This study contributes to the debate on whether defense spending encourages or hinders economic growth. The effect of politics on economic growth in developing societies is assessed, with a focus on the Middle East. The study is the first to add conflict variables to the production function defense-growth model and test them empirically across countries and regions, and provide robust empirical evidence on the differential effects of interstate and intrastate conflicts on economic growth. The study provides compelling empirical evidence and guidelines to policy decision makers on how to allocate the resources of their states and adopt policies that promote political economic development. The study urges Third World leaders to improve levels of freedom, democracy, and openness of their political systems because the results confirm that political factors are at least as important as economic factors in promoting economic growth. Furthermore, the results attest that the reallocation of resources from military to the civilian sector is the sine qua non to improve the performance of developing countries' economies.

The gender-differentiated and more severe impacts of armed conflict upon women and girls are well recognised by the international community, as demonstrated by UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and subsequent resolutions. Similarly, the development community has identified gender-differentiated impacts upon women and girls as a result of the effects of climate change. Current research and analysis has reached no consensus as to any causal relationship between climate change and armed conflict, but certain studies suggest an indirect linkage between climate change effects such as food insecurity and armed conflict. Little research has been conducted on the possible compounding effects that armed conflict and climate change might have on at-risk population groups such as women and girls. Armed Conflict, Women and Climate Change explores the intersection of these three areas and allows the reader to better understand how military organisations across the world need to be sensitive to these relationships to be most effective in civilian-centric operations in situations of humanitarian relief, peacekeeping and even armed conflict. This book examines strategy and military doctrine from NATO, the UK, US and Australia, and explores key issues such as displacement, food and energy insecurity, and male out-migration as well as current efforts to incorporate gender considerations in military activities and operations. This innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, international development, international security, sustainability, gender studies and law.

Civilians in Gaza and Israel are caught up in complex, violent situations that have overstepped conventional battle lines. Both sides of the conflict have found ways to legitimate the use of violence, and continually swap accusations of violations of domestic and international humanitarian laws. Israel's Military Operations in Gaza provides an ideological critique of the legal, military, and social media texts that have been used to legitimate historical incursions into the Gaza, with special focus on Operation Protective Edge. It argues that both the Palestinians and the Israelis have deployed various forms of 'telegenic' warfare. They have each used argumentative rhetorics based on competing interpretations of events, and are locked in a battle to convince international audiences and domestic constituencies of the righteousness of their causes. This critical genealogical study analyses a range of texts and images, from selfies circulated near the Gaza border to judicial opinions produced by the High Court of Israel. With its multidisciplinary approach and original analysis of the Israel/Gaza situation, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East studies and the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as security studies and communication studies.

This book provides a critical understanding of the emerging role of African militaries in peacetime democratic Africa. This book departs from the dominant perspective which simply presents the military as an 'enemy' of democracy because of the history and legacy of unending military coup d'etats and interventions in civilian politics. In the context of Africa, the military has been blamed or largely held responsible for instigating wars, armed conflicts, political violence, poverty and underdevelopment due to bad governance and mismanagement of the state. Drawing from diverse case studies across Africa, including Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia and Egypt, this volume presents the argument that though the military has played a negative, and sometimes, destructive role in undermining constitutional rule and the overthrow of democratic civilian governments, the same military, now operating in a changed global environment, is making effort to support the development of democracy and democratic consolidation as well as remain subjected to civilian democratic oversight and control. Notwithstanding, the real challenge for this emerging trend of African peace militaries is the extent to which they are able to fulfil, on a predictable and consistent basis, their constitutional mandate to defend the people against 'elected autocrats' in Africa who try to use the military to perpetuate themselves in power. This work fills a critical gap in the literature and will be of much interest to students of African security and politics, peace and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general.

Around the world in the twentieth century, political violence in emerging states gave rise to different kinds of silence within their societies. This book explores the histories of these silences, how they were made, maintained, evaded, and transformed. This book gives a comprehensive view of the ongoing evolutions and multiple faces of silence as a common strand in the struggles of state-building. It begins with chapters that examine the construction of "regimes of silence" as an act of power, and it continues through explorations of the ambiguous limits of speech within communities marked by this violence. It highlights national and transnational attempts to combat state silences, before concluding with a series of considerations of how these regimes of silence continue to be extrapolated in the gaps of records and written history. This volume explores histories of the composed silences of political violence across the emerging states of the late twentieth century, not solely as a present concern of aftermath or retrospection but as a diachronic social and political dimension of violence itself. This book makes a major original contribution to international history, as well as to the study of political terror, human rights violations, social recovery, and historical memory.

The right to self-determination has played a crucial role in the process of assisting oppressed people to put an end to colonial domination. Outside of the decolonization context, however, its relevance and application has constantly been challenged and debated. This book examines the role played by self-determination in international law with regard to post-conflict state building. It discusses the question of whether self-determination protects local populations from the intervention of international state-builders in domestic affairs. With a focus on the right as it applies to the people of an independent state, it explores how self-determination concerns that arise in the post-conflict period play out in relation to the reconstruction process. The book analyses the situation in Somalia as a means of drawing out the impact and significance of the legal principle of self-determination in the process of rebuilding post-conflict institutions. In so doing, it seeks to highlight how the relevance of self-determination is often overlooked in this context.

From Partition to Brexit is the first book to chart the political and ideological evolution of Irish government policy towards Northern Ireland from the partition of the country in 1921 to the present day. Based on extensive original research, this groundbreaking and timely study challenges the idea that Irish governments have pursued a consistent set of objectives and policies towards Northern Ireland to reveal a dynamic story of changing priorities. The book demonstrates how in its relations with the British Government, Dublin has been transformed from spurned supplicant to vital partner in determining Northern Ireland’s future, a partnership jeopardised by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. Informed, robust and innovative, From Partition to Brexit is essential reading for anyone interested in Irish or British history and politics, and will appeal to students of diplomacy, international relations and conflict studies. -- .

This book provides an analytical framework for understanding how the concept of quality peace can be used to evaluate post-conflict peacebuilding, using social science, statistics, and case studies. Including contributions from more than 20 researchers and practitioners, it argues that the quality of the peace in a post-conflict state relates to the extent to which peace accords are implemented, the agreed-upon mechanism for the non-violent resolution of the conflict, and the available social space for civil and political actors. To arrive at the concept of 'quality peace', the authors evaluate the existing literature and identify a lack of a satisfactory means of measuring outcomes, and consequently how these might be researched comparatively. The volume problematizes the 'quality peace' concept as a way to understand the origins of armed conflict as well as problems deriving from the conflict dynamics and the need for social, political, and economic changes in the post-conflict periods. The book emphasizes five dimensions as crucial for quality peace in a post-accord society. Negotiations and agreements not only aim at avoiding the return of war but also seek to: (1) promote reconciliation, (2) develop mechanisms for resolving future disputes, (3) provide for reliable security, (4) open economic opportunities for marginalized segments of the population, and (5) generate space for civil society. These five dimensions together provide for quality peace after war. They are studied in the context of internal armed conflicts in which multiple parties have signed a peace agreement. This book will be of great interest to students of peace and conflict studies, civil wars, global governance, security studies, and International Relations in general.

The view that America and Russia have burned their candles on security cooperation with respect to nuclear weapons is simply mistaken. This timely study identifies twelve themes or issue areas that must be addressed by the US and Russia if they are to provide shared, successful leadership in the management of nuclear world order.

The war in Darfur, which has been controversially termed as 'genocide', is still ongoing, alongside a tardy peace negotiation process, which began back in 2010. Around 300,000 people are estimated to have died from the combined effects of war, hunger and disease. Darfur is inhabited by tribes of both African and Arab lineage. Both groups had co-existed for centuries, however, as a result of the increasing desertification of the region in the 1970s and 1980s, the nomadic Arab tribes began to head south in search of water and grazing land. They soon arrived at the settle-ments of the Africans. Skirmishes followed, though the fighting was small in scale and ended in 1994. The conflict resumed in 2003, when African rebel groups under the banner of the Darfur Liberation Front responded to the neglect and marginalization of their communities by initiating attacks. The Sudan government replied with major land and air assaults. By the summer of 2003 the infamous Janjaweed had become involved. By Spring 2004, they had killed several thousand non-arabs and an estimated million more had been driven from their homes. Yet it was not until more than 100,000 refugees, pursued by Janjaweed militia, escaped to neighbouring Chad that the conflict captured the attention of an international audience.

The book Psychosocial Perspectives on Peacebuilding offers a template for those dealing with the aftermath of armed conflict to look at peacebuilding through a psychosocial lens. This Volume, and the case studies that are in it, starts from the premise that armed conflict and the political violence that flows from it, are deeply contextual and that in dealing with the impact of armed conflict, context matters. The book argues for a conceptual shift, in which psychosocial practices are not merely about treating individuals and groups with context and culturally sensitive methods and approaches: the contributors argue that such interventions and practices should in themselves shape social change. This is of critical importance because the psychosocial method continually highlights how the social context is one of the primary causes of individual psychological distress. The chapters in this book describe experiences within very different contexts, including Guatemala, Jerusalem, Indian Kashmir, Mozambique, Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka. The common thread between the case studies is that they each show how psychosocial interventions and practices can influence the peacebuilding environment and foster wider social change. Psychosocial Perspectives on Peacebuilding is essential reading for social and peace psychologists, as well as for students and researchers in the field of conflict and peace studies, and for psychosocial practitioners and those working in post-conflict areas for NGO’s.

This book is a unique contribution to scholarship on the sources of the conflict in Ukraine. The volume brings together writers from Russia, Ukraine, Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia, many of whom attended a gathering of scholars and activists from all over Ukraine, held in Yalta, Crimea, just after the conflict in Eastern Ukraine erupted. Challenging both the demonization of Russia, which has become standard for Western writing on the topic, and the simplistic discourse of official Russian sources, this book scrutinises the events of the conflict and the motives of the agents, bringing to the fore the underlying causes of the most critical flashpoints of the post-Soviet world order. This volume offers a refreshing, profound perspective on the Ukraine conflict, and will be an indispensable source for any student or researcher. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal International Critical Thought.

This book describes to what extent and in what ways the military policies of Western European societies are determined by liberal ideology. A wide variety of issues affected by liberal ideology, including conscription, conscientious objection, military mission, military ethics and the professional identity of soldiers are addressed in the book. The empirical analysis draws on the cases of the German Bundeswehr (from the 1950s onwards), the Swedish Armed Forces (the transformation after the end of the Cold War), and the British Armed Forces (from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards). The book's examination of these cases reveals that specific policies, institutions and practices are preferred because of their relation to liberalism. Since Samuel Huntington's seminal book The Soldier and the State the literature on civil-military relations and military sociology depicts the relationship between liberal ideology and military security as intrinsically antithetical. This book is conceived as a critical debate with Huntington. Contrary to the notion of antithetical societal-military relationship, this book demonstrates that a meaningful adaptation of the military to the principles possessed by its parent society can be, more often than not, desirable also from the perspective of security strategy. This book will be of considerable interest to students of civil-military relations, military sociology, Western European politics, security studies and IR.

This book explores the process of assessing success in the field of conflict resolution, with a focus on the Action Evaluation method pioneered by the author. Since the early days of the field of conflict resolution, researchers and practitioners have been trying to determine how to define and assess success. Are its various approaches to engaging conflict effective? How is effective defined and operationalized and by whom? How might we know? Action Evaluation (AE), a methodology for defining, promoting and assessing success in and of the field, has been developed over the past two decades to answer these questions theoretically and in-use. It was designed from its inception to help create sound and contextualized standards around which the field could coalesce. AE is an appropriate methodology for evaluation of conflict engagement, in part because it is grounded in key values of the field, like participation, ownership and the constructive engagement of conflict among stakeholders in project development and implementation. By illustrating how AE is applied through case studies, and providing tools for others to use, this book is intended to make AE a more widely available, user-friendly and rigorous action-research tool for researchers and practitioners in the still-emerging field and beyond. This book will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, peace studies, research methods and international relations in general, as well as practitioners in the field.

This volume explores new perspectives on contemporary forms of violence in South Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and case studies, it examines the infiltration of violence at the societal level and affords a comparative regional analysis of its historical, cultural and geopolitical origins in South Asia. Featuring essays from Sri Lanka to Nepal, and from Afghanistan to Burma, it sheds light on issues as wide-ranging as lynching and mob justice, hate speech, caste violence, gender-based violence and the plight of the Rohingyas, among others. Lucid and engaging, this book will be an invaluable source of reference as well as scholarship to students and researchers of postcolonial studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural geography, minority studies, politics and gender studies.

This volume examines the lone actor terrorist phenomenon, including the larger societal trends which may or may not have led to their acts of terrorism. With lone actor terrorism becoming an increasingly common threat, the contributors to this volume aim to answer the following questions: What drives the actions of individuals who become lone actor terrorists? Are ideological and cultural issues key factors, or are personal psychological motives more useful in assessing the threat? Do lone actors evolve in a broader social context or are they primarily fixated loners? What response strategies are available to security services and law enforcement? What is the future outlook for this particular terrorist threat? Although these issues are frequently discussed, few books have taken a global perspective as their primary focus. While many books focus on lone actor terrorists in relation to terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaida and the Islamic State, few, if any, cover lone actors of all ideological backgrounds, including the variants of active shooters and malicious insiders in information security, such as Edward Snowden - with both of these latter categories constituting an important variant of lone actors. Utilising the expertise of academics and practitioners, the volume offers a valuable multidisciplinary perspective. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and counter-terrorism, political violence, criminology, security studies and IR.

This book examines the impact of foreign intervention in the course and nature of warfare in civil wars. Throughout history, foreign intervention in civil wars has been the rule rather than the exception. The involvement of outside powers can have a dramatic impact on the course and nature of internal conflicts. Despite this, there has been little research which has sought to explain how foreign intervention influences the course of civil wars. This book seeks to rectify this gap. It examines the impact of foreign intervention on the warfare that characterises civil wars through by studying the cases of the Angolan and Afghan civil wars. It investigates how foreign resources affect the military power of the recipient belligerent, and examines how changes in the balance of capabilities influence the form of warfare that characterises a civil war. Warfare in civil wars is often highly fluid, with belligerents adapting their respective strategies in response to shifts in the balance of military capabilities. This book shows how the intervention of foreign powers can manipulate the balance of capabilities between the civil war belligerents and change the dominant form of warfare. The findings presented in this book offer key insights for policy-makers to navigate the increasing internationalization of civil wars around the globe. This book will be of much interest to students of civil wars, intra-state conflict, war and conflict studies, and security studies.

This book examines and compares the political situations in North Korea and Iran, and the contemporary security challenges posed by their illicit nuclear aspirations. While government officials, including a series of American presidents, strategic policy documents and outside analysts have repeatedly noted that North Korea and Iran occupy a similar challenge, the commonality has largely been left unexplored. This book argues that North Korea and Iran are uniquely common in the world today in their illicit nuclear aspirations in violation of their legal commitments made under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The work evaluates alternative arguments, some of which sustain that the two states should be grouped together based on other metrics, such as nuclear powers that sponsor terrorist organizations or nuclear states that violate human rights, and find alternative explanations do not hold up to empirical scrutiny. Drawing on newly declassified documents and Iranian and North Korean sources, the book provides a comprehensive and comparative assessment of the two states' social, historical, economic, and domestic political structures and situation to make these determinations. Furthermore, it reviews the nuclear issue stemming from Iran and North Korea and the efforts to constrain these programs. The book concludes with specific policy recommendations that apply diplomatic lessons learned from dealing with Iran to North Korea and vice versa. This book will be of interest to students of nuclear proliferation, international security, foreign policy and International Relations.

How are militarism and militarisation embodied and why is it important to study these concepts together? This volume highlights a lack of research into people's emotions, bodies and experiences in global politics, and brings these important dimensions to bear on how we study militarism and process of militarisation. This collection showcases innovative research that examines people's everyday lived experience and the multiple ways militarism is enshrined in our societies. Emphasising the benefits of interdisciplinary thinking, its chapters interrogate a range of methodological, ethical, and theoretical questions related to embodiment and militarism from a range of empirical contexts. Authors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds reveal the myriad of ways in which militarism is experienced by gendered, raced, aged, and sexed bodies. The volume covers a wide range of topics, including the impact of social media; gender, queer, and feminist research on the military; the challenges of writing about embodied experience; and the commercialisation of military fitness in civilian life. This book fills a gap in the study of militarism and militarisation and will be of interest to students and scholars of critical military studies, security studies, and war studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Military Studies.

A vital component of the interdependent global economy, maritime transit routes are nowhere more critical than those traversing the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. Previously, areas of the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific have been viewed as separate and discrete political, economic, and military regions. In recent years, however, a variety of economic, political, and military forces have created a new understanding of these maritime expanses as one zone of global interaction. This book complements the material presented in its companion volume, Maritime Security in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific, by analysing the perceptions, interests, objectives, maritime capabilities, and policies of the major maritime powers operating in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. In addition, the book also assesses the contemporary maritime challenges and opportunities that confront the global community within what is rapidly becoming recognised as an integrated zone of global interaction. A valuable study for researchers and policymakers working in the fields of maritime security; military, security and peace studies; conflict resolution; and Asian affairs.

Philosophers have wrestled over the morality and ethics of war for nearly as long as human beings have been waging it. The death and destruction that unmanned warfare entails magnifies the moral and ethical challenges we face in conventional warfare and everyday society. Intrinsically linked are questions and perennial problems concerning what justifies the initial resort to war, who may be legitimately targeted in warfare, who should be permitted to serve the military, the collateral effects of military weaponry and the methods of determining and dealing with violations of the laws of war. This book provides a comprehensive and unifying analysis of the moral, political and social questions concerning the rise of drone warfare.

This new textbook provides an introduction to humanitarian protection, a field of study concerned with international responses to armed conflict, political violence, and humanitarian crisis. The book engages with a wide range of empirical and normative questions, providing an overview of the academic literature whilst simultaneously discussing the policies and practices associated with protective responses to conflict and humanitarian emergencies that put the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable populations, including civilians, refugees, and minority groups, at risk. Divided into three parts, covering the origins of the humanitarian protection regime, the range of actors involved, and the responsibilities of these actors, the book offers an accessible entry point into the major contemporary debates, providing readers with the conceptual tools for understanding core issues. Key points are reinforced and illustrated through the deployment of selected case studies, and a comprehensive glossary is provided for key terms. Each chapter ends with a summary of key points, questions for further reflection, and a list of recommended reading. This book will be of much interest to students of human protection, humanitarianism, the Responsibility to Protect, human security, peacekeeping, and International Relations in general.

In the early twentieth century, the new technology of flight changed warfare irrevocably, not only on the battlefield, but also on the home front. As prophesied before 1914, Britain in the First World War was effectively no longer an island, with its cities attacked by Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers in one of the first strategic bombing campaigns. Drawing on prewar ideas about the fragility of modern industrial civilization, some writers now began to argue that the main strategic risk to Britain was not invasion or blockade, but the possibility of a sudden and intense aerial bombardment of London and other cities, which would cause tremendous destruction and massive casualties. The nation would be shattered in a matter of days or weeks, before it could fully mobilize for war. Defeat, decline, and perhaps even extinction, would follow. This theory of the knock-out blow from the air solidified into a consensus during the 1920s and by the 1930s had largely become an orthodoxy, accepted by pacifists and militarists alike. But the devastation feared in 1938 during the Munich Crisis, when gas masks were distributed and hundreds of thousands fled London, was far in excess of the damage wrought by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941, as terrible as that was. The knock-out blow, then, was a myth. But it was a myth with consequences. For the first time, The Next War in the Air reconstructs the concept of the knock-out blow as it was articulated in the public sphere, the reasons why it came to be so widely accepted by both experts and non-experts, and the way it shaped the responses of the British public to some of the great issues facing them in the 1930s, from pacifism to fascism. Drawing on both archival documents and fictional and non-fictional publications from the period between 1908, when aviation was first perceived as a threat to British security, and 1941, when the Blitz ended, and it became clear that no knock-out blow was coming, The Next War in the Air provides a fascinating insight into the origins and evolution of this important cultural and intellectual phenomenon, Britain's fear of the bomber.

Contemporary Debates on Terrorism is an innovative textbook, addressing a number of key issues in terrorism studies from both traditional and 'critical' perspectives. This second edition has been revised and updated to cover contemporary issues such as the rise of ISIL and cyberterrorism. In recent years, the terrorism studies field has grown in quantity and quality, with a growing number of scholars rooted in various professional disciplines beginning to debate the complex dynamics underlying this category of violence. Within the broader field, there are a number of identifiable controversies and questions which divide scholarly opinion and generate opposing arguments. These relate to theoretical issues, such as the definition of terrorism and state terrorism, substantive issues like the threat posed by al Qaeda/ISIL and the utility of different responses to terrorism, different pathways leading people to engage in terrorist tactics and ethical issues such as the use of drones. This new edition brings together in one place many of the field's leading scholars to debate the key issues relating to a set of 16 important controversies and questions. The format of the volume involves a leading scholar taking a particular position on the controversy, followed by an opposing or alternative viewpoint written by another scholar. In addition to the pedagogic value of allowing students to read opposing arguments in one place, the volume will also be important for providing an overview of the state of the field and its key lines of debate. This book will be essential reading for students of terrorism studies and political violence, critical terrorism studies, security studies and IR in general.

A single breakthrough could change the world forever.Having just completed a complex recovery assignment, covert salvage specialist Korso is in no mood to take on another job so soon, but he has little choice when he's contacted by Cole Ashcroft, an ex-colleague who's calling in a debt. An official at the US Embassy in Bulgaria has approached Cole with a well-paying salvage job, but only if he can persuade Korso to plan the whole operation. A chemist for a pharmaceutical company has secretly developed a revolutionary glaucoma pill, one with an unexpected side effect that could make it the discovery of the century. But the chemist has since been found dead, and the prototypes are missing... Aware that ownership of these pills could shift the balance of military power overnight, the embassy man offers to pay Korso handsomely to locate and recover them using any means necessary. But with a job this big Korso also knows he'll have to assemble a team to help him, and that brings its own set of problems. Because with potential profits in the billions, can he really trust anyone...? A full-throttle thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end, perfect for fans of Mark Greaney, Ben Coes and Adam Hamdy.