Kaldor's analysis offers a basis for a cosmopolitan political response to these wars, in which the monopoly of legitimate organized violence is reconstructed on a transnational basis and international peacekeeping is reconceptualized as cosmopolitan law enforcement. This approach also has implications for the reconstruction of civil society, political institutions, and economic and social relations.
This second edition has been fully revised and updated to deal fully with the implications of `the new wars' in the post 9-11 world. In a new chapter, Kaldor shows how old war thinking in Iraq has has greatly exacerbated what is, in many ways, the archetypal new war -- with insurgency, chaos and the occupying forces' lack of direction prescient of a different kind of conflict now emerging in the 21st Century.
Like its predecessor, the second edition of New and Old Wars will be essential reading for students of international relations, politics and conflict studies as well as to all those interested in the changing nature and prospect of warfare.
* Exam copies only available to lecturers for whom the book may be suitable as a course text.
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"If you don't read Mary Kaldor's New and Old Wars you won't understand the world of violence we live in. And you will miss the only way out: the perspective of a cosmopolitan realpolitik that Kaldor opens up and paints in detail in her highly sophisticated and original analysis. It is the classical book on new wars."
Ulrich Beck, University of Munich
"More than any other book, Mary Kaldor's brilliantly sustained enquiry into "new wars" helps us grasp the complex terrain of political violence since the end of the Cold War. The richness and clarity of the overall presentation greatly strengthens Kaldor's stature as one of the most consistently imaginative and conceptually creative thinkers of our time on the central issues of global affairs."
Richard Falk, Princeton University
"A timely and important book. Putting the so-called revolution in military affairs firmly to one side, Mary Kaldor has provided us with a window into the future of war."
Martin van Creveld, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
