Product Description

• New edition of groundbreaking and hugely successful text which analyses war in the context of globalization.
• Includes a new chapter on the Iraq war as well as a new foreword and additional material on the Balkans.
• Mary Kaldor is an internationally renowned author and her books are widely adopted worldwide.
• In the current climate of insecurity and conflict, this book is more pertinent than ever.
• This book changes the way we think about war in a global context in the 21st century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #704421 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

Review
If you dont read Mary Kaldors New Old Wars you wont understand the world of violence we live in. And you will miss the only way out: the perspective of a cosmopolitan realpolitik that Kaldor opens up and paints in detail in her highly sophisticated and original analysis. It is the classical book on new wars.

Professor Martin van Creveld, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
"A timely and important book. Putting aside the so-called "revolution in military affairs" firmly to one side, Mary Kaldor has provided us with a window into the future of war."

From the Back Cover
Mary Kaldors New and Old Wars has fundamentally changed the way we understand contemporary war and conflict. In the context of globalization, this path–breaking book has shown that what we think of as war that is to say, war between states in which the aim is to inflict maximum violence is becoming an anachronism. In its place is a new type of organized violence or new wars, which could be described as a mixture of war, organized crime and massive violations of human rights. The actors are both global and local, public and private. The wars are fought for particularistic political goals using tactics of terror and destabilization that are theoretically outlawed by the rules of modern warfare. An informal criminalized economy is built into the functioning of the new wars.

Kaldors analysis offers a basis for a cosmopolitan political response to these wars, in which the monopoly of legitimate organized violence is reconstructed on a transnational basis and international peacekeeping is reconceptualized as cosmopolitan law enforcement. This approach also has implications for the reconstruction of civil society, political institutions, and economic and social relations.

This second edition has been fully revised and updated to deal with the implications of the new wars in the post 9–11 world. In a new chapter, Kaldor shows how old war thinking in Iraq has greatly exacerbated what is, in many ways, the archetypal new war with insurgency, chaos and the occupying forces lack of direction prescient of a different kind of conflict now emerging in the 21st Century.

Like its predecessor, the second edition of New and Old Wars will be essential reading for students of international relations, politics and conflict studies as well as to all those interested in the changing nature and prospect of warfare.