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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Armed conflict
This book, first published in 1944, assesses the prospects of peace following the Allied victory in the Second World War. It examines the tasks that victory would impose on the victors; the development during the war of US policies, military and political; the errors that caused the war; and the viewpoints and needs of the Allied powers. Concluding that the future peace could be only achieved through the power and influence of the United States, it argues that the process of uniting the Allies in peace would need greater statesmanship than united them in war against a common enemy.
Which event better characterises British military interventions: the trauma of Suez or the triumph of the Falklands? This book, first published in 1984, examines these engagements and those of the intervening period to provide a sober and considered response to this question. The issues raised are central to the debate concerning Britain's defence capabilities and its role in world politics. The author argues that it is only under severely restricted conditions that Britain could reasonably expect a successful outcome from long-range military intervention. The constraints are not merely those of military capacity: public opinion also has its role to play. By analysing these conditions and the way they have influenced the outcomes of past interventions the author points the way to framing a practical and reasonable defence and foreign policy in the Third World.
Proponents of arms control and disarmament are often confronted with the argument that reductions in defense expenditure lead to cutbacks in military industries and thus to economic hardship. While a reduction in defense production would cause some economic dislocation, this would be mitigated by the ability of the economy to adapt to changing patterns of production. This book, first published in 1983, assesses the likely effects of reductions in defense industries by an examination of the roles these industries play in national economies. Each chapter discusses industry employment, output, research and development, capital value, profitability, concentration and competition, internal organization and regional employment concentration. Other questions considered include the economic importance of weapons exports, the defense industry as a 'leading edge' in maintaining national technological capabilities, and the reliance of individual firms on defense contracting.
There are so many roadblocks in Central Africa that it is hard to find a road that does not have one. Based on research in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR), Peer Schouten maps more than a thousand of these roadblocks to show how communities, rebels and state security forces forge resistance and power out of control over these narrow points of passage. Schouten reveals the connections between these roadblocks in Central Africa and global supply chains, tracking the flow of multinational corporations and UN agencies alike through them, to show how they encapsulate a form of power, which thrives under conditions of supply chain capitalism. In doing so, he develops a new lens through which to understand what drives state formation and conflict in the region, offering a radical alternative to explanations that foreground control over minerals, territory or population as key drivers of Central Africa's violent history.
Develops a new conceptualisation of lawfare that recognises the polysemantic nature of the term. Illustrates the multifaceted character of lawfare with a wide range of historical and contemporary cases from across the globe, and analyses the implications of actors pursuing political objectives through legal means. Will appeal to scholars and students of law, international relations, political science, anthropology, and sociology.
This handbook offers a comprehensive analysis of peacebuilding in ethnic conflicts, with attention to theory, peacebuilder roles, making sense of the past and shaping the future, as well as case studies and approaches. Comprising 28 chapters that present key insights on peacebuilding in ethnic conflicts, the volume has implications for teaching and training, as well as for practice and policy. The handbook is divided into four thematic parts. Part 1 focuses on critical dimensions of ethnic conflicts, including root causes, gender, external involvements, emancipatory peacebuilding, hatred as a public health issue, environmental issues, American nationalism, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part 2 focuses on peacebuilders' roles, including Indigenous peacemaking, nonviolent accompaniment, peace leadership in the military, interreligious peacebuilders, local women, and young people. Part 3 addresses the past and shaping of the future, including a discussion of public memory, heritage rights and monuments, refugees, trauma and memory, aggregated trauma in the African-American community, exhumations after genocide, and a healing-centered approach to conflict. Part 4 presents case studies on Sri Lanka's postwar reconciliation process, peacebuilding in Mindanao, the transformative peace negotiation in Aceh and Bougainville, external economic aid for peacebuilding in Northern Ireland, Indigenous and local peacemaking, and a continuum of peacebuilding focal points. The handbook offers perspectives on the breadth and significance of peacebuilding work in ethnic conflicts throughout the world. This volume will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, ethnic conflict, security studies, and international relations.
This book, first published in 1961, is an analysis of the great struggle of the twentieth century, the Cold War. It carefully examines the conflict's origins in the Russian Revolution of 1917, and follows the thread of antagonism between west and east all the way up to 1960. These were the key years of the Cold War, when it seemed that the prospect of nuclear confrontation was a real one, and this book offers a close reading of the main events of those years. This volume concentrates on the Cold War in the East, and Volume One focuses on the European theatre.
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.
This book offers an in-depth examination into genocide law by focusing on one of the lesser examined, yet practically significant, issues: the 'substantiality requirement'. This refers to the requirement in international law that intended destruction should be directed towards a 'substantial' part of a protected group in order for an atrocity to qualify as genocide. This comprehensive and detailed study draws connections between different judicial approaches to 'substantiality' and the varying theoretical presumptions about the constitutive concepts of the crime. This prima facia doctrinal problem is used as a springboard to scrutinise the broader theoretical problems underlying the legal conceptualisation of genocide. The book systematically explores how the individualistic and collectivistic conceptions of the crime have been able to co-exist in case law and how the different approaches to assessing substantiality have played a backdoor role between these two conceptions. The work demonstrates that these two philosophical standpoints are far from effectively representing the reality of the protected groups and fully explaining the harm inherent to group destruction. The book revisits the recent philosophical and sociological studies on the crime and, considering ideas from the emerging 'relational approaches to genocide', offers a third way to understand the existing legal representation of the crime and, consequently, the idea of 'substantiality'. It demonstrates the practical significance of its theoretical debates and applies its novel perspective through a case study on South Sudan. This book will be highly useful to students and scholars with an interest in genocide studies, international criminal law and legal theory. It will also be of interest to policymakers engaged with issues around genocide.
This book explores the role of actors in determining transitional justice in peacebuilding contexts. In recent decades, transitional justice mechanisms and processes have been introduced to a variety of settings, becoming widely regarded as essential elements in the 'peacebuilding toolbox'. While it has increasingly been suggested that transitional justice is imposed by neo-imperial actors with little regard for the needs and cultures of local populations, evidence suggests that dismissing these policies as neo-imperial or neo-liberal impositions would result in grossly overlooking their dynamics, which involve a whole range of relevant actors operating at multiple levels. This book interrogates this theme through empirical analysis of three sites of peacebuilding that have seen extensive international involvement: Kosovo, East Timor and Afghanistan. It proposes a novel framework for analysing and approaching transitional justice in peacebuilding that disaggregates three broad sets of actors operating at different levels in relevant processes: external actors (international and regional levels), transitional justice promoters (local, national, international and transnational levels), and transitional regimes (national and local levels). The book argues that transitional justice in peacebuilding must be conceived of as actor-contingent and malleable due to the significance of agency and (inter)actions of key categories of actors throughout peacebuilding transition. This book will be of interest to students and practitioners of transitional justice, peacebuilding, law, and International Relations.
This book examines ethnoterritorial conflict and reconciliation in Ireland from the 1916 Rising to Brexit (2021), including the production and consequences of the island's two distinct political units. Highlighting key geographic themes of bordering, unity, division, and national narratives, it explores how geopolitical space has been employed over time to (re)define divided national allegiances throughout Ireland and within Irish-British relations. The analysis draws from in-depth interviews and archival research, and spans supranational, state, municipal, neighborhood, and individual scales. The book pays particular attention to uneven power structures, statecraft, perceived truths, lived experiences, reconciliation efforts, and renegotiations of national narratives in the production of symbolic landscapes, divided cities, and "shared" space. An Introduction to the Geopolitics of Conflict, Nationalism, and Reconciliation in Ireland provides readers with an analysis of geopolitical power relations and different spatial productions of conflict and peacebuilding in Ireland. Offering deeper understanding of these historic and contemporary geopolitical intersections, this book makes a valuable contribution to the fields of Political Geography, Border Studies, Irish Studies, European Studies, International Relations, Cultural Geography, and Regional Studies.
The essays selected for this volume explore the entire range of issues related to the question of how to implement and enforce international humanitarian law. Measures of self-help that used to play a key role in past international armed conflicts, especially reprisals, have increasingly been outlawed, and thus the enforcement of international humanitarian law has now to be achieved by other means, including criminal proceedings against those who have seriously (or gravely) committed war crimes. Accordingly, the concept of grave breaches, the universality principle and international criminal law are dealt with extensively in this collection. Finally, the volume includes an examination of the practice of 'lawfare' (an abuse of international humanitarian law for military or political purposes) which has proven increasingly effective in contemporary armed conflict.
Covers the global range of historical and contemporary genocide case-studies Includes previously unpublished talks, and media interviews from one of the top scholars in the field of genocide studies.
Drawing on rich empirical work emerging from core conflict regions within the island nation of Sri Lanka, this book illustrates the critical role that women with disabilities play in post-armed conflict rebuilding and development. This pathbreaking book shows the critical role that women with disabilities play in post-armed conflict rebuilding and development. Through offering a rare yet important insight into the processes of gendered-disability advocacy activation within the post-conflict environment, it provides a unique counter narrative to the powerful images, symbols and discourses that too frequently perpetuate disabled women's so-called need for paternalistic forms of care. Rather than being the mere recipients of aid and help, the narratives of women with disabilities reveal the generative praxis of social solidarity and cohesion, progressed via their nascent collective practices of gendered-disability advocacy. It will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of disability studies, gender studies, post-conflict studies, peace studies and social work.
This volume seeks to start a revival of the field of disarmament law scholarship. Law is a fundamental component of disarmament, yet today, most perspectives on the wide range of disarmament issues that exist come primarily from political, diplomatic and public advocacy angles. The aim of this book is to revive the field of disarmament law building on earlier, important and still relevant contributions by international lawyers to the subject. The collection brings together international scholars on various aspects of disarmament. The contributions range across a variety of weapons types, adopt different approaches - doctrinal, historical and critical - to the issues being discussed and taken together, constitute a snapshot of the ideas, concerns and issues that currently occupy disarmament law scholars. The book will be essential reading for academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the area of disarmament.
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 analyses securitization processes outside of the West, with a focus on Africa. The aim of the volume is to develop an original analytical framework to explain the securitization-neo-patrimonialism dynamics in West Africa, drawing upon insights from securitization theory, sociology and psychology. Among critical voices, securitization has become the gold standard for analysing emerging challenges, such as migration, terrorism, and human security. Yet, despite its broadening agenda, the framework has also been accused of bias, with a Western political context and democratic governance structure at its heart. This book aims to re-conceptualise the framework in a way that suits non-Western contexts better, notably by re-conceptualising the securitization-neopatrimonialism nexus in Africa, which gives us significant new insights into non-Western political contexts. It analyses the securitization processes among the political elites under neo-patrimonial statehood, and further stretches the conceptualisation of securitization into African statehood, which is characterised by a blurred line between the leader and the state. The volume explores the processes of securitizing threats in Liberia, Sierra Leone and wider West Africa, as well as the neo-patrimonial regimes of these states. In doing so, it explores the influence these states' neo-patrimonial regimes have on the processes of threat securitization. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, African politics and International Relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
This book examines how states justify the domestic use of military force to foreign audiences. By deploying a sociological approach to legitimacy and drawing on conceptual tools which deal directly with the dynamics of justification, it offers a novel framework for understanding the politics of international legitimacy and domestic armed action. The framework is grounded in detailed qualitative analyses of civil wars in Sri Lanka (2006-2009), and Aceh, Indonesia (2003-2005). The book shows that the meaning of legitimacy in a particular context does not flow directly from a menu of relevant rules, norms and ideas. Rather, legitimacy is always politically contested. When states justify fighting at home, the success of their claims is determined by their capacity to appeal to rules and norms but also to frame their action in ways that their audiences find compelling. Therefore, the framework offered in this book draws attention to the crucial but largely neglected role of audiences in the constitution of legitimacy. This book will be of interest to students of security studies, law, human rights and international relations.
This collection examines the extent to which nuclear weapons modernization has become a significant point of concern and consideration in international security. Recent statements and substantial investments by nuclear weapon possessor states in the upkeep and modernization of their nuclear postures - particularly the United States, Russia and China - illustrate a return of primacy and the salience of nuclear forces in international politics. The upgrading of systems, the introduction of new capabilities, the intermingling of new technologies, and the advancement of new strategic models, are all indicative of their elevation in importance and reliance. With contributions from leading thinkers in the nuclear weapons domain, this book elucidates the global strategic and policy implications such modernization efforts by the above-mentioned states will have on international security. In unpacking and conceptualizing this developing source of potential (in)security and tension, the collection not only provides a technical context, but also frames the likely effects modernization could have on the relations between these nuclear weapon powers and the larger impact upon efforts to curb nuclear weapons - both in terms of horizontal and vertical proliferation. The chapters have been arranged so as to inform a variety of stakeholders, from academics to policy-makers, by connecting analytical and normative insights, and thereby, advancing debates pertaining to where nuclear modernization sits as a point of global security consternation in the 21st century.
This book develops a constitutional theory of international organization to explain the legitimation of supranational organizations. Supranational organizations play a key role in contemporary global governance, but recent events like Brexit and the threat by South Africa to withdraw from the International Criminal Court suggest that their legitimacy continues to generate contentious debates in many countries. Rethinking international organization as a constitutional problem, Oates argues that it is the representation of the constituent power of a constitutional order, that is, the collective subject in whose name authority is wielded, which explains the legitimation of supranational authority. Comparing the cases of the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and the International Criminal Court, Oates shows that the constitution of supranationalism is far from a functional response to the pressures of interdependence but a value-laden struggle to define the proper subject of global governance. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of international organization and those working in the broader fields of global governance and general International Relations theory. It should also be of interest to international legal scholars, particularly those focused on questions related to global constitutionalism.
This book, first published in 1954, is a key analysis of the guiding policies, basic assumptions, fundamental principles and methods of the Red Army, in many respects the most powerful force in the Cold War. This analysis examines the strategy and tactics, weapons systems, training, discipline and political doctrine of the Red Army, as well as focusing on the political control of the USSR and its satellite states.
Domingo explores the potential of cyber capabilities for small states in the Asia-Pacific, the most active region for cyber conflict. He develops a systematic explanation for why Brunei, New Zealand, and Singapore have developed or are developing cyber capabilities. Studies on cyber conflict and strategy have substantially increased in the past decade but most have focused on the cyber operations of powerful states. This book moves away from the prominence of powerful states and explores the potential of cyber capabilities for small states in the Asia-Pacific, the most active region for cyber conflict. It develops a systematic explanation of why Brunei, New Zealand, and Singapore have developed or are developing cyber capabilities despite its obscure strategic value. The book argues that the distribution of power in the region and a "technology-oriented" strategic culture are two necessary conditions that influence the development of cyber capabilities in small states. Following this argument, the book draws on neoclassical realism as a theoretical framework to account for the interaction between these two conditions. The book also pursues three secondary objectives. First, it aims to determine the constraints and incentives that affect the utilization of cyber capabilities as foreign policy instruments. Second, the book evaluates the functionality of these cyber capabilities for small states. Lastly, it assesses the implications of employing cyber capabilities as foreign policy tools of small states. This book will be an invaluable resource for academics and security analysts working on cyber conflict, military strategy, small states, and International Relations in general.
This collection adds to the critical transitional justice scholarship that calls for "transitional justice from below" and that makes visible the complex and oftentimes troubled entanglements between justice endeavours, locality, and memory-making. Broadening this perspective, it explores informal memory practices across various contexts with a focus on their individual and collective dynamics and their intersections, reaching also beyond a conceptualisation of memory as mere symbolic reparation and politics of memory. It seeks to highlight the hidden, unwritten, and multifaceted in today's memory boom by focusing on the memorialisation practices of communities, activists, families, and survivors. Organising its analytical focal point around the localisation of memory, it offers valuable and new insights on how and under what conditions localised memory practices may contribute to recognition and social transformation, as well as how they may at best be inclusive, or exclusive, of dynamic and diverse memories. Drawing on inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches, this book brings an in-depth and nuanced understanding of local memory practices and the dynamics attached to these in transitional justice contexts. It will be of much interest to students and scholars of memory and genocide studies, peace and conflict studies, transitional justice, sociology, and anthropology.
This book, first published in 1987, examines the defence forces of Western Europe and assesses Europe's capacity to defend itself as the 1980s saw the Cold War balance of power shift towards the Soviet Union. Soviet forces were greatly superior to NATO's in terms of tanks, artillery and combat divisions, and this book analyses the NATO response and capabilities.
This book, first published in 1986, is a major study of semialignment and a review of the individual nations within NATO to which the model could be applied. Towards the end of the Cold War, there arose within NATO this intermediate category between alignment and nonalignment, whereby a member state enjoyed the status and facilities of NATO membership while disassociating itself from certain NATO programmes. This book analyses the phenomenon, and the possibility that it weakened the credibility of NATO deterrence and the defence posture versus the Soviet Union. |
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