The world faces a deadly combination as ''pre-modern wars'' harness modern technology, writes Loretta Napoleoni.
World War 3 is a spreading miasma of conflicts that have little resemblance to the two world wars of the 20th century.
Instead, these conflicts are reminiscent of pre-modern warfare, not managed by sovereign states but by warlords, terrorists and mercenaries, whose goal is territorial conquest.
From Nigeria to Syria, from the Sahel to Afghanistan, the victims of these new wars are largely civilians.
In Nigeria, according to Amnesty International, over the past 12 months 4000 people have been killed, mostly civilians, as a result of attacks by Boko Haram and the Nigerian army.
Similar wars and statistics can be found at the very borders of the European Union.
Since April, the UN estimates that 1129 civilians have died in the violent clash between the Ukrainian National Army and the separatist pro-Russian militias.
What we face is pre-modern wars that harness modern technology, a deadly combination that hugely increases the risks to civilian populations.
A striking example is the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner.
Missing are the trenches, battlefields and even international rules that to some extent set codes and boundaries.
The Geneva Convention is consigned to the waste paper bin. The various parties are all guilty of war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and religious killings, most of them are armed groups and even the regular armies behave as militias.
In Nigeria, Amnesty International has filmed Nigerian soldiers and members of the Civilian Joint Task Force as they cut the throats of prisoners suspected of being part of Boko Haram, throwing the decapitated bodies into mass graves, Prof Mary Kaldor, from the London School of Economics, and author of New and Old Wars: Organised violence in a Global Era, wrote that globalisation has dropped some regions into conditions of anarchy similar to what philosopher Thomas Hobbes defined the state of nature, life before society, as ''nasty, brutish and short'' due to the anarchy in which man was forced to live.
The state of men without civil society (which state we may properly call the state of nature) is nothing else but a mere war of all against all ... with a continual fear and danger of violent death. Globalisation has in fact undermined the stability of authoritarian regimes from Libya to Syria.
The fall of Gaddafi in 2011 resulted in a political vacuum that rival tribal militias, from liberals through to hardline Islamist, have filled with violence.
The objective is the conquest of political and economic power for the purposes of exploitation, not the creation of a democratic state nor of a new nation.
The process of the state's degeneration and collapse is the root cause of the pre-modern nature of today's conflicts, and is a phenomenon increasingly tied to economic factors, to the drastic impoverishment of large regions and populations.
Iraq has gone from the nation with the highest level of education in the Arab world to a state where women do not have the right to work. The process of Islamisation has gone hand in hand with that of impoverishment.
Globalisation has brought prosperity in regions such as China or Brazil, and poverty in others.
The crisis of the state in Africa is partly linked to climate change and partly to the race of rich countries to grab the resources.
This deadly combination has stirred up widespread insecurity and fostered tribal conflicts under the religious and ethnic banner.
In Mali, Tuareg separatists and Islamic factions are fighting among themselves and at the same time against the government; in the Central African Republic, Muslim and Christian militias are involved in a bloody war, which threatens to become genocide while members of the nation's army take position according to their creed. In West Africa, al Qaeda in the Maghreb is active almost everywhere.
Brutal violence characterises all contemporary pre-modern, miasmic wars, as is its broadcasting. The most striking example is the killing of the American journalist James Foley by the Islamic State.
However, it is a mistake to include the Islamic Caliphate's war of conquest in Syria and Iraq in the same category of the pre-modern conflicts described above. The Islamic State is a new, dangerous mutation of this phenomenon.
Its purpose is much more ambitious, to seize strategic resources, from oil wells to hydro-electric dams in order to build
the 21st-century version of the ancient Caliphate.
Its sophisticated propaganda is committed to promoting the image of a state legitimised by the Muslim population, not only locally but also internationally.
Abu Bakr al Baghdadi is not presented as a warlord but as the new Caliph, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed.
The Caliphate spreads images of a regular army, quite different from armed gangs of al Qaeda or Boko Haram, an army that is fighting battles on the field in trenches and using modern weapons, for the most part American and Russian, stolen from the Iraqi and Syrian army respectively.
It recruits internationally with sophisticated propaganda tools, its foreign soldiers come from Europe and the US, Asia, North Africa as well as Australia and even New Zealand.
While it may be engaged in sectarian cleansing, the Caliphate is ecumenical and offers anyone the opportunity to convert to Sunni Salafism and thus become a citizen.
Those who refuse are executed.
Because of these peculiarities, the Islamic State threatens not only the existing Middle Eastern regimes, but the fundamental concept of the modern nation state that is based upon the consent (and not the submission) of those who belong to it.
-Loretta Napoleoni is a journalist, lecturer and political economist who divides her time between the US and the UK. She has written extensively on terrorism. She will appear at Aspiring Conversations in Wanaka and Queenstown on October 10 and 11.
