Price of Peace
This is the thesis of “Breaking the Conflict Trap” by Oxford University’s professor Paul Collier, who participated in The Price of Peace. Collier argued that full-scale warfare fought between armies on a battle field is virtually a thing of the past. Nearly all modern warfare is civil conflict and is taking place in dirt poor countries, such as Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. None of the other panellists fully signed up to this argument.
For the editor of an Egyptian newspaper, the hand of the US was seen in virtually every conflict. In Sri Lanka, the fuel for the conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sinhalese majority are the remittances of the wealthy Tamil business community living outside Sri Lanka. In Colombia, the insatiable appetite of the USA for the white powder was identified as a key cause of the world’s longest running civil war.