Chapter 4 Understanding contemporary conflict

Question 1

What are Azar’s three concepts of the new type of conflict?

Answer 1

1. a tendency to understand conflict through forming groups of internal and external dimensions.
2. prevailing frameworks of analysis often had been based on the functional differentiation of conflict aspects and divided into levels of analysis
3. A tendency to focus on overt and violent conflict while ignoring non-violent conflict, termination of violent acts often equal with the state of peace.

Question 2

What are the PSC four clusters of variables identified as preconditions for their transformation to high levels of intensity?

Answer 2

1. Communal content, the most useful unit of analysis is the identity group.
2. deprivation of human needs as the underlying source of PSC, needs are ontological and non-negotiable.
3. In a world in which the state has the authority to govern and use force to regulate society and protect citizens. social conflict tends to be characterized by incompetent, fragile and authoritarian governments that fail to satisfy basic human needs.
4. International linkages, particularly political-economic relations of economic dependency within the international economic system.

Question 3

What does Azar link the disjunction between state and society in many parts of the world to?

Answer 3

A colonial legacy that artificially imposed European ideas of territorial statehood on groups.

Question 4

What are the three groups of process dynamics determinants according to Azar?

Answer 4

Communal actions and strategies, state actions and strategies and Built-in mechanisms of conflict.

Question 5

What entails the determinant Communal actions and strategies?

Answer 5

the various processes of identity-group formation, organisation and mobilisation. the emergence and nature of leadership, the choice of political goals and the scope and nature of externalities.

Question 6

What entails the determinant state actions and strategies?

Answer 6

with governing individuals and elites theoretically facing an array of policy choices running from political accommodation to coercive repression or instrumental co-option.

Question 7

What entails the Built in mechanisms of conflict determinant of Azar?

Answer 7

Various self-reinforcing built-in mechanisms of conflict exhaustively studies by conflict resolution analysts once the spiral of conflict escalation is triggered.

Question 8

What is the contemporary transnational conflict framework?

Answer 8

Not a theory of conflict but an analytic structure where the main theoretical insights and controversies can be locates.

Question 9

What is Transnational conflict?

Answer 9

An extension of protracted social conflict that takes account of the global changes that have occurred since the end of the cold war and the regonalization of conflict that has resulted.

Question 10

What are transnational connectors?

Answer 10

Flows of people, capital, weapons, criminal networks, money and ideas.

Question 11

Which three other levels in addition to global, regional and local level make up contemporary transnational conflict?

Answer 11

State level, Identity group level and elite/individual level.

Question 12

What are two influential alternative ways of characterizing prevailing forms of contemporary conflict?

Answer 12

1. The greed versus grievance debate refuting Azar’s idea that social conflict is rooted in the individual and communal needs of identity groups
2. the analysis of contemporary conflict based on the distinction between old wars and new wars.

Question 13

What is Fearon and Laitin’s argument about civil war?

Answer 13

Civil wars are caused by opportunities that favour insurgencies instead of by grievance.

Question 14

What is the best way to break the cycle of violence driven by political exclusion and economic inequality ?

Answer 14

By involving groups that have been marginalised by giving them a real stake in their country’s future.

Question 15

Why is the element of greed and grievance not good enough to characterize contemporary conflict?

Answer 15

Because even though they are present throughout transnational conflict it is not sufficiently inclusive or distinct to characterize patterns of contemporary conflict as a whole

Question 16

Why is the distinction between old and new wars not enough to characterize contemporary conflict?

Answer 16

Not sufficient to capture the wider lineaments of the emergent post-cold war conflict scene.

Question 17

What is the North-South economic divide?

Answer 17

The locus for the powerful international political economy analysis which argues that new wars in the third world are not symptomatic of local failures in governance but is product of the distortions of late capitalism.

Question 18

What can conflict resolution and post-war reconstruction concerns of liberal governance be seen as?

Answer 18

riot control, end of a spectrum encompassing a broad range of global poor relief activities.

Question 19

What has happened with global ideological contestation in the post cold war world?

Answer 19

more prominent, vastly increased capacity for recruitment and radicalization offered by the communications revolution.

Question 20

What does the transnational flow consist of (transnational connectors)

Answer 20

• people(migrants, refugees, diaspora, radicalized jihadis)
• resources
• corporate investments (may unbalance and exploit indigenous economies)
• weapons (light and heavy weapons possible proliferation of chemical, nuclear material)
• criminals and terrorist networks (whether or not abetted by governments)
• Images, ideas and movements conveyed by the explosively expanding connector of the global social media.

Question 21

What does complex regional conflict systems entail?

Answer 21

the idea of overlapping complex regional conflict systems, this is a development of the earlier work on regional security complexes. A spectrum (1980) ranging from regions in turmoil through security regimes to pluralistic security communities.

Question 22

What is the main thrust of regional analysis today?

Answer 22

To incorporate all of the complex information within the wider analysis of transnational conflict in general despite these differences because of the myriad transnational connectors that link and shape them.

Question 23

At which level is the critical struggle of conflict usually played out?

Answer 23

At the state level.

Question 24

most conflict parties are in the end driven to compete for state control if they want to reach which goals?

Answer 24

Institute revolutionary programmes (revolution/ideology conflict), safeguard communal needs(identity/secession conflicts) or secure factional interests (economic/resource conflict)

Question 25

Which four sectors in assessing state fragility are important?

Answer 25

social sector, economic sector, political sector and geographical sector.

Question 26

What are we concerned about in the social sector?

Answer 26

the major types of social division around which conflict fault lines may develop, recently between those who emphasize the vertical(ethnic) and horizontal (class ) roots of conflict.

Question 27

what are we concerned about in the economic sector?

Answer 27

The measure of agreement that protracted conflict tends to be associated with patterns of underdevelopment or uneven development.

Question 28

Why is the government sector the key arena for many analysts?

Answer 28

social and economic grievances are in the end expressed in political form.

Question 29

What does the geography entail?

Answer 29

A critical factor is widely seen to hinge on the relation between centre and periphery, in fragile states the governance weaken to the point of non-existence in outlying provinces often characterized by geographical features (mountains, forests)

Question 30

Which sectors become increasingly prominent at critical stage in conflict escalation?

Answer 30

The law and order and security sectors. This is the moment when domestic conflict becomes a violent struggle for control of the state itself.

Question 31

When can you see the increasing prominence of the security sector?

Answer 31

When civil unrest can no longer be controlled by non-military means and armed militia emerge.

Question 32

What is the feature: nature of conflict parties (bases for group formation)?

Answer 32

The study of the social bases on which identity groups and conflict parties are built, communities are not pre-existing givens but rather socially constructed play of power.

Question 33

What is the feature intergroup dynamics (escalation and de-escalation)

Answer 33

how national peoples, regional autonomists, communal contenders, indigenous peoples, militant sects, ethnoclasses and other groups may move from non-violent protest, through violent protest, to outright rebellion in an uneven escalation that in most cases takes many years.

Question 34

What will new threats to security and new opportunities lead to?

Answer 34

Mobilisation, and the nature of the emergent leadership will often be decisive in determining degrees of militancy.

Question 35

Psychological factors emerge as critical at which levels?

Answer 35

Identity group and elite/leadership levels.

Question 36

Why are psychological factors critical at identity group and elite/leadership level?

Answer 36

Individual and group psychology gives crucial insights into the paranoia of authoritarianism, the process of radicalization and recruitment in the formation.

Question 37

What is transnational conflict outlined as in the book?

Answer 37

a complicated multi-factorial and multi-level phenomenon as anticipated in the original insights of the founders of the conflict resolution field.

Question 38

What do the Arab revolutions illustrate in regards to a complex system?

Answer 38

change can be in the form of a sudden collapse of the system as a whole as mapped in catastrophe theory an apparently solid system can be progressively hollowed out.

Question 39

What do the Arab revolutions illustrate about the catastrophe theory ? (periods of transition)

Answer 39

Periods of transition are often more turbulent and unpredictable than either the previous status quo (repressive authoritarianism) or the outcome hoped for ( the long term stability of mature democracy)

Question 40

What is a feature of transnational conflict exhibited through the Arab revolutions?

Answer 40

The differential impact of global drivers given the make-up and past history of the regions.

Question 41

How can we explain the striking differential outcomes of revolutions in different countries in state level?

Answer 41

The actions and strategies of different regimes and the underlying social/ political bases on which political power itself rested, past history also influential.

Question 42

How do we explain striking differential outcomes of revolutions on identity-group level?

Answer 42

The resulting complex interplay of mutating ethnic sectarian and class-based politicized factions can be subsequently mapped.