Viejas, nuevas y novísimas guerras: la conflictividad desafía la modernidad

Comparing the political systems, war objectives, type of army, military technique and war economics of the so-called new wars reveals a continuum and a connection of the causes for violence and wars which, in turn, present increasingly local signs (in spite of their global impact). It also stresses the need for rethinking categories and adapting concepts.In fact, after the end of the Cold War, the contexts of formal (and violent) peace in which the old wars between states broke out were transformed into scenes that showed new types of violent conflict, which were to be called “new wars”. However, the traditional approa ches towards the “old wars” made the emergency signs of these new types of conflict invisible, since these did not match any traditional definition of war. The characteristics of these (new) acts of violence have progressively challenged the dividing line between what is defined as war and what is defined as peace. However, the concepts or definitions of conflict and war are not immutable and static but dynamic, and must be able to adapt to new realities. Our proposal is precisely that today there are ill-defined or “nameless” spaces that are usually understood as being contexts of formal peace, but that can include signs of emergence of very new types of conflictive situations. This fact questions and casts doubt on the watertight distinctions between settings of formal peace, war and postwar.