Today’s guest post is the second by Paul Rexton Kan of the U.S. Army War College. Kan recently contributed to a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgency.
There have been two articles that could be read together as one study on the near future of conflicts. In the current edition of Foreign Policy magazine, “Peak Insurgency” by Joshua Keating covers the research of two Yale political scientists who conclude that the number of insurgencies worldwide has actually declined since 1991. Meanwhile, a study by James Fearon concluded that civil wars last 39 years longer when the belligerents are actively involved in illicit activities, primarily cocaine and heroin trafficking.
Are the terror groups and insurgent movements currently active in the world those that will be part of the international security landscape for the foreseeable future? Phil Cerny describes this landscape as “durable disorder”; Phil Williams, “the new Dark Ages” and the US Army , “the era of persistent conflict”. This is the “new abnormal” school that sees violent non-state actors and asymmetric threats as a type of fixed magnetic north for security studies. Future research, new policies and novel strategies can be plotted by focusing on the assessments that are embraced by this school.
I count myself as one of the adherents of the new abnormal. But anything abnormal still rests on a conception of what is “normal”; trends come in bunches and patches. The question should not be about what the near future holds, but how we avoid becoming conventional in our thinking about the unconventional.
Editor’s Note: Kan is eager for feedback, we strongly encourage readers to post their thoughts in the comments section.
Paul Rexton Kan is currently an Associate Professor of National Security Studies at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. While finishing his Ph.D., he was the Deputy Director of the Center for China-United States Cooperation where he coordinated professional exchanges with Chinese officials from the policy institutions linked to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of State Security, and the People’s Liberation Army.
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