34 Scarcity and Surfeit11 J D Singer, Armed conflict in the former colonial regions: From classification to
explanation, Between development and destmtion. An enquiry into the causes of
conflict in post-colonial states. L Van de Goor with K Rupesinghe & P Sciarone
(eds), The MacMillan Press Ltd, London & New York, 1996, p 35.
12 Center for Systemic Peace. op cit, pp 3-4. Singer corroborates this assertion by
saying that these tendencies have "been with us for nearly half a century" and
that they went unnoticed because "most of us living in the 'First' and 'Second'
worlds were too preoccupied with the senselessness of our own confrontation to
notice the death and destruction going on elsewhere". Singer, op cit, p 35.
13 The former Yugoslavia erupted in a vicious civil war, still reverberating in Kosovo
and Macedonia; conflict erupted between Moscow and the former Soviet
republics of Azerbaijan and Tajikistan; and between Armenia and Azerbaijan
over Nagorno-Karabah; and within the Russian republic over Chechnya.
14 K Rupesinghe with S Ni Anderlini, Civil wars, civdpeace. An introduction to con-
flict resolution. Pluto Press, London 1998, p 8.
15 A J Longman, Downward trend in armed conflicts reversed, p 4. c http://www.fsw.
leidenuniv.nl/www/w3~liswo/Newsletter8l/in~its~search~for~root~causes~of.
htm>. See also P Wallensteen and MSollenberg, Armed conflict, 1989-1998,
Journal of Peace Research, vol 36, no 5, 1999, pp 593-606.
16 H Miall with 0 Ramsbotham & T Woodhouse, Contemporary conflict resolution,
Polity Press, Cambridge & Oxford, 1999, p 66.
17 In this regard see Van Creveld, The transformation of war; Free Press, 1991; K J
Holsti. The state, war, and the state of war. Cambridge Studies in International
Relations, Cambridge University Press, 1996 and M Kaldor. New & old wars.
Organized violence in a global era. Polity Press, Cambridge & Oxford, 1999. The
concept of 'Wars of the Third Kind' was originally developed by Edward Rice in
his Wars of the third kind: Conflict in underdeveloped countries, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1988.
18 M Van Creveld, op cit, p 20. Furthermore, contemporary wars are tactically fought
with a mixture of guerilla warfare, terrorism and counter-insurgency. They are
not fought for the capture or control of territory as in conventional or regular war,
in that "the aim is to control the population by getting rid of everyone of a dif-
ferent identity (and indeed of a different opinion)" through the use of means such
as mass killings, forcible resettlement, as well as political, psychological and eco-
nomic techniques of intimidation. M Kaldor, op cit, p 8.
19 As was previously pointed out, the small units characteristic of contemporary
armed conflict deliberately target civilians, use terror and intimidation to harness
popular support, and attrition and/or hit-and-run attacks. The perceived struc-
tural change in warfare has led many authors to attempt to predict how warfare
will be characterised in the future. For instance, Kumar Rupesinghe et a1 pro-
posed five broad trends for the future of warfare, namely, the privatisation of
state armies, the growth of militias and local warlords, the deliberate targetting
of civilians and children, narco-guerillas and criminality and finally the re-emer-
gence of mercenary soldiers. Rupesinghe et al, op cit, p 51.
20 As pointed out by Le Billon, "With the end of the Cold War and the resulting sharp
drop in foreign assistance to many governments and rebel groups, belligerents have