Mary Kaldor

An Answer to War

Global Civil Society

Saskia Sassen

Warfare in the twenty-first century goes well beyond conventional armies and nation-states. In a world of diffuse conflicts taking place across sprawling cities, war has become fragmented and uneven to match its settings. Yet the analysis of failed states, civil war, and state building rarely considers the city, rather than the country, as the terrain of battle. In Cities at War, Mary Kaldor and Saskia Sassen assemble an international team of scholars to examine cities as sites of contemporary warfare and insecurity. Reflecting Kaldor’s expertise on security cultures and Sassen’s perspective on cities and their geographies, they develop new insight into how cities and their residents encounter instability and conflict, as well as the ways in which urban forms provide possibilities for countering violence. Through a series of case studies of cities including Baghdad, Bogotá, Ciudad Juarez, Kabul, and Karachi, the book reveals the unequal distribution of insecurity as well as how urban capabilities might offer resistance and hope. Through analyses of how contemporary forms of identity, inequality, and segregation interact with the built environment, Cities at War explains why and how political violence has become increasingly urbanized. It also points toward the capacity of the city to shape a different kind of urban subjectivity that can serve as a foundation for a more peaceful and equitable future.

Global Insecurity and Urban Resistance

Cities at War

Mary Martin

This edited book examines European external interventions in human security, in order to illustrate the evolution and nature of the European Union as a global political actor.

External Interventions and Missions

The European Union and Human Security

Christine Chinkin

International Law and New Wars examines how international law fails to address the contemporary experience of what are known as 'new wars' - instances of armed conflict and violence in places such as Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. International law, largely constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rests to a great extent on the outmoded concept of war drawn from European experience - inter-state clashes involving battles between regular and identifiable armed forces. The book shows how different approaches are associated with different interpretations of international law, and, in some cases, this has dangerously weakened the legal restraints on war established after 1945. It puts forward a practical case for what it defines as second generation human security and the implications this carries for international law.

International Law and New Wars

Organized Violence in a Global Era ; with an Afterword, January 2001

New and Old Wars

Mary Kaldor’s New and Old Wars has fundamentally changed the way we understand contemporary war and conflict. In the context of globalization, this path-breaking book has shown that what we think of as war – that is to say, war between states in which the aim is to inflict maximum violence – is becoming an anachronism. In its place is a new type of organized violence or ‘new wars’, which could be described as a mixture of war, organized crime and massive violations of human rights. The actors are both global and local, public and private. The wars are fought for particularistic political goals using tactics of terror and destabilization that are theoretically outlawed by the rules of modern warfare. An informal criminalized economy is built into the functioning of the new wars. Kaldor’s analysis offers a basis for a cosmopolitan political response to these wars, in which the monopoly of legitimate organized violence is reconstructed on a transnational basis and international peacekeeping is reconceptualized as cosmopolitan law enforcement. This approach also has implications for the reconstruction of civil society, political institutions, and economic and social relations. This second edition has been fully revised and updated to deal fully with the implications of ‘the new wars’ in the post 9-11 world. In a new chapter, Kaldor shows how old war thinking in Iraq has has greatly exacerbated what is, in many ways, the archetypal new war – with insurgency, chaos and the occupying forces’ lack of direction prescient of a different kind of conflict now emerging in the 21st Century. Like its predecessor, the second edition of New and Old Wars will be essential reading for students of international relations, politics and conflict studies as well as to all those interested in the changing nature and prospect of warfare.

New & Old Wars

Sabine Selchow

Tamsin Murray-Leach

The demonstrations and occupations that emerged across Europe in 2011-12 struck a chord in public opinion in a way that has not been true for many years. Based on research carried out across the continent, this volume investigates why this is occurring now and what they tell us about the future of the European project.

Subterranean Politics in Europe

A Report for the FAST Programme

Global Perspectives on Security, War and Armament

Examines the difficulties in applying international law to recent armed conflicts known as 'new wars'.

Mary Kaldor

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