The Impact of Internal Conflicts on World Politics - Term Paper Example

Lecturer: Topic: Introduction Wars within s now incur international consequences of a disturbing magnitude as these internal conflicts are phenomenons whose causes, dynamic and impacts are incomprehensible outside the global sphere. In human terms alone, that claim so readily intelligible and a look at the organised violence within countries rivals interstate conflicts for its toll of lives taken, deformed or uprooted, as well as the social, economic and physical damage sustained to localities, societies, cultures and nations. From the end of World War II until 2000, over sixteen million perished through internal wars, compared to three and a half million from interstate wars, (Alley 1). For each interstate war within that period, approximately five internal conflicts occurred, the relative totals being 25 and 112 respectively and the incidence of internal war has abated since its peak during the 1990s, although not markedly, (Walensteen and Sollenberg 623)a. Averaging 53 months in duration, internal wars are often protracted; their bitter political effects and legacies of crime, lawlessness and impunity lingering even longer after the guns have fallen silent and even when seemingly settled they often maintain a lethal potential to reignite. Various termed internal, intra-state, or civil wars, these events often lack fine starting and concluding points as the conditions of neither war nor peace testify to inconclusive military outcomes and continuing settlement failure. These conditions harbour unaccountable local elites exploiting them to loot the national patrimony as much about the causes, costs and impacts of internal conflicts remains essentially domestic, but its international dimensions are usually germane and often telling. Embattled governments invite outsiders in; internal conflicts spread across borders; war within states feed off and sustain commercial penetrations; intergovernmental and externally based non-governmental relief operations establish their presence; and these conflicts evoke an array of external interventions ranging from military infiltrations to United Nations (UN) Security Council enforcement engagements authorised under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter. Criminality is now a significant factor in the internationalisation of internal conflict and hence the comprehension of internal wars therefore requires an appreciation of their international dimensions and implications (Walensteen and Sollenberg 593-600)b. Without denying their significant international dimensions, definitions of intra-state wars focus primarily on domestic origins; events fought between self-aware, defined groups that have organisational capacities to plan and carry out military operations in support of political goals. When viewed as insurgencies, internal wars comprise unconventional armed violence organises to either topple an existing regime or secede from an existing state, (Snow 65 & Thakur 117), a distinctive feature is the widespread entanglement of civilians as agents and victims; and such risk overt targeting by protecting and harbouring combatants, operating inside borders and without sanctuaries to which they can withdraw. This confinement intensifies internal wars, combatants and civilians alike forced to live by the knowledge that, should they survive, they will likely have to physically coexist as former enemies and the evenge enacted locally as an end in itself confuses wide objectives, complicating agreement about negotiating priorities or settlement implementation within and between warring factions. Some internal conflicts drag on for so long that few involved retain notions of the originating casus belli or political purpose, the conflict in Angola being an example and to revise Hobbes, internal wars are nasty, brutish and long, (Alley 6) Impacts upon international politics Internal conflicts now cost the international community in a variety of ways. A first cost results from habituation to crisis as the trigger resource mobilisation and claims that such mobilisation is either too little and too late, or that one ounce prevention would have proven more than a pound of cure or less important than another effect. This is a perception, rightly or wrongly construed within conflicts locations, that it takes eruptions of death and violence to activate the wavelengths communicating demands to, and receive responses from the international community Vindicating those beliefs is the increasing militarization of humanitarian assistance into internal conflict settings but although not deliberately intended, this had the effect of crowding out, postponing or partitioning off longer-term development agendas and functions. Issues that loo large for the conventional diplomatic discourse, as potential threats for relations between states, seem to subside once confined within borders. This is a dubious assumption, given the scope of intra-state conflict over water, narcotics and access to mineral resources, to protect internationally. A second cost is conceptual: segregated responses ignore the linkages that facilitate internal war which if neglected, leave the international community groping for coherent responses which include medical, demographic, social and migrant impacts; internal conflicts as seedbeds for readily exportable technologies of disorder, terror and destabilisation; encouragement to transnational crime; and capacity to compromise private sector/governmental relationships. Collapsing state functions, and degradation of the rule of law, intimidate peaceful dispute settlement and reward resort to the gun in the lethal micro-politics of revenge, personal enrichment and political destabilisation International humanitarian laws and internal conflict resolutions Alley (9) argues that international humanitarian law and internal conflict coexist, at times in uneasy juxtaposition. Internal conflicts feed from, and create grey area conditions where civilian/combatant distinctions, essential for international humanitarian law differences, stay deliberately blurred, hat is clouded by conflicts that aggravate internal displacement, enlists child soldiers, and mobilise financial resources through private militias. The hesitancy with which international humanitarian law and international law have confronted internal conflict is regrettable, although most censure justifiable rests with state party failure to meet international humanitarian law obligations entered into and despite progress, observations of relevant compliance and conceptual deficiencies confronting the application of international humanitarian laws within internal conflict is haphazard. Consolidation of customary international law over non-denotable, peremptory norms criminalizing egregious violations, the statutes and outcomes of the ad hoc tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and inception of the international criminal court notwithstanding, an incomplete regime of international humanitarian law application to internal conflict prevails International consequences According to Alley (12), internal conflict capacity to project upheavals upon the international community will not reduce quickly. Indeterminacy regarding grounds for intervention, for example, extends beyond small localised conflicts, although intrusion need not generate unwanted precedents elsewhere, bouts of popular inhumanity, fed by ethnic fear and unconscionable leadership, remain international challenges effectively unmet so far as agreed grounds for intervention criteria are concerned; either neglecting that need or getting it wrong risks serious international harm. Projections of an international political community persistently mishandling the causes and consequences of intra-state conflict exist as one observer warns that the fusion of development and security objectives has given western governments the operational tools needed for selective intervention. Although doing so with some hyperbole foresees a world in which a vast and glittering wealth gap separates the core ad crisis regions, in which dynamic areas are security ring-fenced while those conflagrations within the seething hinterland that threaten core interests are policies by politically mobile and technologically replete humo-cops. It neither does nor exaggerates to claim prominent feature of that divide exist An alternative projection looks less apocalyptically to mixed outcomes reflecting greater willingness and improved results to tackle the core sources – despair, division and discrimination – driving internal conflict. Regarding the possibility as dependent upon political choice, there is a possibility that might encourage individuals, citizen groups, intellectuals and indeed political leaders to recognize the long-term security significance of what has happened and to redouble efforts towards a more equitable and stable world. These inspirations are widely echoed, while efforts to achieve them have produced tangible results in some fields. There is need for reflection as to whether the attempts can progress under an international dispensation based o sovereign state collaboration dominated by existing political and security hierarchies. Those systems operate from assumptions that conflicts comprise finite properties amenable to bargaining, negotiating and conclusions via instruments such as treaties and peace accords. Where the sinews of any conflict concerned are to snarled for such itemization or squaring off, the challenge is one of reforming and reshaping relationships driving that complexity, some domestically based, other primarily external and still other transnational Conclusion Although a substantial agenda, without the simultaneous advancement of reforming and reshaping relationships that drive complexity, long-term lasting international impacts deriving from internal conflicts are substantial. Unsafe are three legged structures where any one support is missing. Frameworks through which to remedy internal conflicts include an appropriately designed, funded and continuing programme of international assistance for educational, judicial, medical, infrastructural and economic purposes, there is the need for essential security including reduced criminality, impunity and arms availability, these objectives backed by employment and training opportunities for the demobilised. Another component entails democratising processes facilitating rights protection and promotion, lawfully conducted elections; and effective public institutions Although now largely neglected, the League of Nations minorities system advanced the principle that state sovereignty was subject to constraints through the international defence of human rights extending beyond individuals to national minorities. While it has a commissioner for human rights, the UN has not emulated the Organisational for Cooperation and security in Europe by establishing a commissioner for minorities. Nor is there a UN version of the Council of Europe’s framework Convention for the protection of national minorities in force since 1995. Conceivably has such a function existed, backs by better use of the Un Charter Chapter VI peaceful settlement of disputes provisions, ethnic cleansing episodes in the former Yugoslavia might have been averted. Croatia has recognised as an independent state despite the Badinter Commission’s warnings over the entity failure to reduce the constitutional changes needed to protect the interests of minorities interests that are much said the resultant of the international conflicts. Works cited Alley, Roderick Martin, Internal Conflict and the International Community: Wars Without End? Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2004. Print Snow, Donald M. Uncivil wars. International security and the new internal conflcts. Boulder, CO: Lynne Riener, 1996. Thakur, Ramesh (2001), ‘Research Note. Cambodia, East Timor and the Brahimi Report’. Internationa Peacekeeping. 8 (3) pp. 115-124 Walensteen, Peter and Margareta Sollenberg (1998) a, ‘Armed Conflict and region conflict complexes, 1989-97’, Journal of peace research. 35(5) pp. 621-634. Walensteen, peter and Margareta Sollenberg (1999) b, ‘Armed Conflict, 1989-98’, Journal of peace research. 36(5) pp. 593-606. Read More