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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Armed conflict
The book begins with an agenda-setting introduction which will provide an overview of the central question being addressed, such as the circumstances associated with the move towards a political settlement, the parameters of this settlement and the factors that have assisted in bringing it about. The remaining contributions will focus on a range of cases selected for their diversity and their capacity to highlight the full gamut of political approaches to conflict resolution. The cases vary in:
This book ranges over the world's major geopolitical zones, including Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe and will be of interest to practitioners in the field of international security. This book was published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.
This edited volume is the first detailed exploration of the last phase of the Cold War, taking a critical look at the crisis of d tente in Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The transition from d tente to a new phase of harsh confrontation and severe crises is an interesting, indeed crucial, phase of the evolution of the international system. This book makes use of previously unreleased archival materials, moving beyond existing interpretations of this period by challenging the traditional bipolar paradigm that focuses mostly on the role of the superpowers in the transformation of the international system. The essays here emphasize the combination and the interplay of a large number of variables- political, ideological, economic and military - and explore the topic from a truly international perspective. Issues covered include human rights, the Euromissiles, the CSCE (Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe), the Revolution in Military Affairs, economic growth and its consequences.
This book analyses the root causes of suicide terrorism at both the elite and rank-and- file levels of the Hamas and also explains why this tactic has disappeared in the post-2006 period. This volume adopts a multi-causal, multi-level approach to analyse the use of suicide bombings by Hamas and its individual operatives in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It uses extensive fieldwork and on-the-ground interviews in order to delve beneath the surface and understand why and how suicide operations were adopted as a sustained mechanism of engagement within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Three core factors fuelled Hamas's suicide bombing campaigns. First, Palestinian suicide operations are a complex combination of instrumental and expressive violence adopted by both organisations and individuals to achieve political and/or societal survival, retaliation and competition. In other words, suicide bombings not only serve distinct political and strategic goals for both Hamas and its operatives but they also serve to convey a symbolic message to various audiences, within Israel, the Palestinian territories and around the world. Second, suicide operations perform a crucial role in the formation and consolidation of Palestinian national identity and are also the latest manifestation of the historically entrenched cultural norm of militant heroic martyrdom. Finally, Hamas's use of political Islam also facilitates the articulation, justification and legitimisation of suicide operations as a modern-day jihad against Israel through the means of modern interpretations and fatwas. This approach not only facilitates a much needed, multifaceted, holistic understanding of suicide bombings in this particular region but also yields policy-relevant lessons to address extreme political violence in other parts of the world. This book will be of much interest to students of Hamas, terrorism, Middle East politics and security studies.
The first volume in Philip Pullman's groundbreaking His Dark Materials trilogy, re-published in hardback with a stunning fine art cover. "Without this child, we shall all die." Lyra Belacqua and her animal daemon live half-wild and carefree among scholars of Jordan College, Oxford. The destiny that awaits her will take her to the frozen lands of the Arctic, where witch-clans reign and ice-bears fight. Her extraordinary journey will have immeasurable consequences far beyond her own world... This classic art edition featuring Jeune Fille en Vert et Rouge, painted by Balthus in 1944, is destined to become a collectors' item. he perfect companion to the Classic Art Edition of The Subtle Knife The smash-hit, critically adored first season of BBC/HBO television series was based on the story of Northern Lights.
Although it is often simplified as an "ethnic conflict" in popular media, the current crisis in Darfur can only be superficially defined across ethnic lines. Any long-term solution to the conflict must also address the underlying social and environmental influences such as changing resource dynamics, expanding poverty, lack of infrastructure, and political corruption, which have brought the crisis to a head. This project diverges from previous studies by examining how the dynamic interaction between the environment, local governance, and national policy in Sudan has resulted in the Darfur crisis. It demonstrates how ecological degradation and the breakdown of community governance have destabilized the region, and how corruption and incompetence at the national level have culminated in the current crisis. Analyzing the interplay of these factors will yield valuable insights as to how a concerned international community can both end the tragic genocide and address the underlying injustices that engendered it. The analysis presented will be informative and accessible to a wide readership of students, academics, and concerned citizens.
The essays in this volume are concerned with armed conflicts in South Asia and the conflict management efforts made to mitigate them. Articles in the volume study conflict management, look at the direction armed conflict is likely to take and provide a set of alternative measures that could be perused by the actors. It addresses five key issues: history of the armed conflict, identifying the principal actors of the conflict, describing the course of the conflict and its major trends, evaluating conflict management measures undertaken, if any, presenting appropriate conclusions. It also includes additional chapters on Naxalism and sectarian strife in Pakistan. Designed as an annual series, this important collection discusses India's geo-strategic importance including its common borders with its neighbours; the psychological and economic costs of violence, and the problem of refugee migrants; treaties and ceasefire agreements signed across countries; the role of the UN and other peacekeeping forces; and the future of failed and failing democracies. The book makes an important contribution to analysing armed conflicts and conflict resolution.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL UNITED SERVICES INSTITUTE DUKE OF WESTMINSTER MEDAL FOR MILITARY LITERATURE** **SHORTLISTED FOR BRITISH ARMY BOOK OF THE YEAR** In the wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and in recent conflicts more generally, liberal powers have blurred the line between military and political activity. Operationally, such blurring is highly effective: it works on the ground. Conversely, in strategic terms, it erases the distinction between war and peace. This, Simpson contends, is undesirable: how can policy control armed force, if armed force is a direct extension of policy? As the information revolution reinforces the politicisation of combat, this is likely to be an irreversible trend. The question this book seeks to answer is not whether the West should engage in such practices, but how to manage, gain advantage from, and mitigate the associated risks. Liberal powers need to win conflicts on the ground, and yet preserve a healthy distinction between war and peace. Failure to preserve that distinction will result in those powers being caught in endless conflicts for which they are operationally ill-equipped. War From The Ground Up offers a distinctive perspective in its consideration of the concept of contemporary warfare. While most accounts of conflict survey the battlefield from an academic perspective, or across it as a personal combat narrative, Simpson looks up from the front line to consider the concepts that put him there, and how they played out.
The close and complex relationship between conflict and communication has been vividly illustrated in work spanning the writings of Homer and Thucydides to blogs bashed out on contemporary battlefields. And in recent decades there has been a huge growth in scholarly and popular interest in the subject. As serious research flourishes as never before, this new two-volume collection from Routledge's acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series has been assembled by the field's leading thinker to meet the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of cross-disciplinary literature. Drawing on disparate, and sometimes less accessible, sources, the two volumes gather together canonical and the very best cutting-edge scholarship to cover a diverse range of key themes, including: the theory and reality of journalistic practice; the effects of conflict communication on the policy process; and the impact of technology on the very nature of war and conflict. The collection also includes a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. War and Conflict Communication is an essential work of reference and will be welcomed as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.
By juxtaposing theoretical and legal frameworks and conceptual contexts alongside a wide distribution of geographical and temporal case studies, this book throws light upon the risks, and the realizations, of art and heritage destruction. Exploring the variety of forces that drive the destruction of heritage, the volume also contains contributions that consider what forms heritage destruction takes and in which contexts and circumstances it manifests. Contributors, including local scholars, also consider how these drivers and contexts change, and what effect this has on heritage destruction and how we conceptualise it. Overall, the book establishes the importance of the need to study the destruction of art and cultural heritage within a wider framework that encompasses not only theory, but also legal, military, social, and ontological issues. The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction will contribute to the development of a more complete understanding and analysis of heritage destruction The Handbook will be useful to academics, students and professionals with an interest in heritage, conservation and preservation, history and art history, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy and law.
This edited volume is the first detailed exploration of the last phase of the Cold War, taking a critical look at the crisis of detente in Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The transition from detente to a new phase of harsh confrontation and severe crises is an interesting, indeed crucial, phase of the evolution of the international system. This book makes use of previously unreleased archival materials, moving beyond existing interpretations of this period by challenging the traditional bipolar paradigm that focuses mostly on the role of the superpowers in the transformation of the international system. The essays here emphasize the combination and the interplay of a large number of variables- political, ideological, economic and military - and explore the topic from a truly international perspective. Issues covered include human rights, the Euromissiles, the CSCE (Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe), the Revolution in Military Affairs, economic growth and its consequences.
Globally, in the past ten years, there has been a four-fold increase in internal war or civil war in developing countries. This book is one of the first full length studies on the subject. A century ago, most conflicts were between nations, and 90 per cent of casualties were soldiers; today almost all wars are civil, and 90 per cent of the victims are civilians. Many of the conflicts that appeared to have been resolved through processes of intervention or negotiation have reappeared. The researches produced by many international bodies suggest that more and more states are going to be drawn into such conflicts in the twenty-first century. This poses the following questions: What explains the steady rise in civil war? How can this cycle be broken? What is the international community's role? Politics of Civil Wars aims to answer these questions and contains case studies that cover a variety of zones of conflict including Africa, Asia and Latin America. This book will appeal to students of international relations, war and conflict studies and peace studies.
The third volume in Philip Pullman's groundbreaking His Dark Materials trilogy, re-published in hardback with a stunning fine art cover.Now a major, critically acclaimed BBC/HBO TV series. "We're going to the land of the dead - and we're going to come back." Will and Lyra, whose fates are bound together by powers beyond their own worlds, have been violently separated. But they must find each other, for ahead of them lies the greatest war that has ever been - and a journey to a dark place from which no one has ever returned... Read the book ahead of the third season of the smash-hit, critically adored BBC/HBO television series. This classic art edition featuring the painting Sophia - the Wisdom of the Almighty, by Nicholas Roerich, 1932, is destined to be a collectors' item. The perfect companion to the Classic Art Editions of Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife
This edited volume offers an in-depth study of heritage and warfare from the perspective of defence studies. The book focuses on how, in different contexts, heritage can be a catalyst and target of conflict, an obstacle to stabilisation, and a driver of peace-building. It documents the changing role of heritage - in terms of both exploitation and protection - in various military capabilities, theatres, and operations. With particular concern for the areas of subthreshold and hybrid warfare, stabilisation, cultural relationships, human security, and disaster response, the volume reviews the historical relationship between heritage and armed conflict, including the roles of embedded archaeologists, safeguarding of ethics, and dislodgement and destruction of material culture. Various chapters in the book also demonstrate the value of understanding how state and non-state actors exploit cultural heritage across different defence postures and within both subthreshold and proxy warfare in order to achieve military, political, economic, and diplomatic advantages. This book will be of interest to students of defence studies, heritage studies, anthropology and security studies in general, as well as military practitioners.
Although today's richest countries tend to have long histories of secure private property rights, legal-titling projects do little to improve the economic and political well-being of those in the developing world. This book employs a historical narrative based on secondary literature, fieldwork across thirty villages, and a nationally representative survey to explore how private property institutions develop, how they are maintained, and their relationship to the state and state-building within the context of Afghanistan. In this predominantly rural society, citizens cannot rely on the state to enforce their claims to ownership. Instead, they rely on community-based land registration, which has a long and stable history and is often more effective at protecting private property rights than state registration. In addition to contributing significantly to the literature on Afghanistan, this book makes a valuable contribution to the literature on property rights and state governance from the new institutional economics perspective.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 European theatre, and Volume Two focuses on the Cold War in the East.
Dialogue format makes it more accessible for readers, as well as easier to get both points of the argument, juxtaposed. Incredibly topical with the war in Ukraine still going on, over six months later.
One of the most crucial issues to affect national policy in the
state of Israel is that of relations between its Jewish and Arab
citizens. The confrontation of October 2000 demonstrated the
explosive potential of the unresolved dilemmas posed by these
relations.
In State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary, William Walters calls for secrecy to be given a more central place in critical security studies and elevated to become a core concept when theorising power in liberal democracies. Through investigations into such themes as the mobility of cryptographic secrets, the power of public inquiries, the connection between secrecy and place-making, and the aesthetics of secrecy within immigration enforcement, Walters challenges commonplace understandings of the covert and develops new concepts, methods and themes for secrecy and security research. Walters identifies the covert imaginary as both a limit on our ability to think politics differently and a ground to develop a richer understanding of power. State Secrecy and Security offers readers a set of thinking tools to better understand the strange powers that hiding, revealing, lying, confessing, professing ignorance and many other operations of secrecy put in motion. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of security, secrecy and politics more broadly.
Revolutionary Worlds looks at the Indonesian revolution (1945-1949) from a local and regional perspective. With seventeen contributions, Indonesian and Dutch researchers bring to life the revolutionary world from widely differing perspectives. The authors explain how Indonesian, Chinese, Indian and Eurasian civilians, fighters, farmers and officials experienced and shaped the often volatile period between 1945 and 1950. The book focuses on different ideas of independence, survival strategies, mobilization, minorities, contestation of authority and the use of force against the backdrop of Indonesian and Dutch authorities' efforts to gain or maintain control. Bringing together two national historiographical traditions which have long remained largely separate, Revolutionary Worlds is the result of a collaboration between the Indonesian research project Proklamasi Kemerdekaan, Revolusi dan Perang di Indonesia ('Proclamation of Independence, Revolution and War in Indonesia', Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta) and the Dutch research group of the Regional Studies project, under the umbrella of the research programme Independence, Decolonization, Violence and War in Indonesia, 1945-1950. The authors of this book - Taufik Ahmad, Galuh Ambar Sasi, Maarten van der Bent, Martijn Eickhoff, Farabi Fakih, Roel Frakking, Apriani Harahap, Anne-Lot Hoek, Sarkawi B. Husain, Julianto Ibrahim, Gerry van Klinken, Erniwati Nur, Mawardi Umar, Anne van der Veer, Abdul Wahid, Tri Wahyuning M. Irsyam, and Muhammad Yuanda Zara - work with various universities and research institutes in Indonesia and the Netherlands.
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. |
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