War, Conflict and Peace: Nature, Causes and Types
Expect definitional precision: the paper penalises candidates who use war, conflict, insurgency and terrorism interchangeably.
Nature and causes
War is organised violence between political communities; conflict is a broader incompatibility of goals that need not be violent. Causes are analysed at three levels derived from Waltz's Man, the State and War: individual leaders and psychology, regime type and domestic politics, and international structure such as anarchy and the security dilemma. Bargaining models add commitment problems and issue indivisibility.
Types
- Interstate vs intrastate; conventional vs unconventional; total vs limited; symmetric vs asymmetric.
- Guerrilla warfare seeks control of the population and withdrawal from the battlefield; terrorism deliberately targets non-combatants for political signalling; insurgency combines both with political mobilisation.
- New wars (Kaldor) feature identity politics, civilian victimisation and globalised financing; hybrid and grey-zone conflict blend military, cyber and economic instruments; Lind's fourth-generation warfare stresses the political and the dispersed.
Just war and peace
Jus ad bellum requires just cause, legitimate authority, proportionality, last resort and right intention; jus in bello requires discrimination and proportionality in conduct; jus post bellum governs the settlement. Galtung distinguishes negative peace (absence of violence) from positive peace (presence of justice). Peacekeeping rests on consent, impartiality and minimum force; peace enforcement sits under Chapter VII; peacemaking is diplomatic; peacebuilding and Lederach's conflict transformation address structural causes.
Worked example
Sri Lanka's civil war is an intrastate ethnic conflict with a secessionist aim, external supply and diaspora financing: the cause is not merely grievance but a bargaining failure between an ethnically bounded state and a movement unwilling to accept autonomy.
Traps
Equating conflict with war; calling terrorism a strategy of insurgency without distinction; confusing peacekeeping with peace enforcement; ignoring voluntary and identity dimensions of new wars.