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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 3-Aug-06
While world watches Lebanon, Sri Lanka goes to war

Web Log - August, 2006

While world watches Lebanon, Sri Lanka goes to war

Tamil Tiger rebels have engaged Sri Lanka government forces in heavy fighting for 9 days now, with dozens of casualties, mostly civilian.


Indian subcontinent, with the island of Sri Lanka off the southern tip of India.
Indian subcontinent, with the island of Sri Lanka off the southern tip of India.

The major feature of the current hostilities is that the Tamil rebels have closed a sluice gate that provides water to 50,000 people. The Sri Lanka army has advanced to take control of the sluice gate, leading to the recent fighting. There's supposedly a peace agreement, signed in 2002, but a rebel leader has declared it to be void. However, the Sri Lanka government says that the agreement is still in force.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics research, I've discussed three wars on this web site that are crisis wars or near-crisis wars.

Crisis wars are the worst wars that a society can endure. These wars are so bad and so genocidal that, when they end, the survivors decide to do everything possible to prevent their children or grandchildren from ever having to go through such a horrible experience. About 55-60 years later, when the generation of people who survived that war all disappear (retire or die), all at once, leaving behind the increasingly confrontational and risk-seeking generations born after the war, a new crisis war begins.

Generally speaking, a civil war is almost always a crisis war. Depending on the society, there may be low-level violence in the society between crisis wars, sometimes taking the form of terrorism.

Sometimes, terrorism begins right after the end of a crisis war by factions that are unhappy with the settlement. Or it begins during the chaos of the awakening era and continues in the form of low-level violence for decades, sometimes turning into a non-crisis civil war.

Often there's an uneasy "peace" settlement during the unraveling era, because both sides (the terrorists and the government) realize that things are getting very serious, and neither side wants a full-blown crisis war. This sets up an equilibrium that both sides can live with until further generational changes disturb the equilibrium enough to trigger a new crisis war. So, all in all, you can have several decades of on and off low-level violence, finally bursting into full scale crisis war.

This pattern has been playing out in different places today, and with the upsurge of the Sri Lanka and Lebanon wars, we have an opportunity to study how crisis wars come about.

Conflict risk level for next 6-12 months as of: 9-Feb-2006
W. Europe 1 Arab Israeli 3
Russia Caucasus 2 Kashmir 2
China 2 North Korea 2
Financial 3 Bird flu 3
Key: 1=green 1=Low risk 2=yellow 2=Med 3=red 3=High 4=black 4=Active

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, what's happening today is that there's a "gathering storm" of increasing violence in the world. Darfur is already in a crisis war, and both Sri Lanka and the Mideast are headed in that direction, with 100% certainly.

This is to illustrate again the concept of "chaotic attractor," in the sense of Chaos Theory. Political events are random, but in a generational crisis period, political events are "attracted" to war. This has been lucidly illustrated in the Mideast, where hardly a day has gone by in the last 18 months where political events haven't measureably brought the region closer and closer to war. The same thing is happening in Sri Lanka. As I predicted in May, 2003, when the "Mideast Roadmap to Peace" came out, the disappearance of Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon from the scene has removed the last major generational inhibitions to full-scale war. (3-Aug-06) Permanent Link
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