Non-western Military Interventions and the Character of Contemporary Warfare

While Western countries regularly intervene militarily abroad, recent years have seen increasing levels of military intervention by non-Western authoritarian and weakly-democratic states. Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly after 9/11, political scientists, historians and military practitioners have debated changes in character of contemporary warfare. However, many of the observations drawn derive from recent Western experiences of intervention and ensuing insurgency/civil war dynamics (in Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan for example), not from these more recent instances of interventions by weakly-democratic/authoritarian states. Recent conflicts involving Western states show (inter alia) patterns of strategically ‘limited’ war-fighting, time-restricted commitments to war, high mediatisation, the promotion of Western political/governance norms and vast material power asymmetries. These factors have in turn influenced, sometimes implicitly, inferences drawn about contemporary war. However, it is unclear whether (and unlikely that) observations drawn from recent wars involving Western powers will apply in other non-Western cases that may not share the above-mentioned characteristics. Yet at present, knowledge of ‘new interventionist’ conflicts involving authoritarian/weakly-democratic non-Western states is underdeveloped. This paper seeks to analyse the conceptual foundations of the literature on contemporary conflict and discuss their applicability in light of a number of recent contemporary interventions and on-going military actions led by non-Western weakly democratic/authoritarian states (Russia in Ukraine, the GCC in Yemen and West/Central African States' actions against Jihadist groups in West Africa).