While the rise of global connectivity may in certain respects have discouraged inter-state warfare, it has in other ways encouraged states to pursue greater inward application of armed violence (Kaldor, 1999; Shaw, 2000). All but three of the sixty-one major armed conflicts recorded between 1989 and 1998 were civil wars (UNDP, 1999: 5; Wallensteen and Sollenberg, 2000). Many of these cases have involved the suppression of subnational ethnic strivings or religious resurgence movements, both of which have often been fed by globalization. On various other occasions states have unleashed armed force to secure the position of global companies, the implementation of structural adjustment programmes, or the privileges of an exploitative local elite that puts greater stakes in global economics and politics than in its purported ‘homeland’.