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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Armed conflict
This volume consists of a book and downloadable resources containing a facsimile collection of diplomatic documents covering British reactions to critical developments regarding Berlin, its quadripartite administration, and role in the Cold War during the crises of 1948-49, 1959-61 and 1988-90. These events were each set within very different international contexts, but four interrelated themes are nevertheless common to each of the three chapters of the volume: the British Government's insistence, in conjunction with the Americans and the French, on upholding and safeguarding the rights of the four occupying powers in Berlin; British concerns with broader matters of military security in Western Europe as a whole and Germany in particular; the interaction of the four occupying powers with one another; and the questions raised by demographic change, especially population movements from east to west. All of the documents dealing with the events of 1989-90 fall within the UK's 30-year rule and are therefore not yet in the public domain.
This book explores the use of deadly force by private security companies during the Iraq War. The work focuses on and compares the activities of the US companies Blackwater and Dyncorp. Despite sharing several important characteristics, such as working for the same client (the US State Department) during the same time period, the employees of Blackwater fired their weapons far more often, and killed and seriously injured far more people in Iraq than their counterparts in DynCorp. In order to explain this disparity, the book undertakes the most comprehensive analysis ever attempted on the use of violence by the employees of these firms. Based on extensive empirical research, it offers a credible explanation for this difference: Blackwater maintained a relatively bellicose military culture that placed strong emphasis on norms encouraging its personnel to exercise personal initiative, proactive use of force, and an exclusive approach to security, which, together, motivated its personnel to use violence quite freely against anyone they suspected of posing a threat. Specifically, Blackwater's military culture motivated its personnel to fire upon suspected threats more quickly, at greater distances, and with a greater quantity of bullets, and to more readily abandon the people they shot at when compared to DynCorp's personnel, who maintained a military culture that encouraged far less violent behaviour. Utilizing the Private Security Company Violent Incident Dataset (PSCVID), created by the author in 2012, the book draws upon data on hundreds of violent incidents involving private security personnel in Iraq to identify trends in the behaviour exhibited by the employees of different firms. Based on this rich and original empirical data, the book provides the definitive study of contemporary private security personnel in the Iraq War. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, Private Security Companies, Military Studies, War and Conflict Studies and IR in general.
This book discusses the practice of no-fly zones in international affairs. The first no-fly zone was imposed over northern Iraq immediately after the first Gulf War, and since then they have become a regular recourse for policymakers confronted with humanitarian crises. They have come to be viewed as a feasible, essentially non-violent form of intervention that can be performed entirely from the air in a situation where some form of action is widely thought to be necessary but the political will for a ground operation is insufficient. Nonetheless, even among policy makers there is limited understanding of the requirements, the shortcomings and the potentialities of no-fly zones. This is the first comprehensive work on this topic, and examines the assumptions surrounding no-fly zones by focusing on issues such as authority, cost, possibility of escalation and effectiveness. Looking back at 25 years of experience with no-fly zones, the book's goal is to look at what historical lessons may be drawn and to make some predictions with regard to the politics and strategy of no-fly zones in the future. This book will be of much interest to students of air power, security studies, Middle Eastern Studies and IR in general
This book brings together, explores and expands socio-spatial affect, emotion and psychoanalytic drives in tourism for the first time. Affect is to be found in visceral intensities and resonances that circulate around and shape encounters between and amongst tourists, local tourism representatives and places. When affect manifests, it can 'take shapes' in the form of emotions such as fun, joy, fear, anger and the like. When it remains a visceral force of latent bodily responses, affect overlaps with drives as expounded in psychoanalysis. The aim of the title, therefore, is to explore how and in what ways affects, emotions and drives are felt and performed in tourism encounters in places of socio-political turmoil such as Jordan, Palestine/Israel, with a detour to Iraq. Affective Tourism is highly innovative as it offers a new way of theorising tourism encounters bringing together, critically examining and expanding three areas of scholarship: affective and emotional geographies, psychoanalytic geographies and dark tourism. It has relevance for tourism industries in places in the proximity of ongoing conflicts as it provides in-depth analyses of the interconnections between tourism, danger and conflict. Such understandings can lead to more socio-culturally and politically-sustainable approaches to planning, development and management of tourism. This ground breaking book will be of valuable reading for students and researchers from a number of fields such as tourism studies, geography, anthropology, sociology and Middle Eastern studies.
This edited volume explores and analyses strategic thinking, military reform and adaptation in an era of Asian growth, European austerity and US rebalancing. A significant shift in policy, strategy and military affairs is underway in both Asia and Europe, with the former gaining increasing prominence in the domain of global security. At the same time, the world's powers are now faced with an array of diverse challenges. The resurgence of great power politics in both Europe and Asia, along with the long term threats of terrorism, piracy and sustained geopolitical instability has placed great strain on militaries and security institutions operating with constrained budgets and wary public support. The volume covers a wide range of case studies, including the transformation of China's military in the 21st century, the internal and external challenges facing India, Russia's military modernization program and the USA's reassessment of its strategic interests. In doing so, the book provides the reader with the opportunity to conceptualize how strategic thinking, military reform, operational adaptation and technological integration have interacted with the challenges outlined above. With contributions by leading scholars and practitioners from Europe and Asia, this book provides a valuable contribution to the understanding of strategic and operational thinking and adjustment across the world. This book will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, security studies, defence studies, Asian politics, Russian politics, US foreign policy and IR in general.
This volume brings together writings by Prof. Ramesh Thakur on the challenge of nuclear weapons, covering more than three decades of researching, thinking and writing on the topic. The core problem of this work can be disaggregated into several components. The essays approach the problem primarily as a normative and political project, not as an analytical project. Chapters 1 3 in Part One describe the scholar-practitioner interface in trying to come to grips with the nature and magnitude of the challenge, the main policy impact of the development of nuclear weapons on security strategy, and the different collective nuclear futures from among which policymakers must choose. The bulk of the world s nuclear weapons are held by Russia and the United States, who also conducted most of the nuclear testing. But in the 1980s and 1990s, world attention was focused on nuclear testing in the Pacific by France as an established NPT nuclear-weapons-state (NWS), then India and Pakistan as they broke through the NPT normative barrier to conduct nuclear tests in 1998 and consolidated their status as non-NPT nuclear-armed states, followed finally by North Korea which became the first country to defect from and break out of the NPT to conduct nuclear tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013. While the world is trying to figure out how to coax North Korea back into the NPT bottle, it is simultaneously struggling with the challenge of trying to keep Iran in the NPT non-nuclear box. Meanwhile, India has been accommodated as a de facto nuclear-armed state outside the NPT regime. The eight chapters in Part Two address these regional nuclear challenges. The various regional challenges have served to highlight serious deficiencies in the normative architecture of the nuclear arms control and disarmament regime. The five chapters in Part Three deal with the international nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament machinery and regime, including regional nuclear-weapon-free zones. In addition, the nuclear proliferation and terrorism agendas merged as a nightmare challenge in the minds of policymakers after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. This is discussed in chapter 15, while chapter 16 asks if the NPT anomalies have become so many and so substantial that the treaty is incapable of functioning much longer as the anchor of the global nuclear arms control regime. The concluding chapter brings together the various disparate strands of the analysis to argue for moving towards a world of progressively reduced nuclear weapons in numbers, reduced salience of nuclear weapons in national security doctrines and deployments, and an eventually denuclearized world. This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear
proliferation, global governance, international organisations,
diplomacy and security studies.
The internet has changed the rules of many industries, and war is no exception. But can a computer virus be classed as an act of war? Does a Denial of Service attack count as an armed attack? And does a state have a right to self-defence when cyber attacked? With the range and sophistication of cyber attacks against states showing a dramatic increase in recent times, this book investigates the traditional concepts of 'use of force', 'armed attack', and 'armed conflict' and asks whether existing laws created for analogue technologies can be applied to new digital developments. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of primary documents and surrounding literature, to investigate whether and how existing rules on the use of force in international law apply to a relatively new phenomenon such as cyberspace operations. It assesses the rules of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, whether based on treaty or custom, and analyses why each rule applies or does not apply to cyber operations. Those rules which can be seen to apply are then discussed in the context of each specific type of cyber operation. The book addresses the key questions of whether a cyber operation amounts to the use of force and, if so, whether the victim state can exercise its right of self-defence; whether cyber operations trigger the application of international humanitarian law when they are not accompanied by traditional hostilities; what rules must be followed in the conduct of cyber hostilities; how neutrality is affected by cyber operations; whether those conducting cyber operations are combatants, civilians, or civilians taking direct part in hostilities. The book is essential reading for everyone wanting a better understanding of how international law regulates cyber combat.
After Ethnic Conflict: Policy-making in Post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia investigates how sensitive policy issues can be resolved in the aftermath of war by investigating how political elites interact and make decisions in ethnically divided societies. Focussing on the interactions between political elites and attempts to reach agreement across ethnic lines in Bosnia and Macedonia the book examines the impact that institutional factors can have on political actors and the decisions they make. Examining domestic factors and external influence in politics, Cvete Koneska identifies four key drivers of post-conflict cooperation: cross-cutting identities, minority veto powers, territorial autonomy, and informal practices to explain inter-ethnic political accommodation. By looking beyond the immediate post-conflict landscape, created by foreign peace negotiators and aid missions, to the internal political process she shows the real reasons political actors cooperate and how competing ethnic tensions are reconciled following ethnic conflict. Delving deeper into specific policy areas to compare successful and unsuccessful attempts at ethnic accommodation this book explores the factors behind the different policy outcomes that sustain or undermine peace and ethnic cooperation in ethnically divided societies.
This is the first book to focus on the two different but very similar campaigns of state-sponsored violence that have engulfed the people of the Nuba Mountains in Sudan. First, between late 1989 and the mid 1990s, the Government of Sudan, under President Omar al Bashir, carried out what some have deemed genocide by attrition against the people of the Nuba Mountains. The second crisis in the Nuba Mountains has been unfolding since July 2011 as the result of continued strife after the civil war in Sudan and the secession of South Sudan. " Perspectives on the Nuba Mountains Crises "examines the two crises in detail and provides a comparative analysis of the conditions and government tactics in both cases. Contributing authors address the issue of impunity, the relation to subsequent genocidal actions in Darfur, and renewed violence in the Nuba Mountains today. Contributors also examine the issues of humanitarian aid, the relatively new mandate of Responsibility to Protect, and the various factors influencing international attention to the current Nuba Mountains crisis. This much-needed volume brings attention to two under-researched conflicts and raises questions of what it means when a government is allowed complete impunity in attacking its own peoples. This book is a significant contribution to our understanding of the prevention and intervention of genocide and ethnic conflict.
In War in the Modern World, 1990-2014, Jeremy Black looks at the most modern of conflicts from the perspective that war is a central feature of the modern world. Arguing that understanding non-Western developments is crucial if the potential of Western war-making is to be assessed accurately, the book also asserts that knowing the history of conflict can only help future generations. Black argues for the need to emphasise the variety of military circumstances, as well as the extent to which the understanding of force and the definitions of victory and defeat are guided by cultural assumptions. War has a multi-faceted impact in the modern world, and this book shows its significance. As the latest volume in the Warfare and History series, this title takes a global and historical perspective on modern warfare, enabling the reader to approach familiar conflicts through a new analytical framework. This book is an invaluable resource for all students of the history of modern warfare.
Insurgencies in North-East India: Moving Towards Resolution aims at creating an awareness of the current status of this national problem in parliamentarians, officers and officials of the Government of India, and the residents of the North-Eastern (NE) States. The author, combining extensive practical experience in counter insurgency operations with research and scholarship, consider the NE insurgencies within the larger context of our Constitution. Thereafter he focuses his enquiry progressively from our north-eastern region to an examination of the insurgencies Nagaland, Manipur and Assam, and then critical assesses the employment of security forces in counter insurgency (COIN) operations. He concludes with recommendations for the way ahead.
This textbook draws on academic theory, field research and policy developments to provide an overview of the connections between security and development, before, during and after conflict. This third edition is revised and updated to take account of changes that have occurred in both policy and academic arenas which are relevant to students and practitioners in this area. In addition, there is a new chapter on memory and memorialisation after conflict. In an interdependent world, it is often argued that the challenges of underdevelopment and insecurity have global implications. This textbook charts an accessible course through these complex debates, providing a comprehensive introduction for those encountering these issues for the first time. The main aims of the revised edition are: to set out how thinking on conflict, security and development has changed over time and continues to evolve; to explore the consequences of these changes, particularly for the theory and practice of development and security promotion; to introduce a range of case studies from across the globe, in order to explore the implications of a combined approach to security and development. The authors are experienced in both the theory and the practice of this field, and illustrate the links between conflict, security and development with practical examples, drawing on key case studies from the past twenty years. Each chapter is informed by student pedagogy, and the book will be essential reading for all students of development studies, war and conflict studies, and human security, and is recommended for students of international security and international relations in general.
Digital War offers a comprehensive overview of the impact of digital technologies upon the military, the media, the global public and the concept of 'warfare' itself. This introductory textbook explores the range of uses of digital technology in contemporary warfare and conflict. The book begins with the 1991 Gulf War, which showcased post-Vietnam technological developments and established a new model of close military and media management. It explores how this model was reapplied in Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), and how, with the Web 2.0 revolution, this informational control broke down. New digital technologies allowed anyone to be an informational producer leading to the emergence of a new mode of 'participative war', as seen in Gaza, Iraq and Syria. The book examines major political events of recent times, such as 9/11 and the War on Terror and its aftermath. It also considers how technological developments such as unmanned drones and cyberwar have impacted upon global conflict and explores emerging technologies such as soldier-systems, exo-skeletons, robotics and artificial intelligence and their possible future impact. This book will be of much interest to students of war and media, security studies, political communication, new media, diplomacy and IR in general.
The Routledge Handbook of Deradicalisation and Disengagement offers an overview of the historical settings, theoretical debates, national approaches and practical strategies to deradicalisation and disengagement. Radicalisation and violent extremism are major global challenges, and as new and violent extremist groups and environments emerge, there is an increasing need for knowledge about how individuals physically exit these movements and how to change their mindset. Historically, much of the focus on these topics has been highly securitised and militarised; by contrast, this volume explores the need for more community-based and 'soft' approaches. The handbook includes discussions from both right-wing/left-wing political and religiously inspired deradicalisation processes. The handbook is organised into three parts: 1 definitions, backgrounds and theories; 2 actors; 3 regional case studies. This handbook will be of much interest to students, researchers, scholars and professionals of deradicalisation, counterterrorism, political violence, political extremism, security studies and international relations in general.
This book offers an analysis of key individuals who have contributed to both the theory and the practice of counterinsurgency (COIN). Insurgencies have become the dominant form of armed conflict around the world today. The perceptible degeneration of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan into insurgent quagmires has sparked a renewal of academic and military interest in the theory and practice of counterinsurgency. In light of this, this book provides a rigorous analysis of those individuals who have contributed to both the theory and practice of counterinsurgency: 'warrior-scholars'. These are soldiers who have bridged the academic-military divide by influencing doctrinal and intellectual debates about irregular warfare. Irregular warfare is notoriously difficult for the military, and scholarly understanding about this type of warfare is also problematic; especially given the residual anti-intellectualism within Western militaries. Thus, The Theory and Practice of Irregular Warfare is dedicated to analysing the best perceivable bridge between these two worlds. The authors explore the theoretical and practical contributions made by a selection of warrior-scholars of different nationalities, from periods ranging from the French colonial wars of the mid-twentieth century to the Israeli experiences in the Middle East; from contributions to American counter-insurgency made during the Iraq War, to the thinkers who shaped the US war in Vietnam. This book will be of much interest to students of counterinsurgency, strategic studies, defence studies, war studies and security studies in general.
Peace is a universal ideal, but its political life is a great paradox: "peace" is the opposite of war, but it also enables war. If peace is the elimination of war, then what does it mean to wage war for the sake of peace? What does peace mean when some say that they are committed to it but that their enemies do not value it? Why is it that associating peace with other ideals, like justice, friendship, security, and law, does little to distance peace from war? Although political theory has dealt extensively with most major concepts that today define "the political" it has paid relatively scant critical attention to peace, the very concept that is often said to be the major aim and ideal of humanity. In War for Peace, Murad Idris looks at the ways that peace has been treated across the writings of ten thinkers from ancient and modern political thought, from Plato to Immanuel Kant and Sayyid Qutb, to produce an original and striking account of what peace means and how it works. Idris argues that peace is parasitical in that the addition of other ideals into peace, such as law, security, and friendship, reduces it to consensus and actually facilitates war; it is provincial in that its universalized content reflects particularistic desires and fears, constructions of difference, and hierarchies within humanity; and it is polemical, in that its idealization is not only the product of antagonisms, but also enables hostility. War for Peace uncovers the basis of peace's moralities and the political functions of its idealizations, historically and into the present. This bold and ambitious book confronts readers with the impurity of peace as an ideal, and the pressing need to think beyond universal peace.
Targeting is the primary method for securing strategic objectives
in an armed conflict. Failure to comply with the law of targeting
jeopardizes the achievement of those aims. It is therefore
essential that all those involved in or studying issues surrounding
targeting have an accurate and complete understanding of this area
of law. This book offers the definitive and comprehensive statement
of all aspects of the law of targeting. It is a 'one-stop shop'
that answers all relevant questions in depth. It has been written
in an open, accessible yet comprehensive style, and addresses both
matters of established law and issues of topical controversy.
This book comprises contributions by leading experts in the field
of international humanitarian law on the subject of the
categorization or classification of armed conflicts. It is divided
into two sections; the first aims to provide the reader with a
sound understanding of the legal questions surrounding the
classification of hostilities and its consequences; the second
includes ten case studies that examine practice in respect of
classification.
This book brings together and critically analyses the disparate conventional, customary, and soft law relating to non-international armed conflict. All the relevant bodies of international law are considered, including international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and international human rights law. The book traces the changes to the legal framework applicable to non-international armed conflict from ad hoc regulation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, to systematic regulation through the 1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Additional Protocols, to the transformation of the law in the mid-1990s. Armed conflicts ranging from the US civil war, the Algerian War of Independence, and the attempted secession of Biafra, through to the current conflicts in the Colombia, Philippines, and Sudan are all considered. The identification and analysis of the law is complemented by a consideration of the practice, allowing both violations of, and respect for, the law, to be ascertained. Given that non-international armed conflicts are fought between states and non-state armed groups, or between armed groups, particular attention is paid to the oft-neglected views of armed groups. This is done through an analysis of hundreds of statements, unilateral declarations, internal regulations, and bilateral agreements issued by armed groups. Equivalent material emanating from states parties to conflicts is also considered. The book is thus an essential reference point for the law and practice of non-international armed conflicts.
The eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire used to be a multi-ethnic region where Armenians, Kurds, Syriacs, Turks, and Arabs lived together in the same villages and cities. The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and rise of the nation state violently altered this situation. Nationalist elites intervened in heterogeneous populations they identified as objects of knowledge, management, and change. These often violent processes of state formation destroyed historical regions and emptied multicultural cities, clearing the way for modern nation states. The Making of Modern Turkey highlights how the Young Turk regime, from 1913 to 1950, subjected Eastern Turkey to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homogenizing the region and incorporating it in the Turkish nation state. It examines how the regime utilized technologies of social engineering, such as physical destruction, deportation, spatial planning, forced assimilation, and memory politics, to increase ethnic and cultural homogeneity within the nation state. Drawing on secret files and unexamined records, Ugur UEmit UEngoer demonstrates that concerns of state security, ethnocultural identity, and national purity were behind these policies. The eastern provinces, the heartland of Armenian and Kurdish life, became an epicenter of Young Turk population policies and the theatre of unprecedented levels of mass violence.
Social scientists and policy makers have long been interested in the causes and consequences of peace and conflict. This handbook brings together contributions from leading scholars who take an economic perspective to study the topic. It includes thirty-three chapters and is divided into five parts: Correlates of Peace and Conflict; Consequences and Costs of Conflict; On the Mechanics of Conflict; Conflict and Peace in Economic Context; and Pathways to Peace. Taken together, they demonstrate not only how the tools of economics can be fruitfully used to advance our understanding of conflict, but how explicitly incorporating conflict into economic analysis can add substantively to our understanding of observed economic phenomena. Some chapters are largely empirical, identifying correlates of war and peace and quantifying many of the costs of conflict. Others are more theoretical, exploring a variety of mechanisms that lead to war or are more conducive to peace.
The war on terror is remaking conventional warfare. The protracted battle against a non-state organization, the demise of the confinement of hostilities to an identifiable battlefield, the extensive involvement of civilian combatants, and the development of new and more precise military technologies have all conspired to require a rethinking of the law and morality of war. Just war theory, as traditionally articulated, seems ill-suited to justify many of the practices of the war on terror. The raid against Osama Bin Laden's Pakistani compound was the highest profile example of this strategy, but the issues raised by this technique cast a far broader net: every week the U.S. military and CIA launch remotely piloted drones to track suspected terrorists in hopes of launching a missile strike against them. In addition to the public condemnation that these attacks have generated in some countries, the legal and moral basis for the use of this technique is problematic. Is the U.S. government correct that nations attacked by terrorists have the right to respond in self-defense by targeting specific terrorists for summary killing? Is there a limit to who can legitimately be placed on the list? There is also widespread disagreement about whether suspected terrorists should be considered combatants subject to the risk of lawful killing under the laws of war or civilians protected by international humanitarian law. Complicating the moral and legal calculus is the fact that innocent bystanders are often killed or injured in these attacks. This book addresses these issues. Featuring chapters by an unrivalled set of experts, it discusses all aspects of targeted killing, making it unmissable reading for anyone interested in the implications of this practice.
This book offers a detailed examination of the professional military education system in the United States, from a critical, insider's perspective. The mission of America's war colleges is to educate senior military officers in both the ways of war and the defence of peace. But are these colleges doing the best job possible in carrying out that important mission? Military education faces many demands, including a lack of preparation by the students, uneven quality of the faculty, and confusion over the curriculum. Many officers attend resident programs at the war colleges programs against the career advice of their leadership, despite the fact that they are virtually guaranteed graduation after less than a year of study, while others do their best to avoid it entirely. As the professional military education system has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism, some have even called for closing the war colleges. That answer, however, does not serve the United States well, especially in a complex, globalized environment, where military leaders need the best specialized education to prepare them for their future challenges. This volume examines the system that created and supports the perpetuation of this system, and why it is imperative that it be fixed. Written by a faculty member at a military college with twenty years' experience of the PME system, this book will of much interest to students of the US Military, US politics and military education in general.
This book is a guide to international human rights law as it applies to situations of armed conflict, to counter-terrorism measures and to any other situation of actual or potential violence requiring security measures. These situations can lead to some of the most fundamental human rights being put in danger of being violated. These include the right to life, the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, enforced disappearance, all the rights relating to detention and due process of law, and the freedoms most commonly affected by armed conflict and counter-terrorism. The book begins with a presentation on the application of human rights to such situations and an explanation of the regime of limitations and derogations. After an overall description of the relationship between human rights law, on the one hand, and international humanitarian law and international counter-terrorism measures, on the other, the book concentrates on the rights themselves. Each chapter presents the relevant treaty provisions and explains the interpretation of the rights by reference to the case law and general comments of these treaty bodies. The book concludes with a section on how international human rights law protects certain vulnerable and disadvantaged populations in such situations. |
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