|CHANGING WAR IN IR | INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS|

The changing war and its impacts on International Relations

Introduction

“Civilians play an increasingly important and complex role in armed conflicts. At the same time, the lines between “civilians” and “combatants” are becoming blurred.”

At the beginning of the 21st century it seems that warfare and armed conflict get messier and more chaotic than ever before. The phenomenon of weak and fragile statehood destabilizes whole regions and makes intra-state conflict to a constant feature with spill-over character in many areas of the world. At the same time do non-state armed actors, from warlords to armed militias to terrorists to private military firms, re-enter the international conflictscene. The globalized character of contemporary organized violence, especially the phenomenon of transnational terrorism, does challenge the international security structure. While symmetric inter-state conflicts are constantly decreasing and less likely to appear, the dominant form of contemporary armed conflict is intra-state and asymmetric by nature. One of the most striking features within contemporary armed violence is the increasingly important role of civilians, as victims but also as perpetrators and participants in hostilities. The year 2009 begins, much as 2008 ended, with hundreds and thousands of civilians killed in international and intra-state wars around the globe.[2] Since World War II and, much more, since the end of the Cold War, it seems that there is a development towards a ‘re-victimization’ of civilians in global armed conflict. The last two to three centuries were marked by efforts to regulate and to institutionalize war as such.[3] Private conflict entrepreneurs, like e.g. well-known mercenaries in the Thirty Years’War, became banned and the modern state developed a monopoly on violence.[4] In the nineteenth century, a comprehensive body of laws of war became established and efforts to protect civilians and prisoners of war (POWs) in armed conflict became somehow and at least partially successful. Although the laws of war do not demand no civilian casualties in armed conflict, they do hold them on low level due to their balance between military necessitiy and humanity:

“The law does not demand that there be no casualties in armed conflict. However, the law, political expediency and public sentiment combine to demand that casualties, whether among members of the armed forces or among the civilian population, should be reduced to the maximum extent that the exigencies of armed conflict will allow.”

But with recent developments in forms of armed conflict and with strongly increasing numbers of civilian victims, the balance between military necessity and humanity seems to be flawed and the protection of civilians in war seems to fail. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and various U.N. reports, the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties was between 5% and 10% in the First World War and then dramatically leapt to 50% during the Second World War.[6] During the 1990s, 75% – 90% of all casualties in armed conflicts were civilian. The changing structure of armed conflicts, its drivers and its impacts is becoming a mayor issue in social science.

“At the turn of the twentieth century, the ratio of military to civilian casualties in wars was 8:1. Today, this has been almost exactly reversed; in the wars of the 1990s, the ratio of military to civilian casualties is approximately 1:8.”

This development has raised concern with the U.N. Security Council. Since 1999, the Council has adopted several resolutions deploring civilian casualties in global armed conflicts and urging states to comply with their obligations under international humantiarian law.