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Jump to Chapter 4 Sections:
>> Conflicts since the Cold War >> Understanding conflict >> Windows of vulnerability and opportunity >> Foreign assistance, conflict management and conflict mitigation >> Guiding principles for encouraging stability >> Notes >> Background paper >> References
During the 1990s there were 111 armed conflicts in 74 locations. Half of these were major conflicts,
defined as involving more than 1,000 battlerelated military deaths . All but three of the major
conflicts were internal driven by clashes over control of a state’s government or territory.
In recent decades internal conflicts have killed hundreds of thousands of people in direct fighting.
Many more have been internally displaced or forced into refugee status. Moreover, these conflicts fuel religious and ethnic intolerance, creating hatred and fear that can take generations to
overcome.
Civil conflicts have also blunted and reversed economic growth, destroyed investments, and slashed living standards. Violence takes a heavy economic toll not only on the countries that experience it but also on their neighbors. These wars also place a staggering financial burden on the international community. In the 1990s donors pledged more than $60 billion to support recovery in war-torn countries with World Bank lending for this purpose increasing by almost 10 times. International spending on peacekeeping jumped from $464 million in 1990 to a high of $3.6 billion in 1995. In 2001 such spending was estimated at $2.5 billion.
Although most recent conflicts are internal, their causes and consequences are increasingly global.
Recent events in Central Asia, Central Africa, and the Balkans show that internal conflicts can spill across borders, sparking regional wars. Among the most intractable and worrisome are conflicts
that create failed states anarchic, lawless countries such as Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Somalia, and Sudan. The National Security Strategy has identified failing or failed states as a serious threat to U.S. security interests.
Such settings have enabled transnational criminal organizations, terrorist networks, and local warlords to amass enormous power and wealth, blurring the distinctions between criminal and political violence. Indeed, many of these groups’ activities-smuggling drugs, trafficking in humans,
defending embattled ethnic and religious brethren, trading arms require conflict to exist and to be profitable. Solving mass violence requires understanding that for these groups and individuals, violence is not a problem but a solution: a political and financial step up.
No single definition captures the many forms that deadly conflict has taken in recent decades. It can be explosive and short-in Rwanda genocide occurred in just a few months. Or it can drag on
for years, as in Afghanistan, Angola, and Sudan. It can follow a traditional path, pitting military
factions against each other as in Mozambique and Tajikistan. Or it can spill up from local or regional violence where institutions are weak and eroding, as it did in Somalia and threatens to do
in Indonesia and Nigeria. Violence can take an explicit ethnic or religious form, as in Burundi
and the Balkans. It can have a strong ideological component, as with the Maoist insurgency in
Nepal. It can be nationalist or secessionist, as in Chechnya (Russia) and Aceh (Indonesia). Or it
can be criminal violence on a new and devastating scale, as in Colombia and Sierra Leone.
Understanding conflict
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