Mary Kaldor, "Beyond Militarism, Arms Races, and Arms Control"

Following the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, people have come to understand the dangers posed by unofficial warfare--that is, conflicts not waged by governments but by paramilitary organizations that are often international and clandestine. While the dangers have become clear, the most effective ways to respond to this kind of warfare are far less obvious. Few writers in our time have addressed the problem more thoughtfully than Mary Kaldor. In the aftermath of September 11, Kaldor wrote in The Nation about just how different this new kind of warfare is: "What we have learned about this kind of war is that the only possible exit route is political. There has to be a strategy of winning hearts and minds to counter the strategy of fear and hate. There has to be an alternative politics based on tolerance and inclusiveness, which is capable of defeating the politics of intolerance and exclusion and capable of preserving the space for democratic politics. In the case of the current new war, what is needed is an appeal for global--not American--justice and legitimacy, aimed at establishing the rule of law in place of war and at fostering understanding between communities in place of terror."

Currently the director of the Program on Global Civil Society at the London School of Economics, Kaldor has spent her professional life studying globalization and the transformation of modern warfare. In the 1980s, she helped to cofound European Nuclear Disarmament (END), a nongovernmental organization dedicated to convincing Western European states to refuse to stockpile a nuclear arsenal. Subsequently, Kaldor cochaired the Helsinki Citizen's Assembly, an international consortium of nongovernmental organizations promoting global peace and human rights; she was also a member of the Independent International Commission to Investigate the Kosovo Crisis. The author of numerous books on global and European politics, her most recent work, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (1999), documents the shift from an earlier form of warfare between armed combatants, where 80% of the casualties were soldiers, to the current form of organized violence, where 80% of the casualties are civilians. In the public talk reproduced here, Kaldor draws on this research to describe the challenges that unofficial warfare poses in the twenty-first century and to argue for the necessity of developing an international, humanitarian response to contain such conflicts.

Kaldor, Mary. "Beyond Militarism, Arms Races, and Arms Control." Talk delivered at the Nobel Peace Prize Symposium, December, 2001.

Biographical information from the London School of Economics and Political Science web site.
Quotation from "Wanted: Global Politics," The Nation, November 5, 2001.

Links to Explore:

"Beyond Militarism, Arms Races and Arms Control": a hypertext version of Kaldor's essay, with hyperlinks that provide additional information about the events and ideas she discusses, as well as links to the other talks given at this symposium on "new war."

"Good Muslim, Bad Muslim – An African Perspective": an essay by Mahmood Mamdani that seeks to complicate media representations of Islam and argues for seeing recent developments not as a "clash of civilizations" but as a "clash within civilizations."

The International Criminal Court:home page for the United Nations' International Criminal Court, which was put into effect on July 1, 2002. Includes links to an overview page, which explains the history preceding the formation of this court, and a list of the nations who have ratified the Rome statute that brought the court into being.

USA for the International Criminal Court: home page for USAforICC.org, an organization committed to getting the United States to resign the treaty that formed the International Criminal Court. This organization is funded by the Campaign for United Nations Reform.

Questions for Learning:

• "Beyond Militarism, Arms Races and Arms Control" begins by establishing a difference between "new war" and "Clausewitzean or modern war." The hyperlinked version of Kaldor's includes a link to Clausewitz's On War, where he made his now famous declaration that, "WAR IS ONLY A CONTINUATION OF STATE POLICY BY OTHER MEANS." After you've had a chance to read through the Clausewitz' text, what would you say his theory of war is? Would Clausewitz that any other social organization besides a state can wage war?
  
  
• What practical consequences would follow from taking the "African perspective" that Mahmood Mamdani recommends in "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim"? How do you think American foreign policy would have to change if "Official America" were to adopt Professor Mamdani's view that this nation has been found on "on two monumental crimes: the genocide of the Native American and the enslavement of the African American"?
  
  
• Over fifty years in the making, the newly formed International Criminal Court emerges out of the United Nations commitment to "securing universal respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals throughout the world." In particular, the establishment of the ICC is seem as a decisive step in "the fight against impunity and the struggle for peace and justice and human rights in conflict situations in today's world." After you read the overview, can you explain why it has taken fifty years for this court to be established? How will this court be able to respond to the developments of "new war"?
  
  
• After you have visited the USA for the International Criminal Court web site, can you summarize the arguments against signing this treaty? Is the United States' historically unprecedented move of "unsigning" this treaty itself evidence of how the definition of politics and the process of justice have been altered by the emergence of the "new war"?
  

Questions for Connecting:

• Kaldor argues that, for "the networks engaged in the new wars, what holds them together is a generally an extreme political ideology based on the exclusive claim to state power
  on the basis of identity - ethnic chauvinism or religious communalism." What is the relationship between the social transformation that creates and extends these networks and the social transformation Drucker describes? Is the rise of the knowledge worker related, in any way, to the rise of the new networks for waging war?

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