New World Disorder: The Roots of Today’s Wars

Michael Renner is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute [www.worldwatch.org]. Before joining the institute in 1987, he was a Corliss Lamont Fellow in Economic Conversion at Columbia University (1986–87) and a research associate at the World Policy Institute in New York City (1984–86). He is the author of Fighting for Survival: Environmental Decline, Social Conflict and the New Age of Insecurity (W.W. Norton, 1996).

Reporting on the Kosovo crisis has been extensive, with frequent media references to the deep-seated hatreds between Serb and Albanian communities. Much less well known is the fact that poverty and unemployment in the province were extremely high even before hostilities flared up. By one estimate, Kosovo suffered a jobless rate of up to 70 per cent. The region’s gross domestic product was in virtual free-fall, cut in half between 1990 and 1995.

 

As in Kosovo, the origins of the violent unravelling of the former Yugoslavia as a whole can be found in social and economic decline that triggered a growing sense of a zero-sum game among the country’s different population groups and presented a window of opportunity for those who sought power and wealth by exploiting the tensions. Rising economic difficulties were arguably worsened by the “shock therapy” administered by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF and other foreign advisers pressed for an expansion of exports to pay off ballooning debts. This and other measures, including currency devaluation, a wage freeze and price decontrol, led to a 40 per cent reduction of living standards between 1982 and 1989, growing unemployment and spreading poverty. As a result, the social fabric was torn apart and the delicate balancing act among Yugoslavia’s provinces began to come unhinged. Intense political jockeying over economic resources among the provinces turned to violence as the richer ones, Slovenia and Croatia, decided to break away.

 

Although this is more snapshot than analysis of the origins of the Balkans crisis, it suggests that “ancient ethnic hatreds”, pure and simple, are an inadequate explanation for what lay at the root of the succession of wars in the region. The ethnic animosities line of argument is usually trotted out to explain why wars suddenly erupt in various countries, including places that were not expected to explode in violence. But rather than explaining the origin of the fighting, this simple-minded reference instead demonstrates the inattention of the world, particularly the West, to the social, economic, environmental and other stress factors that often underlie these conflicts. Worse, by referring to seemingly age-old, unalterable truths, the world at large can conveniently wash its hands of any serious effort to create the conditions for peace.

A Surfeit of Weapons

The vast majority of today’s armed conflicts are not traditional wars between states or coalitions of states, but rather internal conflicts. The fighting is done as often by paramilitary forces, guerrilla groups, ethnic militias, vigilante squads, even criminal gangs and mercenaries, as by regular, uniformed soldiers. The distinction between combatants and non-combatants is often blurred. Indeed, terrorising the civilian population is frequently an integral part of these kinds of conflict.

 

The Cold War may be over, but it has left a deadly legacy. East-West geopolitics ascribed strategic value to certain parts of the developing world, mostly for reasons of resource endowment or geographical location. The industrialised countries accordingly intervened in a variety of ways and armed their protégés to the teeth. Once this confrontation ended, the significance of many once indispensable allies vanished. “Hot” Cold War battlegrounds such as Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, or Central America were abruptly abandoned and reverted to backwater status. Recipients of aid and weapons from the North saw the flow of assistance dry up. War-torn nations have not received any Marshal Plan–type assistance to rebuild and get back on their feet.

 

Without big-power sponsorship propping them up, many Third World armies and some insurgent forces can no longer be maintained at their previous size. Some armed forces are national armies in name only and have begun to fragment. Tales abound of soldiers going unpaid or underpaid for months on end. In consequence, many turn to commercial ventures to supplement their income and resort to looting and extortion, petty crime, or even to mercenary activity. To the civilian population, it may make little difference whether any of the rival armed groups wear government uniforms and insignia or not.

 

What remains is the easy availability of weapons that were liberally spread around the planet by the superpowers and their allies. Together with a pervasive culture of violence and a stunted political system, the surfeit of weapons creates fertile ground for violent and authoritarian responses to unresolved problems. Of particular concern are small arms—weapons that are cheap and whose maintenance and operation do not require any organisational or training capacity. They can be used even by child soldiers, can be transported and smuggled easily and are rugged enough to have a long life. No precise figures exist, but it is believed there are currently some five hundred million small arms in worldwide circulation and that half of these are “illegal”. Among the most potent small arms is the military assault rifle—Kalashnikovs, M-16s and the like. More than one hundred million of such rifles have been produced.

 

Michael Klare, director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies in Amherst, Massachusetts, argues that “the abundance of arms at every level of society means that any increase in inter-communal tensions and hostility will entail an increased likelihood of armed violence and bloodshed”. The dispersal of weapons to private armies and militias, insurgent groups, criminal organisations and other non-state actors feeds a cycle of violence in many societies that in turn causes even greater demand for guns. A variety of motivations spawns different kinds of violence, including political violence, pitting governments against insurgent forces fighting to overthrow the government or to achieve a separate state; communal violence, involving different ethnic, religious or other identity based groups; and criminal violence, involving drug traffickers, organised crime groups or petty individual crime. And ordinary citizens in many countries are increasingly arming themselves in self-defence against widespread crime and violence.

The Privatisation of Security

South Africa and several Central American countries, among others, experienced a seamless transition from politically motivated to criminal violence in the early 1990s. These and other countries have suffered years of fighting with conditions conducive to crime: severe economic and social inequalities, endemic poverty, a pervasive lack of jobs and a culture of violence. Recently demobilised soldiers and former guerrilla fighters in particular often find themselves poorly equipped to make a living in the civilian world. Not surprisingly, many tend to fall back on the tools and skills they acquired during years of conflict, leading to rising banditry in several countries. Moreover, weak or corrupt judicial systems and ineffective police forces have given rise to vigilante squads intent on what they call “social cleansing”, the killing of individuals suspected of crimes or otherwise perceived as undesirable. The pervasive reliance on violence threatens the consolidation of still-weak democracies and compromises the reconstruction and social and economic development that war-torn societies need to get back on their feet.

 

These are factors that feed what Professor Klare calls the “privatisation of security and violence”, a growing tendency of individuals, groups and organisations to rely on private security forces rather than on the state’s police and paramilitary formations. Indeed, private security formations are on the rise and civilian police are becoming more militarised just as national armies are shrinking in size.

 

Private security forces come in several stripes. Some work for corporations. British Petroleum made headlines, for instance, when it announced that it had engaged a battalion of local soldiers to protect its oil-production facilities in Colombia against guerrilla attack. Others, however, are contracting to carry out the tasks that national armies seem unable to accomplish. In recent years, several struggling governments, including those of Sierra Leone, Angola, Zaire and Papua New Guinea, have resorted to hiring private mercenaries to help fight insurgent groups. But the most important phenomenon, in terms of the number of people involved, is those private security services that, in some ways at least, closely resemble police forces. In several countries, private security forces rival or outstrip the size of the public police. In some countries, among them Australia, South Africa and the United States, they outnumber even the national army.

 

As concern about crime and violence grows, individuals, groups and businesses invest increasing amounts of money in private security ventures. In Latin America, public and private security expenses consume 13–15 per cent of the region’s combined gross domestic product, surpassing expenditure on welfare.

 

If the trend toward private security forces is beneficial, then it is so only for some: not necessarily those in need of security services, but rather those who have the ability to pay. Indeed, from Brazil to Pakistan to the United States, the emergence can be seen of walled-in and guarded exclusive communities housing the better off in society. This is happening while rising overall security related spending siphons off scarce resources from programmes which, by enhancing human wellbeing and strengthening the social fabric, help reduce the incidence of crime.

Causes of War

What is behind today’s conflicts? As argued above, the ethnic hatreds explanation is unconvincing. A multitude of pressures and instabilities threatens to shred the social fabric of societies. A toxic brew of growing disparities in wealth, persistent poverty, rising unemployment and job insecurity, population growth and environmental degradation is provoking more social discontent and polarisation, leading to political strife in many countries and to devastating violence in some. Although developing countries are most affected and most vulnerable, richer industrial nations are by no means immune to some of the same stress factors.

 

With the exception of global-scale environmental degradation, these underlying factors are, of course, nothing new. In the past, governments often managed to channel such pressures into patriotism and nationalism, diverting the energy of antagonism towards external adversaries. Today, by contrast, the more likely result is a weakening and unravelling of states and in some cases warfare.

 

The strains are making themselves felt clearly. In recent decades, the gap between rich and poor has grown dramatically. In 1960, those in the top 20 per cent worldwide had thirty times the income of those in the bottom 20 per cent. By the beginning of the 1990s, they had almost sixty times as much and in 1997, seventy-four times. This gaping disparity is replicated within individual countries, more severely in some than others. In the context of globalisation, the inequitable distribution of economic opportunities and social burdens is becoming far more pronounced. At the same time, modern information and communications channels ensure that people are much more aware of these disparities than in the past.

 

Unemployment, along with uncertain job tenure and downward pressure on wages, is a worrisome phenomenon practically everywhere in the world. Overall, at least 150 million people are out of work and another 900 million or so are underemployed, involuntarily working less than full time or earning less than a living wage. Altogether, at least one-third of the global labour force is affected. Additional numbers of people are not even counted as unemployed because, lacking success, they have given up searching for a job.

 

Pressure on labour markets is bound to intensify with high population growth. Most future job seekers—96 per cent of the more than seven hundred million people who are expected to join the world’s economically active population between 1995 and 2010—will be citizens of developing countries. Strong urban population growth and a continued influx of people from the countryside make jobs in cities scarce. Many young people end up in the “informal” sector, the underbelly of the economy where working conditions are unregulated and often poor and wages are low.

 

The shortage of jobs in countries with burgeoning youthful populations is creating widespread social discontent. Already, an estimated sixty million people worldwide between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four cannot find work. The phenomenon of legions of young adults and adolescents with uncertain and often unfavourable prospects for securing a livelihood may be one of the greatest threats to political stability, triggering criminal behaviour, feeding discontent that could burst open in street riots, or fomenting political extremism.

 

In many industrial countries, unemployment has steadily crept upwards since the 1970s and more than one-quarter of the jobless have been out of work for at least a year. Among the employed, temporary, part-time or otherwise insecure work is on the rise. Unemployment, job insecurity, persistent poverty and the growing divide between rich and poor have fuelled social conflict across Latin America. During the 1990s, unemployment there has risen from 6 per cent to almost 10 per cent; real wages have stagnated. In the formerly communist nations of eastern Europe a wrenching and uncertain economic transformation has rapidly led to mass unemployment and poverty. Russia’s economy is verging on the edge of collapse. Gross national product fell by an estimated 50–80 per cent during the 1990s, and the country may be a time bomb socially and politically. The 1997 Asian financial crisis deprived at least ten million people of their jobs. With few social protections in place, the result has been poverty and misery for many.

 

Unemployment and severe economic hardship and uncertainty foster extremist politics and violence. Although the particular circumstances of each case need careful analysis and can generate vastly different outcomes, three examples underline the potential dangers once people are driven to extremes by desperation. One is Kosovo, mentioned earlier, where the Kosovo Liberation Army had little difficulty in enlisting fighters from a population that is predominantly young and unemployed. In Rwanda, extremist Hutu leaders recruited primarily uneducated, jobless youths into militias that carried out genocidal violence in 1994 against ethnic Tutsis, whom they depicted as responsible for the country’s problems. And in East Timor, violent gangs armed by the Indonesian military to thwart the territory’s move towards independence have been drawn in part from the ranks of the unemployed. While not every unemployed person of today will become tomorrow’s shock-trooper of extremism, people’s willingness to tolerate the use of violence will be far higher if they have little hope for the future.

Globalisation

Because it affects the prospects for social and economic development, the process of globalisation, too, carries the potential for tension and conflict. As trade and investment flow, the expansion of travel, communications and technology draws nations deeper into the global economy, tying individual countries’ fates together ever more tightly. Since this process takes place in the context of extensive privatisation and deregulation, it tends to enhance the influence and power of corporations at the expense of governments. At the same time, two factors are spurring a re-dedication to local customs, loyalties and identities. The first is a feeling that national governments can be less and less relied upon to provide essential services, security and a sense of place in the world. The second is growing trepidation about what the forces of globalisation hold in store. While many localising efforts are benign, it is clear that some stem from a xenophobia that gives rise to the internal violence discussed earlier.

 

When national economies are closely linked in a global unregulated market, the ripple effects of economic trouble can be devastating, as the Asian financial crisis showed so clearly. Globalisation proceeds even as international financial and economic institutions—the IMF and the World Bank—lag behind in their ability to cope with its repercussions.

 

Economic integration only works to advance peace if it benefits broad sections of society. Yet the benefits and burdens of globalisation are distributed in spectacularly uneven fashion, heightening disparities between and within nations. Because it entails severe dislocation and social pain and because it is experienced as a challenge to local control and democratic accountability, economic globalisation tears at the very fabric of many societies. The turbulent changes inherent in globalisation may well trigger a backlash of parochialism and xenophobia, a phenomenon that Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University has called “Jihad vs McWorld”.

 

Many developing countries were and are bound into the global economy as highly dependent sellers of raw materials or simple manufactured goods. As the economies of advanced industrialised countries become more oriented towards information and communication technology, these trading relations inevitably undergo structural change. Reduced demand for certain commodities translates into weaker prices, a trend reinforced by the oversupply resulting from the simultaneous attempt of many producer countries to boost their commodity exports. Between 1980 and 1997, the non-fuel commodity price index (based on 1990 constant dollars) fell from 174 to 107. The petroleum price index fell from 224 to 76 during the same period. Economies dependent on the revenues that a single commodity or a handful of them can fetch on the world market are naturally vulnerable to these changes.

Environmental Pressures

Another factor in generating conflict, long disregarded but now increasingly acknowledged, is growing resource scarcity and environmental degradation. The depletion of water resources, excessive exploitation of fisheries, degradation of arable land and deforestation not only affect human health and imperil the habitability of some regions, but they also play an important role in generating or exacerbating some conflicts. Although several cross-border environmental disputes exist and could escalate in the future, environmentally induced conflict is far more likely within than between nations.

 

Environmental problems hit developing countries hardest, particularly those whose economies are heavily geared towards agriculture and other sectors that directly depend on the health of the natural resource base. The needs and interests of contending groups tied closely to the land—farmers, nomads, ranchers and resource extractors—are often at odds and remain unreconciled. Conflicts over scarce land and water abound. As cases from Mexico, Nigeria, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, India and other countries show, poorer communities, minority groups and indigenous peoples typically bear the brunt of adverse environmental change, particularly that triggered by oil drilling, mining, logging and large-scale dam and irrigation projects. There is now growing recognition of the environment-conflict linkage.

 

If climate change becomes a full-blown reality, it will compound present environmental challenges by raising sea levels, shifting vegetation zones and altering precipitation patterns. If heavily populated coastal areas are inundated and crop harvests are ravaged by more frequent droughts, to cite just two possible consequences, there could be dramatic increases in food insecurity. A flood of environmental refugees—displaced residents of engulfed coastal areas and farmers compelled to abandon their parched lands—may find it difficult to secure a new livelihood in already crowded cities and may even clash with hostile host communities. It is obviously impossible to predict either the dynamics of such a scenario or how well societies will cope, but in all likelihood such changes will translate into a sharp increase in human conflict. Already, extreme weather events, such as the devastation visited on Central America by Hurricane Mitch, or the increasingly violent monsoon rains in Bangladesh, give a clear indication of the large-scale loss of life and economic assets that climate change may bring.

 

Even short of catastrophic climate change, many natural systems, such as croplands, forests and freshwater sources, show signs of growing stress. Other things being equal, continued population growth intensifies these pressures. Depending on how environmental transformation translates into the social, economic and political realms, environmental decline could become an increasingly significant factor in violent disputes in coming decades. What matters most in this regard is not necessarily the hardships of environmental degradation per se, but rather that the harmful impacts will be felt highly unevenly by different social strata, communities and countries. This may well reinforce social and economic inequities and further polarise society. For instance, the Sardar-Sarovar dam and irrigation project in India’s Narmada Valley will primarily benefit a small number of wealthy farmers. The burdens—flooding of villages and arable land, destruction of local fisheries and loss of ancestral land and cultural monuments—will fall on hundreds of thousands of poorer peasants.

 

Environmental degradation joins traditional factors causing people to become migrants or refugees: the “pull” of better economic prospects elsewhere and the “push” of war, repression and other life-threatening circumstances. Water scarcity, soil erosion, desertification and other environmental calamities now contribute to the uprooting of large numbers of people, though reliable (or uncontroversial) estimates of how many do not exist. The repercussions of climate change are likely to boost sharply the numbers of those affected. The influx of people into another region or country can impose a considerable burden on the receiving area in competition over land, water, jobs, communal facilities and social services. This is especially the case if the host area’s economy is stagnant or in decline, or if the influx is sudden and massive. Although population movements do not inevitably cause conflict, the potential for trouble is present, particularly where political leaders or challengers are eager to capitalise by stirring up anti-foreigner sentiment.

 

If governments show themselves unable or unwilling to deal with these accelerating pressures, they stand to lose legitimacy. People turn to the more immediate group or community to which they belong in search of support, identity and security. But individual groups in such situations often feel they are competing head-on against each other for scarce resources and services. Governments may even encourage such splits in classical divide-and-rule fashion. All too often, the end result is a polarisation and splintering of societies, inviting violent responses to unresolved problems. Central governments may seek to impose authoritarian solutions, or the society may unravel and collapse.

A New Peace Policy

It is clear from the discussion so far that traditional security policies have very limited relevance for efforts to cope with the kinds of conflict the world is witnessing today. In fact, traditional policies are likely to worsen the situation. What, then, can be done? Efforts at peacemaking confront two central challenges. One is the enormous spread and easy availability of weapons of almost all calibres that make recourse to violence far too easy and tempting. The other is the rising social, economic, demographic and environmental pressures on many societies.

 

To forestall the likelihood of endless skirmishes and wars in the coming century, governments, intergovernmental institutions and civil society groups will need to pursue more vigorously demilitarisation, conflict prevention and global institution building, with greater grassroots engagement and a fundamental recalibration of security investments. A key task will be to establish effective restraints based on three principles, which contrast sharply with the approaches underlying past and present policies: disarmament (as opposed to arms control); universal constraints on arms (as opposed to non-proliferation); and conflict prevention (as opposed to regulating warfare):

1. Disarmament 

Several decades of arms control efforts have yielded mostly weak numerical limits on the numbers of certain weapons that states may deploy and no limits at all on many other kinds of arms. There are still few internationally accepted norms and standards to curb the production, possession and trade of arms. The list of weapons that have actually been outlawed is extremely short. Although the use of chemical weapons was banned in 1925, nearly another seveny years passed before the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention prohibited their production and possession. In 1995 the sale and use of so-called blinding laser weapons was banned and in 1997 a treaty prohibiting anti-personnel landmines was signed, coming into force this year.

 

In light of the dominant types of conflict today, imposing restraints on the conventional arms trade is an extremely urgent task. Huge amounts of weapons of all calibres have been dispersed worldwide. Among the most alarming aspects of this build-up is the widespread proliferation of small arms—the weapon of choice in today’s internal conflicts. One measure long demanded by human rights organisations and other groups is a binding code of conduct to ensure that, at the very least, weapons are not exported to governments that fail to hold free elections, trample human rights or engage in armed aggression. A voluntary code of conduct was adopted by the European Union in June 1998, but establishing truly effective, binding codes in Europe and elsewhere remains a crucial step towards peace. A normative presumption against trading arms is needed so that such transfers are no longer seen as routine commercial transactions but rather as highly unusual events.

2. Universality

The second general principle concerns universality of norms. In order to be just and effective, constraints on armaments need to apply to all states equally. This contrasts with the non-proliferation policies currently in vogue in the West which allow a select (and self-appointed) group of countries to retain certain kinds of weapons denied to all other states. The non-proliferation approach in effect leads to a global security apartheid system. It is morally unacceptable and unlikely to work.

3. Prevention

The third principle focuses on preventing violent conflict rather than merely regulating it. Much could be accomplished by building a network to provide early warning of conflicts. Permanent dispute arbitration centres could be set up in every region of the world. More backing should be given to preventative diplomacy. A corps of skilled and experienced individuals should be formed to serve as roving mediators on behalf of the international community. Conflict prevention is not an exact science, to be sure. It is more a trial-and-error process. There will be cases when early warning of impending violent conflict turns out to be a false alarm. But the international community would do well to have some redundancy built into the conflict prevention apparatus so that a variety of efforts can be launched to ward off mass violence. Preventing the eruption of disputes into full-scale hostilities is by no means an easy task, but its difficulties pale beside those of ending fighting once large-scale bloodshed has occurred.

Additional Measures

Of course, conflict prevention through mediation will not always work, so additional tools are needed. In particular, peacekeeping missions will need to be refashioned so that they can embody the true meaning of the word peacekeeping, instead of serving as last-minute fire brigades. In the course of the last few years, peacekeeping has come to be associated with failure: too few people equipped too poorly and dispatched too late, unable to keep a peace that scarcely exists on the ground. What is needed is the creation of a well-trained, permanent force under United Nations auspices for preventative deployments. It would be dispatched in response to clear signs of imminent violent dispute, either along national borders or even within countries. Such an intervention should not be seen as an end in itself, but rather as providing space for mediation efforts.

 

Far-reaching disarmament, universally applied constraints on armaments and vigorous conflict prevention efforts will go a long way towards addressing the more traditional aspects of a peace policy. But to be successful, these steps will need to be linked with a broader human security agenda. Conflict prevention is not only about positioning peacekeepers between would-be attackers and their intended victims (though a few successful operations of that kind could have a salutary effect). More fundamentally, it is about recognising and alleviating the underlying pressures that lead to violent disputes in the first place. What follows is only a brief sketch of the necessary policies.

 

At the core, the shift towards prevention requires policies geared to strengthening the fabric of society and improving its governance. Central to such policies are goals such as a fair distribution of wealth, a fair balancing of the interests of different population groups, poverty eradication, adequate job creation and the preservation or restoration of ecosystems. These are urgent requirements in a world in which tremendous economic growth combined with widespread inequity is driving environmental destruction, breeding explosive social conditions and fuelling ethnic antagonisms.

 

Governments will need to adopt policies better able to stem the degradation of watersheds and arable lands, and to conserve and protect vital natural systems. They will need to pursue climate stabilisation policies. Also crucial to success are measures to boost the efficiency with which energy, materials and water are used. In developing countries where much of the population depends directly on the integrity and stability of ecosystems, the benefits would not only be to the environment. They would also carry over into the social and political realms by helping to avert the dislocations and distribution conflicts that now accompany wholesale environmental destruction. But the policies of industrialised countries are also crucial, since they consume the bulk of the world’s resources and are thus directly or indirectly responsible for most of the unsustainable mining, logging, metal smelting, fishing and fossil-fuel burning that occurs.

 

It is equally important that governments become more serious about fulfilling pledges to eradicate poverty, promote full employment and reduce massive social inequality. At the World Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995, it was widely recognised that social conditions are closely linked to issues of peace. But the summit’s rhetoric has so far proven stronger than actual policy commitments. Only with strong involvement from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) will it be possible to translate rhetorical pledges into reality.

 

Seen traditionally as bulwarks against state oppression, human rights need also to be understood as tools to protect the economically and socially weak from the depredations of the strong. Human rights are of growing importance in a globalising world as decision-making processes affect more and more individuals and communities in increasingly profound ways. The world’s political and corporate elites have been far more interested and effective in creating a global market structure than in establishing three conditions essential to preventing globalisation from becoming a continuous source of contention: first, making the most powerful market players more accountable; second, preparing the ground on which a global human community, not just a global marketplace, can flourish; and third, setting up international institutions sufficiently strong to advance global norms and safeguard the interests of the global human community.

The Rise of Civil Society

War and peace were primarily a government affair when nation-states were in their prime and most conflicts involved armies of opposing states or coalitions of states. Today, as we have seen, armed conflict is of a very different nature and it is only natural that non-governmental groups should become more involved, not only as combatants, but also as peacemakers.

 

Impatient with the failure of governments to promote conflict prevention and peace building, NGOs—or civil society organisations as they are coming to be called—are playing an increasingly assertive role on the local, national and international levels. NGOs concerned with such varied issues as human rights, governmental accountability, environmental protection, human development and justice and equity are making themselves heard, reflecting a broadened understanding of the preconditions for peace.

 

Recent years have also seen the emergence of working coalitions that, on an issue-by-issue basis, bring together NGOs and like-minded governments. The anti-personnel landmines campaign is the outstanding example of this phenomenon. With the support of countries such as Canada, South Africa, Belgium and Norway, the campaign succeeded in putting landmines on the global agenda, hammering out an international treaty banning these devices and bringing it into force at a far greater speed than any other arms treaty in history. Although the landmines campaign was in many ways unique, it naturally prompted hopes that its stunning success could be repeated in other areas, such as the effort to establish an International Criminal Court, the mounting campaign to counter small arms proliferation and the “Middle Powers Initiative” (an endeavour to encourage nuclear-weapons states to commit themselves to practical steps towards the elimination of their atomic arsenals).

 

“Soft power”, as the growing influence of NGOs is often called, seeks to mobilise public opinion and open traditionally quiet (and often secretive and slow-moving) diplomacy to far greater scrutiny. It is based on the notion that human security, not state security, should be the organising principle of peace policy. It regards military force as having declining utility. And it emphasises the power of ideas and the promulgation of new norms over the power of weapons.

 

While it is clearly premature to expect additional quick successes comparable to the anti-landmine campaign, NGO influence has grown to be a factor that governments must reckon with. It is becoming ever clearer that peace is too important an issue to be left to generals and diplomats.