What is the nature of armed conflict in the 21st Century?

Permutations for diverse interactions among states-as well as nonstate actors-greatly increased. The system continued to be one in which states had to provide for their own and international security. Yet, because of sovereignty, states remained the dominant forces in international politics they alone could tax and conscript. International govern-mental and nongovernmental organizations had grown in number and authority. There had been unprecedented economic growth that made possible immense improvements in living standards while, at the same time, the chasm between the extremely rich and the extremely poor grew. Nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction had been introduced.

The world's popula-tion had more than doubled since 1945, and, as a consequence of decolonization, the number of states in the system had more than trebled. The emerging world configuration would surely not be the world order that postwar planners during the Second World War had hoped for, the order for which the United Nations was designed, the order that might have prevailed had it not been for the Cold War. The nature of this transformation on global politics and its academic study, however, was far from clear. Should examining large-scale violence remain the purpose of security studies? With that global change came a challenge to the focus of traditional security studies on the threat and use of force and its instruments. The end of the Cold War transformed international politics. The threat of unimaginable destruction grew at the same time with the buildup of the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals. Much of the large-scale violence that had occurred during these four decades was a direct consequence of the Cold War. The Cold War had dominated international politics, and the studies of many political scientists and other scholars, since the late 1940s. The fall of the Berlin Wall under the weight of popular protest on Novemmarked the beginning of the end of the Cold War, a process that culminated with the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later.

What is the nature of armed conflict in the 21st Century?