![]() The North Atlantic Alliance has been rapidly transforming itself, since 2002 in particular, to focus on supplying organized multilateral forces for conflict missions outside its own area, rather than on Euro-Atlantic territorial defence as before. Practically every one of the agencies in the UN system – notably UNHCR, the UN High Commission on Human Rights, FAO, UNICEF, World Bank and UNDP – owes a significant part of its work-load to the impact of conflict on societies and individuals. The report on current security threats and challenges that was commissioned by the UN Secretary-General in 2003 from an international High Level Panel, and was published in December 2004, devoted some of its most fully-developed and urgent proposals to the issues both of intervention and prevention (see further below). While the EU has perhaps been most insistent on keeping conflict issues to the forefront of its agenda, every significant international institution that deals with security today has to confront the demands of conflict management – and where possible, conflict prevention. Rather, as the Strategy argues, “The most practical way to tackle the often elusive new threats will sometimes be to deal with the older problems of regional conflict”. ![]() “Conflict can lead to extremism, terrorism and state failure it provides opportunities for organized crime… Regional insecurity can fuel the demand for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)”. In short, the Europeans would argue that the new security agenda focussed on the “asymmetrical threats” of trans-national terrorism and WMD proliferation, which the USA has been promoting since the attacks it suffered on 11 September 2001, should not displace the issue of conflict from the central place it held in the security preoccupations of the 1990’s. After pointing out that conflicts since 1990 have killed nearly 4 million people worldwide and rendered 18 million homeless, the Strategy argues that developing nations can all too easily get trapped in a cycle of “conflict, insecurity and poverty”. The Security Strategy document “A Secure Europe in a Better World” adopted by the leaders of the European Union (EU) at the end of 2003 provides an unusually forthright statement of how developed states in one area of the world view the resulting challenges for themselves. They carry more complicated material implications for non-combatant states because of the generally increasing interdependence and “globalization” of the world economy. They produce more shock and shame, as well as concern, in the onlooker because they appear as exceptions to the trend of stabilization in inter-state and inter-regional relations since 1990 and as a reversion to “pre-modern” methods of behaving in the global society. Localized and active conflicts have attracted proportionately much greater attention since the ending of the East-West Cold War and, with it, of the essentially static military confrontation in Europe that had carried the potential for global annihilation. There can be no doubt about the dominance of conflict as a concern in modern security analysis and policy. There is nothing wrong in talking about economic, social, religious or philosophical “conflict”, but these other manifestations of human disunity are relevant to the present study only if or when they trigger an armed confrontation on a more than individual scale. The qualifier “armed” means that we are talking here about violence that uses weapons against the life and limb of the opponent, and that takes place at some level above the purely personal, domestic, and criminal. Elastic though the term is, however, it will be used in what follows with some fundamental restrictions. “Conflict” may occur between states, within states and between non-state actors it can involve forces acting on their own territory, or far away it does not have to have a single identified “aggressor”, or to be aimed at physical “conquest”, or to be preceded by a single identifiable “dispute” in other form. If the terminology of “conflict” has come largely to replace, and certainly to overshadow, these earlier concepts during the later half of the 20 th century, it is because it can so conveniently be used to encompass a number of different types and sources of armed violence. Instead – and understandably given the time of its genesis – the text refers to “disputes”, “aggression” and protecting the world’s peoples from the threat of “war”. Interestingly enough, the word “conflict” does not appear in the Charter of the United Nations.
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