CENTRAL CURRENTS IN GLOBALIZATION Globalization and Violence VOLUME 4 Transnational Conflict EDITED BY Paul James and R.R. Sharma Introduction and editorial arrangement © Paul James and R.R. Sharma 2006 First published 2006 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge all the copyright owners of the material reprinted herein. However, if any copyright owners have not been located and contacted at the time of publication, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-42, Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi 110 017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 1-4129-1954-1 (set of four volumes) Library of Congress Control Number: Typeset by Star Compugraphics Private Limited, Delhi Printed on paper from sustainable resources Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Contents VOLUME 4 TRANSNATIONAL CONFLICT A Critical Introduction viii SECTION 1 Historical Developments 62. C.A. Bayly 5 ‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena 63. Adam McKeown 32 Global Migration: 1846–1940 64. Joseph S. Nye and Robert O. Keohane 64 Transnational Relations and World Politics: A Conclusion SECTION 2 Refugees, Slaves and Regimes of Global Displacement 65. Kevin Bales 97 Expendable People: Slavery in the Age of Globalization 66. Myron Weiner 117 Bad Neighbours, Bad Neighbourhood: An Enquiry into the Causes of Refugee Flows 67. Barry R. Posen 153 Military Responses to Refugee Disaster 68. Jeff Crisp 190 Refugees and the Global Politics of Asylum 69. Liisa H. Malkki 204 News from Nowhere: Mass Displacement and Globalized ‘Problems of Organization’ 70. Stephen Castles 213 Globalization and Migration: Some Pressing Contradictions vi Contents SECTION 3 Diasporas and Transnational Violence 71. James Clifford 227 Diasporas 72. Charles King and Neil J. Melvin 264 Diaspora Politics 73. Asafa Jalata 293 Ethnonationalism and the Global ‘Modernizing’ Project 74. Rowena Robinson 315 Virtual War: The Internet as the New Site for Global Religious Conflict SECTION 4 Debating the Sources of Insecurity 75. Mary Kaldor 337 Nationalism and Globalization 76. Albert J. Bergenson and Omar Lizardo 355 International Terrorism and the World System 77. Jean-Germain Gros 374 Trouble in Paradise: Crime and Collapsed States in the Age of Globalization 78. Anamaria Dutceac 396 Globalization and Ethnic Conflict: Beyond the Liberal Nationalist Distinction SECTION 5 Critical Projections 79. Jonathan Friedman 427 Transnationalism, Socio-political Disorder, and Ethnification as Expressions of Declining Global Hegemony 80. Paul James 448 Relating Global Tensions: Modern Tribalism and Postmodern Nationalism 81. Gerard Delanty 471 Cosmopolitanism and Violence: The Limits of Global Civil Society Preface Globalization and Violence The first set of volumes in the ‘Central Currents in Globalization’ series takes a particularly pressing manifestation of human relations – violence – and ex- plores its changing nature in relation to the various processes of globalization. It is organized across the four volumes beginning with the historically-deep practice of empire-building Volume 1, Globalizing Empires: old and New. Imperial extension contributed to the processes of globalization to the extent that states sought to claim military and political control over extended reaches of territories – other places and peoples – that they imagined in terms of a ‘world-space’. This was the case whether we talk of the Roman Empire in the first century or the British Empire in the nineteenth century, even though they are very different polities. The first volume covers the theme of empire right through to contemporary debates about globalization and Pax Americana. Volume 2, Colonial and Postcolonial Globalizations, takes up that same story, but examines the process from the perspective of the periph- ery rather than from the centre. It begins with Second Expansion of Europe and colonization in the mid-nineteenth century. It takes in the violence of de- colonization across the world in the period through to the 1960s, and it con- siders the question of contemporary postcolonial violence – not just military, but broader questions of structural violence today. Volume 3, Globalizing War and Intervention, examines the changing nature of military intervention, including the remarkable shift in the form of violence across the globe from interstate violence to intrastate conflict in the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries. This volume includes a section on one of the most dramatic instances of global violence in our time – terrorism and the War on Terror. The emphasis here is on ‘violence from above’, as it were – violence that is in some way institutionalized or directed with the power of sovereign body. Finally, Volume 4, Transnational Conflict, complements the third volume by examining the different forms of transnational and intra-state violence in the world today, what might be called ‘violence from below’. In all of the volumes we are concerned to understand both the globalizing processes and the more general effects of empire in world history. Paul James Transnational Conflict: A Critical Introduction Paul James and R.R. Sharma Transnational conflict, as the term suggests, is a phenomenon that relates to tensions over sovereignty, equity and identity associated with the global- ization of violence in the context of a global system of nations and nation- states. If a nation-state is minimally defined as a sovereign polity with proclaimed territorial boundaries administering to a national community or communities (with the plural here intentional), then, in a simple defin- itional sense, conflict can be said to be trans-national if the violence or the consequences of and support for that violence crosses the borders of nations including those within a state. This is a reasonable starting point. However, the meaning of the concept has more precise connotations. If we left the definition at that, the term ‘transnational conflict’ would refer to almost every kind of political violence or tension in the world today. For a long time now, processes of globalization have generalized the consequences and patterns of most political violence, including that between nation-states. The previous volume Globalizing War and Intervention, Volume 3 covered this process of the globalization of conflict, including the deep history of globalizing wars and the more recent emergence of global wars. The present volume, however, focuses more particularly on violent conflict that not only crosses borders but also begins either to elude or to challenge the sovereignty and organizational capacities of existing nation- states. Here, as in the other volumes in the set of four volumes on ‘Globaliza- tion and Violence’, we are interested in certain forms of conflict and tension – that is, violent conflict, ranging from the violence of globalizing terrorism as it moves across borders to the more systemic violence of contemporary regimes of slavery and indentured labour as those regimes gets embedded in the structures of global capitalism.1 In this sense, the concept of ‘transnational conflict’ came into use to counter the tendency, both in everyday use and across all of the social sciences, to treat nation-states as integral and comfortably-contained units of power – units that pre-exist and then enter into international relations. In political discourse in the West from the early part of the twentieth century to the 1990s the words ‘society’ and ‘nation’ tended to be used interchangeably; and in many contexts this continues to be so used even till today. This conflation is known in the critical literature as ‘methodological nationalism’. It is the  A Critical Introduction ix tendency to treat nation-states as if they form the natural boundaries of societies, and in many cases, to simply assume that nation-states and societies are the same thing. In the 1970s, the term ‘transnational’ began to be used to point to pro- cesses of interchange that could not be contained by this black-box under- standing of nation-states.2 In particular it came to refer to non-governmental relations occurring across nation-state borders. In the mainstream literature, particularly in debates over the nature of international relations, one ap- proach began to look at transnational organization or interactions involving actors within the same organizations on two sides of a shared border.3 In the critical theory literature, particularly in Marxist and World Systems theory writing on neo-imperialism, the term ‘transnational corporation’ came into use as an attempt to displace the narrowing implications of the term ‘multi- national corporation’. The latter term suggested that globalizing corporations were located within a nation-state and then bridged into a multiple set of other national economies. The term ‘multinational corporation’ made sense in terms of analyses that centred on the particular locales of corporate head- quarters or factory production and distribution. However, countering this methodologically narrow way of conceiving of organization, production and exchange, a number of writers argued that although those globalizing corporations might have nationally-based headquarters, their overall market operations – their relations of organization, production and exchange in- cluding the way in which they used global systems of value – were more accurately described as translocated or constituted across nation-state borders.4 That is, corporations might be nationally based or multinational in terms of their predominant core of operation, but in a more abstract sense they were now located in a globalizing system that required them to be transnational whether that was their intention or not. This is most obvious in financial terms where, for example, the notes of the monetary exchange systems might carry the signature of the state, but they depend on global exchange for their value (see Volume 6, Globalizing Finance and the New Global Economy). In this same sense, ‘transnational conflict’ as a concept came to refer not so much to conflict between nation-states as to conflict that either flows across nation-state borders or challenges the sovereign control of those nation-states. This is not to suggest that the nation-state is fading away or that it has no part to play in this process. Neither is it to suggest that we are moving from a modern era into a postmodern era where the form of conflict is completely deterritorialized. It is rather to argue for a more complicated understanding of the global setting in which nation-states continue to exist, and formations of modernism and postmodernism overlay each other. x A Critical Introduction To the extent that a kind of methodological nationalism prevails in many quarters, with the nation-state presumed to be the basic framing social for- mation that is being traversed, the concept of ‘transnational conflict’ has limitations, but there is no necessity for this being the case. ‘Transnational conflict’ is used in the present volume and throughout the series in a historically-demarcated and specific sense. Employed with care, the concept is useful as more precisely denoting a phenomenon that is a subcategory of, but not the same as, the more general concepts of ‘globalizing conflict’ and ‘transborder conflict’. As long as the boundaries of the nation-state are taken to be contingent, then the concept of ‘transnational conflict’ serves to give historical and social specificity to a form of violence that has become pre- dominant in the last few decades – conflict that exists both within and across nation-state boundaries, and that does not primarily involve nation-states in interstate conflict. This perspective was expressively implied, perhaps for the first time, in the UNDP Report of 1994. It stated that with the dark shadows of the Cold War receding, one can now see that many conflicts are within nations rather than between nations. For most people, a feeling of insecurity arises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of cataclysmic world event. Will they and their families have enough to eat? Will they lose their jobs? Will they be tortured by a repressive state? Will they become a victim of violence because of their gender? Will their religion or ethnic origin target them for persecution … Human security is not a concern with weapons – it is a concern with human life and dignity.5 In using the phrase ‘within nations’ to specify the new predominance of transnational violence, the UNDP Report still misses out the way in which such violence tends to have globalizing implications as it stretches along diasporic networks,6 financial support pathways, internet webs7 and arma- ments supply chains, to name just a few. However, it marks an early stage in the increasing recognition of shift away from the predominance of inter- state violence in global politics. Before going any further we also need to explain the structure of the present volume. Why, if ‘transnational conflict’ is being used here as concept that refers to relations of violence stretched across and challenging the borders of existing nations and nation-states, does the volume begin with a section that goes back to the time of empires, kingdoms and other forms of states. This was a period before the consolidation of the nation-state system. It is generally accepted in the nationalism literature that while some nations may have come into existence before the system of nation-states, nation- states themselves did not become a feature of the global landscape before the nineteenth century. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, if nation- states existed at all, they were subordinate to a more general state-system.  A Critical Introduction xi Absolutist states, kingdoms, empires and religious sodalities battled it out in an emerging system of increasingly institutionalized state relations that had become known as the Westphalian system. The notion of the ‘Westphalian system’ is now commonly used in International Relations theory and refers back the treaties of the seventeenth century, including the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, that institutionalized the process of ‘sovereign’ rulers conducting foreign affairs and concluding treaties with other rulers. We begin with this period because it provides necessary background to processes that have continuities to the past but are surfacing in the world in new ways. For example, in his contribution to this volume Kevin Bayles writes: The globalization process is especially clear in the economy. Where the nation- state promoted and organized trade and created and regulated money, glob- alized trade and money are freeing themselves of national controls and becoming supra-national activities. In slavery there is a clear parallel; the nation-state is of diminishing significance in understanding or dealing with slavery, as the dispersal of slavery as an economic activity continues unabated. In the 19th century, slavery was a social and economic relationship that was tied to and regulated by nation-states. Slavery, like marriages or business con- tracts, was given precise legal status enforceable within the boundaries of a state … But new forms of slavery are not just outcomes of economic global- ization, they are part of the globalization process itself.8 In order to situate such contemporary developments, the body of the present volume thus begins with the first modern expansion of the European empires, including the development of the slave trade as a form of ‘structural’ violence as it moved from culture and trade contact on the frontiers of em- pire to embodied exploitation that transported people in chains to the other side of the globe. This coverage complements Volume 1, Globalizing Empires: Old and New. However, whereas the focus of that volume was more on the structural conditions of the globalizing empires, we are using the first section of the present volume to provide specific historical background to contem- porary developments. After that contextualizing section, the emphasis of the present volume Transnational Conflict then shifts to the period from the later part of the twentieth century and into the present. The volume does not directly focus on the violence of decolonization: that theme is covered by Volume 2, Colonial and Postcolonial Globalizations. Rather it concen- trates on contemporary transnational conflict and structural violence: contemporary processes of border-crossing including the international slave trade, refugees fleeing from conflict, modern diasporas, and long-distance nationalists supporting ethnic conflicts in other places. The ‘sources of in- security’ debate refers to the contention over whether the violence arises from local or global sources, immediate changes on the ground and local xii A Critical Introduction enmities or more generalized shifts brought about by the changing nature of state formation and globalizing relations. In this introduction the structure follows are slightly different path from the structure of the body of the volume. Taking the earlier definitional dis- cussion as our point of departure, we broaden this into a general discussion of the question of globalization and conflict. Then, as a way of providing background for the themes of the overall volume, we focus on mapping the forms of globalization in relation to the forms of transnational violence. In particular, we focus on the issues of diaspora violence, the role of so-called ‘failed states’, and the impact of changing zones of war including the rise of global terrorism. Globalization and Conflict In mapping the links between the globalization and conflict, it is important to enter the discourse through a discussion of globalization in relation to issues as broad as human security, social change and social disruption. Our implicit assumption is that there is a generalized relation between glob- alization and conflict – including transnational conflict of the violent kind – based on the argument that social disruption is often associated with increasing tensions and conflict. We are not arguing that globalization directly causes transnational violence. Neither does this suggestion of a generalized relation imply that the descent from conflict into violence is a necessary outcome or a characteristic of globalization per se. Rather we are interested in examining the way that the various processes of globalization contribute to unsettling existing life-worlds, accentuating past and present cleavages of identity politics, intensifying the communicative bases for making eco- nomic and social comparisons, increasing the objective divisions of wealth or disrupting both older authority structures and putting pressure on modern state operations, particularly postcolonial states (see Volume 2, Colonial and Postcolonial Globalizations). This broad connection between globalization, conflict and violence is possible to maintain within the terms of most of the often-cited definitions of globalization. David Held, Anthony McGrew and Jonathan Perraton suggest, for example, that globalization can be defined as a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions, assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact – generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction and the exercise of power.9  A Critical Introduction xiii Conflict and violence do not carry through explicitly as themes in their broader discussions, and nor should they – at least in the first instance. There is nothing intrinsic about contemporary globalization-in-itself that makes for increasing violence. In the terms set out by Held and his co- authors, globalization is characterized by four types of change. Firstly, it in- volves a stretching of social, political and economic activities across frontiers, regions and continents. Secondly, it is marked by the intensification, or the growing magnitude, of interconnectedness and flows of trade, investment, finance, migration and culture. Thirdly, it can be linked to the spreading of global interactions and processes as the unfolding of world-wide systems of transport and communication increases the velocity of the diffusion of ideas, goods, information, capital, and people. And fourthly, it can be associated with the deepening impact of global interactions and processes such that the effects of distant events can be highly significant elsewhere and specific local developments can come to have considerable global consequences. In this sense, after a relatively short period in world history when Western nation-states attempted to regulate all movement across their borders, the relation between domestic matters and global affairs has become increasingly fluid – at least at more abstract levels of interchange.10 From the present standpoint – and as we will see in a moment it is not the only possible standpoint – the intensification of globalization brings with it new lines of potential cleavage, and thus almost certain conflict (and possible violence). The process is one of intensifying change and impact, but it is not all one way. The practices and decisions of highly-localized groups can have significant global reverberations because localized events influence, and are influenced by global events. For example, when the Taliban in Afghanistan extended ‘traditional’ Islamic hospitality to Osama bin Laden, a two-way escalation of the conflict ensued – first as a refusal to meet the United States’ ultimatum to hand over bin Laden by modernist Afghani clerics trying to show their neo-traditional credentials; and secondly in the form of an invasion of Afghanistan by the United States-British war-machine later rationalized by postmodern rhetoric about ‘freedom’ being God’s gift to humanity. This quickly came to put pressure on the security of the global system as a whole even though the response could have been defined and practised in more contained terms, either regionally or globally. In this regard, it is pertinent to examine the local-global context of a range of polities and communities under threat across what has been called the ‘Arc of Insecurity’, from Africa and the Middle East through Central Asia to Southeast Asia. These polities and communities range from the poorly-named ‘failed states’ in the Global South to communities that are either experiencing continuing human insecurity in fast-developing countries such as India and China, or seeking to ameliorate emerging conditions before they take hold. In relation xiv A Critical Introduction to the narrowly category of war, it is significant that over 90 per cent of all wars since World War II have been fought in the Global South. From a different standpoint, one that takes globalization as a narrow empirical set of indicators, it is possible to argue that there is no connection between globalization and conflict at all. John Ishiyama’s recent essay at first read appears to be supporting such a view.11 In a study examining 102 minority groups across 34 different Global South countries he set out to test whether or not globalization contributes to increasing ethnic conflict in the world today. One of the mainstream views is that it does, especially in conjunction with the releasing of atavistic and primordial pressures. Ishiyama concludes that there is no such direct correlation. If we ignore the issue that Ishiyama’s study problematically reduces globalization to ‘increasing economic interdependence’ and that globalization is tested with a meth- odology that takes the nation-state as a given political container in country- by-country comparison (methodological nationalism again), his findings are interesting: increasing levels of globalization so defined in terms of a country- by-country globalization index brings increasing levels of ethnic awareness and political protest (low-level conflict), but ‘no direct relationship’ to com- munal violence. The key phrase here, however, is no direct relationship, and this does little to qualify our argument for a generalized relationship between globalization and the form of conflict and the overall patterns of violence. Thomas Friedman’s ‘Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention’ takes another standpoint again. Arguing from a position that seems to ignore history, he suggests that a certain level of economic development means a country will not go to war: In The Lexus and the Olive Tree I argued that to the extent that countries tied their economies and futures to global integration and trade, would act as a constraint to going to war with their neighbours … The Golden Arches Theory stipulated that when a country reached the level of economic development where it had a middle class big enough to support a network of McDonald’s, it became a McDonald’s country. And people in McDonald’s countries didn’t like to fight wars anymore. They preferred to stand in line for burgers.12 The position developed at length, replete with insulting characterizations of nation-states as McDonald’s countries or otherwise, as well as the implication that non-McDonald’s countries do not mind going to war, fell down almost as it was first enunciated. Two McDonald’s countries, the USA and Serbia, went to war just after the theory was announced. In reply to this critique, Friedman would say that he was not referring to interventions, civil wars, internal wars or border skirmishes. He thus however leaves out of his theory the predominant forms of conflict of the last half-century, a pattern of ‘intra- state violence’, ‘low-intensity conflicts’ (or what we would prefer to call  A Critical Introduction xv localized transnational violence) violence that still need to be explained. In addition, the recent propensity of affluent countries such as United States, Britain and Australia to enter into wars by invasion of countries such as Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan also needs explanation. His theory is doubly redundant given that since the period of the two world wars (as we will elaborate in a moment) conventional interstate wars have been on the relative decline anyway, with a significant shift towards localized transnational wars. When Raymond Kroc took over the McDonalds brothers’ franchise and set up the ‘first’ McDonalds’ restaurant in 1955 in Des Plaines, Illinois, the transformation was already well underway, and by the time the first McDonalds were opened outside the United States in 1967 – in Canada and that powerfully middle-class country (not) Puerto Rico – it might as well have been argued, given the historical sequence, that the changing nature of violence explains the spread of McDonalds. Friedman has since upgraded his theory to the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention which suggests that the spread of just-in-time global commodity supply-chains are an even more significant restraint of war than even the increasing standard of living sup- posedly brought about. Here, however, he has more explaining to do. Why was it in two successive world wars that countries with the most tightly- integrated economies in world history till that time – Britain, France and Germany – were at the centre of the conflagrations? Coming forward to the present, what is the impact today of the world’s armaments industries as they follow the same trend of global supply chains that Friedman describes as bringing about peace? In summary, in response to the general question ‘Does globalization cause increasing conflict or bring about a more peaceful world?’ we can say that it is not helpful to posit a simple causal link either way. What then is a more productive way of approaching this issue? If we begin from the broad socio- logical premise discussed in Volume 3, Globalizing War and Intervention, that conflict including war is part of all social formations across history, but that the patterns and forms of that violence are historically and spatially framed, then two key questions arise.13 ‘What are the main sources of conflict in the existing globalizing order?’ and ‘What is the changing nature of conflict and violence in relation to the effects of globalization?’ The underlying implication here in asking such questions is that if we are able to identify the sources of insecurity and to understand the structure of different forms of conflict, it should be possible to moderate different instance of conflict and violence, and resolve some of the arising issues in ways that have less deadly consequences than contemporary wars have had, for example, in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. Here the core assumptions of conventional international relations theory, including the assumptions of most conventional security studies, are unhelpful xvi A Critical Introduction in understanding the contemporary structure of transnational conflict. The particular structure of violence deemed to be strategically central in mainstream international relations theory is that violence is either caused by state-against-state military conflict or by a partial collapse of the network of strong sovereign states with violence breaking out in weak states. Given, as we will argue, that the dominant form of violence in the contemporary period is largely transnational in foundation rather than just centred on state formations, this leaves conventional international relations with little to say other than by repeating old mantras. ‘Realist’ theorists still assume that the most potent threats to global security emanate from other states (or from a particular state’s poor preparation for outside assaults), rather than from a changing relationship between states and non-state actors in the context of globalizing modes of practice. Even on a conventional under- standing, the evidence suggests that the vast body of violence and conflict comes from ‘within’ states, and therefore, this phenomenon should be the key reference point for a meaningful understanding the generalized assault on security. The events of 11 September 2001 loom as a ‘defining moment in history’, and yet within state departments and foreign affairs bureaux it seems to have contributed little to dissolving the core international relations myth that security is lodged in protecting one’s state borders. The evidence suggests that threats increasingly emanate from relationships that have already crossed those borders; relationships that are difficult to manage by ‘homeland security’ – at least not of the border-protection kind. Nevertheless, the dominant security approach has taken the universal value of human security and naturalized one form of its maintenance as the key to defending national communities: namely, a modern forward defence of bordered terri- tory stance. We have already quoted from the UNDP Report of 1994. Subsequent UNDP reports take this further and in a more penetrating way, particularly in relation to the nature of violence in world politics. Some of their major points deserve to be stated again and cast within the current framing awareness of globalization:
In the early 1990s, genocide occurred in Europe and Africa, with more than 200,000 people killed in 1992-95 and over 500,000 [probably closer to 800,000] killed in Rwanda in 1994.
Across the decade of the 1990s we saw a large decrease in deaths from interstate conflicts down to 200,000 people over the decade; down from nearly three times that in 1980s. However, nearly 3.6 million people were killed in wars within states in the 1990s.
During the 1990s the number of refugees and internally-displaced persons grew by 50 per cent.  A Critical Introduction xvii
During this period, half of the civilian war-casualties were children, and there were estimated 300,000 child-soldiers worldwide.14 The picture that is drawn is of a frighteningly violent world, with violence taking many forms and reaching deep into the life-worlds of people on the ground. The important point to note is that, in most cases, tensions in these regions are related to the negative impact of particular globally-patterned and inappropriate models of modernization and development on the life- worlds of the people of these regions. Thus the changing domestic envir- onment is characterized by dislocations caused by globally-connected forms of economic development and an associated undermining or distorting of traditional cultures, beliefs, and practices. In the light of the above, how do we conceptualize the existing patterns of violence? How do we come to grips with the very violent world we live in? What are the underlying causes of direct form of violence? Of course, these are complex questions. Decidedly, these cannot be answered within the framework of entrenched domain assumptions or straightforward em- pirical generalizations based upon state-by-state indicators. Forms of Globalization in Relation to Forms of Conflict In earlier volumes in the ‘Central Currents in Globalization’ series we dis- cussed the changing nature of globalization in terms of overlaying ontological formations of traditionalism, modernism and postmodernism. Traditional globalization, for example, we suggested has a long-run history and tended to be carried by empires and their agents or by people moving across the land- scape on trade routes. Expressed in spatial terms, traditional lines of global- ization tended to radiate outwards from and between imperial city-states or other cosmologically-understood centres of power. Modern processes of globalization tended (and tend now) to involve Cartesian lines and networks of extension, crossing and connecting centres of sovereign state authority. Postmodern globalization, by comparison, tends to generate post-territorial systems of abstracted sovereignty which have no overriding state centre and no last-instance centres of embodied authority. In the present period, we suggest, these forms of globalization overlay each other in contradictory ways. In this volume we want to carry that analysis forward but give it more specificity by distinguishing between different dominant kinds of glob- alism expressed in terms of modes of integration from the most concrete to the most abstract. It is simply another perspective on familiar processes that systematizes the form of extension as a series of levels from embodied global- ization to disembodied globalization. It will allow us to make some finer- grained distinctions in relation to the nature of transnational conflict today. xviii A Critical Introduction Embodied Extension Embodied globalization includes the movements of peoples across the world, the oldest form of globalism and a dominant characteristic of traditional globalization. This form is still current today in the staccato and regulated movements (not flows) of refugees, emigrants, and tourists. In relation to questions of transnational violence it remains relevant as pertaining to the question of globalizing diasporas and their support for insurgencies ‘back home’. We have always had diaspora populations across world history, but the ties that link different places have become more immediate. The difference today is the form and extent of those connections, not their newness as some authors have suggested. There are other continuities-discontinuities. For example, however postmodern the high-tech weapons of war have been become (that is, transcending of time and space), the brunt of the violence is still visited on the bodies of people. In fact, despite the possibility of precise- guided munitions (PGMs), the brunt of the new wars in terms of sheer deaths is now predominantly carried by civilians not soldiers. Civilian deaths as a proportion of deaths in war escalated to 10 per cent in World War I, to over 50 per cent in World War II, and to over 90 per cent of the 40 million killed since 1945. Object-extension Object-extended globalization involves the movements of objects, in particular traded commodities, as well as those most ubiquitous objects of exchange and communication: coins and stamps. It is no small irony that Nike is at once the (traditional) Greek goddess of military victory and also the name of a (modern/postmodern) globalized consumption object largely produced in the Global South on consignment to a company that no longer produces anything itself except a corporate advertising image. Here the most relevant cycles of object-extension for thinking about transnational violence include the bourgeoning arms bazaar,15 an industry that itself is going through the same phenomenon that Thomas Friedman talks about when he discusses the spread of outsourcing and just-in-time global commodity supply-chains. Agency or Institutionalized Extension Agency-extended globalization can be characterized by the movements of agents of institutions such as corporations and states so prominent today, though gaining ground quite early in the first millennium with the expansion- ist empire of Rome. In the present, this form of globalization is complicated by the bourgeoning number of non-governmental and international organ- izations (NGOs and IOs), networks, syndicates and cartels, with states as  A Critical Introduction xix only one form of transnational ‘actor’ amongst others. States were the key formation of institutionalized extension caught up in war-making up until 1945, but since then while a number of states have been involved in more than ten wars each – United Kingdom, India, Iraq, USA, France and China16 – the institutional framing of war has become much more complicated, in- cluding by the entry of a growing number of privatized military and security organizations. Disembodied Extension Disembodied globalization is defined in terms of the flows of ‘immaterial’ things and processes including images, electronic texts and encoded capital. This is the only new level of contemporary globalization, taking both modern and postmodern forms. It has its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, but it only really took off in a substantial way with the development of elec- tronic communications and computerized exchange of the late twentieth century.17 It is associated with processes of what is called ‘deterritorialization’, that is the crossing of older territorial boundaries (although it also generates new forms of reterritorialization including around the formation of diasporas subjectivity calling upon embodied ties but integrated increasing at the level of the disembodied). This is the least regulated form of globalization, with embodied globalization the most state-regulated. Indeed we can say that the more materially abstract the form of globalization, the least regulated by the state it seems to be. In relation to warfare, despite the continuing im- portance of embodied relations as we have been careful to underline, the military capacity of the larger powers, in particular the United States, is increasingly framed by disembodied practices – abstracted communications, reconnaissance, surveillance, force-delivery and systems management – all of which has been recently discussed in a vast technical literature and labelled the revolution in military affairs (RMA).18 Put most directly, the argument here is that in a world increasingly stretched between embodied and disembodied globalization the forms and patterns of violence are shifting with contradictory outcomes, including the intensi- fying of localized impacts and responses. In this process, the state has become a contested domain of ambiguous and contradictory power attempting to mediate between localizations and globalizations. Increased economic and cultural integration as well as juridical-normative global negotiation may indeed mean, in a general framing sense, that states are less likely to go to war with each other than 50 years ago, but on the other hand the contestation of power has become stretched more contradictorily than ever before between relations of embodied tension and abstract systems of power projection – and states are caught up in this ‘stretching’ as much as any other entity. xx A Critical Introduction If this point sounds a little complicated then an illustration should serve to clarify it. Contemporary globalizing conflict has, for example, brought to the fore the centrality of the global media, a disembodied medium for pre- senting electronic images around the world almost instantaneously in ‘real time’. Mass broadcasting via the internet or television is an objectively-ab- stracted medium used, for instance, by terrorists to promote their cause – there is no need for persons to carry their images and messages physically out into the world, no need for someone to stand in Times Square handing out leaflets about global Jihad. At the same time, the textual content and images that are projected are used to accentuate the embodied effects of specific practices in very specific locales. Beheading an American freelance telecommunications contractor or abducting an Australian civilian in Iraq has a powerful effect on publics in far-away places.19 This in turn draws Western states into behind-the-scenes interventions – even negotiations with ‘those whom we will never negotiate’ – because state leaders have to be seen to be doing something. These tensions can be seen in more detail as we discuss a series of issues over the next sections of the essay, beginning with the question of globalizing diaspora communities. Cultural Upheaval, Globalizing Diasporas and Transnational Violence The contemporary discourse on diasporas in international politics is largely focused on contemporary extensions of diasporic identity. There are however older diaspora that we need to remember. They were (and are) sustained by changing historical conjunctures from traditional kingdoms in Africa and early modern capitalism to the class-structured marginalization of many African Americans in the United States today. The work of writers such as Paul Gilroy and James Clifford brings out a complex history of the Afro- Caribbean diaspora. The writings evoke the historical depth of a diverse black diaspora culture and its various expressive forms of oppression and resistance linked to a particular lineage of plantation capitalism. In Gilroy’s words, ‘The history of black Atlantic, continually criss-crossed by the move- ment of black people – not only as commodities – but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy and citizenship, is a means to re-examine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory’.20 In his argument, the trans-Atlantic diaspora of Africans was constituted in a structure of globalizing violence. This does not mean, how- ever, that they were made over in the image of the antebellum New World. Such diaspora cultures are, as Clifford argues, ‘to a varying degrees, produced by regions of political domination and economic inequality. But the violent  A Critical Introduction xxi processes of displacement do not strip people of their ability to sustain dis- tinctive political communities and cultures of resistance … Fundamentally ambivalent, they grapple with the entanglement of subversion and the law, of invention and constraint.’21 As to understanding the present, Clifford suggests that one has to draw upon the embodied historical experiences of globally-dispersed communities caught up in a once-institutionalized structure that still has consequences today. In this light, it is hard to visualize mass transnational genealogical networks in the present not produced by conflict or not responding with ambivalence to the hegemony of western globalizing society.22 In the area of diaspora politics, the cultural trajectory of contemporary globalizations has a profound bearing on the nature of conflict. Notwith- standing the diverse theorizations of globalization, one conclusion common to most is the assertion of growing global cultural homogenization, at least at the level of electronically-transmitted culture. While some writers such as Malcolm Waters argue that globalization is a Westernizing project, entailing the diffusion of European culture across the globe,23 others such as Roland Robertson argue that globalization invariably brings cultural/religious differ- ences into sharp contrast, forcing people to respond to the presence of other religions.24 Both positions can be brought together in the ‘levels approach’ just outlined. Disembodied globalization engenders what Robertson calls a ‘localizing dialectic’, which takes various embodied forms across locales criss-crossed by layers of different conceptions temporality and spatiality. These responses include defiance, resignation, self-help, conflict, violent armed action, and so on. Such responses are sometimes articulated in confrontation with the hegemony and the false universality of Western culture. It is well established that cultural beliefs are interlocking, and they have a ‘strain to- wards consistency’. In the growing tensions between the ‘globalizing mod- ernity’ and continuing local and regional cultural traditions, people struggle to make sense of the discrepancies that occur in the intersection of layers of integration and differentiation. Elaborating this dimension, Edwin Gimode treats this as multilayered domination imposed by false globalization. ‘False globalization’ is a term that does not quite work, but it does point up how one intellectual from the Global South perceives the dominant form of glob- alization today: the existing false globalization denies dialogue, highlights differences in a discriminatory manner, establishes hegemony, intensifies domination among human beings in different forms – racial, cultural, religious and economic. It is to this multilayered domination … that the local, poor and dominated respond, refusing to die and stubbornly surviving.25 The outcome has been the renewal and revival (in a more reflexive form) of cultural-political expressions of identity: neo-traditional religious loyalties, xxii A Critical Introduction ethnic and racial identities, genealogical and linguistic differences.26 In very specific circumstances these are indeed precursor processes to violent conflict, even acts of embodied terrorism. This renewal draws together both people living in places that feel the tension, and those persons, lifted out of place, who look back upon the predicament of their compatriots from the distance of being refugees, migrants, guest workers or exiles somewhere else. It is this reflexive ‘looking back’ that makes for what are called diaspora communities – whether they are national or postnational in their orientation. Here we confront very different interpretations. Mary Kaldor, for example, believes that although there can be positive forms of nationalism the new diasporic nationalism is exclusivist, closer to religious fundament- alism and will contribute to ‘a wild anarchic form of globalisation’.27 By comparison, Arjun Appadurai, although still a cosmopolitan critic of the old nationalism, famously looks to postnationalism as a form of deterritor- ialized identity that will contribute to resolving the increasing levels of institutionalized violence in the world today. Supposedly postnationalism will usher in the end of the territorial nation-state and therefore get rid of one of the main sources of violence.28 Neither position is entirely satisfactory. Both writers are right to accentuate that the goals of emerging new nationalist movements and postnational sensibilities are stretched across local and global, and that the movements tend to be transnational in organizational and cultural terms. And both writers are right that the new nationalistic groups are able to garner support from various elements across the diaspora, including from individuals to non-governmental organizations and religious schools. It is here that the role of identity politics and subjectivities of embodiment come to the fore, even as communicated across long distances of spatial extension. Globalization has ignited identity as a motif of both conflict and interconnection. How then do we come to terms with diasporas and their politics? Are diaspora communities just older ethnic communities divided by state fron- tiers? Is their very existence a source of insecurity? There is no denying the fact that diaspora politics plays a significant role in the global affairs. Myriad ethnic groups are now spread across transnational frontiers, and their world- views and practices play a special role in several areas of national and global interest. There is a general perception among the scholars that transborder ethnic ties can be a locus of violence. Robert Harkavy and Stephanie and Neuman, for example, quite unselfconsciously use the term ‘ethnic conflict’ as almost a synonym for localized transnational wars.29 However, it is prob- lematic to come to a firm and generalized conclusion that diasporas per se are an abiding source of insecurity. Ethnicity seems rarely a direct basis for militarized violence, at least not by itself. One writer, though not represent- ative of the field of security studies, Klaus Gantzel, nominates ethnicity as the main cause of only three wars between 1945 and 1992.30 What we can  A Critical Introduction xxiii say is that while there is a strong argument to suggest that diasporic cultural politics are rarely innocent of narrow nationalist aims and chauvinist agendas, the consequences of that fact as a source of violence still need to be debated. As James Clifford argues in his contribution to the present volume, while some of the most violent articulations of purity and racial exclusivism came from diaspora populations … such discourses are usually weapons of the (relatively) weak … Whatever their ideologies of purity, diasporic cultural forms can never, in practice be exclusively nationalist. They are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode practices as well as accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and their norms.31 At the same time one cannot overlook the issue that like nation-states, dias- poras are in part constructed by political elites, who have their own agendas. This is particularly relevant in the realm of international relations where in the words of Charles King and Neil Melvin (also reproduced in the present volume) ‘identity politics is often more about politics than about identity’.32 The movement of the people from one part of the world to another raises further questions, particularly with regard to the intersection of in- security, cultural difference and economic inequity. The departure of a large number of working people from a region produces a strong impact both at national and local level, and is itself often produced by globally or regionally- framed civil conflict at home.33 The interim placement of refugees in mass camps is a setting for another kind of institutionalized violence.34 And the receiving country also faces problems when refugee reception or migrant movement is associated with sustained marking of differences across ethnic- racial-religious lines and compounded by restrictions of access to the job market. Through this process, over the long-term, the trends suggest that immigration and refugee movement often leads to dissension and conflict, and sometimes even to violence. However, it seems not to be the movement of people in itself that causes the violence, but rather the extent to which it is associated with continuing structural inequities and uncertainties. In some cases, we have seen localized backlashes escalate with global consequences. On 27 October 2005, riots began following an incident in Clichy-sous-Bois, an immigrant suburb of Paris with high unemployment. Teenagers running from the police, climbed a wall to hide in a power sub- station, and two of the boys, one of Malian background and another of Tunisian, were electrocuted; a third boy whose parents are Turkish Kurd was injured and hospitalized. Subsequently nine-thousand vehicles were torched in Paris across twenty days of rioting. Across late October and into early November, this initially very local incident spread across France and Europe as related fire-bombings and violence occurred in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, and Spain. By the beginning of December, a xxiv A Critical Introduction researcher could put ‘Zyed Benna’, the name of one of the teenagers who died, into the Google internet search-engine, and have 22,800 sources listed from across the web-connect globe. Here face-to-face relations – the grieving pain of family and friends – are overlaid with disembodied processes of global extension as ‘Zyed Benna’ becomes an iconic reference for patterns of embodied-disembodied interrelation. The local had ‘become’ global. Looking at the issue from the other way around – this time from a global- to-local rather than local-to-global perspective – there are several well- documented instances which reveal that globalized diasporic communities play a significant role in precipitating violence and conflict in localities a world away. Crucial support is extended in various guises and forms. These include financial support, networking at international fora, delivering arms and ammunition to diaspora-connected ethno-religious groups and in- surgents, as well as in some cases sending individuals to fight as combatants. While there are several such cases of localized transnational wars in South, Southeast and Central Asia, one obvious example is the Tamil diasporic com- munity of Sri Lanka spread across Asia, Australasia, and North America. It is alleged to have extended a generous support to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In fact, it is alleged that LTTE’s major source of funding is the Tamil diaspora in other countries. Domestic politics within the ‘kin states’ profoundly effects the political articulations of the diasporic communities. However, the institutional strength of diaspora communities to intervene in the politics of kin states depends to a great on their internal organization, the level of economic-financial resources, and their capacity for transnational communication of ethno-national identity (in other words, the capacity of diasporas formed in ties of embodied subjectivity to reach out beyond their immediate connections through relations of institutional and disembodied extension). Those who have these capacities are far more effective in ‘chal- lenging the leading role of indigenous elite within the homeland and becoming powerful independent actors both within the kin state and in the international arena’.35 In summary, the existence of transborder ethnic groups or diasporas, themselves often formed by globalizing violence, represent a potential, but only potential, source of conflict. While emerging global diasporas are likely to be significant policy targets both for the kin states as well as the host states, the pattern of violence depends on the wider socio-economic context.36 It is this light that we now turn to, to discuss economics and politics. Economic Change, the State and Transnational Violence In the Global South, globalization is invariably viewed in the context of lib- eralization, market deregulation, and their effect upon the nature of the state. The key figures here are the World Bank and International Monetary Fund  A Critical Introduction xxv as the sponsors of economic reforms, including through Structural Adjust- ment Programs (SAPs).37 As analysts such as Samir Amin and Dharam Ghai assert, capitalist globalization and SAPs are tightly linked,38 leading either to the retreat of the notion of the state as part of a regime of social support or to it being pushed in a new direction. Here our phrase ‘regime of social support’ refers to an institutional matrix of polity, market, community and family, all potentially generating social welfare outcomes. In the West this role was taken over in part by the welfare state. In the postcolonial South, while welfare states never developed to the same extent, social policy and social development became for a time the main two strategic concerns for nation-building. Two of the major tasks were to build modern institutions and renew social justice in the aftermath of decolonization. Over the last couple of decades these concerns have been left increasingly in the back- ground because they are seen as contributing very little to direct economic growth. The point being made is that the shrinking social agenda of the state, particularly in Asia and Africa, has made a major contribution to generating a new sense of generalized insecurity. While these changes are relatively obvious, the pre-violent stirrings of politics and consciousness at the mass level in the Global South have seldom been adequately responded to by the ruling elite. The interface between a globalizing corporate economy and the ‘New Word Order’ engulfing major regions and states in the Global South, provides the new setting for a post- colonial state, ‘under siege of trying to hide this fact by bravado of anti-western (mainly anti-American) reactions, while permitting multiple backlashes and counter thrusts’.39 The demands of neo-liberal globalization have led Western- oriented ruling elites to step back from the possibility of seeing through al- ternative transformative policies. These elites tend either to have their own self-seeking agenda or to be overwhelmed by the rapidly-changing base of the political process and the consequent radically-changed set of demands and conflict situations. The consequent withdrawal of state from implementing innovative social policy has had several serious ramifications. There are several research studies which reveal growing ‘pauperization’, accentuated class cleavages, and in- creasing pressures on sheer survival in the rural countryside all over South Asia and Africa. Consequently, there are unambiguous signs of deep con- vulsions, which are bound to intensify. There are no strong institutional mechanisms available to hold them in check, except in some cases institu- tionalized counter-violence from state-sponsored military apparatuses. In Rajani Kothari’s words, it is because of this ‘closure to the new aspiring entrants that a whole variety of forms of ethnicity (autonomy-seeking, separ- atists, based on claims of self-determination or recognition of “indigenous people”) have been on the upswing’.40 You can add to this list those who are branded as ‘terrorists’ and ‘insurgents’. In some cases they have emerged xxvi A Critical Introduction out of the dissatisfied, deprived and excluded segments of the society; in other cases they drew on the solidarity of such segments – either instrumentally or idealistically. States in these regions of insecurity, or what Myron Weiner calls ‘bad neighbourhoods’, have tended to respond in ad hoc and counterproductive ways to this local-global pressure. In this sense, we can say that the increase in localized transnational violent conflicts is also an outcome of poor govern- ance, democracy deficits, and political manipulation of ethnic disputes, which stoke the ambers of past conflicts and add fuel to the contemporary internal dislocations and social unrest (all exacerbated rather than necessarily caused directly by the current dominant form of globalization). Such political regimes in so many cases lack broad political legitimacy and have little basis for generating sustainable long-term political and strategic visions. Inherited, imposed and makeshift systems of governance impose severe limitations on the efficacy of political institutions and structures. The fragile character of the political system is largely associated with ‘grey patronage economies’, ‘façade democracies’ or ‘weak-authoritarian states’ – all of which variously get named as the consequence of ‘failed states’. We will come back to this question of ‘failed states’ in a moment, but in the present context it is worth being clear about a couple of the lineages that over-determine the chronic nature of much of this violence. Firstly, self-absorbed elites have built upon and instrumentally used the changing political and social environment, often fostering social tensions and conflicts, either unintentionally or for their own ends. Consequently, the organs of the state resort to coercive means to quell the response. The end result is escalat- ing popular discontent, leading to radical and underground violent move- ments. In theoretical terms, façade democracies do not engender a healthy and functional framework for social sustainable relations of governance or what goes by the ugly political-science label of ‘elite-mass linkages’. This not only prevents the development of socio-political dialogue but also encourages neo-traditionalist and reactionary formations. Façade democracies or weak- authoritarian states are invariably static and fragile, and this obviously creates wide-ranging instability and insecurity for itself, and most of all for their neighbours, and, in consequence, for intervening global coalitions. Secondly, the neoliberal model of globalization – comfortable with ‘short-term’ marginalization, exclusion and the disposability of the week and poor – has tended to exacerbate the problem, even while at the same time expounding its concern to eradicate poverty by increasing market-driven globalization.41 Globalization as a discourse of economic power is very differ- ent from universalism as part of the normative concern for global well-being.42 Some neoliberals argue that the problems of poverty are a short-term outcome of uneven globalization that will be resolved with the longer-term globaliza- tion of trade flows. However, one of the extreme versions of the neoliberal  A Critical Introduction xxvii version sees the poor (not poverty), as a category of person that can be comfortably eradicated. Remember the ‘poor squads’ in Latin America or examine the following formulation from a World Bank official in a debate in the Economist on spending money on AIDS research: ‘If AIDS falls dis- proportionately on the people of these countries, poor countries, then the fact they will die of it will have a positive impact on the economic growth of these nations’.43 Thirdly, the militarization of the national and global response to local upheaval compounds the problems. The upshot is that we have put in place a generalized insecurity regime which creates severe and diverse backlashes at local and transnational levels. One outcome is that state systems are invariably weakened, and wider human security is greatly undermined. Back- lashes do not operate in a vacuum. They create their own trajectories in inter- action, as Philip Cerny puts it, with ‘economic and social process of complex globalization to create overlapping and competing cross-border networks of power, shifting loyalties and identities, and new sources of endemic low- level conflict – the durable disorder’.44 While there are considerable problems with Cerny’s naming of this setting as constituting a new medievalism, his characterization of the breakdown of order is powerful. In a situation of this kind it is counter-productive to address insecurities through conventional modern forms of state power. It provokes more backlashes, ethnic and reli- gious conflicts, and warlordism. Moreover, in a spiral of effects it raises the threshold of demands on military, economic and political resources contri- buting to the phenomenon of ‘failed states’. Through all of this discussion we also need to treat the concept of ‘failed states’ very carefully. Failing states are often an attributed cause of internal and transnational violence. However, in the argument presented here we are suggesting that the processes of failure cannot be simply attributed to internal or state-based processes in themselves.45 The growth of disorganized ‘grey’ economies linked to globalized movement of black-market goods and arma- ments, the entry of transnational criminal groups,46 and the failure of central authorities from the World Bank to the United Nations to give cohesion to the state as it faces major global changes are all local-national-global pro- cesses contributing to impairing the functioning of state systems. In the Global South this process came to the fore in the aftermath of postcolonial restructuring. In the Balkans and Caucasus this process was associated with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the reorganization of national power- elites. These global influences intersect with internal problems including the lack of democratic culture/reform, exclusion of the mass of the people from the political system, and failure on the part of political elite to meet the basic needs and aspirations of the masses. When developments such as ethno- national mobilization, growing cleavages on ethnic religious lines and inten- sifying efforts of the warlords to secure a space for themselves in the civil xxviii A Critical Introduction society invariably lead to the decay of the state system, these problems are generally considered as local problems. The phenomenon of the failing states is not however an isolated or even a regional problem: it is located within and has wider repercussions for the security and stability of global system of states. Moreover, it is not the case that ‘failed states’ just fall in a heap. Rather, they remain continuing institutions of agency-extension maintaining some processes of integration while accentuating others of differentiation. All the while they continue competing for loyalty and power amongst the mess of mass emigration and refugee displacement, proliferating regimes of small arms and drugs dealing, insurgency, and sometimes even terrorism. ‘Low-Intensity Wars’ and Transnational Violence: Towards a Conclusion Most wars since 1945 have been of a new kind, sometimes called, as was mentioned earlier, ‘low-intensity wars’. The concept of ‘low-intensity wars’ (LICs), like that of ‘failed states’, however, is another of the many terms in the field that can be very misleading. Such wars have been defined as exten- sive, internal, unconventional guerrilla or civil wars.47 The problem with this appellation is that such wars are often highly intense with massive casu- alty rates and substantial or totalizing effect on the effected populations. In the case of Rwanda, Angola, Mozambique, the Congo, the Sudan and Bosnia- Herzegovina, these wars have had higher casualty rates than most conven- tional wars – the so-named ‘high-intensity wars’. Hence we get unhelpful resolutions to this problem including distinguishing between high-low intensity war, medium-low intensity war and low-low intensity war, where the second adjective just carries the same misleading meaning as it always has. Other writers have chosen to call such wars ‘wars of the third kind’,48 because most of this kind of wars tends to happen in the Third World, and they are distinct from interstate wars or cold wars. However, for most writers, because they concentrate on the zone of immediate militarized violence rather than the larger setting of conflict, the defining characteristic of this new kind of war is taken to be that the wars are ‘intra-state’ or ‘domestic’. Ignoring most of the evidence to the contrary, Kalevi Hoslti, for example, writes, ‘If such a large proportion of the wars have domestic origins, then the place to pursue explanations is not in the character of the relations between states, but in the character of the states themselves’.49 The concern of the present volume is to challenge this emphasis on the state as the centre of the explan- ation and to suggest that the new wars need to be placed in local-global context. It is for these reasons that throughout this essay we have tended to use the term localized transnational war.  A Critical Introduction xxix We have also been concerned to suggest that localized transnational wars and conflicts have a different relationship to the state than in earlier periods. As Mary Kaldor writes: In contrast to the vertically organized hierarchical units that were typical of ‘old wars’, the units that fight these wars include a disparate range of different groups such as paramilitary units, local warlords, criminal gangs, police forces, mercenary groups and also regular armies including breakaway units of regular armies. In organizational terms, they are highly decentralized and they operate through a mixture of confrontation and cooperation even when on opposing sides. They make use of advanced technology even if it is not what we tend to call ‘high-technology’ (stealth bombers or cruise missiles, for example). In the last fifty years, there have been significant advances in lighter weapons – undetectable land mines, for example, or small arms which are light, accurate and easy to use so that they can even be operated by chil- dren. They also make use of modern communications – cell phones or com- puter links – in order to co-ordinate, mediate and negotiate among the disparate fighting units.50 This quote also points up a further concern of our analysis – namely that these kinds of wars gain their intensity in a new stretching of an old contra- diction between relations of embodied or face-to-face engagement and disembodied engagement, such as through communications links that connect people and processes over extended reaches of territory. Before finishing we need to add in one more significant illustration of this process. Since September 11, 2001, although with continuities going back for a number of decades, networked terrorism has emerged as one of the most graphic form of transnational violence.51 It a number of significant respects it does not resemble earlier patterns of violence. It is now network based, projected to a global communications industry, and involves an ex- tensive loosely-connected body of non-state combatants, who are either reasonably mobile across the borders or are connected by the possibilities of globalizing communication networks. While United States’ policy has concentrated on a couple of key states, large parts of the Middle East and Asia, beyond the high-profile cases of Iraq and Afghanistan are in serious trouble. Country after country is being destabilized both by insurgents52 and by inappropriate military responses to such terrorism. As Daalder and Lindsay have shown in their analysis of the present US foreign policy, the principal strategic assumption underlying the War on Terrorism is the assumed link between terrorist organizations and nation-state sponsors.53 It was as part of this centring on the territorial state that President Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the chief threat to global security. However, it remains a peculiar blindness on the part of some American policy-makers such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary xxx A Critical Introduction of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to see terrorism as closely linked to certain ‘rogue states’ who are regarded as its sponsors and responsible for its spread. As this volume documents, the core issues of security and violence have to be understood in the context of localizing, transnationalizing and glob- alizing trends – and their underlying social, political and economic causes. The fundamental shift in the existing form of violence away from inter-state wars to ‘low-intensity conflicts’ is part of this shift, as is the new form of networked terrorism, with both reflecting deeper and wider structural changes. Contemporary violent conflicts are intertwined with processes of globalization – linkages that include and also cut across nation-states and have profound consequences on the ground as states have been put under increasing pressure. In response, state systems are also unable to guarantee it because they have moved away from what Mitchell Dean calls the goal of the ‘civilization of politics and society’ where the emphasis is on ‘social development, welfare and good governance’.54 Notes 1. On the structural violence of contemporary slavery, including debt bondage and contract slavery, see the article reproduced in this volume by Kevin Bales ‘Expendable People: Slavery in the Age of Globalization’, Journal of International Affairs, vol. 53, no. 2, 2000, pp. 461–84. 2. See for example the article, reproduced in the present volume, by Joseph S. Nye and Robert O. Keohane ‘Transnational Relations and World Politics: A Conclusion’, International Organization, vol. 25, no. 3, 1971, pp. 721–48. See also Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, (eds.), Transnational Relations and World Politics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1972. 3. Joseph S. Nye, ‘Transnational Relations and Interstate Conflicts: An Empirical Analysis’, International Organization, vol. 28, no. 4, 1974, pp. 961–998; and Samuel P. Huntington, ‘Transnational Organizations in World Politics’, World Politics, vol. 25, April 1973, pp. 333–68. 4. This position has been predictably countered by other writers who have reasserted the national base of these corporations. See for example, E.B. Kapstein, ‘We are Us: The Myth of the Multinational’, The National Interest, vol. 26, winter 1991–92, pp. 55–62; and P.N. Doremus, et al., The Myth of the Global Corporation, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998. 5. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, p. 229. 6. Charles King and Neil J. Melvin, ‘Diaspora Politics’, International Security, vol. 24, no. 3, 1999–2000, reproduced in this volume. 7. Rowena Robinson, ‘Virtual War: The Internet as the New Site for Global Religious Conflict’, Asian Journal of Social Science, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 198–215, reproduced in this volume. 8. Bayles, ‘Expendable People’, pp. 472–3. 9. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 16. 10. David Held and Anthony McGrew, ‘Globalization’, in The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.  A Critical Introduction xxxi 11. John Ishiyama, ‘Does Globalization Breed Ethnic Conflict?’ Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, vol. 9, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–23. 12. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2005, p. 420. See also his The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999. 13. Without necessarily agreeing with Klaus Gantzel’s overall approach or conclusions, this historical locating of the questions follows his argument that ‘in comparative research on the causes of war, the historicity of war has been widely neglected: “War in the Post- World War II World: Empirical Trends and a Theoretical Approach”’, in David Turton, War and Ethnicity: Global Connections and Local Violence, University of Rochester Press, Rochester, 1997, p. 139. 14. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, 1997 and 2002. 15. The term comes from Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, Bantam Books, New York, 1978. More recent official figures for the United States suggest for example that ‘Foreign Military Sales’, the US arms transfer program, quadrupled from 2000 to 2003 from $9.8 million to $40.3 million. See William D. Hartung and Frida Berrigan, ‘Militarization of US Africa Policy, 2000 to 2005’, a fact sheet published by the Arms Trade Resource Center, New York, March 2005. The overall world trade in armaments is estimated to be approximately US$900 billion. 16. Klaus Gantzel, ‘War in the Post-World War II World’, p. 135. 17. See Paul James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory back In, Sage Publications, London, 2006, for an elaboration of that framework. 18. See for example, Michael J. Mazaar, The Revolution in Military Affairs: A Framework for Defense Planning, US Army War College, Carlisle, 1994. 19. The video was available on the web from November 2004 and could be accessed months later. http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/decapitation_video.htm accessed 2 December 2005. 20. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 193, cited in James Clifford, ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthro- pology, vol. 9, no. 3, 1994,, p. 316–17. 21. Clifford, ‘Diasporas’, p. 319. 22. There are of course many emerging examples among elite transnationals. See for example, Aiwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality, Duke University Press, Durham, 1999. 23. Malcolm Waters, Globalization, Routledge, London, 1995. 24. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, Sage Publications, London, 1992. 25. Edwin Gimode, ‘Globalization, Islam and Social Policy’, in Globalization and Social Policy in Africa, Tade Aina, et al., (eds.) CODESRIA, Dakar, 2004, PAGE NUMBER OF QUOTE 26. James Mittleman, ‘The Globalization Challenge: Surviving At Margins’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 3, 1994, pp. 427–43. 27. Mary Kaldor, ‘Nationalism and Globalization’, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 10, no. 1–2, 2004, p. 162 (reproduced in this volume). 28. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996. 29. Robert E. Harkavy and Stephanie G. Neuman, Warfare and the Third World, Palgrave, New York, 2001, passim. 30. Klaus Gantzel, ‘War in the Post-World War II World’, p. 136, fn 20. 31. James Clifford, ‘Diasporas’, p. 307. 32. King and Melvin, ‘Diaspora Politics’, p. 1. 33. See Weiner, ‘Bad Neighbours, Bad Neighbourhood: An Enquiry into the Causes of Refugee Flows’, International Security, vol. 21, no. 1, 1996, pp. 5–42, reproduced in the present volume. xxxii A Critical Introduction 34. Liisa H. Malkki, ‘News from Nowhere: Mass Displacement and Globalized “Problems of Organization”’, Ethnography, vol. 3, no. 3, 2002, pp. 351–60 (reproduced in this volume). 35. Ibid., p. 10; See also Robinson, ‘Virtual War’ (reproduced in this volume), on the use of the internet as one of these key resources. 36. For example, on the Tamil Tigers in global/local context see Bruce Kapferer’s seminal essay, ‘Ethnic Nationalism and the Discourses of Violence in Sri Lanka’, Communal/Plural, vol. 9, no. 1, 2001, pp. 33–67. 37. According to a Finnish report by Olli Tammilehto, Globalisations and Dimensions of Poverty, Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, Helsinki, 2003, p. 12, ‘In 1999 they were renamed “Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers” or PRSPs. It seems that in most cases the new name has not changed the content decisively. In practice they have meant a reduction of public expenditure on healthcare, education and infrastructure. The prices of food and other necessities are rising because the programmes forbid state subsidies. The imports, which are cheap partly because of the subsidies of rich countries, replace domestic food production and throw large numbers of people into unemployment. Unrestricted imports and high interest rates, caused by the programmes, also make other forms of production collapse, which also increases unemployment. Employment is further diminished by cuts in the numbers of civil servants – something also demanded by the plans. This all obviously increases poverty.’ 38. For a general analysis of the effect of capitalism on the Global South see Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, Zed Books, London, 1997. 39. Rajani Kothari, ‘Globalization and Revision of Tradition’, Economic and Political Weekly, 25 March 1995. 40. Ibid. 41. For example, a recent copy of The Economist (5 November 2005) has a sleeping Mexican on the front cover leaning against planet earth. The cover title reads, ‘Tired of Globalization, but in Need of much more it’. Inside the issue, a special survey of microfinance is entitled ‘The Hidden Wealth of the Poor’. 42. Ian Gough, ‘Human Well-being and Social Structures: Relating the Universal and the Local’, Global Social Policy, vol. 4, no. 3, 2004, pp. 163–189. 43. Cited in Niranjana Gupta, ‘The Local and the Global,’ in Malini Bhattacharya, (ed.) Globalization, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2004, PAGE NUMBER OF CITATION 44. Philip G. Cerney, ‘Terrorism and the New Security Dilemma’, Naval War College Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2005, p. 17 45. See also Robert Hunter Wade, ‘Failing States and Cumulative Causation in the World System’ International Political Science Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 2005, pp. 17–36. 46. See Jean-Germain Gros, ‘Trouble in Paradise: Crime and Collapsed States in the Age of Globalization’, British Journal of Criminology, vol. 43, 2003, pp. 63–80, reproduced in the present volume. 47. Harkavy and Neuman, Warfare and the Third World, p. 35. 48. Edward Rice, Wars of the Third Kind: Conflict in Underdeveloped Countries, University of California Press, 1988; Kalevi J. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War, Cambridge University Press. 49. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War, pp. 25–6. 50. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in the Global Era, Polity Press, Cambridge, p. 8, and cited in Harkavy and Neuman, Warfare and the Third World, p. 191. 51. Here we are distinguishing analytically between ‘embodied terrorism’ (of the kind that involves groups of persons responding in an immediate and embodied way to perceived or actual oppression), ‘networked terrorism’ (such as evidenced by Al Qa’ida or Laksa Jihad) and ‘institutionalized terror’ (of the kind used by states, with examples including the British firebombing of Germany and the United States’ nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. These overlapping forms were discussed in the introduction to Volume 3, Globalizing War and Intervention.  A Critical Introduction xxxiii 52. Across the period of 2003 to 2005 the term ‘insurgents’ was progressively removed from the lexicon of the US Pentagon’s war-language on Iraq, culminating in Donald Rumsfeld declaring at a press conference in November 2005 that the term was not applicable to such ‘illegitimate enemies’. The process surfaced in spring 2003 after the military declared an end to initial major combat operations. Secretary Rumsfeld began calling the insurgents ‘dead-enders’ and ‘former regime loyalists’. 53. Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, Brookings Institute Press, Washington, 2003. 54. Mitchel Dean, Governmentability: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Sage, London, 1999.