New and Old Wars — Organized Violence in a Global Era

Mary Kaldor (b. 1946) was professor at the LSE and one of the defining voices of European peace-research scholarship; New and Old Wars is her articulation of what came to be called the "new wars" thesis — that post-Cold-War armed conflict had shifted away from state-versus-state combat between regular forces and toward configurations of paramilitaries, criminal networks, foreign fighters, and state–private hybrids, with civilian populations as the principal casualty. The argument was developed against the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, where Kaldor did extensive fieldwork, and it became the working vocabulary for international relations and security studies on non-state violence through the 2000s.

The book has been co-published by Polity (UK) and Stanford University Press (US) since 1999. The 1999 first edition is the locus classicus; second (2006) and third (2012) editions add prefaces and reweight the post-9/11 cases without overturning the descriptive frame. Polity's editorial register is academic-trade, aimed at policy and graduate readers as well as researchers, which is visible in the book's accessible prose and in its having become a syllabus standard for conflict-studies courses.

The thesis has been actively contested. Stathis Kalyvas's The Logic of Violence in Civil War (2006) is the standard counter — Kalyvas argues, with statistical and historical evidence, that the old-war / new-war dichotomy collapses on inspection and that civil wars across the twentieth century show similar dynamics around civilian targeting. Edward Newman, Bart Schuurman, and others extended the critique on both empirical and conceptual grounds: that the "newness" Kaldor identifies is partly a function of where the academic spotlight had been pointing, not of the underlying conflict patterns. Any "new wars" claim in this corpus should be read against Kaldor and her critics together, rather than treated as settled.

Kaldor's stake is normative and explicit. Peace-research scholarship of her stripe is built around a cosmopolitan argument for international intervention against organised violence and human-rights abuses; the descriptive thesis (post-Cold-War conflict has this hybrid form) and the prescriptive argument (a cosmopolitan, human-security-oriented response is needed) come bundled in her work and should be read together. She is not pretending otherwise — the political project is on the surface of the prose.

For this corpus, New and Old Wars gives the broader frame within which the chartered private military company is one institutional form among several, and gestures at the neomedieval restructuring of sovereignty that Sean McFate's later book names directly. Where Singer's Corporate Warriors describes the firm, Kaldor describes the landscape it operates in.