Fourth World Nations vs. The States’ “Nation-Destroying” Projects From 1946 to 2020

Post-WWII Wars, Armed Conflicts, and Indigenous Military Resistance

Hiroshi Fukurai

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to provide empirical analyses of the global armed conflicts between the nation and the state in the post-WWII era from 1946 to 2020. The empirical data comes from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO). Other comparable data on global armed conflicts also exists, including the Correlates of War (WCO) information; the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) dataset, which is an outgrowth of WCO; the Minority at Risk (MAR) datasets from the Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM) at the University of Maryland; and the Konflict-Simulations-Modell (COSIMO) datasets from the Study Group for the Causes of War (AKUF), among others. The present analysis relies on the UCDP/PRIO dataset because it provides the most updated and regionally-detailed empirical information on armed conflicts, military confrontations, and violent battles that have taken place throughout the world. Specifically, the UCDP contains information on all contested battles situated in the “government and/or territory over the use of armed force between the military forces of two parties,” and the violent confrontations that have “resulted in at least 25 battle-related deaths each year.”

Empirical examination reveals that most post-WWII military conflicts around the world have been fought between the state, on one side, and Fourth World peoples and nations (89.9%), on the other. Most of these conflicts in Asia and the Middle East (or West Asia) have also involved territorial and land disputes, while most of the intra-state armed struggles in Africa and the Americas have been fought over geo-political control of the government and its bureaucratic authority.

The paper concludes by summarizing the past conflicts between the state and the nation, considering the devastating consequences of the state and state-assisted corporate projects that have facilitated the continuous destruction of biodiversity and the evisceration of the environment, thereby ultimately threatening the future survivability of both human and non-human life on our planet.