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problems is so underfinanced, then a heavier burden will fall on host governments and civil societies of the places that displaced people see as targets of migration. In political administrative terms this means that less institutional control by UNHCR and other international and regional organizations will produce more friction, illegal acts and violence.
The problem with humanitarian support for migrant-refugees is that the institutions that deal with them are tackling the consequences of a worldwide phenomenon without trying to address the causes of it. The causes are complex but well known. War and warlike situation endanger human lives by directing violence against civilians. In the last decades, 85% to 90% of the victims of wars are civilians (Wiist et al., 2013; Roberts 2010). If to this we add the economic disarticulation produced by war situation and all it involves, it is clear that masses of civilians will migrate from war zones looking for refuge in safer areas and will try to migrate towards places that offer an antinomy in life terms, as mentioned before.
Wars do not seem to be recessing. They have changed shape from what Mary Kaldor calls “new wars” that are different from old wars in the following ways (Kaldor, 2013):
• Actors: Old wars were fought by the regular armed forces of states. New wars are fought by varying combinations of networks of state and non-state actors – regular armed forces, private security contractors, mercenaries, jihadists, warlords, paramilitaries, and so forth. The larger the number of actors and the less institutionalized they are, the more difficult wars are to deal with.
• Goals: Old wars were fought for geo-political interests or for ideology (democracy or socialism). New wars are fought in the name of identity (ethnic, religious or tribal). Identity politics has a different logic from geo-politics or ideology. The aim is to gain access to the state for particular groups (that may be both local and transnational) rather than to carry out particular policies or programs in the broader public interest. The rise of identity politics is associated with new communication technologies, with migration both from country to town and across the world, and the erosion of more inclusive (often state-based) political ideologies such as socialism or post-colonial nationalism. Perhaps identity politics is constructed through war. Thus political mobilization around identity is the aim of war rather than an instrument of war, as was the case in ‘old wars’.
• Methods: In old wars, battle was the decisive encounter. The method of waging war consisted of capturing territory through military means. In new wars, battles are rare and territory is captured through political means, through control of the population. A typical technique is population displacement – the forcible removal of those with a different identity or different opinions (generating large migration of refugees). Violence is largely directed against civilians as a way of controlling territory rather than against enemy forces.
• Forms of Finance: Old wars were largely financed by states (taxation or by outside patrons). In weak states, tax revenue is falling and new forms of predatory private finance include looting, pillaging the ‘taxation’ of humanitarian aid, Diaspora support, kidnapping, smuggling oil, diamonds, drugs, people, and so forth. It is sometimes argued that new wars are motivated by economic gain, but it is difficult to distinguish between those who use the cover of political violence for economic reasons and those who engage in predatory economic activities to finance their political cause. Whereas old war economies were typically centralizing, autarchic and mobilized the population, new wars are part of an open, globalized and decentralized economy in which participation is low and revenue depends on continued violence.
These are the features of the new type of wars:
• The virtual disappearance of wars between states;
• The decline of all high intensity wars, involving more than a thousand battle deaths;
• The decline in the deadliness of war measured in terms of battle deaths;
• The increase in the duration and/or recurrence of wars; and
• The risk factor of proximity to other wars.
Chaotic ground war, or more technically, ‘militarized occupation’, continues to prevail in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and are globally-impacting. In Bosnia and Kosovo they are still rebuilding their devastated social infrastructure with limited support. In North Korea and the Taiwan Strait new tensions are developing. In sub-Saharan Africa conflict is endemic. In short, the application of massive intervention forces has not brought about a positive peace anywhere, and long-simmering conflicts are intensifying, such as that in the Kashmir region, wheretwo states have now developed weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, it also seems likely that new zones of military engagement will continue to emerge in the coming years. In the meantime, the world faces a global war called the War on Terror that has come to frame most existing conflicts whether they are local, regional or global. In Simon Cooper’s words, ‘a combination of political, economic and technological factors are leading towards a state where civilian populations are permanently militarized, where the gap between war and peace collapses, and where peace as a mode of being distinct in its own right seems impossible to constitute’ (James & Friedman, 2009, p. 31).
From out of the discussion, we can garner some simple conclusions: firstly, not all wars are globalizing, but modern wars tend to do so. Secondly, the new transnational wars of the contemporary period tend to occur in zones where there was previously a colonial order of authority as part of an earlier period of imperial globalization. Thirdly, while regional and localized wars in the past usually had limited impact beyond their immediate region – that is, except when great powers became involved – now they have increasingly come to have profound globalizing consequences. Fourthly, the process of globalization in relation to war is contradictory – one of a relative balance of forces, between centralizing and fragmenting tendencies caught in a web of global relations. And finally, with the War on Terror we face a new kind of global war based on globalized networked relations and a new kind of engagement that, at one level, transcends territorial and temporal containment (Modelski & Morgan, 2006).
To all the above we must add the intractability of religious-ethnic conflicts that mix with political and economic interests – as are the cases of the Kurd minority in Turkey, Iraq and Syria, Alawi minority in Syria and Christian Minorities in Middle East –that make the attempt to resolve the “roots” of the conflictual situations into an almost impossible task.
Therefore we should seek for possible solutions in the political, economic and military aspects that lie behind the ongoing conflicts. As a general observation, we could claim that higher levels of institutionalization may help to prevent conflicts and refugee migration. This means better functioning states, as well as regional and international organizations in the conflictive areas. One of the phenomena that is obvious to the observer of the last decades’ conflicts is that lower levels of governability or higher levels of state de-structuration or the disappearance of states - as has been the case in Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and certain African countries – produce political chaos, high levels of violence, economic impoverishment and massive waves of migrant-refugees. The reaction of all the interested parties – by this I mean the internal actors in each conflict and the regional and international communities - should be to strengthen existing states and to closely assist transitions from authoritarian rule to more democratic situations, taking special care of fostering viable models of national economies in countries affected by these kind of processes.
The other side to address according to the above models is what makes possible modern massive violence, globalized wars and terrorism, or what the means to be controlled are. Illegal capital movements that can finance wars are a classic case of lack of control. Drug production has financed internal violence and wars - and probably still do – in Lebanon, Colombia, Afghanistan, Myanmar and other places. Weapons trade - legal and illegal – feed violence and wars everywhere. All these suggest that in order to have less military clashes in the periphery, there is a serious need to strengthen intelligence and police work on the behalf of the central and richer countries in order to thereby avoid the phenomena that make war in the periphery possible.
The other feature about migration-refugee problems is that most of the people that flee a combination of war, violence and economic crisis, for a variety of reasons migrate to neighboring