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War and peace: What's the

difference?
a
David Keen
a
Lecturer in Development Studies , The
London School of Economics and Political
Science
Published online: 08 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: David Keen (2000) War and peace: What's the difference?,
International Peacekeeping, 7:4, 1-22, DOI: 10.1080/13533310008413860

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 War and Peace: What's the Difference?

DAVID KEEN

At one level, the question posed in the title of this contribution can be
quickly dispensed with: war is violent and peace is, well, peaceful; in other
words, peace is the antithesis of war. This is certainly the common-sense
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view, and it is one usually reinforced by the media. Journalists, after all, are
interested in change: theirs is a world of news (what is new), of events,
discontinuities and drama. What could be more dramatic than the change
from one thing into its opposite? Historians, by contrast, are often
interested in continuities, and it is this approach that informs this essay.
What do war and peace have in common? Answering this question is
particularly important if we hope to understand transitions: the transition
from peace to war and the transition from war to peace. Perhaps we can
also take a cue here from the natural sciences: how can one thing change
into another - a bulb into a plant, a liquid into a gas - unless it has already
begun to resemble it?
A conventional model of war portrays it as a conflict between two sides
with opposing aims. These aims are typically presented as 'political': in the
case of international wars, the aim is seen as furthering the political interests
of a state; in the case of civil wars, the aim is seen as changing the policies
and the nature of the state. It follows, for the conventional model of conflict,
that the aim in a war is to win (and thereby gain a favourable political
settlement). This is war as a continuation of politics by other means, as
Clausewitz famously noted. How to make a peace in the face of such a war?
The obvious way is to secure a compromise between the opposing political
aims of the two sides. Another is simply for one or other side to secure an
outright victory.'
The idea of a war between 'sides' (usually two, often 'ethnic') is easy to
grasp; it helps to make complex events digestible and (apparently)
comprehensible. James Fallows has argued that the US media covers
American politics as if it were covering sport. Favoured questions include:
Who is going to win? Who is ahead in the polls? And what are the tactics?
Other questions - like 'What are the policy issues?' - are hard to answer and
easy to neglect.2 Much contemporary coverage of violent conflict also
follows this 'sporting' model. Who is it between? Who is going to win?
What are the tactics? And who (if we are delving really deeply into the
 2 MANAGING ARMED CONFLICTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

matter) are the goodies and baddies? Again, we may be left with little idea
of the complex issues behind the conflict. For those who do wish to know
what is at stake in a conflict, the parade of warring initials is likely to leave
them frustrated. For those who might wish to ask about the (diverse) reasons
why (diverse groups of) people are orchestrating, funding and carrying out
acts of violence, the perfunctory reference to a conflict's 'underlying
causes' may be similarly unenlightening.
In practice, many wars deviate from the conventional model of a battle
between two sides, and recent civil conflicts usually deviate considerably
from this model. In order to think sensibly about peace, we need to think
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clearly about what war actually is. Rather than simply being concerned with
'winning', many of those helping to shape violence during a conflict have
other aims, aims which often foster a limited but very enduring violence.
Among the most important aims in contemporary conflicts are: limiting
exposure to violence, accumulating resources and suppressing political
opposition. If we assume we know what 'war' is, we are likely to miss the
importance of these aims. We are also likely to miss important continuities
with peacetime. Part of the function of war may be that it offers a more
promising environment for the pursuit of aims that are also prominent in
peacetime. In these circumstances, keeping a war going may assist in the
achievement of these aims, and prolonging a war may be a higher priority
than winning it. While conflict is an undeniable reality in many countries,
the fault-lines of that conflict should not be taken at face value. What are the
systems of collusion obscured by 'war'? And what are the hidden conflicts
(for example, class conflict or conflict between armed and unarmed groups,
conflict between the military and civil society) that are obscured when
officials and journalists portray civil war as a more or less unproblematic
contest between two or more 'sides'?

Limiting Violence
Opposing factions or armies have often been concerned with limiting
violence. This does not necessarily result in violence that is small-scale; on
the contrary, the violence may be massive. What is stressed here is that key
actors in conflict have repeatedly given priority to minimizing their own
exposure to violence. Ideally, violence will not happen to you, to your
political constituency, or even to your armed forces. There are a variety of
means for achieving this goal of limiting violence. One key step is to avoid
directly confronting an armed enemy. Where such a confrontation is
necessary, children (who can often be easily manipulated) have sometimes
been used as 'front-line' troops (Sierra Leone and Liberia). In many
conflicts (for example, Sudan, former Yugoslavia and Burma/Myanmar)
 WAR AND PEACE: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? 3

there has been an attempt to exploit - and foment - divisions within civil
society, for example by encouraging the formation of ethnic militias (see
Zahar in this volume). This method can help avoid the necessity of raising
a large, conscripted army - something that is likely to be expensive and
politically unpopular both at home and abroad.
Within many recent civil conflicts, cooperation between armed groups
has often been significant. Pitched battles have been the exception rather
than the rule. And civilians have borne the brunt of the violence. In Angola,
there were reports of trading and fraternizing between UNITA and
government forces after the war resumed in 1992. In Liberia, faction leaders
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were reported drinking together in Monrovia while violence raged

upcountry. Pitched battles between armed groups were relatively rare, with
civilians consistently targeted for violence.3 During the ongoing conflict in
Algeria, elements of the national army have often appeared to be
cooperating with Islamic extremists - perhaps because the 'Islamic threat'
has tended to legitimize military control and undemocratic government.4
Although the superpowers of the Cold War era were sometimes drawn
into direct participation in conflicts (the US in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan), they most often conducted their ideological struggle by
means of proxies (for example, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Angola, and
Ethiopia). Noticeably absent were direct (and almost certainly suicidal)
attacks on one another. This was in many ways a system for limiting conflict
and for ensuring that it happened to other people. It is notable that, for all
the obscenity (and profitability) of large nuclear arsenals, only two nuclear
weapons have so far been detonated in combat, and these in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in 1945, against a nation lacking the ability to strike back. In
recent years, the desire of the US to avoid casualties to its own troops has
powerfully shaped American foreign policy, with the Somalia debacle in
1993 (see Adebajo and Landsberg, and Berdal, in this volume)
compounding persistent fears of 'another Vietnam'. This aversion to risk
has helped to shape patterns of intervention (high-altitude bombing over
Kosovo) and non-intervention (the reluctance to recognize, or counter,
genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda). In these circumstances, much of
contemporary peacekeeping has been delegated to other people, whether
private military companies5 (see Brooks in this volume) or regional
peacekeeping organizations such as ECOMOG in West Africa.6

Accumulating Resources
Making money is an important - and increasingly prominent - aim in
warfare.7 With capitalism having 'won' the Cold War, socialist movements
lost much of their remaining allure, and at the same time the pursuit of
 4 MANAGING ARMED CONFLICTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

economic self-interest has arguably been elevated to a position of

ideological hegemony - a fertile climate for the world's most genuinely
aggressive entrepreneurs. Falling support for governments and rebels from
the superpowers during the Cold War often fed into an increasing emphasis
on funding fighting through internal predation.8
Contemporary conflicts have frequently taken on a paradoxical quality.
A concern with economic accumulation has often prompted actions that are
counter-productive from a purely military point of view. One such is selling
arms to the other side.9 Another is economically-motivated raiding that
predictably radicalizes its victims and encourages support for a rebel group.
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In Sudan, for example, northern Sudanese militia raiding on a variety of

groups preceded and helped to create their affiliation with the rebel Sudan
People's Liberation Army.10
The case of conflict in Sierra Leone brings out the importance of
accumulating resources (as well as the desire to limit conflict). Peacetime
corruption in the diamond economy has mutated into (collaborative)
conflict. In a pattern that some Sierra Leoneans dubbed 'sell-game',
government soldiers in the early and mid-1990s were observed attacking
civilians, engaging in illegal diamond mining, dressing up as rebels, selling
arms to rebels, and coordinating movements with rebels so as to minimize
clashes and maximize the exploitation of civilians."
Significantly, the pattern of 'sell-game' during the civil war in Sierra
Leone has been a variation on a peacetime phenomenon: prior to the
outbreak of war in 1991, state officials repeatedly participated in the
smuggling they were supposed to be suppressing. Anti-corruption drives
proved again and again to be fertile ground for extending corruption.
Meanwhile, the corruption of government officials helped to ensure, first, a
lack of genuine development in Sierra Leone and, second, a lack of treasury
revenue to suppress either smuggling or the growing discontent engendered
by precisely this lack of development.
During periods of relative clam, conflict has tended to mutate back
into more institutionalized forms of corruption. Sierra Leonean rebels and
government soldiers have tended to share an interest in perpetuating
insecurity and in exploiting civilians. During peace negotiations at the
time of the handover of power to a democratic government in 1996,
witnesses reported something distasteful in the warmth with which
supposedly opposing commanders embraced each other during peace
negotiations.12 Government soldiers and rebels - who staged a joint coup
in May 1997 - shared important interests not just in preserving systems of
economic exploitation that had flourished under the cover of war but also
in preventing recriminations or prosecutions under a democratic
government.
 WAR AND PEACE: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? 5

Also in the early and mid-1990s, another kind of 'sell-game' was going
on in Cambodia. After the Paris peace agreement of 1991, exporting timber
and gems through Thailand helped the Khmer Rouge to resist UN pressures
for disarmament. At the same time, Cambodian government officials and
especially the armed forces had become heavily involved in the logging
business, helping to denude Cambodia's forests. In 1994, the Cambodian
Defence Ministry was awarded the sole right to licence timber exports and
to receive all the revenue from those exports. This gave the armed forces,
particularly senior officers, a powerful interest in not eliminating the Khmer
Rouge altogether, and the army in fact winked at timber concessions in
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areas they knew would provide funding for the Khmer Rouge. Between
1994 and 1997, elements of the army came to arrangements with the Khmer
Rouge over the control of economic resources in respective areas of
influence, and cooperated in exporting, and in getting the best prices for,
some commodities. Some soldiers were even reported to be selling
armaments to the Khmer Rouge.'3
While the focus of this contribution is on civil conflicts, it is worth
noting that at the international level, the military-industrial complexes
dating from the Cold War era can be argued to have a vested interest in the
continuation of conflicts of some kind. Certainly, the waning of the Cold
War should draw attention to the economic as opposed to political or
ideological reasons for the still-large spending on armaments. Arms
industries (particularly in the former eastern bloc) pursue markets in
conflict zones, and weapons and personnel decommissioned by NATO and
eastern bloc countries have found their way into a variety of conflict zones.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, Russia,
China, France and Britain) although charged with the primary responsibility
of preserving global peace and security, are still responsible for 85 per cent
of global arms sales. When industrialized countries do opt for conflict, this
is usually against much weaker countries or regions where there is a
reasonable certainty of winning (Britain versus Argentina; the US versus the
might of Panama, Grenada, Libya or Iraq; and Russia versus the -
admittedly underestimated - Chechens). The closely-controlled media
coverage of such conflicts preserves their status as 'wars' (rather than
somewhat one-sided punitive operations) and can sometimes serve as good
advertising for military hardware - points emphasized by Jean Baudrillard
in relation to the Gulf War of 1991 following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.14

Weakening or Eliminating Political Opposition

A third major goal in contemporary conflicts has been weakening or
eliminating political opposition. Fomenting ethnic conflict has frequently
 6 MANAGING ARMED CONFLICTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

proved a useful way of dividing the opposition, and indeed ethnic

nationalists have often fed off one another's nationalism. Genocide and
massacres have been used as a tool for political survival and for weakening
the opposition in many contexts, including Sudan, Rwanda, the former
Yugoslavia and Guatemala.
In its analysis of the war in Guatemala, the report of the Commission for
Historical Clarification notes that guerrilla groups did not have the strength
or numbers to pose a serious threat to the Guatemalan state. The widespread
attacks on civilians served a much wider function than simply suppressing
the guerrillas, namely the suppression of a wide band of political and
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cultural opposition.15 In these circumstances, the problem goes beyond

simply ending the war or reaching a compromise between government and
rebels and extends to how to institutionalize widespread popular
participation in politics - and how to do so without prompting an elite
backlash of the kind that fired the war in the first place.

The Functions of 'Us and Them'

Deficiencies in the portrayal of civil conflicts are more than deficiencies in
understanding; they frequently play directly into the hands of those
manipulating or profiting from violence. The idea that a conflict is bi-polar
- in other words, that conflict is 'really' about government troops fighting
rebel troops or about Serbs fighting Muslims or about Hutus fighting Tutsis
- has proven extremely useful to elites protecting their own privileges.
There are three main reasons for this.
First, international confusion and pessimism in the face of 'intractable,
ancient ethnic hatreds' or 'irrational rebels' allows time for planning and
carrying out human rights abuses with minimal international repercussions.
These abuses are often carried out by forces linked to the government; yet
government responsibility is obscured when the focus is on 'ethnic' conflict
or on a particularly reviled rebel group such as UNITA in Angola, the
Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, or the Lord's Resistance
Army (LRA) in Uganda.
Second, the image of bi-polar conflict helps in suppressing political
dissent since dissenters can be readily labelled as supporters of 'the other
side' (whether these are 'rebels' or some reviled and demonized ethnic
group). It is precisely the distinction between 'us' and 'them' which those
manipulating conflict wish to encourage. Once this distinction is
established, it follows that if you are not with us, you are against us. Ethnic
fault-lines harden. Those manipulating conflict in this way may include
ethnic nationalists or warlords but also democratic leaders who find that war
boosts their popularity. In Russia, Vladimir Putin rode to the Presidency on
 WAR AND PEACE: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? 7

the back of war-fever over Chechen 'terrorists', and there are serious
concerns over possible involvement by Russian oligarchs linked to Putin in
the Moscow apartment bombings that did so much to ignite anti-Chechen
feelings.16 In Pakistan, military brass-hats have used the conflict with India
(notably, the nuclear stand-off and the conflict over Kashmir) to justify their
continued interference in politics and a large military budget (see Sidhu in
this volume); at the same time, many within the military establishment have
benefited from drugs-trading links with the Taliban in Afghanistan, a nexus
threatened by pressure from the US and perhaps defended by the October
1999 military coup.17
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A third function of presenting conflicts as bi-polar is that the image of

an enemy may assist those benefiting from the political economy of
conflict. These benefits may take a number of forms. They may include the
profits arising from preparation for war and from weapons procurement
during conflict - a major source of profits for a small ruling cabal in Angola,
for example.18 They may also include access to minerals (often in areas
partially depopulated by conflict and famine), access to agricultural
commodities (usually through forced labour), and access to the profits of
illegal trading that may flourish under conditions of conflict and of minimal
government control and taxation (most notably, the drugs trade).
The tactics of divide and rule often depend on 'ethnic' war being talked
into existence. Local media have often played a key role in instilling fear of
the ethnic 'other', apparently a necessary condition for genocide.19 And as
the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic notes, the passion for naming and
labelling during ethnic conflicts can put pressure on a writer to abandon
their sense of ambiguity and multiple truths. Suddenly there is an army of
petty informers ready to point the finger at those who reject this new passion
for labelling; petty jealousies can fuel this finger-pointing.20
In Turkey, the government has blamed the burning of villages by the
army on the rebel PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party), and the distortion has
usually been uncritically reported by the Turkish press. Paradoxically, as the
Kurdish dissident Yasar Kemal notes, resisting this conspiracy of silence
and pursuing an objective truth can be seen as taking sides.21 We have seen
the same thing22 in Cambodia and Sierra Leone. Enoch Opondo in his
analysis of conflict in Kenya23 - and Phillip Knightley in his more general
analysis of truth as the first casualty of war24 - have both suggested that in
wartime, those who try to be 'objective' may quickly be accused of
complicity with the enemy and/or undermining the morale of friendly
forces.
International journalists often play their part in solidifying ethnic
divisions by taking these divisions as an immutable given, rather than
questioning how ethnicity has come to be important, how this process has
 8 MANAGING ARMED CONFLICTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

been manipulated, and how conflict generates ethnicity.25 Similarly,

immeasurable damage is done when international journalists take divisions
between government forces and rebels as a given, rather than investigating
the violent, exploitative and exclusionary processes which this discourse
may facilitate. Insofar as the simplistic model of conflict as sport or ethnic
hatred proves cheaper to produce and easier to digest than a more nuanced
understanding, we can see here the local political economy of war
interacting damagingly with the international political economy of news.
Foreign journalists face fewer obstacles than local journalists in scrutinizing
and resisting the politics of 'us and them'. But often such opportunities are
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wasted.
Part of the construction of ethnicity and ethnic hatred in the media is
done through denigrating or demonizing entire nations rather than simply
groups within nations. Jonathan Mermin shows how the US often pumps up
the fear of the foreign 'other' - even (perhaps especially) in relation to small
states like Panama and Grenada.26 In many ways, the Anglo-Saxon axis of
Britain and the US constitute a major ethnic group on the world stage, and
one that is sometimes prepared to act outside of UN channels (as over
Kosovo and Iraq).
For those seeking to divide the world into 'us' and 'them', any neutrals
or 'undecideds' may constitute a powerful cognitive threat, a threat to the
world view and moral universe of the chief combatants, as Antonius
Robben has argued in relation to Argentina's 'dirty war' in the 1970s.27 This
argument can be extended onto the world stage to help explain the strong
hostility to analysts like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.

Violence in Peace
If war can involve elements of cooperation and collusion, of limiting
violence, and of the consolidation of various kinds of order, then it is also
important to note that peace can be quite violent. Indeed, it may be difficult
to account for mass violence or civil war without examining the violence
embodied in peace.
Violence in many ways lies at the heart of democracy and of capitalism.
Democracies have tended to emerge from a process of violent struggle. And
capitalism, too, has its roots in violence, notably the looting of commodities,
the forcible appropriation of land (creating a pool of industrial workers),
and the appropriation of labour in the form of slavery.28 Much of the
violence surrounding the origins of capitalism and democracies has simply
been forgotten, though some ethnic groups are more interested in
remembering it than others. Moving into the present, capitalist democracies
may also involve large elements of militarism, which begs the following
 WAR AND PEACE: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? 9

question: to what extent can a society be said to be at peace when it is

planning for war?
Closely related to the assumption that peace is not violent are two
common assumptions, first, that 'the rule of law' is at the opposite end of
the spectrum from lawless violence and, second, that development is at once
non-violent and an insurance against violence.
Yet the apparent lawlessness of civil war is often supported by the state
in some way: it is sanctioned illegality, as when the state supports the
creation of violent ethnic militias. As for peace, Jenny Edkins - in her
critique of Amartya Sen and his limited consideration of the role of violence
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in creating famine - has rightly emphasized the violence embodied in the

law.29 Johan Galtung distinguishes 'structural violence' from 'direct
violence', using the former to include processes of exploitation and
marginalization, indeed anything that limits human well-being to levels
below what is possible.30 Peter Uvin has written about the 'humiliations' of
the development process in Rwanda and its contribution to violence and
genocide.31
In Sudan, much of the development process has been violent, including
the forcible ejection of people from land, and this violent process helps to
explain the more overt and visible violence of civil war.32 Here and
elsewhere, vulnerable groups have fallen partially below the protection of
the law in peacetime, and after this process has propelled significant
numbers into rebellion, these marginalized groups have been further
marginalized and stigmatized in conditions of war, and have fallen still
further below the law's protection. Those falling below the law have not just
been in the south of Sudan but also the west and, increasingly, the east.
Much of the violence in peacetime consists of crime. Peace may be
riddled with violent crime; it may not feel particularly peaceful. Much of
this crime may be organized crime, and since war can also take the form of
organized crime, the distinction between peace and war is further eroded.
The murder rate in El Salvador is about 15 times as high as in the United
States. War in El Salvador (between 1980 and 1992) destroyed families,
often leaving children living with distant relatives who have been unable to
afford schooling. This, together with widespread unemployment and
perhaps also a culture of violence encouraged by the war, seems to have
created a susceptibility to joining criminal gangs. On top of this, the US has
been deporting large numbers of illegal and legal Salvadoran immigrants
who are convicted of crimes in America, and these have often played a key
role in gang warfare inside El Salvador.33
In Guatemala, crime has also been very high since the advent of 'peace'.
Where ordinary people feel their physical security remains under threat and
where police forces have not been developed and supported to provide
 10 MANAGING ARMED CONFLICTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

security, one temptation has been to vote for 'hard-line', rightist candidates
who promise law and order. This has created opportunities for those
associated with the old counter-insurgency, adding to the problem of
impunity and to the difficulties of ending the war.
Nor is Europe immune to large-scale organized crime, whether in
peacetime or wartime. In southern Italy, an estimated 10,000 people were
killed by organized crime during the 1980s.34 In contemporary Russia, the
inability of the state to provide a secure environment for property-
ownership has combined with a surplus of ex-soldiers and security
personnel to encourage a growth of mafia activity. These conditions bear a
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significant resemblance to those that fostered the emergence of the Sicilian

mafia in the late-nineteenth century, as Federico Varese has shown.35 In a
development that has some parallels with patterns of cooperation between
'enemies' in war-time (and the phenomenon of soldiers turning into rebels
in Sierra Leone), Russian policemen have been leaving their posts in large
numbers and joining the ranks of the criminals. Others (again echoing Sierra
Leone) have cooperated with criminals while still in their posts. More
broadly, the sale of Russian state assets to a small clique of oligarchs at
'knock-down' prices can be seen as a form of organized pillage,36 albeit a
pillage that has for the most part been organized under conditions of
'peace'. Organized crime has been a marked feature of the various conflicts
in the former Yugoslavia.37
War economies tend to be linked to regional trading systems, with
surrounding countries - though perhaps formally 'at peace' - getting drawn
into illegal trading (often drugs and arms) that can bring growing insecurity.
As with the states presiding directly over a war economy, surrounding
countries may lack the resources or the will to control smuggling that
further saps their revenue.38

The Transition from War to Peace

How are we to understand the transition from war to peace? This tends to
be presented as a move from madness to sanity, or from evil to good, but if
we are mindful of the violence in peace and the cooperation in warfare, the
transition from war to peace takes on a different complexion.
A 'transition from war to peace' is unlikely to see a clean break from
violence to consent, from theft to production, from repression to democracy,
or from impunity to accountability. Peace is likely to institutionalize
violence in some form; indeed, peace may not be possible without
institutionalizing violence in some way. One way of looking at the problem
of contemporary conflicts is to consider those who mobilize violence from
above and to consider those who embrace it - willingly or unwillingly -
 WAR AND PEACE: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? 11

from below.39 External interventions will need to try to make peace appear
a more attractive option than war for both of these groups. This may be a
messy, compromising business. Peace could also be called 'order', a word
that carries a different set of associations and assumptions.
Relationships of cooperation during wartime may create important
opportunities for peace, though it would be wise to ask: peace on what
basis? It may, for example, be a peace that is deeply infused with violence
and exploitation.
Ethnic nationalists, having benefited from one another's extremism in
wartime, may agree to cooperate in creating (more or less) ethnically pure
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states. This can be called peace. Others might call it the institutionalization
of 'ethnic cleansing', a charge that has been levelled at the Dayton
agreement of 1995 in the former Yugoslavia.
Some things seem almost self-evidently useful in the business of conflict
resolution and conflict prevention. These things include justice (to put an end
to the climate of impunity); reconstruction and development (to give people
hope and put what is often seen as the 'madness' of violence behind them);
democracy (to empower the oppressed and restrain the rulers); and a ceasefire
(to strengthen negotiations and build up trust). According to the so-called
'Washington consensus', economic liberalization is another policy that will
promote peace, as growth reduces resentments and trade becomes too lucrative
to disrupt through warfare. It is tempting, moreover, to imagine that 'all good
things go together', and that the solution to conflict lies in a package of justice,
reconstruction, development, democracy, ceasefires and liberalization.
However, one also needs to ask why people should accept these
apparently benign phenomena? Do the key actors (whether elites, fighters
or 'ordinary people') have an interest in justice, reconstruction,
development, democracy, ceasefires and/or liberalization? And if they do
not, how might these phenomena - and the goal of democracy stands out as
particularly problematic here - be rendered acceptable to them? One has to
remember the profits and limited exposure to risk that frequently
characterize contemporary conflict. Ensuring that armed groups agree to
some kind of peace is likely to involve a range of compromises. Unless
armed groups are given some kind of stake in peace, including perhaps a
material reward, why then would they choose to accept it?

Justice
A common idea is that peace and justice are indivisible. Amnesty
International has often leaned towards this position, emphasizing a legalistic
solution to the problem of violence based on the need to ensure and enforce
human rights by holding abusers accountable.
 12 MANAGING ARMED CONFLICTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

Certainly, there is a link between impunity and violence, and

correspondingly it is dangerous to leave human rights abuses unpunished. A
particularly troubling example is the history of accommodation to
Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, including the support of the Khmer Rouge in
exile in the 1980s by the West, Thailand and China, in opposition to the
Vietnam-installed government in Phnom Penh. In Cambodia itself, the
August 1996 deal between the government and elements of the Khmer
Rouge under Ieng Sary (a former Foreign Minister under Pol Pot), while
critical in weakening the Khmer Rouge, can also be seen as sending out
potentially damaging signals on the acceptability of violence and
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corruption. Amnesty International observed that the deal contributed further

to a climate of impunity in Cambodia.40 China has been particularly keen to
avoid a war crimes tribunal for Khmer Rouge leaders that might highlight
Beijing's own role in supporting the Khmer Rouge.
At the same time as there are dangers in accommodating violence,
there are dangers in a rigid policy of punishing abuses. As Charles King
notes:
The prospect of war crimes tribunals, the arrest of belligerent leaders
and assigning blame for atrocities committed during the war all create
great disincentives for leaders to enter negotiations and generate
equally strong incentives for them to renege on commitments during
the implementation of peace agreements.41
The art of facilitating a transition from war to peace may lie, to a
considerable extent, in ensuring that some of those benefiting from war are
in a position to benefit to a greater extent from peace. In practice, these
benefits may (at least initially) be secured under some kind of 'armed peace'
in which a number of players remain in a position to use the threat of force
to underwrite control of economic activity. Charles Tilly has traced this
process in relation to the establishment of European states.42 Groups that
have been able to use violence to secure control of production, trade and
emergency aid in wartime may be able to carve out for themselves a degree
of control over production, trade and development or reconstruction aid
after a peace settlement. (Indeed, part of the point of wartime violence may
be precisely to secure a commanding and lucrative position within the
peacetime economy.)
In Somalia, mafia-type operations have benefited from a degree of order
as conflict abated somewhat. Ken Menkaus and John Prendergast argue that
this had the effect of assisting trade and minimizing turf battles while
holding out the prospect of attracting foreign donors.43 Alex de Waal points
to the shared interest of many Somali landlord-elders in a particular kind of
peace, one that excludes politically-marginalized agriculturalists from land
 WAR AND PEACE: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? 13

they used to cultivate before it was taken away by quasi-legal means or

simply by force. He notes that clan analysis has often obscured class
analysis.
In Cambodia, some progress towards peace was achieved through a
combination of offering rewards for impunity and tightening economic
sanctions. The holding of elections without Khmer Rouge participation -
what Stephen Stedman calls the 'departing train' strategy - had already
weakened the Khmer Rouge.44 Then the threat by the US Congress to
impose sanctions on countries aiding the Khmer Rouge seems to have
prompted Thailand to tighten control of trading with the rebel group in late
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1996. This created incentives for Thai officials, military officers, and gem
and log traders on the ground to deal directly with elements of the
Cambodian government, in turn encouraging defections from those
elements of the Khmer Rouge - including Ieng Sary, who had benefited
most from doing business with Thai officials. Ieng Sary and his supporters
were offered a pardon and access to lucrative gem and timber concessions
within the Cambodian government system.45 The links that Sary had built up
with traders, army commanders and the Cambodian government contrasted
with the more isolated and ideologically 'pure' world inhabited by Pol Pot
himself, and these links seem to have prepared the way for Sary's defection
from the Khmer Rouge.46
The ambiguities of peace and war have also been notable in Burma.
Here, many rebellious ethnic groups signed ceasefire agreements with the
SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council) military government,
apparently in return for government tolerance of their drug-trafficking
within their respective areas. The Burmese opium warlord Khun Sa, who
apparently 'surrendered' to the government in January 1996, was reported
to be living unpunished in Rangoon, investing in casinos and, most
bizarrely, funding a portion of the Burmese army.47
It is doubtful whether South Africa's security services would have
accepted the end of apartheid without the prospect of some kind of amnesty
for abuses that could be shown to be politically motivated. Many Ugandans
still reject the idea of bringing Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels to
justice, seeing this as a recipe for continued LRA violence.48 In international
wars, a concern with bringing criminals to justice can also be argued to be
risky. For example, the indictment of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic
as a war criminal during the conflict over Kosovo was seen by some as
impeding a negotiated solution.49
An alternative policy to punishing those who have perpetrated violence
is to reward them for giving up violence. In practice, peace often has a
quality of pragmatism. Charles King mentions awarding control of
significant portions of Bosnia to the Serb Republic, or granting diamond
 14 MANAGING ARMED CONFLICTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

concessions to companies set up by UNITA in Angola, as examples of such

pragmatism. Mozambique's RENAMO was bought off with funds to
transform itself into a political party. The award to the Revolutionary United
Front (RUF) leader, Foday Sankoh, of the chairmanship of a Commission
for Strategic Resources to manage Sierra Leone's diamonds failed to
achieve the peaceful outcome desired by its American architects. Indeed,
the RUF appears to have built up its military muscle with the help of
officially-sanctioned control of mining revenue. The distinction between
rewarding someone for giving up violence and rewarding them for the
violence they gave up may not always be clear. In Sierra Leone, elements of
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the old government army used hostage-taking to draw attention to their

dissatisfaction at being largely excluded from the peace agreement between
the Ahmed Tejjan Kabbah government and the rebel RUF. Violence in
Sierra Leone has been a response to exclusion, underlining the dangers in
peace agreements that include some but exclude large numbers of others.
What looks to some people like realism and pragmatism may look to others
like appeasement and a prolongation of impunity. Similarly in Liberia, the
appeasement of Charles Taylor, who was elected President in 1997, has led
to the exclusion of some groups from the political process and security
institutions and a potential recourse to armed violence.

Reconstruction/Development
We hear a lot about rehabilitation, reconstruction, resettlement and all the
various 're's of post-conflict work. But if you could recreate and reconstruct
the exact social and economic conditions prevailing at the outset of a civil
war, would it simply break out all over again - for the same reasons as before?
The role of structural violence and of peacetime violence in creating
conditions for war implies a need, in the aftermath of a war, to re-form a
state, to re-form an economy, and to reorient development. Zygmunt
Bauman argued in relation to the Holocaust that violence is likely to be
generated by society and its norms, rather than simply representing the
breakdown of these norms.50 Rather than simply representing a breakdown
in development, violence is often generated by particular patterns of
development. This should call into question the advisability of resuming
these patterns of development in the aftermath of a conflict.
The end of Sudan's first civil war (in 1972) did not produce a political
system that remedied the underdevelopment of the south or the
marginalization of significant groups in the north. In the absence of lasting
political protection for the south, the economic rehabilitation of the area
merely served to regenerate resources (notably cattle) that could be raided
by northern pastoralists who themselves continued to be marginalized
 WAR AND PEACE: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? 15

within the north, notably by the growth of mechanized farming. In

circumstances where rebel leaders have been bribed into peace (as happened
to a significant extent in Mozambique and later in Sierra Leone and
Liberia), then a failure to tackle underlying grievances may be particularly
likely and particularly damaging in the long run.
In our haste to separate the evil perpetrators of violence from the
innocent victims of violence - and this tendency applies particularly to the
media - we often forget that soldiers are recruited from civilians and that
civilians' disillusionment with peace may provide one of the critical clues
to why violence is taking place. Rather than simply reconstructing an
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economy, one might want to think about how to put into reverse the process
by which diverse groups took up arms or persuaded others to do so.
The fact that fighters - whether in Sierra Leone or in criminal gangs in
the industrialized countries - often have shared goals and shared needs (for
money, status, security, a sense of belonging) suggests a need to think of
conflict resolution not only as a compromise between two divergent
positions but as the simultaneous provision of what both sides need. This
resonates with John Burton's 'human needs' approach to conflict resolution,
which sees conflict as an attempt to meet basic human needs not being met
in peacetime.51 If we take seriously the diverse reasons why ordinary people
participate in violence, rather than simply concentrating on states or leaders
(as has been common in international relations), then this alerts us to the
importance of shared goals. This way of thinking tends to put education,
employment and ensuring the rule of law at the heart of conflict prevention
and resolution. In other words, it highlights the need for development - but
probably not the kind of development that preceded the conflict.
Patterns of development and reconstruction that meet the needs of
ordinary people - whether these are needs for resources, for education or for
security - will tend to weaken the position of warlords, extremist politicians
and faction leaders who offer to meet these needs through more violent
means. Menkaus and Prendergast argue that UN intervention in Somalia
actually did the opposite by giving resources and legitimacy to the major
warlords, and encouraging conflict over central authority in a context where
resources were concentrated in Mogadishu. Moreover:
The failure of the UN mission in Somalia is to a large degree the
extension of a bankrupt donor policy which for decades supported
overly centralised, unsustainable government structures in Mogadishu
whose legitimacy came primarily from the barrel of a gun.52
As in Somalia, Liberian civilian organizations have often opposed
recognition of armed faction leaders in peace negotiations, arguing that this
boosts their prestige and their ability to attract a following."
 16 MANAGING ARMED CONFLICTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

When it comes to the demobilization of armed groups, there is a danger

that demobilization, like emergency aid, will be tackled as a discrete
programme, isolated from a wider understanding of political and economic
processes. For example, Save the Children Fund staff accused the Structural
Adjustment Programmes in Mozambique of undermining economic
opportunities just at the point when demobilized soldiers needed to be
absorbed. Commenting on peace agreements signed in January 1992 in El
Salvador, one Oxfam report noted:
Generally it was recognised that whilst the Agreements dealt in detail
with issues related to the demobilisation and demilitarisation
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processes, limited attention was given to fundamental economic and

legal issues which constituted the root causes of the internal conflict.54
Land reform, in particular, was not given a high priority. Indeed, the failure
to fulfil expectations of demobilized combatants jeopardized security and
contributed to the high crime rates mentioned earlier.
One of the obstacles to constructing the kind of political economy that
will not generate a resumption of war is a lack of adequate funding. There
is often a contrast, noted for example by Menkaus in relation to Somalia,55
between very large sums spent on emergency relief and then very small
sums spent on rehabilitation once the cameras, and perhaps the international
peacekeepers, have gone away. In Kosovo, there have been major shortfalls
in funding for rehabilitation. No recent rehabilitation programme has seen
anything remotely comparable to the estimated $88 billion (at present-day
prices) that was pumped into the rebuilding of Germany under the Marshall
Plan after the Second World War. Analysing the roots of the latest conflict
in Chechnya, Anatol Lieven, author of Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian
Power, has written:
Since being defeated in that war [that is, the war of 1994—96],
Moscow...failed to give President Asian Maskhadov any serious aid to
reconstruct Chechnya's shattered economy. By doing so, the Kremlin
fatally undermined the only Chechen leader who has combined a desire
for pragmatic relations with Russia with real prestige at home. The ruin
of the Chechen economy obviously contributed enormously to the
dangerous anarchy of the region, as thousands of unemployed, heavily
armed ex-fighters turned either to kidnapping or raiding or to Islamist
and nationalist extremism.56

Democracy
Democracy has sometimes been presented as a panacea for peace. But
securing consent for democracy may not be easy. Securing consent even
 WAR AND PEACE: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? 17

from ordinary people may sometimes be a problem. Why, for example,

should the Tutsis accept democracy in Rwanda, where the Hutus constitute
a large majority? Moreover, a rapid push towards democracy has sometimes
been destabilizing, as in neighbouring Burundi. In the former Yugoslavia,
Milosevic and his cabal have defended themselves against democracy with
a series of conflicts that reinforce a Serb 'siege mentality', deepen
politically - and economically - profitable sanctions, legitimize
undemocratic rule, stigmatize political opposition as 'Western
collaborators', and allow various kinds of asset transfer from ordinary
people to this cabal (not least from ordinary Serbs through a variety of
pyramid schemes, taxation and monopolistic pricing).57 In Rwanda,
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encouraged by international prevarication and French support, extremist

Hutu factions defended their privileged position against democracy with a
ruthlessness that embraced carefully planned genocide. In East Timor, the
Indonesian army reacted to the threat of secession by encouraging militias
to attack and intimidate civilians. More broadly, the army seems to have
been stirring up conflict in Indonesia to underline its continuing political
importance and to guard against the sidelining of the military and its
economic interests in a process of democratization.
In Sierra Leone, the advent of democracy in 1996 (something the UN
and its member states failed to back with peacekeeping) proved
unacceptable to rebels and soldiers alike, who saw in it an end to their
impunity, an end to the lucrative war economy, and a return to corrupt pre-
war politics - hence, in large part, the May 1997 coup. In Liberia,
democracy in 1997 meant the appeasement of Charles Taylor and an
electoral victory based on the veiled threat of a return to war if he did not
win.

Ceasefires
Ceasefires have often been a step on the road to peace. But there are
circumstances in which a call for an immediate peace, or a ceasefire, may
represent an accommodation - and even an invitation - to massive violence.
War and genocide frequently run alongside each other. Part of the rationale
for the Allied war effort in the Second World War was putting an end to the
Nazi genocide. Few would question the legitimacy of this. Yet some 25
years later, most of the world condemned the Vietnamese invasion of
Cambodia in 1978 - even though it was this event that brought an end to
genocide by the Khmer Rouge. In April-June 1994, a ceasefire in the war
between the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) and the Rwandan government
- called for by the UN Security Council - would actually have halted the
RPF's advance in circumstances where this advance was the most realistic
 18 MANAGING ARMED CONFLICTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

hope of ending the genocide, something the RPF was eventually able to
achieve.58

Liberalization
The liberalization of an economy may sit uneasily with a process of
democratization. In Rwanda, as African Rights has argued, the international
drive towards democratization in Rwanda appears to have run aground, in
part, on the resource shortages fostered by internationally-generated
austerity packages.59 In Sierra Leone, privatization proved to be a means of
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transferring state assets to a small monopolistic oligarchy, reinforcing the

vested interests opposed to the end of one-party rule.60 And in Russia, the
partial criminalization of business has been linked to the transition from a
command economy to a market economy operating with institutions (banks,
accounting systems, means of enforcing contracts) that organize and
regulate markets. The process has been accelerated by the collapse of state
agencies, which became unable or unwilling to control this
criminalization.61 And democratization has been compromised by deals
between former President Boris Yeltsin and the newly-enriched oligarchs
controlling much of the Russian economy and much of the media on which
politicians rely for generating electoral support.

Conclusion
The existence of peace begs a number of questions: Whose peace are we
talking about? Peace on what terms? Peace in whose interests? And peace
negotiated by which individuals or groups? In one sense, everybody wants
peace; it is just that they want their own version of peace. This line of
analysis prompts Eftihia Voutira and Shaun Brown to be particularly
sceptical in relation to NGOs involved in conflict-resolution: 'What kind of
a peace are you working towards,' they ask.62 It is a good question.
Who are you excluding in a peace settlement? To what extent is it an
agreement between armed factions to the exclusion of most elements
of civil society? If an agreement between government and rebels can
exclude civil society, in extreme cases, the rebels themselves are excluded
from peace agreements. The Sudan Peace Agreement of 1997 was in
many ways an agreement between military allies - the Sudan government
and southern factions with which it was already linked. The rebel SPLA
was excluded. The agreement coincided with a marked escalation of
the war. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, civil society groups were eventually
marginalized in the peace agreements reached in 1995 and 1999,
respectively.
 WAR AND PEACE: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? 19

What forms of corruption are you institutionalizing in the peace process?

And what exactly is the difference between peace and war in circumstances
where peace institutionalizes violence and where war involves forms of
covert cooperation and tacit non-aggression between ostensibly warring
parties?
In a sense, for a peace agreement to succeed, two factors are essential:
first, one needs an agreement between leaders; second, these leaders must
be legitimate individuals who can maintain a following that encompasses
all important sectors of the population and who, moreover, do not
sacrifice a significant part of this following by the very act of making a
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peace agreement. One immediately thinks of the nascent Palestinian

state, and the split between Yassir Arafat and those who would wish to
see a more far-reaching solution to the Palestine/Israel problem.
Members of the Palestinian Leadership Organisation (PLO) leadership
have certainly profited from international aid and business monopolies
while militant groups like Hamas and Hizbollah have attracted more
support because of economic crisis in the small area controlled by the
Palestinian elite.63
The diverse aims of those involved in warfare (and in crimes during
war) should be taken into account by those who are seeking to intervene
in some way, whether such intervention takes the form of long-term aid,
of emergency aid, of attempts to broker or militarily enforce a peace, or
of rehabilitation efforts. Rather than simply concentrating on
negotiations between the 'two sides' in a war, it may be helpful to try to
map the benefits and costs of violence for a variety of parties and to seek
to influence the calculations they make. This will include attempts to
reduce the economic benefits of violence (for example, through sanctions
such as the freezing of bank accounts), to increase the economic benefits
of peaceable activities (for example, through the provision of
employment and more geographically-even forms of development), and
to reduce the legal (and moral) impunity that may be enjoyed by a variety
of groups (for example, by publicizing abuses, initiating international
judicial proceedings, and making aid explicitly conditional on human
rights observance). We need to investigate what international
interventions (aid, diplomacy, publicity, investment, trade) are doing to
accelerate or retard the processes by which people fall below the
protection of the law.
'Interventions' are not simply something that 'the West' or 'the
international community' does to remedy humanitarian disasters once they
occur; more often than not, interventions occur prior to the disaster,
perhaps helping to precipitate it - witness, for example, the international
support for abusive and unrepresentative governments like those of Siad
 20 MANAGING ARMED CONFLICTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

Barre in Somalia, Samuel Doe in Liberia and Juvenal Habyarimana in

Rwanda.
In order to develop effective strategies for ending conflict, one must first
understand its complex dynamics and the various interests involved in
perpetuating conflicts. One of the best ways to minimize the suffering
resulting from 'war' is to combat the strategies and misinformation of those
who seek to use 'war' as cover for their anti-democratic and/or criminal
agendas.

NOTES
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1. Charles King has argued that when one side wins, the peace is often more long-lasting, in
Ending Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper 308, Oxford University Press/International Institute for
Strategic Studies, 1997.
2. James Fallows, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, New
York: Pantheon, 1996.
3. Stephen Ellis, 'Liberia 1989-1994: A Study in Ethnic and Spiritual Violence', African
Affairs, Vol.94, No.375, Apr. 1995.
4. David Hirst, 'Escalation of Blood', The Guardian, 25 Sept. 1997, p.17; and John Sweeney,
'We Accuse, 80,000 Times', The Observer, 16 Nov. 1997.
5. David Shearer, Private Armies and Military Intervention, Adelphi Paper 316, Oxford
University Press/International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998.
6. Adekeye Adebajo, 'Nigeria: Africa's New Gendarme?', Security Dialogue, June 2000,
Vol.31, No.2, pp. 185-99.
7. David Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper 320,
International Institute for Strategic Studies/Oxford University Press, 1998; and Mats Berdal
and David Malone (eds.), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, Boulder,
CO and London: Lynne Rienner, 2000.
8. Jean Francois and Jean-Christophe Rufin (eds.), Economie des Guerres Civiles, Paris:
Hachette, 1996.
9. See, for example, Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: A Small Victorious War,
London: Pan Original, 1997, on the Russian army in Chechnya.
10. David Keen, The Benefits of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine and Relief in
Southwestern Sudan, 1983-89, Princeton and Chichester, UK: Princeton University Press,
1994
11. David Keen, 'When War Itself Is Privatized: The Twisted Logic That Makes Violence
Worthwhile in Sierra Leone', Times Literary Supplement, 29 Dec. 1995, pp.13-14.
12. Focus on Sierra Leone, London, Feb. 1996.
13. Mats Berdal and David Keen, 'Violence and Economic Agendas in Civil Wars:
Considerations for Policymakers', Millennium, Vol.26, No.3, 1997.
14. For an interesting discussion, see Nicholas Zurbrugg (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Art and
Artefact, London: Sage, 1997.
15. Commission for Historical Clarification, Guatemala: Memory of Silence, Conclusions and
Recommendations, n.d.
16. See, for example, George Soros, 'Who Lost Russia?', The New York Review of Books, 13
Apr. 2000, Vol.XLVII, No.6, pp.10-16; and Jonathan Steele, 'The Ryazan Incident', The
Guardian, 24 Mar. 2000, 22.
17. Malik Mohan, 'Front Line, Fault Line', The World Today, Feb. 2000, Vol.56, No.2, pp.14-16.
18. Anna Richardson, 'Police Aid Angola Oil Demo', Independent on Sunday, 12 Mar. 2000,
p.20.
19. See, for example, Mark Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and
Hercegovina, Luton: University of Luton Press, 1999; and 'Rwanda: Death, Despair and
Defiance', African Rights, London, 1994.
 WAR AND PEACE: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? 21

20. Dubravka Ugresic, 'Goodnight Croatian writers', in W.L. Webb and Rose Bell (eds.), An
Embarrassment of Tyrannies, London: Victor Gollancz, 1997, pp.204-10.
21. Yasar Kemal, 'The Dark Cloud over Turkey', in Webb and Bell (eds.), pp.251-6.
22. William Shawcross, 'Tragedy in Cambodia', New York Review of Books, 1 Nov. 1996,
pp.41-6 and Dec. 19 pp.73-4; and author's research in Sierra Leone.
23. Enoch O. Opondo, 'Representation of Ethnic Conflict in the Kenyan Media', in T. Allen, K.
Hudson and J. Seaton (eds.), War, Ethnicity and the Media, London: South Bank University,
1996.
24. Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent
as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker, London: Pan, 1989.
25. David Turton, War and Ethnicity: Global Connections and Local Violence, New York:
University of Rochester Press, 1997, Introduction.
26. Jonathan Mermin has analysed media coverage of US intervention in Grenada in 1983 and
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Panama in 1989, as well as the build-up to the Gulf War. He shows that the range of debate
in the American media was closely tied to the degree of criticism coming from the Democrats
in any given crisis. Where there was little criticism, there was little debate. He also argues
that polls showing public support for an aggressive military line had a circular quality, since
limited media coverage had powerfully shaped the public opinion that was then polled.
Where memory of abuses by one ethnic group is suppressed (and abuses by the other side are
played up), this feeds into the 'us' and 'them' mentality. If the US and the English-speaking
allies in the UK are considered as an ethnic group, one can add that the US and UK media
often suppress abuses by this ethnic group and play up threats against it. See Jonathan
Mermin, Debating War and Peace: Media Coverage of US Intervention in the Post-Vietnam
Era, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
27. Antonius Robben, 'The Fear of Indifference: Combatants' Anxieties about the Political
Identity of Civilians during Argentina's Dirty War', in K. Koonings and D. Kruijt (eds.),
Societies of Fear: The Legacy of Civil War, Violence and Terror in Latin America, London:
Zed, 1999.
28. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, London: Oxford University
Press, 1999 edition.
29. Jenny Edkins, 'Legality with a Vengeance: Humanitarian Relief in Complex Emergencies',
Millennium Journal of International Studies, 1996, Vol.25, No.3, pp.547-75; and Amartya
Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford: Clarendon
Press 1981 (reprinted 1984).
30. Johan Galtung, Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Developments and
Civilization, London: Sage, 1996.
31. Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, West Hartford, CT:
Kumarian Press, 1998.
32. David Keen, 1994 (n. 10 above)
33. Lucy Jones, 'LA's deportees send murder rate soaring in El Salvador', The Guardian, 29 Feb.
2000, p. 16.
34. Alexander Stille, Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic,
Vintage Books, 1996.
35. Federico Varese, 'Is Sicily the Future of Russia? Private Protection and the Rise of the
Russian Mafia', Archives é de Sociologie, 1994, Vol.35, No.2, p.249.
36. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium, Maiden, Mass: Blackwell, 1998.
37. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1999.
38. On Afghanistan see, for example, Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great
Game in Central Asia, London, 2000: I.B. Tauris; and Kaldor (n.37 above).
39. See David Keen, 1998 (n.7 above).
40. William Shawcross (n.22 above).
41. Charles King (n.1 above).
42. Charles Tilly, 'War Making and State Making as Organised Crime', in Peter Evans, Dietrich
Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985.
 22 MANAGING ARMED CONFLICTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

43. African Rights, 'Land Tenure, the Creation of Famine and Prospects for Peace in Somalia',
Discussion Paper No.1, London, Oct. 1993.
44. Stephen John Stedman, 'Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes', International Security, Fall
1997, Vol.22, No.2.
45. William Shawcross (n.22 above).
46. Pierre P. Lizée, 'Cambodia in 1996: Of Tigers, Crocodiles and Doves', Asian Survey, 1997,
Vol.37, No.1; and Mats Berdal and David Keen (n.13 above).
47. The Guardian, 27 Nov. 1996.
48. Personal communication, Andrew Mawson.
49. See, for example, Ian Black and Stephen Bates, 'War crimes move dims peace hopes', The
Guardian, 28 May 1999, p.1.
50. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity, 1989.
51. John W. Burton (ed.), Conflict: Human Needs Theory, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.
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52. Ken Menkaus and John Prendergast, 'Political Economy of Post-Intervention Somalia.
Somalia Task Force', Issue Paper No.3, Apr. 1995, pp. 1-18.
53. Samuel Kofi Woods II, 'Civic Initiatives in the Peace Process', in Jeremy Armon and Andy
Carl (eds.), ACCORD: The Liberian Peace Process, 1990-1991, London: Conciliation
Resources, 1996, pp.27-32.
54. Oxfam/Community Aid Abroad, 'United Nations Interventions in Conflict Situations', A
submission to Ambassador Richard Butler, Chair of the UN Preparatory Committee for the
Fiftieth Anniversary, Oxford, 1994, p.A3.
55. Ken Menkaus, 'US Foreign Assistance to Somalia: Phoenix from the Ashes?', Middle East
Policy, Vol.5, No.l, Jan., 1997.
56. Anatol Lieven, 'The Only Hope for Ending the Chechen Nightmare', Independent, 5 Nov.
1999, p.5.
57. Author's research in Belgrade, 1999.
58. African Rights, 1994 (n.19 above).
59. Ibid.
60. William Reno, Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone, Cambridge University Press,
1995; and author's research in Sierra Leone.
61. Castells (n.36 above); Soros (n.16 above).
62. Eftihia Voutira and Shaun Brown, Conflict Resolution: A Review of Some Non-governmental
Practices — 'A Cautionary Tale', Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet/Swedish International
Development Cooperation Agency, 1995.
63. David Hirst, 'Shameless in Gaza', The Guardian, 21 Apr. 1997, pp.8-10; and Edward Said,
Peace and Its Discontents: Gaza-Jericho 1993-1995, London: Vintage, Parker, 1995.