Resource conflict in the lower Mekong

Abstract

The end of the Cold War did not bring an end to conflict, much less a peace dividend. Ten years after the wall fell, at the turn of a new millennium, this is increasingly apparent even with regard to traditional security issues. In addition, the last decade's growing efforts to convert what the former Thai Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan (now deceased) called “the battle field into a market place” have created new types of conflict that cannot easily be explained in traditional security terms. These new types of conflict are intrinsic to the dominant economic patterns and processes of globalization emerging in the wake of the Cold War. The anatomy of these new conflicts differs in important respects from Cold War security concerns: they affect more directly people‐centered security than state‐centered national security; they are often more politically and socially complex than conventional conflicts; and they are likely to stay with us, and even grow and escalate well into the twenty‐first century.