Tour de Force: From State-Based to Non-State Internal Fighting

Abstract

For about two decades, peace and conflict research has been discussing the emergence of “New Wars”. Despite the global theses that can be deduced from the concept of New Wars, the discussion remained a theoretical debate merely supported by case-study evidence or evidence from comparative case-study designs. Systematic tests of deduced hypotheses have not been conducted. The few existing quantitative analyses on this matter remain limited to single dimensions of New Warfare and/or resort to conflict data that do not include or only incompletely cover New Wars (i.e. they do not capture non-state fighting, wars in failed states or conflicts in countries that lack international recognition). In order to close this gap, this study relies on new conflict data (covering the missing category of non-state/sub-state armed conflict) to explore whether the incidence and the significance of non-conventional (non-state) internal fighting are indeed increasing, to investigate whether non-conventional (non-state) fighting tends to occur in more fragile states where certain conflict resources are produced more often, whether it lasts significantly longer than conventional (state-based) internal fighting and whether it is carried out by a significantly larger number of violent actors whose nature (e.g. their level of organization) also differs as well as the kind of violence they apply. The empirical analysis captures all dimensions of New Warfare, equally covers intense warfare and low intensity armed conflicts and - most importantly - contrasts non-conventional with conventional intra-state (instead of inter-state) wars and conflicts. If appropriate and if data are available, the empirical analysis not only covers the conflict and the war level, but also the actor level, the conflict-episode level and the country level to study the robustness of effects. In addition, this study aims to refine the concept of New Wars by identifying mechanisms that link a privatization of violent actors, the availability of (certain) conflict resources and worsening levels of state weakness with changes in the nature, intensity and duration of fighting. This is especially demanding because so far the theoretical discussion of New Wars lacks a clear understanding of the meaning of the concept, its dimensions and how these dimensions relate to each other. Overall, I find that non-state internal fighting indeed differs from state-based internal fighting - sometimes as proposed by the concept of New Wars. At times, however, the differences in the context and the nature of these sub-types of internal armed conflict are less pronounced or even contrary to the expectations of the concept.