Everybody knows that there’s a war happening in Ukraine. But not everybody knows that it’s not the only war happening in the world today. Yemen is still burning. Mali is still fighting terrorists. Rebels are still holding out in the Congo. Afghanistan is still reeling under the Taliban. Haiti hasn’t had peace in years.
The list is ridiculously long. In 2020, there were 56 active conflicts around the world. Africa alone has seen some 200 civil wars in the last 50-odd years. Millions die, generations are lost — but, as some people have started pointing out now, there’s hardly any outrage or empathy for these countries.
It hasn’t helped that the Western media is using appallingly racist language to describe what’s happening in Ukraine. A CBS News foreign correspondent called Kyiv a “relatively civilised, relatively European city” — not “Iraq or Afghanistan”. NBC’s correspondent said that Ukrainians fleeing violence are “not refugees from Syria”; they are “Christians, they’re white, they’re very similar people,” she moaned.
Even for countries whose racist history is legendarily infamous, the bluntness with which multiple reporters evoked special sympathy for “Europe’s war” in skin-tone terms was shocking. But there is a somewhat different, less racist case to be made for why Ukraine’s war is not the same as those other wars I mentioned (even if it isn’t more devastating or heartbreaking).
For starters, after World War II, the nature of “war” changed. While, previously, nation-states used to be at each other’s throats frequently, since 1946 — and especially since the end of the Cold War in 1991 — wars between countries have become extremely rare. Instead, starting in the early 1990s, there was a spurt in the number of wars within countries — between different factions in a civil war or between rebels and the government.
The overwhelming reason for these intrastate wars (like those in Yemen, Haiti, Afghanistan etc) — as I argued in my book Flying Blind — is a crippling lack of basic state institutions. In the absence of proper governance and democracy (or inclusive, non-majoritarian democracy), governments lose legitimacy in the eyes of large sections of their people, who in turn take arms and storm the presidential palace, thereby triggering a cycle of conflict.
To be sure, these “internal” conflicts were often made worse by foreign interference. During the Cold War, both the Americans and the Soviets backed brutal dictators of their choice in different countries, depending on whether they followed capitalism or communism. Afghanistan, for instance, may well have been a far less violent country today if the Soviets hadn’t invaded them in the 1980s to protect a highly unpopular communist regime (and if the Americans hadn’t created Islamist militias in response).
But in a strange way, the world turned out to be somewhat more “peaceful” during the Cold War than after it (as you can make out from the graph above). During the Cold War, the two superpowers created client states for themselves and often held unopposed sway in their respective client states — thereby deterring aggression both from each other as well as internal rebels in those countries.
After the Soviet Union ‘passed away’, its client states were left ‘orphaned’, leaving dictators in those countries more vulnerable to attack from rebels — hence triggering a spurt in “intrastate” wars in the 1990s.
This is a vicious cycle of violence: most civil wars come to a brief recess after a peace agreement is signed, but the fundamental issues (that of providing inclusive state institutions and a functional democratic government) are left unresolved — and war therefore resumes after a few years. Sometimes, the actors in the play change — the governing faction gets dethroned and becomes the rebel, and vice-versa — but the script is often the same.
Ukraine, though, is a different story. Here is a country that used to be a relatively stable democratic state, attacked — without an immediate trigger cause — by a much larger, nuclear-armed neighbour. If Putin hadn’t sent his troops into Ukraine, it’s highly likely that there would have been no death or destruction in that country.
In doing so, Putin turned the clock back to an era when relatively stable countries were in danger of instability through foreign invasions.
After World War II, the widespread devastation (and the impetus of the anti-colonial movements) built a world that left stable states to govern themselves (or, as diplomats put it, “respected state sovereignty”). During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States violated that understanding in countries where there was a power struggle between communist and capitalist factions (as in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan etc). Yet, countries that weren’t undergoing domestic political strife still enjoyed a certain level of security.
Putin’s invasion, however, has broken all those codes of conduct, reprising — in a way — the rationale of colonialism. When European colonisers invaded countries, they often overthrew stable governments that had been running affairs fairly smoothly for centuries, and they rationalised those invasions by citing selfish national interests, such as a need for land, labour or other resources, or a buffer state to keep a rival power away (the British, for instance, invaded Afghanistan in the 1800s several times in an attempt to keep the Russians out of that country — pretty much the same way in which Putin says he wants to keep NATO out of Ukraine).
In the absence of a credible international framework to punish and deter powerful rogue regimes from unilateral invasions, countries both stable and unstable have suddenly become less secure. Will China now invade Taiwan? What about North Korea into South Korea? Can a Chinese port in Sri Lanka tempt India someday? Or would Shia Iran grow tired of living next to Sunni Saudi Arabia, once it has nuclear weapons?
In a world that is still trying to climb out of a pandemic, Putin’s Ukraine adventure has already sparked off a race for arms. The Europeans — who had been content with spending on social welfare since the end of WWII — are now suddenly upping their defence budgets. South Koreans are publicly wondering if they should get a nuclear weapon.
As terrible as civil wars are (in fact, in my book, I called them “the world’s biggest security challenge”), no civil war has ever sparked off a worldwide race for arms. In that regard, Ukraine definitely seems to be a chapter of its own.
But what do you think?
Is the world making much ado about nothing new? Has anything really changed with the Ukraine war? Share your thoughts in the comments and, if you like my work, you can support me!