After 1945, more than 1000 international conflicts occurred in the world, of which more than three hundred were armed. An international conflict is a clash of two or more parties in the system of international relations, pursuing various mutually exclusive goals. One of the longest in the twentieth century was the post-war conflict between the USSR and the USA, which later became known as the Cold War. Each of the parties to this conflict sought to influence world political events. International conflicts often take the form of military confrontation. The largest military international conflict in its scale and devastating consequences, into which the states of all continents were drawn, one way or another, known as the Second World War, lasted from 1939 to 1945.
After the era of the Cold War ended, many thought that international conflicts were a thing of the past, but in reality, on the contrary, the number of regional and local violent confrontations increased, often turning into a military phase. An example of this is the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, the events in Yugoslavia, the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, the war of Russia and Georgia in 2008, and others.
For a long time, international conflicts were studied mainly by historical science, but starting from the middle of the 20th century, with the works of P. Sorokin and K. Wright, they began to be considered as a kind of social conflict.
The reasons for such conflicts, scientists see in the following: competition of states; differences in national interests; claims to certain territories; social injustice; uneven distribution of natural resources; intolerant perception of one side of the other; personal dislike of leaders and more.
There is no universally recognized concept of international conflict because of differences in political, economic, social, ideological, diplomatic, military and international legal signs, properties and features.
Interstate conflicts can be divided into four stages: 1) awareness of the problem; 2) escalation of tension; 3) pressure to resolve the problem; 4) military operations in order to solve the problem.
Conflicts between states have their own specifics, causes, functions, dynamics and consequences. International conflicts have positive and negative functions and consequences. Positive are the prevention of stagnation in relations between countries; stimulation of a constructive search for ways out of this situation; determination of the degree of divergence of interests and goals of states; the prevention of more serious conflicts and the provision of a stable existence by the way of a conflict of lesser intensity.
The negative consequences of international conflicts include: violence, instability and unrest; they increase the state of stress in the population of the participating countries; the use of ineffective political decisions and more.
The typology of international conflicts is carried out on various grounds, and share them:
- according to the number of participants, conflicts are divided into bilateral and multilateral;
- by degree of distribution - to local and global;
- by time of existence - for short-term and long-term;
- for the means used in conflicts - armed and unarmed;
- depending on the reasons - economic, territorial, religious, ethnic and others;
Terrorism, which is currently spreading in the world, takes on the character of a substitute for a new world war and, becoming a global problem, it forces state authorities to resort to rather tough measures, which in turn raises the question of expanding the prerogatives and powers of states and their associations in the fight against global terrorist threat.