Contemporary warfare: an analysis of the conflict in Syria under Kaldor's 'new wars' paradigm

If studied under the Clausewitz’s school of thought, war is a rational act carried out by state actors, through their regular armies, in order to achieve their main goal, namely the outright destruction of the enemy forces. From a more general perspective, a combination of both ideology and pragmatism prompted states to wage war against each other: the aim was, indeed, to pursue a geopolitical interest by exerting violence against another country advocating, very often, hostile theories and policies. Most of pre-1945 conflicts fall into the Clausewitzian paradigm. Nevertheless, from the end of World War II onwards, conflicts have been undergoing a sweeping change. The methods they are fought with, the actors involved in and their goals, the forms of finance and the social and economic contexts – together with other characteristics having to do with the relationship between death toll and civilians, with the technologies employed etc. –, all of these characteristics strikingly differ from those analysed under the Clausewitzian model so much so that they enable us to develop the concept of ‘new wars’. This concept has been used first by Mary Kaldor, in her book “New and old wars: Organised Violence in a global era”, even if other authors had previously introduced some post-Clausewitzian tenets. Some recurring aspects characterise the new wars: the erosion of the monopoly of the legitimate force; the presence of a thriving underground economy supplanting the formal one; the strategic deliberate targeting of civilians aimed at establishing ethnic-homogeneous territories also through outrageous actions such as ethnic-cleansing operations. Moreover, the actors on the ground are all but states, or rather, states contributes only to a certain extent to the conflict. Indeed, new wars swarm with non-state armed groups that benefit from the perpetuation of the state of war, as they share self-perpetuating economic and political interest stemming from the collapse of the centralised institutions. That being the case, the war in Syria, begun in 2011, can be involved within Kaldor’s paradigm. The privatisation of violence, the sectarian agenda pursued by the warring factions, the progressive collapse of the Syrian institutions and the establishment of a thriving war economy are all new wars’ feature that can be found in the Syrian war. Thus, how can we deal with contemporary warfare? Kaldor propounds a ‘cosmopolitan approach’ that has to put human rights at the forefront through the concrete application of International Humanitarian Law, in order to avoid humanitarian catastrophes. Therefore, throughout the thesis it will be also assessed whether or not Kaldor’s approach could be applied as a possible solution to end, or at least ease, the war in Syria.