buzan (1991: 207, 210) lists it among his “regional security complexes.” Many other analysts concur with that categorization.

When thinking about war, we usually conjure up the image of two countries arraying their military forces against each other, followed by combat between distinctively designated, organized, and marked armed forces. The purpose of fighting is to destroy the adversary's capacity to resist and then to impose both military and political terms on the defeated party. This was the pattern in the 1991 Gulf War, World War II, and World War I, to mention several of the most famous wars of this century. Diplomatic practitioners, military leaders, and academic experts on international politics typically regard war as a contest between states. This characterization of war is also found in the Charter of the United Nations, in hundreds of bilateral and multilateral treaties between states, in government defense ministries, and in standard textbooks on international politics and security studies.

War defined as a contest of arms between sovereign states derives from the post-1648 European experience, as well as from the Cold War. It is historically and culturally based. In other historical and geographical contexts, wars have been better characterized as contests of honor (duels), marauding, piracy, searches for glory, and pillaging forays. Armies, navies, gangs, and hordes battled, sometimes in quick but massive battles, at other times in decades-long campaigns. They represented clans, tribes, feudal barons, city states, empires, and religious orders such as the Templars and Hospitallers. For many, such as Genghis Khan's hordes, war was at once a style of life, an economic system, and an instrument of the Khan's temper to punish those who offended him.

The Peace of Westphalia failed to establish a comprehensive order, but it did include some elements of a hypothetical international order. There was a primitive system of governance (Swedish and French guarantees), the assimilation of the Holy Roman Empire, and in particular, some important territorial allocations that were to provide benchmarks of legitimacy.

Did Westphalia provide important sources of stability for international politics in succeeding decades? The reality probably lies somewhere between Giraud's claim that post-Westphalia Europe constituted “a community of destinies and of interests,” a “system, born of facts but consecrated by law,” (1847:12–13), and Zeller's comment (1955:111, 16) that Westphalia did not reveal “the shadow of a constructive idea,” and that the statesmen and diplomats of the later seventeenth century had no conception of a common good, or of a concern for the future of Europe. Westphalia sanctified anarchy, to be sure, but it also drew a map of Europe that defined the bounds of legitimacy, one that was commonly regarded as drawn for eternity (Rabb 1975:78).