Abstract
This study is based on the article written by Paul Richards in 2005: New War: An Ethnographic Approach. What was really important in this article, according to me, was to discover a new way to look at and to study wars. In this study, I will try to sum up what I've found in the article by stressing three important precisions that are essential while dealing with the subject: ‘Old and new wars'.
The concept of new war comes from the 90's and describes the conflicts that took place after the end of the Cold war. All those conflicts were no more influenced by an ideology. Those conflicts were new in so far as they are low intensity conflicts and they see the opposition of a lot of different players in a kind of global network. This number of players comes from the fact that the Western countries can't ignore anymore the conflicts in the South, given the fact that they can have some repercussions in their own countries. Those conflicts are not synonymous anymore with battlefield or conventional armies and weapons. They are based on what we call ‘Interzones', that is to say the zones where the State is absent or inefficient.
