The Armed Conflict Survey is an annual publication from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, publisher of yearly reference work on national defence capabilities The Military Balance and annual review of world affairs Strategic Survey. The book is edited by Nigel Inkster, Director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk at the IISS. The ACS provides yearly data on fatalities, refugees and internally displaced people for all major armed conflicts, alongside in-depth analysis of their political, military and humanitarian dimensions. The second edition of the book covers the key developments and context of more than 40 conflicts, including those in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Myanmar, Syria and Yemen. This title features essays by some of the world's leading authorities on armed conflict, who write on subjects such as the development of jihadism after 9/11; hybrid warfare; refugees and internally displaced people; criminality and conflict; and the evolution of peacekeeping operations. The authors discuss the principal thematic and cross-regional trends that have emerged over the past year, complementing the granular approach to each conflict at the core of the book. The ACS also includes maps, infographics and multi-year data, as well as the highly regarded IISS Chart of Conflict.

This volume searches for pragmatic answers to the problems that continue to beset peacebuilding efforts at all levels of society, with a singular focus on the role of legitimacy. Many peacebuilding efforts are hampered by their inability to gain the support of those they are trying to help at the local level, or those at regional, national or international levels; whose support is necessary either for success at the local level or to translate local successes to wider arenas. There is no one agreed-upon reason for the difficulty in translating peacebuilding from one arena of action to another, but among those elements that have been studied, one that appears understudied or assumed to be unimportant, is the role of legitimacy. Many questions can be asked about legitimacy as a concept, and this volume addresses these questions through multiple case studies which examine legitimacy at local, regional, national and international levels, as well as looking at how legitimacy at one level either translates or fails to translate at other levels, in order to correlate the level of legitimacy with the success or failure of peacebuilding projects and programs The value of this work lies both in the breadth of the cases and the singular focus on the role of legitimacy in peacebuilding. By focusing on this concept this volume represents an attempt to build beyond the critical peacebuilding approach of deconstructing the liberal peacebuilding paradigm to a search for pragmatic answers to the problems that continue to plague peacebuilding efforts at all levels of society. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, development studies, security studies and International Relations.

This book offers a critical analysis, both theoretical and practical, of ethics education in the military. In the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly important to ensure that the armed forces of Western and other democracies fight justly and behave ethically. The 'good soldier' has to be not only professionally skilled but morally intelligent. At a time of relentless media scrutiny, the publicising of incidents of morally and legally unacceptable behaviour, such as the gross mistreatment of prisoners and the torture of suspected terrorists, can do much to undermine the credibility of those who claim to hold the moral high ground in any particular conflict. Written by an international team of academic theorists and military practitioners, this volume provides inter-disciplinary insights into the present state, and the future, of ethics education in the militaries of Western democracies. The contributors critically address the central question of whether such education is sufficient to prepare members of the armed forces to face the peculiar challenges of conflict environments that are now primarily 'wars among the people', in which the opposing combatants may have little or no regard for human life and fail to discriminate between soldiers and civilians when choosing their targets. Drawing lessons from recent examples of unethical conduct, this original book offers insightful and constructive advice, both theoretical and practical, as to how situations can be improved and on the means that could and should be employed towards this end. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, ethics and international relations.

Classroom role-playing simulations bring the drama of politics to life and enrich traditional learning by plunging students into the midst of historical or current events. Ben-Yehuda gives students and instructors the resources and confidence to embark on a careful enactment of scenarios that will inspire enthusiasm in participants and stick in the memory long after the curtain falls. The book includes in-depth discussions of three possible theatrical simulations: appeasement in 1938 Munich, the regional turmoil following the 1947 UN Palestine Partition decision, and the Syrian civil war and ongoing global confrontation with ISIS. It is appropriate for students in global studies courses at all levels.

Classroom role-playing simulations bring the drama of politics to life and enrich traditional learning by plunging students into the midst of historical or current events. Ben-Yehuda gives students and instructors the resources and confidence to embark on a careful enactment of scenarios that will inspire enthusiasm in participants and stick in the memory long after the curtain falls. The book includes in-depth discussions of three possible theatrical simulations: appeasement in 1938 Munich, the regional turmoil following the 1947 UN Palestine Partition decision, and the Syrian civil war and ongoing global confrontation with ISIS. It is appropriate for students in global studies courses at all levels.

This book offers a critical appraisal of the international legal idea of the 'Responsibility to Protect'. The idea that the international community has a responsibility to protect populations at risk has become the prominent mode and structure of address in response to mass human atrocities, gross human rights violations, and large-scale loss of life. Although the "international community" of liberal international law and of legal cosmopolitanism for the most part projects a self-assured collective project, this book maintains that it transforms global ethical responsibility into a project of governance, management, and control. Pursuing this argument, and drawing on critical legal literature, critical international relations and on ideas of responsibility and ethical relationality in the work of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, the book develops a concept of "irresponsibility". This concept is then juxtaposed to the dominant Responsibility to Protect discourse. By exposing and acknowledging "the sites of irresponsibility" of the Responsibility to Protect, the book argues that irresponsibility itself can become the condition of ethical responsibility and the possibility of justice. This original approach to an increasingly important topic will prove invaluable to those working in international law, international relations, politics and legal theory.

This book brings together a variety of perspectives on how religion can be related to violence and war - both in a destructive and constructive way. Religion can justify and mobilize violence - even terrorism or guerilla wars - just like political ideology. But how is such a link between religion and violent behavior established in the first place? How can we go further in understanding this possible connection between religion and war? Is religious peace work just the flip side of religious support of war? Or can peace work be informed by knowing about how religion promotes violence and war? In the search for answers to the puzzle of religion and war, it is easy to focus on conflict and war situations, but maybe there is as much to learn from peace work as from war studies? Therefore, this book also analyses religious peace work from different contexts. The multifaceted presence of religion in conflict situations - whether justifying violence or promoting peace - is illustrated in this book using a variety of situations, in an enlightening panorama of one of today's must puzzling social connections: religion and armed conflict.

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.

Pakistan's army has dominated the state for most of its 66 years. It has locked the country in an enduring rivalry with India to revise the maps in Kashmir and to resist India's slow but inevitable rise. To prosecute these dangerous policies, the army employs non-state actors under the security of its ever-expanding nuclear umbrella. The Pakistan army started three wars with India over Kashmir in 1947, 1965, and 1999 and failed to win any of them. It has sustained a proxy war in Kashmir since 1989 using Islamist militants, some of whom have now turned their guns against the Pakistani state. The Pakistan army has supported non-Islamist insurgencies throughout India as well as a country-wide Islamist terror campaign that have brought the two countries to the brink of war on several occasions. Despite Pakistan's efforts to coerce India, it has only achieved modest successes. Even though India vivisected Pakistan in 1971, Pakistan continues to see itself as India's equal and demands the world do the same. The tools that the army prefers to use, non-state actors under a nuclear umbrella, has brought international opprobrium upon the country and the army. In recent years, erstwhile proxies have turned their gun on the Pakistani state itself and its peoples. Why does the army persist in pursuing these revisionist policies that have come to imperil the very viability of the state itself, from which the army feeds? This volume argues that the answer lies, at least partially, in the strategic culture of the army. From the army's distorted view of history, the army is victorious as long as can resist India's purported hegemony and the territorial status quo. To acquiesce is defeat. Because the army is unlikely to abandon these preferences, the world must prepare for an ever more dangerous future Pakistan.

This book is a collection of essential essays on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by eminent social psychologist Herbert C. Kelman. Few experts or practitioners know the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as Kelman, and for over forty years he has conducted interactive problem-solving workshops at Harvard University and elsewhere, engaging more than one hundred Israeli, Arab and Palestinian political activists, journalists and intellectuals in constructive dialogue. Spanning the years 1978 to 2017, the essays gathered here are still relevant today, and attest to the author's broad empathy for Palestinians and Israelis and his passionate pursuit of a resolution of their conflict based on consistent principles that satisfy the essential psychological needs and minimum political interests of both. The selected essays are not only insightful academic papers, but also serve as snapshots-in-time of the ebb and flow of conflict and peace efforts as well as guideposts for future would-be negotiators and facilitators. This volume will be of much interest to students of Middle Eastern politics, peace and conflict studies, and international relations, and will help would-be negotiators and mediators in practice.

This book explores the prosecution of wartime sexual violence in international criminal law and asks what the juridicalisation of gender-based violence signifies for women. The book explores the portrayal of the various gendered identities that surface in armed conflict and it asks whether the law is capable of reflecting these in subsequent judgements. Focusing on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as well as subsequent developments in the International Criminal Court, the book shows how the tribunals have delivered landmark jurisprudence in the area of sexual violence against women and provided a legacy for how gender justice is incorporated into international law. However, Daniela Nadj argues that in the relevant cases there is a tendency to depict women in monolithic fashion with little agency or sense of identity beyond their ethnicity. By bringing to the surface the complexity and multi-faceted gendered identities in wartime, the book calls for a reconceptualisation of notions of femininity in armed conflict.

This volume examines the EU's Global Strategy in relation to human security approaches to conflict. Contemporary conflicts are best understood as a social condition in which armed groups mobilise sectarian and fundamentalist sentiments and construct a predatory economy through which they enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary citizens. This volume provides a timely contribution to debates over the role of the EU on the global stage and its contribution to peace and security, at a time when these discussions are reinvigorated by the adoption of the EU Global Strategy. It discusses the significance of the Strategic Review and the Global Strategy for the re-articulation of EU conflict prevention, crisis management, peacebuilding, and development policies in the next few years. It also addresses the key issues facing EU security in the 21st century, including the conflicts in Ukraine, Libya and Syria, border security, cyber-security and the role of the private security sector. The book concludes by proposing that the EU adopts a second-generation human security approach to conflicts, as an alternative to geopolitics or the 'War on Terror', taking forward the principles of human security and adapting them to 21st-century realities. This book will be of interest to students of human security, European foreign and security policy, peace and conflict studies, global governance and IR in general.

As the most comprehensive edited volume to be published on perpetrators and perpetration of mass violence, the volume sets a new agenda for perpetrator research by bringing together contributions from such diverse disciplines as political science, sociology, social psychology, history, anthropology and gender studies, allowing for a truly interdisciplinary discussion of the phenomenon of perpetration. The cross-case nature of the volume allows the reader to see patterns across case studies, bringing findings from inter alia the Holocaust, the genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the civil wars in Cambodia and Cote d'Ivoire into conversation with each other. The chapters of this volume are united by a common research interest in understanding what constitutes perpetrators as actors, what motivates them, and how dynamics behind perpetration unfold. Their attention to the interactions between disciplines and cases allows for the insights to be transported into more abstract ideas on perpetration in general. Amongst other aspects, they indicate that instead of being an extraordinary act, perpetration is often ordinary, that it is crucial to studying perpetrators and perpetration not from looking at the perpetrators as actors but by focusing on their deeds, and that there is a utility of ideologies in explaining perpetration, when we differentiate them more carefully and view them in a more nuanced light. This volume will be vital reading for students and scholars of genocide studies, human rights, conflict studies and international relations.

Young People and Everyday Peace is grounded in the stories of young people who live in Los Altos de Cazuca, an informal peri-urban community in Soacha, to the south of Colombia's capital Bogota. The occupants of this community have fled the armed conflict and exist in a state of marginalisation and social exclusion amongst ongoing violences conducted by armed gangs and government forces. Young people negotiate these complexities and offer pointed critiques of national politics as well as grounded aspirations for the future. Colombia's protracted conflict and its effects on the population raise many questions about how we think about peacebuilding in and with communities of conflict-affected people. Building on contemporary debates in International Relations about post-liberal, everyday peace, Helen Berents draws on feminist International Relations and embodiment theory to pay meaningful attention to those on the margins. She conceptualises a notion of embodied-everyday-peace-amidst-violence to recognise the presence and voice of young people as stakeholders in everyday efforts to respond to violence and insecurity. In doing so, Berents argues for and engages a more complex understanding of the everyday, stemming from the embodied experiences of those centrally present in conflicts. Taking young people's lives and narratives seriously recognises the difficulties of protracted conflict, but finds potential to build a notion of an embodied everyday amidst violence, where a complex and fraught peace can be found. Young People and Everyday Peace will be of interest to scholars of Latin American Studies, International Relations and Peace and Conflict Studies.

This book offers an in-depth study on the deployment of military operations in the framework of the European Union's Common Security and Defence Policy (ESDP/CSDP). While existing studies of the subject are either descriptive or focused on a single level of analysis, this book incorporates factors from three different levels of analysis to explain the deployment of ESDP military operations. First, the international level, where the emergence of events that threaten certain values held dear by EU member states, catalyses the process leading to an operation; second, the national level, where the member states formulate their initial national preferences towards a prospective deployment based on national utility expectations; and third, the EU level, where the member states come to negotiate and seek compromises to accommodate their different national preferences towards a deployment. The strength of this multi-level collective action approach is demonstrated by four in-depth military case studies, which analyse the preference formation of France, Germany, and the UK towards the deployments of Operation Althea in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Operation Artemis and EUFOR RD Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Operation Atalanta off the coast of Somalia, respectively. The author draws on a wealth of primary sources, including over 50 semi-structured interviews conducted with national and EU officials during 2011-15, and provides an up-to-date overview and critique of the existing theoretical literature on the deployment of ESDP/CSDP military operations. This book will be of much interest to students of European security, EU politics, military and strategic studies, and International Relations in general.

This book is a critical exploration of the war on terror from the prism of armed drones and globalization. It is particularly focused on the United States' use of the drones, and the systemic dysfunctions that globalization has caused to international political economy and national security, creating backlash in which the desirability of globalization is not only increasingly questioned, but the resultant dissension about its desirability appears increasingly militating against the international consensus needed to fight the war on terror. To underline the controversial nature of the "war on terror" and the pragmatic weapon (armed drones) fashioned for its prosecution, some of the elements of this controversy have been interrogated in this book. They include, amongst others, the doubt over whether the war should have been declared in the first place because terrorist attacks hardly meet the United Nations' casus belli - an armed attack. There are critics, as highlighted in this book, who believe that the "war on terror" is not an armed conflict properly so called, and, thus, remains only a "law enforcement issue." The United States and all the states taking part in the war on terror are obligated to observe International Humanitarian Law (IHL). It is within this context of IHL that this book appraises the drone as a weapon of engagement, discussing such issues as "personality" and "signature" strikes as well as the implications of the deployment of spies as drone strikers rather than the Defence Department, the members of the U.S armed forces. This book will be of value to researchers, academics, policymakers, professionals, and students in the fields of security studies, terrorism, the law of armed conflict, international humanitarian law, and international politics.

This volume critiques contemporary power trends by examining key bilateral dynamics between five putative 'poles' of the multipolar order in the twenty-first century. Written by emerging scholars and established academics, this work provides a timely and authoritative analysis of one of the most controversial and compelling security debates of the twenty-first century. Adopting a detailed case study approach, the volume examines contemporary great power relations between the US, China, Russia, India and the EU. Each chapter explores the essential nature and characteristics of individual inter-state relationships in order to explicate and appraise the empirical evidence for a putative multipolar order. The volume aims to deepen understanding of power trends and critically assess the individual inter-dynamics at play. In doing so, it critiques the various models offered, such as the hub and spoke model (with the US remaining as the primary actor) and Zakaria's 'networked' model, as part of a purported 'post-American world'. The work places each of the individual relationships into a wider strategic and political context, in relation to the continued international turbulence and change that has seemed even more prominent in recent times, taking into account the twin challenges of Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump. It concludes by returning the focus to the central questions of if, how and when a post-American, multipolar world could develop. This volume will be of much interest to students of global security, foreign policy, and IR in general.

This book provides an account of how the responsibility to protect (R2P) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) were applied in Kenya. In the aftermath of the disputed presidential election on 27 December 2007, Kenya descended into its worst crisis since independence. The 2007-08 post-election crisis in Kenya was among the first situations in which there was an appeal to both the responsibility to protect and a responsibility to prosecute. Despite efforts to ensure compatibility between R2P and the ICC, the two were far from coherent in this case, as the measures designed to protect the population in Kenya undermined the efforts to prosecute perpetrators. This book will highlight how the African Union-sponsored mediation process effectively brought an end to eight weeks of bloodshed, while simultaneously entrenching those involved in orchestrating the violence. Having secured positions of power, politicians bearing responsibility for the violence set out to block prosecutions at both the domestic and international levels, eventually leading the cases against them to unravel. As this book will reveal, by utilising the machinery of the state as a shield against prosecution, the Government of Kenya reverted to an approach to sovereignty that both R2P and the ICC were specifically designed to counteract. This book will be of interest to students of the Responsibility to Protect, humanitarian intervention, African politics, war and conflict studies and IR/Security Studies in general.

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.

This book develops a new contractualist foundation for just war theory, which defends the traditional view of the moral equality of combatants and associated egalitarian moral norms. Traditionally it has been viewed that combatants on both sides of a war have the same right to fight, irrespective of the justice of their cause, and both sides must observe the same restrictions on the use of force, especially prohibitions on targeting noncombatants. Revisionist philosophers have argued that combatants on the unjust side of a war have no right to fight, that pro-war civilians on the unjust side might be targetable, and that lawful combatants on the unjust side might in principle be liable to prosecution for their participation on the unjust side. This book seeks to undercut the revisionist project and defend the traditional view of the moral equality of combatants. It does so by showing how revisionist philosophers fail to build a strong foundation for their arguments and misunderstand that there is a moral difference between collective military violence and a collection of individually unjustified violent actions. Finally, the book develops a theory defending the traditional view of military ethics based on a universal duty of all people to support just institutions. This book will be of much interest to students of just war theory, ethics philosophy, and war studies.

Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, this book opens new ground for research on territorial disputes. Many sovereignty conflicts remain unresolved around the world. Current solutions in law, political science and international relations generally prove problematic to at least one of the agents part of these differences. Arguing that disputes are complex, multi-layered and multi-faceted, this book brings together a global, inter-disciplinary view of territorial disputes. The book reviews the key conceptual elements central to legal and political sciences with regards to territorial disputes: state, sovereignty and self-determination. Looking at some of the current long-standing disputes worldwide, it compares and contrasts the many issues at stake and the potential remedies currently available in order to assess why some territorial disputes remain unresolved. Finally, it offers a set of guidelines for dispute settlement and conflict resolution that current remedies fail to provide. It will appeal to students and scholars working in international relations, legal theory and jurisprudence, public international law and political sciences.

This book looks at the representations of modern war by analysing texts and examining the ways in which authors relate to the atrocious horrors of war. Rejecting the assumption that violence is simply a denial of reason or, at best, a pathological form of collective sadism, this book considers it 'a cultural act' that needs to be understood as underpinned by a series of shared and accepted norms and values stemming from a society at a given moment of its history and shaped by its language. Traditional vocabulary and language seem inadequate to describe soldiers' experience of modern warfare. The problem for writers is to depict and render intelligible a dramatically unprecedented reality through recourse to something familiar. For some historians and literary critics, the absurdity of the First World War has shaped our ironic and disenchanted reading of the entire twentieth century. Yet these ways of coping with the urge to communicate inexpressible feelings and emotions in most cases are not sufficient to overcome the incoherence of the sentiments felt and the events witnessed. The contributors attempt to address the questions and issues that are posed by the highly ambiguous views, texts, and representations examined in this volume. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal European Review of History: Revue Europeenne d'Histoire.

Based on research in camps in Iraqi Kurdistan and among refugees in Germany, this book addresses the challenges, strategies and support systems that exist for the rehabilitation and reintegration of Yazidi women recovering from human trafficking. Through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and case studies, it gives women trafficked by ISIS their own voice to express their experiences during captivity, whilst offering an overview of the forms of support and protection available and necessary for survivors. An examination of the experiences and needs of refugee women who have undergone traumatizing experiences, Trauma and the Rehabilitation of Trafficked Women will appeal to scholars and policy makers with interests in gender studies, feminist thought, sexual violence during war, human trafficking and trauma recovery.

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.

This Handbook links the growing body of media and conflict research with the field of security studies. The academic sub-field of media and conflict has developed and expanded greatly over the past two decades. Operating across a diverse range of academic disciplines, academics are studying the impact the media has on governments pursuing war, responses to humanitarian crises and violent political struggles, and the role of the media as a facilitator of, and a threat to, both peace building and conflict prevention. This handbook seeks to consolidate existing knowledge by linking the body of conflict and media studies with work in security studies. The handbook is arranged into five parts: Theory and Principles. Media, the State and War Media and Human Security Media and Policymaking within the Security State New Issues in Security and Conflict and Future Directions For scholars of security studies, this handbook will provide a key point of reference for state of the art scholarship concerning the media-security nexus; for scholars of communication and media studies, the handbook will provide a comprehensive mapping of the media-conflict field.