4 Scarcity and Surfeit
'Velvet Revolution' was the exception rather than the rule in a Cold War tran-
sition characterised by turbulence and instability.I3 In addition, the end of
superpower patronage to client movements worldwide was considered to
have created a power vacuum whose inevitable results would include "the
spread of violence and the emergence of disparate groups, ostensibly fighting
in the name of ideology, religion or ethnicity, but seeking to finance their
operations through local taxation, plunder and pillage".
However defined, these conflicts had in fact become the rule in a world
that was fast changing from the predictability of bipolarity to a vaguely
defined unipolar 'New World Order'. This caused a fundamental shift in the
analysis of war and armed conflict, a shift that permeated all disciplines that
focused on this most destructive of human activities. These became the con-
flicts that mattered, for not only could they threaten global peace and secu-
rity in their tendency to metastise to neighhouring countries, but they also
caused unprecedented levels of human and material destruction. Largely
focused on a 'clausewitzian universe' of interstate wars, academia and
policy-making circles in the West were largely unprepared for the task of
explaining such 'societal conflicts'. The tools of strategic and war studies
seemed increasingly irrelevant to explain ethno-nationalism, religious mili-
tancy, environmental degradation, resource scarcity, preventive diplomacy,
peacekeeping or humanitarian intervention.
In fact, after the end of the Cold War and in particular the latter half of the
1990% the incidence of such conflicts increased. Conflict monitoring projects
such as those led by Schmid and Longman (PIOMM) and Wallensteen and
Sollenberg (SIPRI) have found a disturbing escalatory trend in the occurrence
of violent conflicts. While a total of 22 high-intensity conflicts were being
fought worldwide in mid-1995, this number rose to 25 by November 1999.
Equally perturbing was the increase in low-intensity conflicts which rose
from a low of 31 in 1996 to a high of 77 by mid-1999. On a lower violence
threshold, violent political conflicts also increased dramatically, from a low of
40 in 1995 to a staggering 151 in mid-1999.15 As Miall, Ramsbotham and
Woodhouse found, this raises the following question:
"What are we to call these conflicts? Current terminology includes 'inter-
nal conflicts' (Brown (ed) 1996), 'new wars' (Kaldor and Vashee (eds)
1997), 'small wars' (Harding 1994), 'civil wars' (King 1997), 'ethnic con-
flicts' (Stavenhagen 1996), 'conflict in post-colonial states' (Van de Goor
et a1 (eds) 1996) and so on, as well as various expressions used by
humanitarian and development NGOs and international agencies, such as
'complex human emergencies' and 'complex political emergencies .. ."IIf war had in fact changed, its transformation needed to be explained. It is in
this context that the 'structural transformation of war' proposition was put
forward by, among others, Martin Van Creveld, Kalevi Holsti and Mary