les conflits - une approche gÉopolitique

Conflicts – a Geopolitical Approach. Because in the entire humanity’s written history there have been too few years without conflicts – these still being present today – we can draw the conclusion that war is the natural state of human beings. Thus, in the past few decades a true general theory regarding conflicts was developed – the most important contribution belonging to the realist school – which offers, among other things, a strategy regarding the options of solving a crisis situation. Over time, three large causal chains in determining the origin of conflicts have been marked out: the fight for resources, for controlling strategic locations and for a collective identity (national, ethnical, religious etc.). There is a large variety of types of war, the latest additions to the classic ones (global, colonial, national freedom etc.) being the asymmetric wars (terrorism, organised crime etc.) and the preventive ones etc. At the end of the XXth century and the start of the XXIst a series of changes have interfered, moving the focus from interstate conflicts to intrastate ones, from classic motivations (economy, resources, territories etc.) to the identity character based on values and beliefs, from large armies to small groups (guerrilla, individual terrorism etc.). In this paper, as model of an unfolding international crisis we have chosen the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), in which the four phases are clearly identified: pre-crisis, crisis escalation, detente and impact.