Abstract
From the United Nations (UN) to the Commonwealth of Nations, resolving conflicts by peaceful means is one of the primary goals of international, intergovernmental political institutions, assuming that human development without peace and security is oxymoronic as is peace without relative degrees of social and economic security. Ironically and unfortunately, their inadequacy to help peaceful resolution of global conflicts comes in sharp focus with the fact that the twentieth century was the most violent of all previous centuries in terms of its lethality. Forty-five major wars were fought in that century. Approximately 90 million people, military and civilians, lost their lives in those wars. In comparison, WWI took 19 million lives; World War II killed 61 million, including 300,000+ Americans; the Korean War alone caused 3.6 million civilian and military deaths; the Vietnam War killed millions of Vietnamese and 58,000+ Americans; and the four-year (1984–87) Iraqi-Iranian war resulted in 1.5 million (estimated) casualties including hundreds of thousands deaths on each side.1
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Notes
Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and other Figures (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002).
Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 128–42.
Siddiq Salik, Witness to Surrender (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);
R. LaPorte, “Pakistan in 1971: The Disintegration of a Nation,” Asian Survey 12, no. 2 (1972): 97–108.
Heinrich Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1954); “Invasion and Illegal Annexation of Tibet: 1949–1951,” The Government of Tibet in Exile online, April 27, 1999, http://tibet.net/whitepaper/white2.html.
Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, “War-Related Deaths in the 1991–1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results,” European Journal of Population 21, nos. 2–3 (2005): 187–215.
Mark Kurlansky, Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Danerous Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2006).
Anup Shah, “Arms Trade—A Major Cause of Suffering,” Global Issues, January 5, 2013, http://globalissues.org/issues/73/arms-trade-a-major-cause-of suffering.
Cindy Combs, Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003);
Albert J. Bergson and Omar Lizardo, “International Terrorism and the World System,” Sociological Theory 22, no. 1 (2004): 38–52.
This definition is informed by the following sources: Aqueil Ahmad and Michael Sileno, “Pre- and Post-9/11 Sociological Response to Terrorism,” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 42, no. 2 (October 2005): 189–206;
Jonathan R. White, Terrorism: An Introduction (Stanford, CA: Wadsworth Thomson Learning, 2002);
Gus Martin, Understanding Terrorism: Challenging, Perspectives, and Issues (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003).
For this line of explanations, see Aqueil Ahmad, “Powerful Reaction to Powerlessness,” Peace Review 8, no. 10 (September 1996): 423–29; and “Terrorism as Powerful Reaction to Powerlessness in Global Society” (paper presented at the Association of Humanist Sociology, Annual Meeting, Newport, RI, November 15–18, 2001).
Rabindra Ray, The Naxalites and Their Ideology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988).
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© 2013 Aqueil Ahmad
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Ahmad, A. (2013). Global Conflicts. In: New Age Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319494_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319494_7
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