Dynamics and Constraints in Negotiating Internal Conflicts

Abstract

As the dominant system of conflict and world order disintegrates, internal conflicts and their regional ramifications emerge as the primary challenge to international peace and security. Because of their inherent asymmetry, internal conflicts are condemned to escalate. Unlike the cold war system of conflict, they do not represent a cause and counter cause that sweep the world and lock it in a global struggle. Rather internal conflicts are endemic infections in the body politic that demand attention and intervention—undulating fevers, old wounds, and running sores that do not heal, resulting in neither victory nor defeat, with no common cause, and yet merely the aberrational outgrowths of normal political processes gone bad. In contrast to the kind of attention given to internal wars and rebellion during the cold war era (particularly in the 1960s), the focus here is not on counterinsurgency or on the tactics of prevailing in conflict. The key to the new approach is a basic acknowledgement of the legitimacy of internal dissidence, seen as the result of the breakdown of normal politics. This does not mean that in internal conflicts the insurgents are assumed to be “right”; it only means that they are assumed to have a point and to represent legitimate grievances, even if they do not use legitimate means of pursuing them. The new focus in the post-cold-war era is on resolving rather than combating internal conflict.