delanceyplace.com 08/21/06 - poverty and modern war

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In today's excerpt - writing in 1996, Robert Kaplan notes the connection between poverty and modern war:

"Scholars have been writing more and more about the corrosive effects of overpopulation and environmental degradation in the third world, while journalists cover an increasing array of ethnic conflicts that don't configure within state borders. Of the eighty wars since 1945, only twenty-eight have taken the traditional form of fighting between regular armies of two or more states. Forty-six were civil wars or guerrilla [read: terrorist] insurgencies. Former UN secretary-general Perez de Cuellar called this the 'new anarchy.'

"... In 1993, forty-two countries were immersed in major conflicts, and thirty-seven others experienced lesser forms of political violence: Sixty-five of these seventy-nine countries were in the developing world."