Mary Kaldor

Why do politicians think that war is the answer to terror when military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere has made things worse? Why do some conflicts never end? And how is it that practices like beheadings, extra-judicial killings, the bombing of hospitals and schools and sexual slavery are becoming increasingly common? In this book, renowned scholar of war and human security Mary Kaldor introduces the concept of global security cultures in order to explain why we get stuck in particular pathways to security. A global security culture, she explains, involves different combinations of ideas, narratives, rules, people, tools, practices and infrastructure embedded in a specific form of political authority, a set of power relations, that come together to address or engage in large-scale violence. In contrast to the Cold War period, when there was one dominant culture based on military forces and nation-states, nowadays there are competing global security cultures. Defining four main types - geo-politics, new wars, the liberal peace, and the war on terror she investigates how we might identify contradictions, dilemmas and experiments in contemporary security cultures that might ultimately open up new pathways to rescue and safeguard civility in the future.

Mary Kaldor's New and Old Wars has fundamentally changed the way both scholars and policy-makers 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. Kaldor's 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 third edition has been fully revised and updated. Kaldor has added an afterword answering the critics of the New Wars argument and, in a new chapter, Kaldor shows how old war thinking in Afghanistan and Iraq greatly exacerbated what turned out to be, in many ways, archetypal new wars - characterised by identity politics, a criminalised war economy and civilians as the main victims. Like its predecessors, the third 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.

The terms 'global' and 'civil society' have both become part of the contemporary political lexicon. In this important new book, Mary Kaldor argues that this is no coincidence and that the reinvention of civil society has to be understood in the context of globalization. The concept of civil society is no longer confined to the borders of the territorial state. Whether one considers dissidents in repressive regimes, landless labourers in Central America, campaigners against land mines or global debt, or even religious fundamentalists, it is now possible for them to link up with other like-minded groups in different parts of the world and to address demands not just to national governments but to global institutions as well. This has opened up new opportunities for human emancipation, and, in particular, for going beyond war as a way of managing global affairs. But it also entails new risks and insecurities. This is a book about a political idea - an idea that came out of the 1989 revolutions. It is an idea that expresses a real phenomenon, even if the boundaries and shape of the phenomenon are contested and subject to constant redefinition. The study of past debates as well as the actions and arguments of the present is a way of directly influencing the phenomenon, and of contributing to a changing reality, if possible for the better. The task is all the more urgent in the aftermath of September 11. Global Civil Society will be read by students of politics, international relations and sociology, as well as activists, policy-makers, journalists and all those engaged in global public debates.