They produce more shock and shame, as well as concern, in the onlooker because they appear as exceptions to the trend of stabilization in inter-state and inter-regional relations since 1990 and as a reversion to “pre-modern” methods of behaving in the global society. Localized and active conflicts have attracted proportionately much greater attention since the ending of the East-West Cold War and, with it, of the essentially static military confrontation in Europe that had carried the potential for global annihilation.

There can be no doubt about the dominance of conflict as a concern in modern security analysis and policy. There is nothing wrong in talking about economic, social, religious or philosophical “conflict”, but these other manifestations of human disunity are relevant to the present study only if or when they trigger an armed confrontation on a more than individual scale. The qualifier “armed” means that we are talking here about violence that uses weapons against the life and limb of the opponent, and that takes place at some level above the purely personal, domestic, and criminal. Elastic though the term is, however, it will be used in what follows with some fundamental restrictions. “Conflict” may occur between states, within states and between non-state actors it can involve forces acting on their own territory, or far away it does not have to have a single identified “aggressor”, or to be aimed at physical “conquest”, or to be preceded by a single identifiable “dispute” in other form. If the terminology of “conflict” has come largely to replace, and certainly to overshadow, these earlier concepts during the later half of the 20 th century, it is because it can so conveniently be used to encompass a number of different types and sources of armed violence.

Instead – and understandably given the time of its genesis – the text refers to “disputes”, “aggression” and protecting the world’s peoples from the threat of “war”. Interestingly enough, the word “conflict” does not appear in the Charter of the United Nations.

Major armed conflict north africa 2003