This book explores the ethical implications of using armed contractors, taking a consequentialist approach to this multidisciplinary debate. While privatization is not a new concept for the US military, the public debate on military privatization is limited to legal, financial, and pragmatic concerns. A critical assessment of the ethical dimensions of military privatization in general is missing. More specifically, in light of the increased reliance upon armed contractors, it must be asked whether it is morally permissible for governments to employ them at all. To this end, this book explores four areas that highlight the ethical implications of using armed contractors: how armed contractors are distinct from soldiers and mercenaries; the commodification of force; the belligerent equality of combatants; and the impact of armed contractors on the professional military. While some take an absolutist position, wanting to bar the use of private military altogether, this book reveals how these absolutist arguments are problematic and highlights that there are circumstances where turning to private force may be the only option. Recognising that outsourcing force will continue, this book thus proposes some changes to account for the problems of commodification, belligerent equality, and the challenge to the military profession. This book will be of interest to students of private security, military studies, ethics, security studies, and IR in general.

Military robots and other, potentially autonomous robotic systems such as unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) could soon be introduced to the battlefield. Look further into the future and we may see autonomous micro- and nanorobots armed and deployed in swarms of thousands or even millions. This growing automation of warfare may come to represent a major discontinuity in the history of warfare: humans will first be removed from the battlefield and may one day even be largely excluded from the decision cycle in future high-tech and high-speed robotic warfare. Although the current technological issues will no doubt be overcome, the greatest obstacles to automated weapons on the battlefield are likely to be legal and ethical concerns. Armin Krishnan explores the technological, legal and ethical issues connected to combat robotics, examining both the opportunities and limitations of autonomous weapons. He also proposes solutions to the future regulation of military robotics through international law.

A popular myth emerged in the late 1990s: in 1900, wars killed one civilian for every eight soldiers, while contemporary wars were killing eight civilians for every one soldier. The neat reversal of numbers was memorable, and academic publications and UN documents regularly cited it. The more it was cited, the more trusted it became. In fact, however, subsequent research found no empirical evidence for the idea that the ratio of civilians to soldiers killed in war has changed dramatically. But while the ratios may not have changed, the political significance of civilian casualties has risen tremendously. Over the past century, civilians in war have gone from having no particular rights to having legal protections and rights that begin to rival those accorded to states. The concern for civilians in conflict has become so strong that governments occasionally undertake humanitarian interventions, at great risk and substantial cost, to protect strangers in distant lands. I n the early 1990s, the UN Security Council authorized military interventions to help feed and protect civilians in the Kurdish area of Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia. And in May 2011 , Barack Obama 's National Security Advisor explained the United States' decision to support NATO's military intervention in these terms "When the president made this decision, there was an immediate threat to 700,000 Libyan civilians in the town of Benghazi. We've had a success here in terms of being able to protect those civilians." Counting Civilian Casualties aims to promote open scientific dialogue by high lighting the strengths and weaknesses of the most commonly used casualty recording and estimation techniques in an understandable format. Its thirteen chapters, each authoritative but accessible to nonspecialists, explore a variety of approaches, from direct recording to statistical estimation and sampling, to collecting data on civilian deaths caused by conflict. The contributors also discuss their respective advantages and disadvantages, and analyze how figures are used (and misused) by governments, rebels, human rights advocates, war crimes tribunals, and others. In addition to providing analysts with a broad range of tools to produce accurate data, this will be an in valuable resource for policymakers, military officials, jou rnalists, human rights activists, courts, and ordinary people who want to be more informed-and skeptical-consumers of casualty counts.

Are victims of armed conflict entitled to reparation, which legal rules govern the question, and how can reparation be implemented? These key questions of transitional justice are examined by three scholars whose professional, theoretical, and methodological backgrounds and outlooks differ greatly. They discuss how regional human rights case law, international criminal law, the practice of ad hoc international bodies, and domestic practice give rise to a right to reparation. This right emerges out of the interplay between international and domestic law. The problems of mass claims, fragile statehood, and the high risk of marginalisation of particular groups of victims are addressed. The analysis is alert to the current backlash against international legal institutions, and to the practical constraints in making post-conflict law work. The multiperspectivism of the trialogical setting exposes the divergence and complementarity of the authors' approaches and leads to a richer understanding of the law of reparation.

The first book to examine in detail the impact of the Northern Irish Troubles on southern Irish society. This study vividly illustrates how life in the Irish Republic was affected by the conflict north of the border and how people responded to the events there. It documents popular mobilization in support of northern nationalists, the reaction to Bloody Sunday, the experience of refugees and the popular cultural debates the conflict provoked. For the first time the human cost of violence is outlined, as are the battles waged by successive governments against the IRA. Focusing on debates at popular level rather than among elites, the book illustrates how the Troubles divided southern opinion and produced long-lasting fissures. -- .

Like shifting sands of a desert, the global nuclear landscape changes every few years across its three main constituents - nuclear energy, non-proliferation and disarmament. Each of these has seen phases of cautious optimism, deep scepticism and outright pessimism over the last two decades. This book offers a bird's eye view on all the three, even as the individual authors offer a worm's eye view on each specific topic within the larger ambit. The first section of the book examines developments in the nuclear energy sector. The second part of the book is devoted to non-proliferation. The last section of the book examines the consequences of use of nuclear weapons, concepts of CBMs and arms control, and recent disarmament initiatives. A tentative exploration of the prospects of disarmament in the wake of Russia-Ukraine conflict is also undertaken. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

While liberal-democratic states like America, Britain and Australia claim to value freedom of expression and the right to dissent, they have always actually criminalized dissent. This disposition has worsened since 9/11 and the 2008 Great Recession. This ground-breaking study shows that just as dissent involves far more than protest marches, so too liberal-democratic states have expanded the criminalization of dissent. Drawing on political and social theorists like Arendt, Bourdieu and Isin, the book offers a new way of thinking about politics, dissent and its criminalization relationally. Using case studies like the Occupy movement, selective refusal by Israeli soldiers, urban squatters, democratic education and violence by anti-Apartheid activists, the book highlights the many forms dissent takes along with the many ways liberal-democratic states criminalize it. The book highlights the mix of fear and delusion in play when states privilege security to protect an imagined 'political order' from difference and disagreement. The book makes a major contribution to political theory, legal studies and sociology. Linking legal, political and normative studies in new ways, Watts shows that ultimately liberal-democracies rely more on sovereignty and the capacity for coercion and declarations of legal 'states of exception' than on liberal-democratic principles. In a time marked by a deepening crisis of democracy, the book argues dissent is increasingly valuable.

In Exit Strategies and State Building, fifteen of the world's best scholars and practitioners of peace building focus on relevant historical and contemporary cases to provide a comprehensive overview of this issue. The book identifies four basic types of international operations where state-building has been a major objective-colonial administrations, peacekeeping operations, international administrations, and military occupations. Editor Richard Caplan and his contributors cover a variety of topics, from broad-ranging studies of exit in many types of state-building operations, to focused studies on specific historical cases, to thematic analyses under frameworks such as economics and global international relations. By examining the major challenges associated with the conclusion of international state-building operations and the requirements for the maintenance of peace in the period following exit, this book provides a unique perspective on the realities of military and political intervention. Given the twenty-first century trend toward international intervention the world over , Exit Strategies and State Building sheds more light on what is not merely an academic issue, but a pressing global policy concern.

This new and updated edition of International Security Studies provides students with a comprehensive introduction to the subject of security studies, with a strong emphasis on the use of case studies to illustrate theoretical debates. In addition to presenting the major theoretical perspectives, the book examines a range of important and controversial topics in covering both traditional military and non-military security issues such as WMD proliferation, humanitarian intervention, food security and environmental security. The volume also offers a wide range of case studies providing detailed analyses of important global security issues. The 37 chapters contain pedagogical features and recommended further reading and are divided into five thematic sections: Conceptual and Theoretical Military Security Non-Military Security Institutions and Security Case Studies Updates for the second edition include: New chapters on cybersecurity and the insecurity of the LGBT community. Substantial revisions to existing chapters to incorporate analysis of important international political developments, including the Trump Presidency; 'Brexit'; North Korean nuclear standoff; the Syrian Civil War; Yemen Civil War; Mediterranean migration crisis; Climate change diplomacy and the Sustainable Development Goals. This textbook will be essential reading for all students of security studies and highly recommended for students of critical security studies, human security, peace and conflict studies, foreign policy and International Relations in general.

This book is a concise and accessible introduction to the problem of war crimes in modern history, emphasizing the development of laws aimed at regulating the conduct of armed conflict developed from the 19th Century to the present. Bringing together multiple strands of recent research in history, political science, and law the book starts with an overview of the attempts across the pre-modern world to regulate the initiation, conduct, and outcomes of war. It them moves on to present a survey of the legal revolution of the 19th Century when, amidst a global welter of colonial wars, the first body of formal codes and laws relating to distinguishing legal from criminal conduct in war was developed. Further chapters investigate failed but influential attempts to develop the laws of war in the post-World War I period, summarize the major landmarks in international law related to war crimes, such as the Hague conventions and the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, as well as hundreds of lesser-known post-World War II trials in Europe and Asia. It also looks at the origins and debated significance of the Genocide Convention of 1948 and the 1949 Geneva Conventions accounts for the acceleration worldwide of war crimes investigations and trials from the 1970s into the 2000s and summarizes current thinking about international law and the rapidly changing nature of warfare worldwide as well as the memorialization of war crimes. Including images, documents, a bibliography highlighting the most recent scholarship, a chronology, who's who, and a glossary, this is the perfect introduction for those wishing to understand the complex field or war crimes history and its politics.

Conflict, Cultural Heritage, and Peace offers a series of conceptual and applied frameworks to help understand the role cultural heritage plays within conflict and the potential it has to contribute to positive peacebuilding and sustainable development in post-conflict societies. Designed as a resource guide, this general volume introduces the multiple roles cultural heritage plays through the conflict cycle from its onset, subsequent escalation and through to resolution and recovery. In its broadest sense it questions what role cultural heritage plays within conflict, how cultural heritage is used in the construction and justification of conflict narratives and how are these narratives framed and often manipulated to support particular perspectives, and how we can develop better understandings of cultural heritage and work towards the better protection of cultural heritage resources during conflict. It moves beyond the protection paradigm and recognises that cultural heritage can contribute to building peace and reconciliation in post-conflict environments. The study offers a conceptual and operational framework to understand the roles cultural heritage plays within conflict cycles, how it can be targeted during war, and the potential cultural heritage has in positive peacebuilding across the conflict lifecycle. Conflict, Cultural Heritage, and Peace offers an invaluable introduction to cultural heritage at all stages in conflict scenarios which will benefit students, researchers and practitioners in the field of heritage, environment, peace and conflict studies.

This book discusses the phenomenon of femicide-the killing of women globally because of their gender-in peacetime and in war. Femicide in war is different from femicide in peace, and yet the dividing-line between the two is thin. Violence against women happens in many forms-from emotional, psychological, and financial abuse, barriers to personal autonomy and security to physical and sexual abuse terminating in murder. It includes infanticide, sex selection, misogynistic laws and cultural practices and can include genital mutilation, forced sterilization, or forced pregnancy. Women experience these forms of violence during peacetime, as well as in times of crisis, conflict, or national insecurity. The Covid-19 pandemic led to an increase in violence against women as women were thrown back to their violent partners, who were released from jail because of the pandemic. This volume draws upon cases from both Global North and Global South to give a detailed view of crimes against women and how femicide is perceived in different countries. It brings together scholars from diverse countries and disciplines, and from many parts of the world where femicide has never or rarely been reported. This book will be a beneficial read for advanced students and researchers of Gender Studies, War and Conflict Studies, and Terrorism. It was originally published in Peace Review.

This path-breaking book uncovers the important, under-appreciated role of armed opposition groups turned political parties in shaping long-term patterns of politics after war. Based on an empirically grounded and theoretically informed retrospective on nearly thirty years of post-conflict democratic state-building efforts, it examines whether this practice has contributed to peace and finds that engaging post-rebel parties in electoral politics has proven to be a viable long-term strategy for bringing political stability, that disparate post-rebel parties from different political contexts invest heavily in electoral politics and that few post-rebel parties actively seek return to civil conflict as a solution after becoming a political party. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in democracy, governance, elections, political parties, post-conflict peacebuilding, and more broadly to international relations, comparative politics, and regional politics.

Workers from the Syrian diaspora have maintained a presence in Lebanon for decades, building multimillion-dollar apartment complexes, toiling for backbreaking hours in grocery stores. From the mid-2000s, liberalising reforms saw accelerating levels of poverty among workers, often paid as low as $20 per day. Instead of 'opportunity', workers faced the prospect of indefinite economic exile, the unending drudgery of hard labour, and a constant struggle to make ends meet. But in 2011, revolution came to Syria. Rural towns and villages exploded in revolt, but even those workers who remained in Beirut found means to protest at a distance. Their movement, which this book identifies as 'rebel populism,' represents an early instance of an increasingly common global contentious political formation, a form of mass politics that emerges not via a charismatic orator or developed ideological convictions, but through the weaving together of grievances aimed at the ruling class. -- .

This work explains and critically examines the main theoretical aspects of operational warfare at sea. It utilizes diverse examples from naval history, ranging from the ancient era to the present day, to offer a comprehensive description and analysis of the key components of operational warfare at sea today. Specifically, it explains the military/naval objectives, levels of war, types of major naval/joint operations and maritime campaigns, and their main elements. In contrast to many works, this book focuses on the role of the naval operational commanders in command and control and decision-making. It also describes in great detail the main elements of naval operational leadership and operational thinking, which are illustrated by examples of successful warfighting admirals. This new edition has been completely revised and updated, with three new chapters, and analyses in even more detail the planning and execution of major naval/joint operations and maritime campaigns. This book is intended to serve as a primer of how to plan, prepare, and execute major naval/joint operations and maritime campaigns for naval operational commanders and their staffs, but will also be of great interest to students of naval power, strategic studies, and military history 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.

Does religion cause much of the world's violence? Is religion inherently violent? Would violence disappear if religion did? Is true religion a force for peace? Is religion a mask for power and self-interest? What aspects of religion make violence more-or less-likely? Religion and Violence: A Religious Studies Approach explores the potential of classic social theories to shed light on the relationships between religion and violence. This accessible and engaging book starts from the premise that both religion and violence are ordinary elements of social life and that rather than causing violence religion plays a crucial role in the management of violence. Ideal for any student approaching the topic of religion and violence for the first time, this core textbook includes chapter overviews and summaries, guides for applying theory to real-world events, discussion questions, and case studies. Further teaching and learning resources are available on the accompanying companion website.

Analyses evolving doctrines and new and disruptive technologies (including nuclear deterrence), and how these impact the conflict dynamics between India and Pakistan. Evaluates the ways and means by which crisis and deterrence stability is achieved between India and Pakistan. Will help to predict future course of conflicts and offer a future policy framework for arms race / deterrence stability.

This book investigates the ways in which the war on terror has transformed the postcolonial state in Africa. Taking American intervention in Islamic education in Uganda as the entry point, the book demonstrates how state control over Islamic truth production and everyday Muslim life has increased. During the colonial period, the Muslims in Uganda were governed in two ways: partly as lesser citizens within the Christian-dominated civil sphere and partly as members of a distinct Muslim domain. In this domain, a local system of Islamic education developed with a degree of autonomy that reflected the limits of the colonial state in shaping the Muslim subject. In the subsequent postcolonial period, systems of patronage and clientalistic networks dominated, and Muslim leaders were co-opted by the state, but without much real interference in the day-to-day lives of ordinary Muslims. However, as part of the war on terror, the US State Department seeks to bring the mechanisms of Islamic truth production, especially the madrasa, under direct state control and civil society scrutiny. This book argues that the "Muslim domain as a separate entity is coming to an end as it is being absorbed into the civil sphere, unifying the state’s domination of society." The book also analyzes local Ugandan Muslim initiatives to modernise and contextualize their own education and religion and how these initiatives are shaped by and transcend the dominant power. A thorough exploration of US foreign policy and Islamic education, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Political Studies, African Studies and Religious Studies.

Across a rich terrain of empirical and theoretical trajectories, the concept of military masculinity (now understood in its plural as military masculinities) has been a significant conceptual tool in both feminist international relations (IR) and in critical men and masculinities studies scholarship. The concept has helped us to unpack the relationships between gender, war, and militarism, including how military standards function in the production of wider normative, hegemonic manliness. As such, military masculinities has been a rewarding tool for many scholars who take a critical approach to the study of war and the military. This edited volume advances an emerging curiosity within accounts of military masculinities. This curiosity concerns the silences within, and disruptions to, our well-established and perhaps-too-comfortable understandings of, and empirical focal points for, military masculinities, gender, and war. The contributors to this volume trouble the ease with which we might be tempted to synonymize militaries, war, and a neat, 'hegemonic' masculinity. Taking the disruptions, the asides, and the silences seriously challenges the common wisdoms of military masculinities, gender, and war in productive and necessary ways. Doing so necessitates a reorientation of where, to whom, and for what we look to understand the operation of gendered military power. The chapters were originally published in a special issue of Critical Military Studies.

This volume offers an overview of the methodologies of research in the field of military studies. As an institution relying on individuals and resources provided by society, the military has been studied by scholars from a wide range of disciplines: political science, sociology, history, psychology, anthropology, economics and administrative studies. The methodological approaches in these disciplines vary from computational modelling of conflicts and surveys of military performance, to the qualitative study of military stories from the battlefield and veterans experiences. Rapidly developing technological facilities (more powerful hardware, more sophisticated software, digitalization of documents and pictures) render the methodologies in use more dynamic than ever. The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Military Studies offers a comprehensive and dynamic overview of these developments as they emerge in the many approaches to military studies. The chapters in this Handbook are divided over four parts: starting research, qualitative methods, quantitative methods, and finalizing a study, and every chapter starts with the description of a well-published study illustrating the methodological issues that will be dealt with in that particular chapter. Hence, this Handbook not only provides methodological know-how, but also offers a useful overview of military studies from a variety of research perspectives. This Handbook will be of much interest to students of military studies, security and war studies, civil-military relations, military sociology, political science and research methods in general.

This new handbook is about the practices of conducting research on military issues. As an edited collection, it brings together an extensive group of authors from a range of disciplinary perspectives whose chapters engage with the conceptual, practical and political questions raised when doing military research. The book considers a wide range of questions around research about, on and with military organisations, personnel and activities, from diverse starting-points across the social sciences, arts and humanities. Each chapter in this volume: Describes the nature of the military research topic under scrutiny and explains what research practices were undertaken and why. Discusses the author's research activities, addressing the nature of their engagement with their subjects and explaining how the method or approach under scrutiny was distinctive because of the military context or subject of the research. Reflects on the author's research experiences, and the specific, often unique, negotiations with the politics and practices of military institutions and military personnel before, during and after their research fieldwork. The book provides a focussed overview of methodological approaches to critical studies of military personnel and institutions, and processes and practices of militarisation and militarism. In particular, it engages with the growth in qualitative approaches to military research, particularly research carried out on military topics outside military research institutions. The handbook provides the reader with a comprehensive guide to how critical military research is being undertaken by social scientists and humanities scholars today, and sets out suggestions for future approaches to military research. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, war and conflict studies, and research methods in general.

In Indonesia, the events of 1st October 1965 were followed by a campaign to annihilate the Communist Party and its alleged sympathisers. It resulted in the murder of an estimate of one million people - a genocide that counts as one of the largest mass murders after WWII - and the incarceration of another million, many of them for a decade or more without any legal process. This drive was justified and enabled by a propaganda campaign in which communists were painted as atheist, hypersexual, amoral and intent to destroy the nation. To date, the effects of this campaign are still felt, and the victims are denied the right of association and freedom of speech. This book presents the history of the genocide and propaganda campaign and the process towards the International People's Tribunal on 1965 crimes against humanity in Indonesia (IPT 1965), which was held in November 2015 in The Hague, The Netherlands. The authors, an Indonesian Human Rights lawyer and a Dutch academic examine this unique event, which for the first time brings these crimes before an international court, and its verdict. They single out the campaign of hate propaganda as it provided the incitement to kill so many Indonesians and why this propaganda campaign is effective to this day. The first book on this topic, it fills a significant gap in Asian Studies and Genocide Studies.

This book examines the conditions under which the presence and use of militias result in an increase or decrease in violence against civilians in intra-state conflicts. Showcasing the breadth and diversity of modern militias in the context of violence against civilians, the volume addresses the predation and repression that many such groups are infamous for, as well as increasingly important efforts by other militias at civilian protection in war-torn settings. The chapters examine militias from around the world, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods as they cover groups as varied as gangs, death squads. grassroots community-defense groups, official state militias, and party-sponsored armies -- groups on the "civic vice" side, the "civic virtue" side, and the wide and mixed in-between space where most cases fall. Taken as a cohesive unit, the work lays the foundation for an encompassing theory and interrogation of the causal chain between militia type and operating context and the levels of violence against civilians. It provides path-breaking theory-building and empirical scholarship. Policymakers and national-security practitioners dealing with issues relating to armed groups will also benefit from the practical issues covered here, such as how different forms of sponsorship and training affect militia behavior. This book will be of interest to students of civil wars, political violence, counterinsurgency, civil-military relations, and security studies in general.

This book provides a holistic view of the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours and studies the global implications of their fraught relations. Focusing on the conflict from its beginning in the late 19th Century, the author provides a well-rounded and balanced narrative by examining its religious, ideological, ethnic, political, national, regional and international dimensions. The volume covers a wide range of issues such as the conflicting historical legacy of the city of Jerusalem, Jewish longing for a homeland, the partition of Palestine, various wars and conflicts since 1948, Palestinian resistance, Arab Boycott of Israel and the Abraham Accords. It also tackles the contested national claims and the refugee question and looks at various peace-making efforts, including the role of external stakeholders such as the US, UK, Russia and India. A comprehensive study of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the book is richly supported by a swath of references to materials, documents, maps and video links. It will be an essential reading for students, academics, and teachers of politics and international relations, national security, geopolitics, history, military and strategic studies, Middle East studies, conflict resolution and peace-making.