2
The Twenty-First Century Risks
The twenty-first century began when the Cold War ended. During the Cold War, we believed that a third world war, a nuclear holocaust, was the worst possible threat to human security. While the use of nuclear weapons is an ever-present possibility, our more immediate concern is a much more complicated mix of political violence, crime, material deprivation, and environmental degradation. Twentieth-century militaries were developed to defeat the ground forces, air forces, and naval forces of an enemy state. The threats of the twenty-first century will more closely resemble forces of nature. The instruments of security developed in the Cold War are increasingly unsuited for managing this.
In this chapter, we tell the stories of Sarajevo and Goma, two cities that typify the kind of human insecurity experienced in many parts of the world in the twenty-first century.
Returning to Sarajevo in July 1993 in the middle of the war, on a mission to support the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, Mary Kaldor was greeted by Haris Pasovic, the theater director. “Welcome to the twenty-first century,” he said. “Come and see the beginning of the end of Western civilization.” At that time, what the Bosnians called the “multi-multi spirit” (multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious) of Sarejevo was being strenuously preserved. Mixed marriages and mutual celebrations of festivals were still taking place. More importantly, the city was determined to remain secular, irreverent, cultured, and as Sarajevans liked to say, “European.” Because the airport was being shelled, Kaldor got stuck in Sarajevo. She spent her time doing what Sarajevans did: going to concerts and art exhibitions and, of course, to the theater. She watched a naughty English comedy performed by candlelight. It was called How to Get Rid of Your Wife, and the audience rocked with laughter as wives, prostitutes, men dressed up as women, and policemen frolicked about on the darkened stage—drowning out the sound of shelling outside. “What’s it got to do with Sarajevo?” someone asked the director afterwards. “Everything,” he said. “It’s funny.”
All this took place against the backdrop of war. The week before Kaldor’s visit, some thirty-one people had been killed and 194 wounded. Since the siege of Sarajevo, which began in 1992, 8,871 people had been killed, including 1,401 children, and 16,660 people wounded. On the streets you could be hit by sniper fire from Serbs encamped in the hills around Sarajevo. Shelling was continuous—it felt like a permanent thunderstorm. Locals learned where to take cover and how to cross the more exposed roads—the road from the airport, for instance, was known as Snipers’ Alley. You could easily get picked up by one of the more fearsome Bosnian commanders and find yourself forced to dig trenches while exposed to Serbian fire. There were some thirty-six groups who called themselves armies (militias, criminal gangs, self-defense groups) in Sarajevo alone. Crime was rife.
Imports were blocked by the siege—except what came through the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) by air, which was totally inadequate. The monthly rations, which arrived by the same plane as Kaldor, included, for each family: one kilo of flour, half a kilo of rice, half a liter of oil, one tin of beef, three soaps, and a packet of biscuits for people over sixty. The black market flourished; a lot could be bought with foreign currencies or cigarettes. People were exhausting their life savings.
As one person put it, living in Sarajevo was like a very expensive foreign holiday. There was no water or electricity; gas was supplied intermittently, when permitted by the Serbs. Most of the trees in Sarajevo had been cut down for fuel. A colleague of Kaldor’s, Zdravko Grebo, a professor of international law at the University of Sarajevo and chair of the Yugoslav branch of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, showed her how to soak the pages of books in water and roll them out when dry to make fuel for cooking. The works of Lenin, he told her, made particularly good fuel.
The people of Sarajevo were trying to preserve the city’s multimulti character while it was being attacked by Serb nationalists. Both Serb and Croat nationalists wanted to carve out ethnically pure territories. The technique of the nationalists was ethnic cleansing. The Serbs, for example, would start by shelling a village and terrifying the local inhabitants. They would then send in a paramilitary group with lists of rich Muslims or Croats as well as intellectuals, who would be killed and their homes looted. They would separate men and women. Men were often detained in detention camps; women were raped and expelled. Historic buildings and cultural symbols were destroyed. The long-preserved footprint of Gavrilo Princip, when he assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, sparking the First World War, was concreted over by Muslim nationalists because Princip was a Serb. The beautiful national library of Sarajevo, a unique example of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian architecture, was shelled; all of its irreplaceable manuscripts in Persian, Arabic, Latin, and all of the Yugoslav languages—which documented the “multi-multi” history of Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Yugoslavia—went up in flames. The shreds of burned manuscripts that floated around Sarajevo were known as “black butterflies.”
Sarajevo during the siege was full of foreigners. United Nations peacekeeping troops were supposed to be delivering humanitarian assistance. International agencies like UNHCR and the International Committee of the Red Cross were represented. There were international NGOs and solidarity groups like the women’s groups who delivered humanitarian aid in vans called Faith and Hysteria. The Montpelier branch of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly had established an office in Sarajevo. There were foreign mercenaries who helped to train and equip the thirty-six armies. And, of course, there were many journalists. The foreigners were, by and large, protected from the war. They wore flak jackets and helmets to protect themselves from snipers. They had special blue passes that allowed them to cross checkpoints and move from Serb-controlled zones to Bosnian or Croat zones and back again. Many of them lived in the Holiday Inn, where they paid in foreign currency and were able to take baths or showers and eat proper food. Early in the morning, American journalists could be seen jogging along the corridors before their morning trips to report on what was happening. When they all returned after curfew at ten o’clock, dinner was served in the dining room, which was full of well-known people, like Christiane Amanpour and David Rieff, and abuzz with card games and discussions of the latest news. They all lived in a wildly different, and much healthier, reality than the Sarajevans.
Yet all of these foreigners seemed powerless to stop the war. Kaldor met General Morillon, the commander of the UN troops (who had his own chef flown out from France). He told her that he had developed plans to lift the siege of Sarajevo and that he thought it was feasible with the troops currently in Sarajevo. He also asserted that he had the mandate to lift the siege; United Nations Security Council Resolution 770 authorized UN troops to use “all necessary means” to ensure the supply of humanitarian assistance to the civilian population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was what is known as a Chapter VII operation, which allows UN troops to use force even without the consent of local parties. But not until the very end of the war was the order given to lift the siege.
The Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly and other groups issued a long stream of proposals to the international community. They called for an international protectorate for Bosnia and Herzegovina. They called for safe havens, for lifting the siege of Sarajevo, for war-crime trials, and for protection of the civilian population from ethnic cleansing. Yet although some of these proposals were adopted, they were never fully backed and implemented. Not nearly enough troops were sent to defend the safe havens, and although the mandate was strong on paper, they never received the orders that would have allowed them to defend the safe havens. Moreover, peace proposals never got as much press coverage as violence. Kaldor, Zdravko Grebo, and Haris Pasovic held a press conference in the Holiday Inn to issue what they called the “Last-Chance Appeal for Sarajevo,” but only two journalists came. The main effort of the international community was talks with the warring parties—the very people who were committing heinous war crimes.
The war finally ended when ethnic cleansing was complete. At least 100,000 people
1 were killed and more than two-thirds of the population expelled from their homes. It is true that Western aircraft shelled Serb positions at the very end of the war and that British and French ground troops lifted the siege of Sarajevo. But basically, the international community, through talks and in the Dayton Peace Accords, legalized what had happened on the ground: the partitioning of Bosnia into separate Serb, Muslim, and Croat parts. A substantial international presence remains in the country to sustain that agreement and to prevent the few remaining flashpoints (Sarajevo, Brcko, and Mostar) from flaring up again. A hugely complicated and dysfunctional state apparatus provides jobs for the extremist parties and presides over a largely illicit economy in which unemployment is very high and crime is rampant. The “multi-multi” spirit has largely ebbed. Many young people want to leave. Sarajevo, by any reckoning, is hardly “secure.”
A decade later, Shannon Beebe visited Goma in Eastern Congo, on a mission to assess the environmental impact of conflict. He flew there from Kinshasa, the capital of Democratic Republic of the Congo, on a flight with the UN Organization Mission in DR Congo (MONUC), provided by the workhorse aviation NGO Air Serv International. MONUC is one of the largest UN missions in the world. Beebe had been told that this flight was the only reliable connection between Kinshasa and the eastern provinces. Indeed, just a few days before, a passenger airliner from Goma had crashed after it struck lava at the end of the runway and then cut a swath through Goma until the wreckage came to rest in the downtown area. The U.S. embassy had banned all flights except Air Serv’s MONUC shuttle flights.
The flight to Goma was magnificent, crossing over the expanse of the DRC and the lush jungle below. As the plane began its final approach into Goma a sprinkling of colored canopies started to appear in the jungle. As the plane got closer to the ground, Beebe noticed that these canopies were makeshift living quarters.
The ride from the airport to the heart of Goma was surrounded by a press of humanity. People were carrying anything and everything, by all possible means and methods along, roads that were pitted and pocked enough to rake out the transmission from almost any vehicle. Driving was painstakingly slow. The only things that seemed to be perfectly at home in these conditions were the many Chinese-made motor scooters weaving in and out of traffic, people, animals, and whatever other obstacles appeared.
Beebe’s driver pointed out where the airliner crash had happened. He reported that since there were no fire brigades, people had formed a human chain and put out the fires by handing cups of water in assembly-line fashion. Once the fires had burned out everything had been scavenged, including the sheet metal from the aircraft. The only things left were too heavy to lift.
Eastern Congo saw the brunt of what was known as “Africa’s World War” during the late 1990s. During Beebe’s visit it still suffered from the ravages of conflict between four rebel groups struggling for preeminence in various resource-rich areas. The population lived in a constant state of fear. Some estimates put the number of war dead in the Congo as high as 5 million.
This area is home to tin, coltan, cassiterite, and diamond mines. The potential Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of this region is staggering, yet instability made wealth possible for only a few political and economic predators with ties to the “democratic” government in Kinshasa, 1,000 miles away. The area was wracked by uncertainty. Politically motivated killings were commonplace; mass rapes and atrocities occurred almost daily. Despite the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement signed in 1999, which established the MONUC mission, violence has continued unabated in eastern Congo.
Beebe eventually arrived at his hotel on the outskirts of town. It was beautifully situated on a peninsula jutting into Lake Kivu. As the driver pulled up to two heavy iron gates, he sounded the horn and then waited. A few moments later, there was movement behind the gate and a small slit opened; two eyes peered through. Beebe asked the driver why such security was necessary so far out of town—was the place robbed or looted a lot? The driver responded, “It’s complicated.”
The owners of the hotel were of Tutsi origin, and just last week the owner’s brother had been killed. The entire family suspected that the killers were a government “hit squad” who saw the family as threats to the government—the family had money and were Tutsi. Anyone with influence in the area, not directly associated with the central government of Kinshasa, was perceived as opposition and as a threat. Inside the gates, the Karibu Resort looked like a paradise. It was pristine. Everything was perfectly manicured and cared for. The only thing that seemed a bit peculiar was that there was only one other car.
The primary focus of Beebe’s trip was to go to Virunga National Park to learn more about the illegal charcoal trade endangering the oldest national park in Africa and the killing of six Mountain Gorillas just a few months before. Sentries of the Congolese army were posted almost every other kilometer on the road leading out of Goma to the park. The soldiers lived in lean-tos or poncho liners stretched out with a pot underneath. Beebe asked the driver how long they stayed in those conditions, and he shook his head, not really wanting to discuss it. “I don’t know. Maybe a few weeks. Maybe a couple of months.” Beebe thought he didn’t understand the question and asked specifically how long the soldiers lived in these locations without relief. He shook his head again, answering, “Yes, yes. I understand. They live there. Where else will they go?”
They continued on up the road for a few hours, finally reaching the ranger station—a beautiful building constructed in the early 1920s that must have been magnificent in its heyday. Now, there was no electricity, heat, or running water of any kind. Beebe and his companion were greeted by a host of curious park rangers. The interim director of the park asked if Beebe was there to do a story on the gorilla killings. Beebe said he wasn’t, but was instead trying to understand how the conflict was impacting the natural environment and people there and vice versa. The director smiled wryly and asked, “So you are actually interested in the people of Kivu? That’s different.”
The story he told was heartbreaking. The instability in the region had driven many rebel groups to look for income from the charcoal trade, which in North Kivu was worth nearly $30 million per year, while locals’ average salary was around $7 per month. All groups were involved in some way with charcoaling. The groups soon realized that some of the largest and best trees were in Virunga National Park. Beebe asked if they didn’t understand that there was far more revenue to be gained by ecotourism lured in by the presence of mountain gorillas than by charcoaling, with its short-term and finite potential for gain. The interim director looked at Beebe: “People are starving today. Why should they worry about something tomorrow that may never happen?” It brought home the fact that societies in conflict and in desperation will mortgage their futures simply to survive today.
The rest of the story was horrible and sad. The gorilla family had been executed because of the charcoal trade. The director of Virunga National Park had been attempting to stop the charcoal-making operations. Little did he know, the director of the North Kivu province was receiving money from the trade and wanted him fired in order to continue the operation. The regional director hired one of the park rangers to assassinate the family of gorillas to make the park director look incompetent—it would be passed off as a “rebel attack” on the animals. No one knows for sure how much the park ranger was paid, but most people think he was hired for $25.
Beebe spent most of the rest of the day speaking with the rangers and their families. Many of them had been brought up as sons of rangers, grandsons of rangers and/or nephews of rangers. Their hearts and souls were devoted to the park and its animals. Beebe asked many of the rangers if the government was regular about paying wages. “It’s complicated,” and a smile, was the usual response. Beebe found out that most of the rangers had not been paid in three months; they were barely subsisting. No wonder it had been so easy to corrupt one of their number.
After spending the day in Rutshuru, Beebe returned to Goma around 11 p.m. The streets were eerily silent compared to the nights before. Beebe knew something was amiss. He asked the driver what was going on, and he shook his head, saying, “I’m not sure, but it’s not good.” They arrived at the hotel and the normally chatty driver left promptly, saying only, “Have a good night, sir. Stay inside.” The entire front desk was abandoned.
At 2:38 a.m. Beebe awoke to a sound he knew all too well. There are only a few things in the world that sound like AK-47 gunfire. In North Kivu at 2:38 in the morning there is only one thing that sounds like AK-47 gunfire. A fierce fight had broken out not more than 100 meters away. It ended suddenly. Once the sun came up, Beebe ventured outside.
When Beebe went to check out, the hotel owner’s daughter, whom he’d never met before, was at the desk. She was visibly shaking and talking rapidly on a mobile. She was interrupted twice by employees coming up to tell her something. When she finally turned to Beebe, he asked her what had happened.
“A government assassination squad from Kinshasa was sent out here to murder my father, and they attacked our house last night,” she said. The family had fled a few days before to Rwanda. Against her family’s wishes, she had heard of the attack and crossed back over to see what had happened. “My family has owned this land and this hotel since the early 1970s. We are business people and want nothing more than stability for this area so we can have better business. This is our country too. Why does disagreement mean death?”
Beebe asked her if she thought it was because they were ethnic Tutsis. Her answer was telling: “I don’t know what the reason is, but I do know we will get rebel protection now. What other choices do we have?”
Beebe nodded, “Yes, it’s complicated.”
Sarajevo and Goma represent the tragic underside of what we call globalization. Sarajevo was a middle-income city in Europe. Goma is a potentially rich city in Africa. Yet both have been engulfed by the typical twenty-first-century pattern of violence. Both cities are located in formerly authoritarian states that were massively weakened by opening up to the world. Yugoslavia was communist, even if its form of communism was mild by Soviet standards. The Congo had experienced periodic conflict since independence and had been ruled by a mad, brutal military dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who had siphoned away much wealth.
The term globalization is a catchall to refer to new features of the twenty-first century. It has something do with increased information, communication, and travel. It has something to do with the interconnectedness of people in different countries, organizations, and businesses. And it sometimes just means a global market, freer trade, and more foreign investment. But specifically what does globalization mean for places like Sarajevo or Goma?
In social and economic terms, globalization means a shift from place-based, often state-dominated sectors like agriculture and industry to a “weightless economy” centered on sectors like finance, design, or marketing, as well as myriad services (both formal and informal). The rise of the weightless economy has also meant the rise of a global middle class that speaks one of the world languages, communicates through the Internet and mobile phones, travels by air, and watches various world TV channels. In places like China and India, millions have been pulled out of poverty by success in the global market.
But at the same time, millions have been thrown out of work by a combination of state mismanagement and competition from the global market. Yugoslavia, for example, began its economic opening to the outside world in the early 1980s when it turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for financial assistance. While the middle classes in places like Sarajevo could travel and speak English, many rural workers who owned small plots in the countryside and came to work in state-owned factories lost their jobs. It was young men of this type who formed the backbone of the nationalist militias and who resented the cosmopolitans in the towns.
2 The unscrupulous entrepreneurs of violence who manipulated this situation were often engaged in large-scale corruption and crime at the interstices of the state-controlled economy. One of the big figures of the Belgrade underground, whose militia, the “Tigers,” carried out some of the worst atrocities, was known as Arkan; he owned a string of pizza parlors that were covers for the drug trade. The war dramatically accelerated these developments. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, industrial production was more or less wiped out and national income fell by 90 percent while crime flourished. Looting, pillaging, smuggling of cigarettes and alcohol, extraction of remittances from abroad through restriction of necessities at checkpoints, and “taxation” of humanitarian aid all became essential elements of the war economy. Even though there has been economic growth since the war’s end, local and transnational crime and joblessness are still very high.
In DRC, or Zaire, as it was known between 1971 and 1997, the formal economy fell precipitously at the turn of the twenty-first century. Gross Domestic Product per capita fell from $380 in 1985 to $224 in 1990 to $85 ($0.23 a day) in 2000, making it one of the poorest countries in the world.
3 The formal economy basically collapsed through a combination of pervasive corruption and the inability to compete in world markets for basic commodities even before the war compounded these ills, engulfing the country in hyperinflation, epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, and unthinkable levels of impoverishment. An Amnesty International report details the ways in which the war provided opportunities to make money via activities such as looting (which was often accompanied by torture, killing, and/or rape), targeting harvests, stealing from medical centers, attacking and robbing villages, systematically pillaging food aid, and sexual exploitation.
4 Particularly important was the competition to control mineral wealth, including water, diamonds, coltan, cassiterite, tin, copper, timber, and, as Beebe found, charcoal. There is a growing demand for coltan for use in computers and mobile phones.
Although GDP per capita has recovered since the international effort, as happens in many post-conflict situations, human-development indicators such as life expectancy, literacy, and access to water and clean sanitation have continued to fall. In 2009, the DRC ranked 176th out of 182 in the UN’s Human Development Report.
5There is a growing gap between ordinary people in DRC and a new global middle class, partly created by the international effort. Beebe saw this gap clearly when returning to Kinshasa to stay in the Grand Hotel. He might have been anywhere in the world. There were numerous shops, boutiques, and restaurants filled with goods from Europe, telephone cards, and CDs. In the restaurants sat large Congolese men surrounded by bodyguards. A few of them sat alone with just their protection squads standing watch, talking rapidly and animately on their mobile phones while others enjoyed the company of very attractive young women. In a country where over half the population lives on less than $1 per day, Beebe found that the simple task of checking e-mail in the hotel’s business center cost $20—almost a month’s wages for a local.
Up to now, the growth of the global market has been based on twentieth-century technology, particularly the use of fossil fuels. This has led to global warming, the loss of biological diversity, deforestation, pollution, shortages of resources, and the advent of environmental refugees. In both Sarajevo and Goma, the cutting down of trees for immediate survival imperils the long-term future of the planet. Twenty-first-century technologies offer more of the same but also the possibility of conservation and environmental protection.
Globalization has also wrought a profound cultural and ideological transformation. States like Yugoslavia and DRC lost their information monopolies. They could not sustain communism (in Yugoslavia) or postcolonial nationalism (in Congo). On the one hand, global communications have made possible much greater awareness of our shared human fate, of human-rights abuses in different parts of the world, and of the interdependence of the environment, health, and energy. On the other hand, local radio and television broadcasts in local languages, videos, and mobile phones reach people who do not have the reading habit and make possible mobilization of insecurity around various exclusive ideologies. The war in DRC was a spillover from the genocide in Rwanda, when hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were killed by the Hutu regime. There, the regime used the radio stations
Radio Rwanda and
Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) to mobilize ordinary Hutus to join the government-organized militias in a killing spree. In the former Yugoslavia, television was in the hands of different national republics. In the years leading up to the wars, a war in the imagination was already being conducted on television; people got swept up in historical narratives that shaped their understandings of the current conflict. Serbian television, for example, interspersed current events with stories about the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389 (when Ottoman Turkey defeated Serbia) and World War II (when a fascist Croatian regime killed Serbs along with Jews and Roma in concentration camps). As David Rieff reported in his gripping account of the war in Bosnia, young men in the hills above Sarajevo saw themselves as “ridding Europe of the Turks.”
6In both Africa and the Balkans, stories circulated through Web sites, mobile phones, and videos—mobilizing sentiment among diasporas in other countries. In the Bosnian war, Croatian “weekend fighters” would come from Germany, where they worked, to join in what appeared like a fictional adventure.
In political terms, the formal political world has become more multipolar and multilateral under globalization. Global politics involving new multilateral institutions, states, emerging powers, and a range of non-state actors including international NGOs and global social movements is increasingly supplanting international relations, the world of strategy, and state-to-state diplomacy.
All states have to engage in a multilateral process. States remain the repositories of sovereignty and the key members of the multilateral system, but they no longer have the same hegemony of action or decision on the world stage.
For example, the global effort to stem climate change—the Kyoto Protocol—was formally negotiated among 170 countries. International agencies like the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) also took part in the negotiations. Some 250 NGOs, including both businesses and environmental groups, as well as local authorities, observed the negotiations and lobbied governments—some of the environmental NGO’s were organized into the Climate Action network.
7 The International Criminal Court (ICC) was an initiative of ten to fifteen “likeminded” countries, but the negotiations also involved a powerful network of NGOs—the Coalition for the International Criminal Court—and were hosted and promoted by the United Nations.
8These changes have created a hugely contradictory situation. Important decisions are made at a global level, but the basis of politics, particularly democratic politics, is still national. On the one hand, global communications makes it difficult for states to maintain information monopolies, and more and more people are demanding democracy. On the other, often states cannot respond to democratic demands because they are dependent on multinational corporations, international financial institutions like the IMF, or multilateral processes like the Kyoto Protocol or the ICC.
Indeed some states, caught between domestic struggles and outside pressures, have not been able to manage the transition to a more multilateral world. The domestic consensus that underpinned their rule has disappeared. They have been undermined by falling revenue—formal economies have declined; external aid has decreased (especially since the loss of superpower patrons at the end of the Cold War), and rapacious government officials have stolen significant amounts of the remaining funds. These states have lost legitimacy; their ruling ideologies appear increasingly hollow and they are less and less able to provide services or maintain infrastructure. They have been pulled apart by ethnic, religious, and tribal claims.
Perhaps the most important aspect of state weakness has been the loss of the monopoly on violence. For some countries, as in Europe, this is a result of transnationalization. Armed forces are integrated into multilateral security arrangements like NATO, and a range of international treaties has led to more and more arrangements for mutual exercises and inspections. But this is also a result of the privatization of violence.
Military technology has become more accurate and lethal. That is one reason twentieth century wars, in which armed forces fight each other on the battlefield, have become so rare. Clashes between symmetrical opponents would lead to immensely destructive stalemates, as in the Iran-Iraq war. At the same time, simple, light, easy-to-use weapons can be acquired by non-state actors, even children, and used against unprotected targets. Authoritarian states tend to proliferate security services so as to play them against each other. As states can no longer afford high levels of military spending nor the cost of maintaining law and order, bits of the insecurity services break off; redundant or unpaid soldiers sell their services and their weapons to all sorts of political and criminal groups. Hence the spread of asymmetric violence, where civilians and population centers are leveraged as part of the warfare and crime.
In Yugoslavia, for example, territorial defense units (TOs) were introduced in the 1970s after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They were trained and equipped for guerrilla warfare in the event of a Soviet invasion. Yugoslavs participated in the military effort and often owned their own weapons. As Serbia started to use the Yugoslav National Army, the separate republics started to arm the TOs and the police with surplus weapons acquired from Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War. All sides started to recruit paramilitary and other armed groups. Foreign mercenaries were also involved; redundant British, French, and Italian soldiers helped to train many of the gangs, while mujahideen from the Soviet war in Afghanistan came to “help” the Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Some of them married locals and stayed.)
Under Mobutu, Congolese unpaid soldiers were encouraged to loot and pillage. Mobutu made desperate attempts to hold on to power by creating more and more security services. In addition to the army, there were border guards, a presidential guard, a gendarmerie, and various types of internal security forces. In the end, Mobutu could only rely on his personal guard to protect him. Meanwhile, the security forces that were no longer paid formed their own paramilitary groups, all of which had easy access to weapons—both Cold War surplus and the CIA’s use of the Congo as a conduit to supply weapons to Angolan rebels offered steady streams of arms through DRC.
Organizational forms have also changed in the global era. In place of the centralized, vertical, and hierarchical organizations of the twentieth century (e.g., militaries) are loose horizontal networks that link groups at all levels of society. Robert Reich likens the organizational structures of big corporations to spider webs; the proud names of companies have become brands or fronts for a complex mix of partnerships and subcontracts. Others talk of the “hollow” corporation, a description that also applies to politics—to governments, whose ministers are increasingly brokers of domestic interests and international agreements; to civil society, with its networks and coalitions of NGOs, social movements, and civic institutions like churches and universities; and to entrepreneurs of violence, who can now rally forces from global networks of disenfranchisement and despair. In Yugoslavia, the strategy of ethnic cleansing was carried out by networks of paramilitary groups and regular forces—that is, the Serbian army, which succeeded the Yugoslav National Army and the republican TOs. In DRC, the rebels under Laurent Nkunda were Congolese soldiers, Congolese Tutsi Banyamulenge, as well as Rwandan, Ugandan, and some Burundian government troops. The government side was also backed by the armed forces of neighboring states, including Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. All sides mainly attacked civilian areas rather than each other.
So globalization has its good and bad sides. It has led to dramatic economic growth; it has increased our awareness that we live on a shared planet and are part of a single human community; it has spread openness and democracy; more and more states cooperate and are part of multilateral arrangements; organizations are less top-down and hierarchical; and there is more scope for individuals. But these changes have also created the dark underbelly of globalization—the combination of deprivation, exclusive ideologies, environmental and economic vulnerabilities, crime, and weak states that has given rise to networks of desperation (what are often described as creeping vulnerabilities or asymmetric risks or threats).
In violent upheavals, all the conditions that led to violence are made worse. The formal economy collapses and the state becomes even weaker. Young men often have little choice but to join the fighting or a criminal group. The war produces fear and hatred among ethnic or religious groups and thus helps to underpin exclusive ideologies. The need to finance the war further spreads criminality, which in turn further weakens the rule of law. This is why contemporary conflicts are so difficult to end; they strengthen the vested political and economic interests in war and create a vortex of violence. The warring parties need the war to mobilize extremist ideologies and to carry on the criminal activities (looting; pillaging; smuggling; trading in drugs, people, or valuables) through which the war is financed. Hence terms like persistent, unending, or forever wars.
New wars are not only difficult to contain in time; they are also difficult to contain in space. They spread through refugees and displaced persons; through transnational criminal activities; and through polarizing activities. They are the epicenter of “bad neighbourhoods” like the Horn of Africa, the Upper Nile, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
There are international efforts to address these new phenomena. In both Yugoslavia and DRC there were peacekeeping troops. But although they were mandated to protect civilians, both the UN Protection Force in Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR) and the UN Organization Mission in DR Congo (MONUC) saw their tasks in military terms: to separate the opposing sides in the conflicts. These forces do not have enough troops and are not trained and equipped for this kind of task. They remain caught in twentieth-century military thinking in which soldiers are used to fight on one side or the other or to separate warring parties after a cease-fire. There is no doubt that the United Nations has been through a learning process over the past decade. UN forces have gotten better at helping to negotiate and sustain cease-fires, but they have not yet succeeded in providing human security.
Globalization does offer the possibility of a more cooperative world based on the idea of a single human community and the extension of law and politics across borders, but despite the growth of multilateralism there are mammoth obstacles in constructing such a world—obstacles that have to do with the national basis of politics and the difficulty of reorienting economic and environmental priorities. Not least is the difficulty of reorienting the way we think about security.
Twentieth-century solutions—for example, the use of military forces to fight wars in fragile situations—make things even worse. Twentieth-century military forces that once produced security may well be responsible for consuming security in the twenty-first century. If we maintain traditional ways of thinking along parochial institutional lines we will tend to destabilize rather than reinforce fragile systems. The use of military force to attack a house of cards can have catastrophic consequences. This is what happened after President George W. Bush announced the War on Terror.
