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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Armed conflict
This textbook provides a thorough grounding in the vocabulary, concepts, issues and debates associated with modern land warfare. The second edition has been updated and revised, and includes new chapters on non-western perspectives and hybrid warfare. Drawing on a range of case studies spanning the First World War through to contemporary conflicts in Syria, Ukraine, and Nagorno-Karabakh, the book explores what is unique about the land domain and how this has shaped the theory and practice of military operations conducted upon it. It also looks at land warfare across the spectrum of its conduct, including conventional campaigning, counterinsurgency, and peace support and stabilisation operations. Key themes and debates identified and analysed include: the tensions between change and continuity; the role of technology in land warfare; the relevance of culture and context; the difficulties in translating theory into effective military practice; in-depth discussions on issues of immediate contemporary significance, including hybrid warfare, emerging military technologies, and the military reform processes of the US, Russian, and Chinese land forces. This book will be essential reading for military practitioners and for students of land warfare, military history, war studies and strategic studies.
This book examines the role religion played in the dismantling of Yugoslavia; addressing practical concerns of inter-ethnic fighting, religiously-motivated warfare, and the role religion played within the dissolution of the nation.
This edited volume examines a range of historical and contemporary episodes of reconciliation and anti-reconciliation in the aftermath of war. Reconciliation is a concept that resists easy definition. At the same time, it is almost invariably invoked as a goal of post-conflict reconstruction, peacebuilding and transitional justice. This book examines the considerable ambiguity and controversy surrounding the term and, crucially, asks what has reconciliation entailed historically? What can we learn from past episodes of reconciliation and anti-reconciliation? Taken together, the chapters in this volume adopt an interdisciplinary approach, focused on the question of how reconciliation has been enacted, performed and understood in particular historical episodes, and how that might contribute to our understanding of the concept and its practice. Rather than seek a universal definition, the book focuses on what makes each case of reconciliation unique, and highlights the specificity of reconciliation in individual contexts. This book will be of much interest to students of transitional justice, conflict resolution, human rights, history and International Relations.
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.
Although many scholars and practitioners recognize that development and conflict are intertwined, there is much less understanding of the mechanisms behind these linkages. This book takes a new approach by critically examining how various development strategies provoke or help prevent intrastate violence, based on cases from all developing regions.
This book uses an historical body of knowledge, Just War Theory, as the basis for analyzing modern conflicts involving Armed Non-State Actors who employ force against states. As the global community faces the challenges of globalization, terrorism, 24-hour international news coverage, super power collapse, weapons of mass destruction, and failed states, the author explores whether the historic bodies of knowledge governing decision makers during conflict remain relevant. Tracing the evolution of Just War Theory, he analyzes circumstances involving Armed Non-State Actor (ANSA) groups possessing powerful and destructive capabilities and a desire to use them, and pursues answers to the central research question: how does Just War Theory apply in modern scenarios involving ANSA groups who challenge the state and international institution's monopoly on use of force? The study finds that Just War Theory still has the capacity to accommodate modern day statecraft and application in scenarios involving Armed Non-State Actors. This book will be of great interest to those researching and studying in the fields of political theory, security studies, international relations, war and conflict studies, and public ethics.
These riveting first-hand accounts of Turkish soldiers who have fought in the nasty internal war against the Kurds speak to universals: the shock of entering military life and the traumas of warfare; the changes in personality and relations with family and friends, the lingering emotional effects of violence, and the difficulties in returning to the 'real world', to borrow a phrase from Vietnam vets. Corruption, disillusionment and despair alternate with the small victories of humanity overcoming hellish conditions. Mater's reportage is in the best tradition of revealing the surreal, illuminating the universal truth of war's devastation. At a time when American troops are again caught in a vicious insurgency, the Kurdish issue has high visibility, and Turkey is a major actor in the Middle East, the experiences of these former soldiers resonate.
A Sunday Times and FT Book of the Year When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, the most likely outcome is war. In this razor-sharp analysis, Harvard scholar Graham Allison examines the phenomenon known as Thucydides’s Trap, which is currently playing out between the world’s two biggest superpowers: the US and China. Through uncanny historical parallels, Destined for War shows how close we are to the unthinkable. Yet, stressing that war is not inevitable, Allison also reveals how clashing powers have kept the peace in the past ― and what painful steps international leaders can and must take to avoid disaster.
This book critiques the dominant physical and biological interpretation of the Genocide Convention and argues that the idea of "culture" is central to properly understanding the crime of genocide. Using Raphael Lemkin's personal papers, archival materials from the State Department and the UN, as well as the mid-century secondary literature, it situates the convention in the longstanding debate between Enlightenment notions of universality and individualism, and Romantic notions of particularism and holism. The author conducts a thorough review of the treaty and its preparatory work to show that the drafters brought strong culturalist ideas to the debate and that Lemkin's ideas were held widely in the immediate postwar period. Reconstructing the mid-century conversation on genocide and situating it in the much broader mid-century discourse on justice and society he demonstrates that culture is not a distraction to be read out of the Genocide Convention; it is the very reason it exists. This volume poses a forceful challenge to the materialist interpretation and calls into question decades of international case law. It will be of interest to scholars of genocide, human rights, international law, the history of international law and human rights, and treaty interpretation.
Proscribing peace offers a systematic examination of the impact of proscription on peace negotiations. By introducing the concept of 'linguistic ceasefire', Haspeslagh adds to our understanding of the timing and sequencing of peace processes in the context of proscription. With relevance for more than half of the conflicts around the world in which an armed group is listed as a terrorist organisation, 'linguistic ceasefire' helps to explain why certain conflicts remain stuck in the 'terrorist' framing, while others emerge from it. International proscription regimes criminalise both the actor and the act of terrorism. Proscribing peace calls for an end to the amalgamation between acts and actors. By focussing on the acts instead, Haspeslagh argues, international policy would be better able to consider the violent actions both of armed groups and those of the state. By separating the act and the actor, change - and thus peace - become possible. -- .
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.
"Peace interventions can promote violence, while conflict may be a crucial means for constraining and preventing it. This book explores these statements, re-thinking the relationships between peace, conflict and violence. From this perspective it reinterprets several phenomena that challenge the "peace process" in Northern Ireland"--
This is a unique publication; though criminology is often interested in those who cause social harm, biographies are very rare (beyond some of the seminal text of the 1930s). This offers something new to the field, while still situating itself in contemporary debates on social harm and narrative criminology. The author had unparalleled access to his subject, and this biography is based on extensive interviews that took place over Skype. This book will find a wide market across criminology, sociology, critical security studies, international relations and those engaged with the arms industry.
This book contains articles on the theory of conflict. Conflict appears in many forms, from a dictator terrorizing his country to organized crime demanding protection money. Among the questions addressed are the conditions which make conflict severe (for example, is class conflict worse than ethnic conflict?), whether voluntary agreements can avoid future conflict, how the outcome of one war will affect the incentives of countries to wage war in the future, how dictators hold power, and why revolutions appear. The book provides an overview of existing literature, applies the theory of conflict to new situations, and gives foundations for future work. It should interest both researchers and students studying political economy, public choice, international relations, and comparative politics.
Dialogue format makes it more accessible for readers, as well as easier to get both points of the argument, juxtaposed. Incredibly topical with the war in Ukraine still going on, over six months later.
Palestine Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Winner 2022 'Roy is humanely and professionally committed in ways that are unmatched by any other non-Palestinian scholar' - Edward W. Said Gaza, the centre of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to the occupation, is the linchpin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the key to its resolution. Since 2005, Israel has deepened the isolation of the territory, severing it almost completely from its most vital connections to the West Bank, Israel and beyond, and has deliberately shattered its economy, transforming Palestinians from a people with political rights into a humanitarian problem. Sara Roy unpacks this process, looking at US foreign policy towards the Palestinians, as well as analysing the trajectory of Israeli policy toward Gaza, which became a series of punitive approaches meant not only to contain the Hamas regime but weaken Gazan society. Roy also reflects on Gaza's ruination from a Jewish perspective and discusses the connections between Gaza's history and her own as a child of Holocaust survivors. This book, a follow up from the renowned Failing Peace, comes from one of the world's most acclaimed writers on the region.
How did the Israeli military learn to cope with the ubiquity of media technologies that routinely document their power abuses? Why did they re-appropriate these to tighten their grip on Palestinian civilians? This book explains why a high-tech nation with advanced military technologies came to rely on the everyday media habits performed by soldiers and civilians. Daniel Mann argues that the intensification of the security regime in Palestine, and the increasingly personal use of media technologies by both soldiers and civilians, are deeply entangled. The book traces how, beginning in the 1990s, the integration of media into the lives of civilians and Israeli soldiers enabled Israel to transfer responsibilities to individual users, who in turn became legally and ethically liable for state abuses of power. Drawing on declassified documents, found footage, and social media, Mann shows how both media and warfare have been remodelled around the figure of the defensive, isolated, and insular 'individual'. Mann suggests that the focus on representations and their close visual analysis paradoxically hinders our ability to understand media. Instead of zooming into fine details, we must step back to reveal the assemblage of images, users, and infrastructure that together serve to maintain the racial, legal and aesthetic divide between Israel and Palestine.
Gender is widely recognized as an important and useful lens for the study of International Relations. However, there are few books that specifically investigate masculinity/ies in relation to world politics. Taking a feminist-inspired understanding of gender as its starting point, the book: * explains that gender is both an asymmetrical binary and a hierarchy; * shows how masculinization works via 'nested hierarchies' of domination and subordination; * explores the imbrication of masculinities with the nation-state and great-power politics; * develops an understanding of the arms trade with commercial processes of militarization. Written in an accessible style, with suggestions for further reading, this book is an invaluable resource for students and teachers applying 'the gender lens' to global politics.
Humanitarians operate on the frontlines of today's armed conflicts, where they regularly negotiate to provide assistance and to protect vulnerable civilians. This book explores this unique and under-researched field of humanitarian negotiation. It details the challenges faced by humanitarians negotiating with armed groups in Yemen, Myanmar, and elsewhere, arguing that humanitarians typically negotiate from a position of weakness. It also explores some of the tactics and strategies they use to overcome this power asymmetry to reach more favorable agreements. The author applies these findings to broader negotiation scholarship and investigates the implications of this research for the field and practice of humanitarianism. This book also demonstrates how non-state actors - both humanitarians and armed groups - have become increasingly potent diplomatic actors. It challenges traditional state-centric approaches to diplomacy and argues that non-state actors constitute an increasingly crucial vector through which international relations are replicated and reconstituted during contemporary armed conflict. Only by accepting these changes to the nature of diplomacy itself can the causes, symptoms, and solutions to armed conflict be better managed. This book will be of interest to scholars concerned with conflict resolution, negotiation, and mediation, as well as to humanitarian practitioners themselves.
Launches and develops the concept of cultural statecraft that has advantages compared to alternative terms, such as cultural diplomacy and soft power. Russia's cultural statecraft has received growing attention in the Western world, but there is no comprehensive analysis of the interlinkages between politics and culture across a variety of fields.
Mary Kaldor's New and Old Wars has fundamentally changed the way both scholars and policy-makers understand contemporary war and conflict. In the context of globalization, this path-breaking book has shown that what we think of as war - that is to say, war between states in which the aim is to inflict maximum violence - is becoming an anachronism. In its place is a new type of organized violence or 'new wars', which could be described as a mixture of war, organized crime and massive violations of human rights. The actors are both global and local, public and private. The wars are fought for particularistic political goals using tactics of terror and destabilization that are theoretically outlawed by the rules of modern warfare. Kaldor's analysis offers a basis for a cosmopolitan political response to these wars, in which the monopoly of legitimate organized violence is reconstructed on a transnational basis and international peacekeeping is reconceptualized as cosmopolitan law enforcement. This approach also has implications for the reconstruction of civil society, political institutions, and economic and social relations. This third edition has been fully revised and updated. Kaldor has added an afterword answering the critics of the New Wars argument and, in a new chapter, Kaldor shows how old war thinking in Afghanistan and Iraq greatly exacerbated what turned out to be, in many ways, archetypal new wars - characterised by identity politics, a criminalised war economy and civilians as the main victims. Like its predecessors, the third edition of New and Old Wars will be essential reading for students of international relations, politics and conflict studies as well as to all those interested in the changing nature and prospect of warfare.
In early summer 1982--winter in the South Atlantic--Argentina's military junta invades the Falklands. Within days, a Royal Navy Task Force is assembled and dispatched. This is the story of D Squadron, 22 SAS, commanded by Cedric Delves. The relentless tempo of events defies belief. Raging seas, inhospitable glaciers, hurricane-force winds, helicopter crashes, raids behind enemy lines--the Squadron prevailed against them all, but the cost was high. Holding fast to their humanity, D Squadron's fighters were there at the start and end of the Falklands War. Theirs was the first Union Jack raised over Government House in Stanley. Across an Angry Sea is a chronicle of daring, skill and steadfastness among a tight-knit band of brothers; of learning fast, fighting hard, and winning through.
Why does an armed group adopt not only one measure but also combine multiple strategies in its mobilization efforts? This book argues that, given a difference in a group's influence between the stronghold and contested areas, it will adopt varying mobilization strategies that range from involuntary to voluntary recruitment. When the group attempts to collect combatants in the stronghold, it can use coercion as a means of mobilization. Within contested areas, in contrast, the group seeks to recruit dedicated participants whose interests coincide with the groups' long-term goals.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL UNITED SERVICES INSTITUTE DUKE OF WESTMINSTER MEDAL FOR MILITARY LITERATURE** **SHORTLISTED FOR BRITISH ARMY BOOK OF THE YEAR** In the wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and in recent conflicts more generally, liberal powers have blurred the line between military and political activity. Operationally, such blurring is highly effective: it works on the ground. Conversely, in strategic terms, it erases the distinction between war and peace. This, Simpson contends, is undesirable: how can policy control armed force, if armed force is a direct extension of policy? As the information revolution reinforces the politicisation of combat, this is likely to be an irreversible trend. The question this book seeks to answer is not whether the West should engage in such practices, but how to manage, gain advantage from, and mitigate the associated risks. Liberal powers need to win conflicts on the ground, and yet preserve a healthy distinction between war and peace. Failure to preserve that distinction will result in those powers being caught in endless conflicts for which they are operationally ill-equipped. War From The Ground Up offers a distinctive perspective in its consideration of the concept of contemporary warfare. While most accounts of conflict survey the battlefield from an academic perspective, or across it as a personal combat narrative, Simpson looks up from the front line to consider the concepts that put him there, and how they played out.
This book provides a rich analysis of the actors and organizations to reflect on the antecedents and trajectories of terrorism and insurgency in South Asia, and the different countermeasures adopted by the countries to deal with the security and developmental challenges. South Asia is a complex geography that has been both a victim and a playing field for indigenous insurgencies, and domestic and transnational terrorist movements. The contributors to this volume explore how this situation has posed serious challenges to the sovereignty of the states, to national and human security, and to the socioeconomic fabric of the communities, and to the ethnic and religious cohesion. The book provides detailed studies of country cases on terrorism, security, and insurgencies, and it underlines the national, regional, and global implications of the threats that emanate from this region. Presenting an opportunity to diversify away from a Western-centric focus on terrorism and security, this book will be valuable to researchers in political science, criminology, defense and security studies, and to policy makers and think tanks. |
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