Wars in the Twenty First Century: The African Dimension.

The history of mankind is replete with the issue of conflicts and wars. War has been throughout history a normal way of conducting disputes between political groups and nations. It seems that no human activity can be actualized without an element of conflict since there have always been differences in preferences in beliefs, religion, policies and approach to fundamental issues affecting different individuals/nations. The fact that comparative advantage of materials and human resources are more in favour of certain groups than the others makes conflicts concurrently palpable in human relations. It is therefore absolutely impossible for any nation to maintain a policy of isolation without interaction with other nations; and the process of interaction leads to disagreements. It is in the course of inter-group relations that conflict erupts, especially where the rules binding such a relationship are not well defined and properly understood. Although, we sometimes attribute conflicts to heterogeneity of societies but we must also not forget the paradox that most disastrous conflicts of our time emanated from homogeneous societies such as the war we are witnessing in Somalia where the people have a common language, cultural affinities and historical heritage. The main thrust of this paper is to critically assess the concept of the new kind of war that is rampart in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]