Content area
Full Text
Introduction
What is the role of ideologies in post-Cold War internal armed conflicts? Have economic motivations completely sidelined ideological and political ones? The absence of a deeper understanding of the role of ideologies in the post-Cold War has undermined the ability of scholars to explain coherently the dynamics of contemporary armed conflicts. This highly problematic shortcoming of scholarly research affects negatively the chances of success of international and governmental conflict resolution policies, as it leaves unaddressed a key component of modern insurgencies. This paper will argue that ideologies play not only an important but fundamental role in explaining the dynamics of contemporary armed conflicts, though I do not claim this is the case of every armed insurrection. While authors like Francis Fukuyama and Paul Collier have greatly influenced the understandings of post-Cold War conflict by minimizing the role of ideology, I present evidence from three major societal conflicts pointing in the opposite direction, which has implications for research in Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science, and in the practice of conflict management and resolution.
Between 1989 and 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, scholars began to think that ideologies might have become a thing of the past. After defeating monarchy, fascism and communism, wrote Francis Fukuyama famously in 1989, liberal democracy might constitute the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" ([27] Fukuyama, 1989). He described the collapse of the communist utopia as a global coming back to senses, asserting that "the collapse of Marxist ideology in the late 1980s reflected, in a sense, the achievement of a higher level of rationality on the part of those who lived in such societies, and their realization that rational universal recognition could be had only in a liberal social order" ([28] Fukuyama, 2006). Not seeing any other global-reach ideology to compete with liberal democracy, he declared it the solitary winner of history's ideological struggles, overlooking the multiple projects that would emerge throughout the decade as merely localized phenomena doomed to pass.
In general, the global discredit of ideologies as a useful category to account for war in the post-Cold War led some researchers to search for new explanations on why armed conflict did persist into the 1990s, and many focused particularly on the economic motivations ([26]...