Concept of Internal Conflict and Method of Solution
(7)
BY
Suleiman Sandal Haggar
In the modem world, states seldom try to enlarge their territory by sending their armies to occupy the territory of other states; instead, they increase their influence by encouraging factions sharing their own ideology to seize or retain power in other states.
The existence of ideologies transcending national frontiers not only makes civil wars more frequent; it also increases the dangers of civil wars developing into World Wars, because the rules of international law concerning participation in civil wars by foreign states are not as clear as the rules prohibiting World Wars. A civil war may be fought for control of the government, or part of the population’s desires to form a
new state. The groups of individuals who wish to set up a new government or new state called rebels or revolutionaries.
There is a consensus among scholars and policymakers that civil wars are on the rise since 1945. Jimmy Carter recently observed that of the 116 wars since World War II. all but Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a civil war (l4). The seminal correlates of war project identified between 1945 and 1980 are 43 civil wars, 12 international wars, and 18 extra-systemic colonial and imperial wars. Paul Pillar lists 16 civil, 14 international and extra-systemic wars after 1945. Gantz and Meyer-Stamer developed a list of 31 wars going on in 1984; 26 of them were classified as internal. Hugh Miall constructed a set of about 350 conflicts between 1945 and 1985. From this, he worked with a subset of 81 and found 6 international conflicts with major violence as compared 10 28 civil or civil/international ones. Ruth Sivard counted 24 wars being fought in 1087, 22 of which were civil wars or wars of secession. The common ground of these studies is that civil violence is a major phenomenon in the current world (15).
In general, it is very difficult to predict human behaviour in social and political interaction. Nonetheless, recently there have been some scientific tools that enable government, organization, and scholars to predict conflict behaviour in civil wars. New conflict prediction models developed by Collier and Hoeffler (2000) help in behavioural prediction. African civil wars always end, but they usually restart. The model of Collier and Hoeffler (CH) discussed three factors has more risk to conflict, but one of them has not yet been discussed because it is not readily amenable to policy application.