1946
Mary Kaldor
British academic, professor emerita at the London School of Economics, long associated with European peace-research and human-security scholarship. Her early career was on military-industrial questions (The Baroque Arsenal, 1981); from the 1990s onwards her work shifted to the analysis of post-Cold-War conflict patterns, producing the "new wars" framework that became the dominant academic frame for thinking about non-state violence in the Yugoslav wars, the African civil wars, and the post-2001 conflicts.
Stake§
Kaldor writes from an explicitly normative position — she is a peace- research scholar, and the "new wars" framework comes attached to a cosmopolitan argument for international intervention against organised violence and human-rights violations. The descriptive thesis (that post-Cold-War conflicts blur war, organised crime, and large-scale human-rights abuse) and the normative argument (that international cosmopolitan responses are needed) sit together in her work and have to be read together.
The "new wars" framework names a real shift in the form of armed conflict — away from state-on-state war between regular forces, towards configurations involving paramilitaries, criminal networks, foreign fighters, and state-private hybrids — and it has been picked up across international relations and security studies as the working vocabulary for the period.
For the chartered-violence corpus, Kaldor is the third corner of the canonical academic triangle alongside Singer and McFate. Where Singer and McFate analyse the PMC, Kaldor's frame reaches the whole post-Westphalian configuration of armed violence — the chartered private operator is one institutional form within that wider new-wars landscape.