Book Review: Global Governance and the New Wars

Mark Duffield's second edition of ‘Global Governance and the New Wars’ offers an important and biting critique of how different actors within the security and development discourse have adapted to the various transformations of war in the post-cold war era. In this picture drawn by Duffield, the power of states in the South continues to be eroded by an exclusionary market that is driven by the global political economy wherein state's development and security responsibilities are increasingly assumed by non-state actors (predominately constituted by Western aid agencies). Those who fall outside the bounds of the state, development and humanitarian aid agencies can be found operating in an expanding shadow economy that is also shaped by a global dynamics which make the conditions for ‘network war' possible. In this context, the lines between ‘war' and peace” are difficult to distinguish. Overall, the book paints a depressing picture on the lack of substantive changes in the livelihoods of the poor as attention has been directed to discussions about ‘new wars' or altered forms of violence that have characterized the post-cold war era. The book unforgivingly exposes the failures of the discursive changes post-cold war to reconceptualize development and security in terms that move beyond description and into substantive change especially regarding shifting the development discourse from its historic modernizing impulses