Global Security Concerns - Project Gutenberg Consortia Center

asic motives for conflict have not changed, but an evolutionary transition has occurred
in the specific objects pursued and the weapons employed.
This present volume does not argue that human nature has changed and that we will
experience fundamentally new sources of conflict. Indeed, Huntington argues
persuasively the case for historical continuity-except for the interjection of modern
demographic and technological variables. We seek to identify new manifestations of
human desire that warrant war activities. We could identify such objects using scientific
methodologies, but others may argue that the inherently subjective nature of such social
phenomena will not necessarily add greater precision.
Projected conflicts in the near-term future already may be detected in nascent form
by the attentive observer. Certainly war motives stemming from religious, economic, or
security concerns are not new. Yet, as the various analyses in this book demonstrate, we
may consider anticipated hostile confrontations over international criminal activities,
population migrations, human rights violations, water and food access, land degradation,
and terrorism as new conflict sources, but we have already experienced them earlier in
history. The West does not conceive of overt transnational hostilities over food, yet the
last several years have witnessed a dozen armed confrontations over fishing disputes on
the high seas among developed countries. We may speculate that many existing tensions
today may intensify to the point of overt conflicts in the future, but we must be mindful
that such tensions will not represent sudden, completely unprecedented or unanticipatable
causes of conflict.
Another dimension in these analyses should demonstrate that sources of conflicts are
not singular but are invariably mixtures or combinations of motives. For example, wars
over purely religious concerns have occurred in history, but despite public perceptions to
the contrary, few wars are fought because of that cause today. Underneath the religious
veneer, ethnic interests-or more than likely economic interests-may be in evidence. By
way of example, one may argue that the conflict in Northern Ireland has more to do with
class than it does with religion; that the Israeli-Arab differences stem not from religion
but ethnicity, history, and territorial claims: that the widening large-scale civil
disturbances in Algeria stem not so much from religious doctrinal sources as from the
failures of economic development under the republican regime; and that the prolonged
civil war in Sudan is not simply a conflict between Muslims and Christians, as often
reported, but the conflict concerns race, ethnicity, history, poverty, oil, and water issues.
Certainly in Bosnia, Western Christian states are not troubled by their support of the
Muslim population against the Christian Orthodox Serbs. In this latter case, US economic
concerns do not predominate as do humanitarian sentiments. In the same vein, the World
Commission on Environment and Development recognized that “environmental stress is
seldom the only cause of major conflicts within or among nations. Nevertheless, they can
arise from the marginalization of sectors of the population and from ensuing violence.” 34
The search for motives of war represents the supreme analytic challenge for students
of international relations. This search has produced historically the most engrossing
literature on political discourse. Caution must be exercised that superficial assumptions
about such motives are not made by the policymaker. Simplistic conclusions about most
conflicts in Africa identify “tribalism” as the source of all conflicts, but this identification
ignores the basic fact that tribal wars have been traditionally characterized by battles in
pursuit of nonpolitical objectives. 35 Africa's wars are modern, but just what are the
11