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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Armed conflict
The connection between ecology and conflict has been the object of extensive study by political scientists and economists. From the contribution of natural resource 'scarcity' to violent unrest and armed conflict; to resource 'abundance' as an incentive for initiating and prolonging armed struggles; to dysfunctional resource management and environmental degradation as obstacles to peacebuilding, this literature has exerted a huge influence upon academic discussions and policy developments. While international law is often invoked as the solution to the socio-environmental challenges faced by conflict-affected countries, its relationship with the ecology of war and peace remains undertheorised. Drawing upon environmental justice perspectives and other theoretical traditions, the book unpacks and problematizes some of the assumptions that underlie the legal field. Through an analysis of the practice of international courts, the UN Security Council, and Truth Commissions, it shows how international law silences and even normalizes forms of structural and slow environmental violence.
Hitherto 'less-lethal' weapons, in contrast to classical firearms and other highly destructive weapons, have literally slipped under the radar of public international law. This book is the first monograph addressing and analysing all international legal regimes applicable to less-lethal weapons, ranging from arms control treaties, international humanitarian, criminal and human rights law. In doing so the different scenarios in which less-lethal weapons come to use will be taken into account, such as law enforcement, armed conflict and law enforcement scenarios during armed conflict. The relationships between the different legal regimes will be elaborated thoroughly with a view to examining how international law responds to less-lethal weapons. The final chapter provides guidelines as well as recommendations on appropriate use and regulation of less-lethal weapons, where the different scenarios of application, such as in armed conflict and law enforcement, will be given due account.
This handbook explores the challenges and opportunities for leadership and conflict response in the context of Africa at several levels. Leadership plays a vital role in affecting conflict response but is frequently only examined at the macro level of state, government, and international organizations. This handbook addresses the need to explore challenges and opportunities for leadership at several levels: macro (global, regional, national), meso (NGOs, religious groups, academics), and micro (civil society organizations, youth groups, women's organizations). Analysis from multiple levels provides a broader explanation of conflict dynamics and helps to fit localized conflict transformation approaches into wider national or regional structures. The multidisciplinary essays presented in this volume encompass the psychological, political, and structural dimensions of conflict response and demonstrate how its success is fundamentally linked to the style of effectiveness of leadership, among other factors. The volume is divided into four thematic sections: Part I: The theory and dynamics of conflict response and leadership Part II: Macro-level leadership experiences in conflict response Part III: Meso-/micro-level leadership experiences in conflict response Part IV: Recommendations for improved leadership in conflict response This book will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, peace studies, African politics, security studies, and international relations, in general.
Economic activity continues during war. But what rules apply when US troops occupy Syrian oil fields? Who is responsible when multinational companies use minerals extracted by child labourers in war zones? This book examines how international law regulates the war economies that are at the heart of strategic competition between great powers and help sustain the irregular warfare in today's war zones. Drawing on advances in our understanding of the social and economic dynamics in war zones, this book identifies predation, a combination of violence and economic opportunity, as the core pathology of war economies. The author presents a framework for understanding the regulation of war economies based on the history of international law and existing norms of international humanitarian law, international criminal law, international human rights law and the law of international peace and security. War Economies and International Law concludes that the pathologies of predation in war demand answers based on an international regulatory strategy.
This comprehensive volume on teaching peace and war demonstrates that our choice of pedagogy, or the way we structure a curriculum, must be attentive to context. Pedagogical strategies that work with one class may not work in another, whether over time or across space and different types of institutions, regardless of the field of study. This book offers insight on how to address these issues. The chapters contain valuable information on specific lessons learned and creative pedagogies developed, as well as exercises and tools that facilitate delivery in specific classrooms. The authors address a wide range of challenges related to broader questions on what teachers are trying to achieve when teaching about peace and war, including reflections on the teacher's role as a facilitator of knowledge creation. This collection offers a valuable reference for scholars and instructors on structuring peace and war curricula in different global contexts and pedagogical strategies for a variety of classrooms. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Peace Review.
Expanding from her path-breaking work in Unspeakable Truths, Priscilla Hayner focuses on a new challenge in The Peacemaker's Paradox: the age-old problem of negotiating peace after a war of atrocities. Drawing on her first-hand involvement in peace processes and interviews from the frontlines of peace talks, the author recounts many heretofore-untold stories of how justice has been negotiated, with great difficulty, and what this tells us for the future. Those with the most power to stop a war are the least likely to submit to justice for their crimes, but the demand for justice only grows louder. She also asks how the intervention of an international tribunal, such as the International Criminal Court, changes how a war is fought and the possibility of brokering peace. The Peacemaker's Paradox looks far and wide, from Gaddafi's Libya to the FARC talks in Colombia, to provide an unparalleled exploration of these thorniest of issues. A combination of interview-based reporting and political analysis, The Peacemaker's Paradox brings clarity to a field fraught with both legal and practical difficulties.
Despite a massive investment of international diplomacy and money in recent years, the Democratic Republic of Congo remains a conflict-ridden and volatile country, its present situation the result of a series of rebellions, international interventions and unworkable peace agreements. In Congo's Violent Peace, leading DRC expert Kris Berwouts provides the most comprehensive and in-depth account to date of developments since the so-called 'Congo Wars' - from Rwanda's destructive impact on security in Eastern Congo to the controversial elections of 2006 and 2011; the M23 uprising to Joseph Kabila's increasingly desperate attempts to cling to power. An essential book for anyone interested in this troubled but important country.
In the past two decades, peace negotiators around the world have increasingly accepted that granting amnesties for human rights violations is no longer an acceptable bargaining tool or incentive, even when the signing of a peace agreement is at stake. While many states that previously saw sweeping amnesties as integral to their peace processes now avoid amnesties for human rights violations, this anti-amnesty turn has been conspicuously absent in Asia. In Negotiating Peace: Amnesties, Justice and Human Rights Renee Jeffery examines why peace negotiators in Asia have resisted global anti-impunity measures more fervently and successfully than their counterparts around the world. Drawing on a new global dataset of 146 peace agreements (1980-2015) and with in-depth analysis of four key cases - Timor-Leste, Aceh Indonesia, Nepal and the Philippines - Jeffery uncovers the legal, political, economic and cultural reasons for the persistent popularity of amnesties in Asian peace processes.
In this edited volume, experts on conflict resolution examine the impact of the crises triggered by the coronavirus and official responses to it. The pandemic has clearly exacerbated existing social and political conflicts, but, as the book argues, its longer-term effects open the door to both further conflict escalation and dramatic new opportunities for building peace. In a series of short essays combining social analysis with informed speculation, the contributors examine the impact of the coronavirus crisis on a wide variety of issues, including nationality, social class, race, gender, ethnicity, and religion. They conclude that the period of the pandemic may well constitute a historic turning point, since the overall impact of the crisis is to destabilize existing social and political systems. Not only does this systemic shakeup produce the possibility of more intense and violent conflicts, but also presents new opportunities for advancing the related causes of social justice and civic peace. This book will be of great interest to students of peace studies, conflict resolution, public policy and International Relations.
This book outlines challenges to the effective operation of regional economic communities (RECs) with regards to peacebuilding in Africa. Critically examining these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on comparative analysis of the status, role, and performances of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), it examines particular constraints to their effective participation in regional initiatives. Focussing on inadequate technical capabilities, the complicity of state and non-state actors in conflicts within a region, the domestic politics of member states, it additionally addresses related theories and practices of peacekeeping, security, development, and the peacebuilding nexus. It also engages provisioning, regionalism, and regional peacekeeping interventions, the legal and institutional framework of RECs, and civil society and peacebuilding. Fundamentally, the book asks how effective the alliances and partnerships are in promoting regional peace and security and how much they are compromised by the intervention of external powers and actors, exploring new ideas and actions that may strengthen capacities to address the peacebuilding challenges on the continent effectively. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of African politics and studies, peace and security studies, regionalism studies, policy practitioners in the field of African peacebuilding, and more broadly to international relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at: http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003093695, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Examining the thematic intersection of law, technology and violence, this book explores cyber attacks against states and current international law on the use of force. The theory of information ethics is used to critique the law's conception of violence and to develop an informational approach as an alternative way to think about cyber attacks. Cyber attacks against states constitute a new form of violence in the information age, and international law on the use of force is limited in its capacity to regulate them. This book draws on Luciano Floridi's theory of information ethics to critique the narrow conception of violence embodied in the law and to develop an alternative way to think about cyber attacks, violence, and the state. The author uses three case studies - the 2007 cyber attacks against Estonia, the Stuxnet incident involving Iran that was discovered in 2010, and the cyber attacks used as part of the Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election - to demonstrate that an informational approach offers a means to reimagine the state as an entity and cyber attacks as a form of violence against it. This interdisciplinary approach will appeal to an international audience of scholars in international law, international relations, security studies, cyber security, and anyone interested in the issues surrounding emerging technologies.
This important book considers whether the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), which was established jointly through an unprecedented bilateral treaty between the United Nations (UN) and Sierra Leone in 2002, has made jurisprudential contributions to the development of the nascent and still unsettled field of international criminal law. A leading authority on the application of international criminal justice in Africa, Charles Jalloh argues that the SCSL, as an innovative hybrid international penal tribunal, made useful jurisprudential additions on key legal questions concerning greatest responsibility jurisdiction, the war crime of child recruitment, forced marriage as a crime against humanity, amnesty, immunity and the relationship between truth commissions and criminal courts. He demonstrates that some of the SCSL case law broke new ground, and in so doing, bequeathed a 'legal legacy' that remains vital to the ongoing global fight against impunity for atrocity crimes and to the continued development of modern international criminal law.
Can we understand torture by focusing on the torture chamber or even on the states in which it is practiced, or do we have to consider the wider political context in which it is embedded? This is the central question of this book which explores concepts of state crime for understanding and responding to the indirect use of torture by external nation states. Drawing on the cooperation between France and Argentina in Argentina's Dirty War, this book explores the utility of the concept of state crime for understanding and responding to the indirect use of torture by external nation states with a detailed examination of the exportation of torture techniques and training expertise as complicity in torture. Discussing the institutionalisation of torture in its international structural context, this book focuses on examining three alleged manifestations of the torturer: direct perpetrator, institutional perpetrator, and transnational institutional perpetrator. Important reading for those in the fields of criminology, sociology, international relations and human rights law, this book will also be of key interest to scholars and students in the areas of state crime, human rights and imperialism.
Edward W. Said once urged the legendary Eqbal Ahmad not to leave your words scattered to the winds, or even recorded on tape, but collected and published in several volumes for everyone to read. Then those who don t have the privilege of knowing you will know what a truly remarkable, gifted man you are. In these intimate and wide-ranging conversations, Ahmad discusses nationalism, ethnic conflict, the politics of memory, and liberation struggles around the world.
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. This book represents the first interdisciplinary study of how memory has driven and challenged the political transition of Irish republicanism from armed conflict to constitutional politics through endorsing policing and the rule of law in the North of Ireland. Locating itself within memory studies, critical criminology and transitional justice, this book uses original interviews with political activists, community workers and former combatants from across the spectrum of modern Irish republicanism to draw out how the past frames internal tensions within the Irish republican constituency as those traditionally opposed to state policing structures opt to buy into them as part of a wider transitional process in post-conflict Northern Ireland. The book critiques the challenges of making peace with the enemy against a backdrop of communal narratives and memories of historic injustice, counterinsurgency policing and human rights abuse that do not simply disappear when war turns to peace. Through a rich empirical basis the book offers an insight into these challenges from the perspective of those who were, and remain, in the thick of the Irish republican debate on policing. In doing so it provides an acute insight into the role that individual and collective memory plays in reshaping ideological outlooks, understanding processes of political transition, contextualising 'moving on' processes with former enemies and conditioning views of post-conflict police reform.
This book analyses collective punishment in the context of human rights law. Collective punishment is a concept deriving from the law of armed conflict. It describes the punishment of a group for an act allegedly committed by one of its members and is prohibited in times of armed conflict. Although the imposition of collective punishment has been witnessed in situations outside armed conflict as well, human rights instruments do not explicitly address collective punishment. Consequently, there is a genuine gap in the protection of affected groups in situations outside of or short of armed conflict. Supported by two case studies on collective punishment in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in Chechnya, the book examines potential options to close this gap in human rights law in a way contributing to the empowerment of affected groups. This analysis centres on the European Convention on Human Rights due to its relevance to the situation in Chechnya. By questioning whether human rights instruments can encompass a prohibition of collective punishment, the book contributes to the broader academic debate on rights held by collectivities in general and on collective human rights in particular. The book will be of interest to students, academics and policy makers in the areas of International Human Rights Law, International Humanitarian Law and International Criminal Law.
Having suffered military defeat at the hands of advanced Western powers in the 1850s, Russia and Japan embarked upon a program of catch-up and modernization in the late-19th Century. While the two states sought in the main to replicate the successes of the advanced great powers of the West, the discourse on national identity among Russian and Japanese elite in this period evinced a considerable degree of ambivalence about Western dominance. With the onset of the crisis of power and legitimacy in the international order ushered in by the First World War, this ambivalence shifted towards more open revolt against Western dominance. The rise of communism in Russia and militarism in Japan were significantly shaped by their search for national distinctiveness and international status. This book is a comparative historical study of how the two "non-Western" great powers emerged as challengers to the prevailing international order in the interwar period, each seeking to establish an alternative order. Specifically, Anno examines the parallels and contrasts in the ways in which the Russian and Japanese elites sought to define the two countries' national identities, and how those definitions influenced the two countries' attitudes toward the prevailing order. At the intersection of international relations theory, comparative politics, and of historical sociology, this book offers an integrated perspective on the rise of challengers to the liberal international order in the early-twentieth century.
This book brings together a diverse range of international voices from academia, policymaking and civil society to address the failure to connect historical dialogue with atrocity prevention discourse and provide insight into how conflict histories and historical memory act as dynamic forces, actively facilitating or deterring current and future conflict. Established on a variety of international case studies combining theoretical and practical points of view, the book envisions an integrated understanding of how historical dialogue can inform policy, education, and the practice of atrocity prevention. In doing so, it provides a vital basis for the development of preventive policies sensitive to the importance of conflict histories and for further academic study on the topic. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of history, psychology, peace studies, international relations and political science.
Pakistan's army has dominated the state for most of its 66 years. It has locked the country in an enduring rivalry with India to revise the maps in Kashmir and to resist India's slow but inevitable rise. To prosecute these dangerous policies, the army employs non-state actors under the security of its ever-expanding nuclear umbrella. The Pakistan army started three wars with India over Kashmir in 1947, 1965, and 1999 and failed to win any of them. It has sustained a proxy war in Kashmir since 1989 using Islamist militants, some of whom have now turned their guns against the Pakistani state. The Pakistan army has supported non-Islamist insurgencies throughout India as well as a country-wide Islamist terror campaign that have brought the two countries to the brink of war on several occasions. Despite Pakistan's efforts to coerce India, it has only achieved modest successes. Even though India vivisected Pakistan in 1971, Pakistan continues to see itself as India's equal and demands the world do the same. The tools that the army prefers to use, non-state actors under a nuclear umbrella, has brought international opprobrium upon the country and the army. In recent years, erstwhile proxies have turned their gun on the Pakistani state itself and its peoples. Why does the army persist in pursuing these revisionist policies that have come to imperil the very viability of the state itself, from which the army feeds? This volume argues that the answer lies, at least partially, in the strategic culture of the army. From the army's distorted view of history, the army is victorious as long as can resist India's purported hegemony and the territorial status quo. To acquiesce is defeat. Because the army is unlikely to abandon these preferences, the world must prepare for an ever more dangerous future Pakistan.
This updated and revised second edition examines the conceptualisation and evolution of peace in International Relations (IR) theory. The book examines the concept of peace and its usage in the main theoretical debates in IR, including realism, liberalism, constructivism, critical theory, and post-structuralism, as well as in the more direct debates on peace and conflict studies. It explores themes relating to culture, development, agency, and structure, not just in terms of representations of IR, and of peace, but in terms of the discipline of IR itself. The work also specifically explores the recent mantras associated with liberal and neoliberal versions of peace, which appear to have become foundational for much of the mainstream literature and for doctrines for peace and development in the policy world. Analysing war has often led to the dominance - and mitigation - of violence as a basic assumption in, and response to, the problems of IR. This study aims to redress this negative balance by arguing that the discipline offers a rich basis for the study of peace, which has advanced significantly over the last century or so. It also proposes innovative theoretical dimensions of the study of peace, with new chapters discussing post-colonial and digital developments. This book will be of great interest to students of peace and conflict studies, politics, and IR.
In Conflict and Human Security Threats in Africa, South African scholar Victor Ojakorotu unravels the dynamics of conflicts and human security threats now affecting numerous African nations. While some of these conflicts are local, others are national and international. This current and highly engaging study captures multiple cases of insecurity, presenting discussions of terrorism, kidnapping, militia activities, human trafficking, political violence, teenage pregnancy, civil war, and armed conflicts, as well as strategies for their future management. Ojakorotu documents a philosophical assessment of African politics as well as the place of the "new" media in the politics of human security and the development of an African worldview in the post-modern intellectual arena. This book is a must-read for all students of African and global politics, as well as policy makers and diplomats working with Africa, which will soon be home to more than three billion people and a center of global growth.
The application and interpretation of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their two Additional Protocols of 1977 have developed significantly in the seventy years since the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) first published its Commentaries on these important humanitarian treaties. To promote a better understanding of, and respect for, this body of law, the ICRC commissioned a comprehensive update of its original Commentaries, of which this is the third volume. The Third Convention, relative to the treatment of prisoners of war and their protections, takes into account developments in the law and practice in the past seven decades to provide up-to-date interpretations of the Convention. The new Commentary has been reviewed by humanitarian law practitioners and academics from around the world. This new Commentary will be an essential tool for anyone involved with international humanitarian law.
In the Gaza Strip, growing up on land owned by his family for centuries, eleven-year-old Yousef is preoccupied by video games, school pranks, and meeting his father's impossibly high standards. Everything changes when the Second Intifada erupts and soldiers occupy the family home. Yousef's father refuses to flee and risk losing the house forever, so the army keeps the family in a state of virtual imprisonment. Yousef struggles to understand how his father can be so committed to peaceful co-existence that he welcomes the occupying Israeli soldiers as `guests', even in the face of unfair and humiliating treatment. Over time, Yousef learns how to endure his new life in captivity - but he can't anticipate that a bullet is about to transform his future in an instant. Shot by an Israeli soldier at the age of fifteen, and taken to hospital in Tel Aviv, Yousef slowly and painstakingly confronts the paralysis of his lower body. Under the ceaseless care of Israeli medical professionals, he gains a new perspective on the value of co-existence. These transformative experiences set Yousef on a difficult new path that leads him to learn to embody his father's philosophy, and spread a message of co-existence in a world of deep-set sectarianism. The Words of My Father is a moving coming-of-age story about survival, tolerance and hope.
This book explains how security is organized from the local to the national level in post-war Sierra Leone, and how external actors attempted to shape the field through security sector reform. Security sector reform became an important and deeply political instrument to establish peace in Sierra Leone as war drew to an end in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through historical and ethnographic perspectives, the book explores how practices of security sector reform have both shaped and been shaped by practices and discourses of security provision from the national to the local level in post-war Sierra Leone. It critiques how the notion of hybridity has been applied in peace and security studies and cultural studies, and thereby provides an innovative perspective on IR, and the study of interventions. The book is the first to take the debate on security in Sierra Leone beyond a focus on conflict and peacebuilding, to explore everyday policing and order-making in rural areas of the country. Based on fieldwork between 2005 and 2018, it includes 200+ interviews with key players in Sierra Leone from the National Security Coordinator and Inspector-General of Police in Freetown to traditional leaders and miners in Peyima, a small town on the border with Guinea. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security, anthropology, African politics and IR in general. |
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