Painful Existence: Representations of Civil Wars in the Global Age

[[abstract]]The twentieth century is a century of wars. Wars have experienced various changes and alterations from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the century and they never really come to an end. So many military scholars and experts would like to call the twentieth century a century of wars. This thesis emphasizes representations of new civil wars at the end of the twentieth century by reading the latest texts concerned with wars. The four texts in analysis include one fiction and three novels that can help us to investigate new civil wars and contemporary representations of warfare. Focusing on the global developments during the 1980s, this thesis investigates the political and economical relationships between new civil wars and globalization to examine perplexity of civil wars and connections between new war economy, political wrestling, and global developments. Based on the background of a global age, this thesis advances to study tortures of civilians in civil wars. Besides, this thesis aims to contemplate new war discourses and interpretations especially when civilians have gradually replaced soldiers to be the main participants of warfare. In the thesis, the four texts I choose all describe wars in the viewpoints of local inhabitants and display complicated and horrible war scenes. They not only present victimization of local inhabitants but also show transformations of civil wars which become part of life experiences of civilians in their daily life. By contemplating on the relationships between civil wars and civilians, I purpose to construct new war discourses and understandings of wars. Moreover, I expect to draw more scholars’ attentions to such an issue to study the nature of new wars and meanings of wars in contemporary period to constitute more interesting and insightful topics and directions.