What arguments have critics of American wars and interventions put forward, and what arguments do they currently employ? Thomas Jefferson, Henry Thoreau, John Calhoun, the Anti-Imperialist League, Herbert Hoover, Charles Lindbergh, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ron Paul (among others) have criticized proposals to intervene in other countries, enter wars, acquire foreign territory, and engage in a forward defense posture. Despite cogent objections, they have also generally lost the argument. Why do they lose? This book provides answers to these questions through a survey of oppositional arguments over time, augmented by the views of contemporary critics, including those of Ron Paul, Chalmers Johnson and Noam Chomsky. Author David J. Lorenzo demonstrates how and why a significant number of arguments are dismissed as irrelevant, unpatriotic, overly pessimistic, or radically out of the mainstream. Other lines of reasoning might provide a compelling critique of wars and interventions from a wide variety of perspectives - and still lose. Evaluating oppositional arguments in detail allows the reader to understand problems likely to be faced in the context of policy discussions, to grasp important political differences and the potential for alliances among critics, and ultimately to influence decision-making and America's place in the international power structure.

This book explores a cross-cultural worldview called 'radical apocalypticism' that underlies the majority of terrorist movements in the twenty-first century. Although not all apocalypticism is violent, in its extreme forms radical apocalypticism gives rise to terrorists as varied as members of Al Qaeda, Anders Behring Breivik, or Timothy McVeigh. In its secular variations, it also motivates ideological terrorists, such as the eco-terrorists Earth Liberation Front or The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. This book provides an original paradigm for distinguishing between peaceful and violent or radical forms of apocalypticism and analyses the history, major transformations, and characteristics of the apocalyptic thought system. Using an inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural approach, this book discusses the mechanisms of radicalization and dynamics of perceived oppression and violence to clarify anew the self-identities, motivations, and goals of a broad swath of terrorists. As conventional counter-terrorism approaches have so far failed to stem the cycle of terrorism, this approach suggests a comprehensive "cultural" method to combating terrorism that addresses the appeal of radical apocalyptic terrorist ideology itself. This book will be of much interest to students of apocalypticism, political violence, terrorism and counter-terrorism, intelligence studies, religious studies, and security studies.

The book examines how exercises of power and processes of security exercised in the Occupied Palestinian Territories have formed Palestinian women as subjects. To understand how women experience occupation, this book examines the various ways in which the occupation is directed at making Palestinian women into subjects of power. The work argues that the exercises of power are focused on controlling and disciplining women's bodies. The objectives are to expose how the exclusions of women's daily-lived experiences of conflict in the occupied Palestinian territories obscures how power operates, to demonstrate how the elements of Israeli security practices make women insecure, and to highlight how resistance to the occupation can be found embedded within daily life in the occupied territories. Ultimately, all of these themes can be related more broadly to how women might experience conflict and resist subjectification by exposing different ways that subjectifications result in insecurities and resistance to those insecurities. While the book is specific to women in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the exercises of power and enactments of resistance it exposes demonstrate how important it is to take seriously the feminist argument that 'the personal is international, and the international is personal.' This book will be of much interest to students of gender politics, critical security studies, Middle Eastern politics, sociology and IR in general.

The Middle East conflict system is perhaps the world's most important and intractable problem area, whose developments carry global consequences. An effective investigation of the context and change in the region calls for a melding of academic approaches, methods and findings with policy oriented needs. The Israeli Conflict System brings together leading conflict scholars primarily from political science, applying a range of advanced, rigorous analytic and data-gathering techniques to address this single empirical domain-the contemporary Israeli Conflict System. Recognising the causal complexity of this conflict system, the volume's central theme is that the system's current conditions are best understood in their broader temporal/historic, cultural/linguistic, and spatial/geographic contexts. Through the lens of economic, geographic, historical, linguistic, and political analyses, and the application of data analysis, experiments, simulations, and models of rational choice, this volume shows how diverse disciplinary perspectives and methodologies can complement each other effectively. In this way, its chapters provide a model for the integration of factors and contexts necessary for understanding contemporary world politics, and a sampling of theories, approaches, and methods that are applicable, useful, or valid under different conditions. This book offers a cutting-edge resource for scholars and students of Political Science, International Relations, Conflict Studies and Middle East Studies.

This book examines cyberspace superiority in nation-state conflict from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. This volume analyses superiority concepts from the domains of land, maritime, and air to build a model that can be applied to cyberspace. Eight different cyberspace conflicts between nation states are examined and the resulting analysis is combined with theoretical concepts to present the reader with a conclusion. Case studies include the conflict between Russia and Estonia (2007), North Korea and the US and South Korea (2009) and Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Aramco attack (2012). The book uses these case studies to examine cyberspace superiority as an analytical framework to understand conflict in this domain between nation-states. Furthermore, the book makes the important distinction between local and universal domain superiority, and presents a unique model to relate this superiority in all domains, as well as a more detailed model of local superiority in cyberspace. Through examining the eight case studies, the book develops a rigorous system to measure the amount of cyberspace superiority achieved by a combatant in a conflict, and seeks to reveal if cyberspace superiority proves to be a significant advantage for military operations at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. This book will be of much interest to students of cyber-conflict, strategic studies, national security, foreign policy and IR in general.

Daniel Pipes has collected some of his sharpest and most prescient writings from the quarter century 1989-2014. In them, he addresses a range of current topics, from the origins of the civil war in Syria to denying the Islamic factor in terrorism, to the way to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Pipes pursues two themes in particular: the internal instability of Muslim-majority countries, in which nothing abides, and the expression of Muslims' drive to apply Islamic law. Pipes' interests concentrate on the Middle East as understood from a historical point of view and on the role of Islam in politics. Divided into five thematic sections, this work addresses the Arab-Israeli conflict, Middle Eastern politics, Islam in modern life, Islam in the West, and individuals connected to American Islam. Pipes' deep knowledge, gained over forty-five years of study, combined with incisive writing and a well-regarded courage to speak out on controversial topics make Nothing Abides a compelling read for Middle East specialists, students, and the interested public.

Daniel Pipes has collected some of his sharpest and most prescient writings from the quarter century 1989-2014. In them, he addresses a range of current topics, from the origins of the civil war in Syria to denying the Islamic factor in terrorism, to the way to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Pipes pursues two themes in particular: the internal instability of Muslim-majority countries, in which nothing abides, and the expression of Muslims' drive to apply Islamic law. Pipes' interests concentrate on the Middle East as understood from a historical point of view and on the role of Islam in politics. Divided into five thematic sections, this work addresses the Arab-Israeli conflict, Middle Eastern politics, Islam in modern life, Islam in the West, and individuals connected to American Islam. Pipes' deep knowledge, gained over forty-five years of study, combined with incisive writing and a well-regarded courage to speak out on controversial topics make Nothing Abides a compelling read for Middle East specialists, students, and the interested public.

This book analyses the changing dynamics of sovereignty resulting from contemporary international state-building interventions. It aims to highlight how the exercise of 'exceptional' forms of power by intervening agencies impacts on the sovereign capacity of intervened states. Drawing upon in-depth analyses of three case studies - Kosovo, East Timor and the Kurdistan Regional Government, the book shifts the focus of the debate to the nature of contemporary intervention as an act of statemaking, and argues that foreign intervention changes the dynamics of political power upon which sovereignty is structured. At the same time, it reveals how intervention reproduces the imposed conditions of international state-making, thus permanently internalising external regulatory mechanisms. International intervention, in other words, becomes the constitutive element of governance in the newly created state. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, war and conflict studies, global governance, security studies and IR.

Newly revised and updated, The Law of Armed Conflict, introduces students to the law of war in an age of terrorism. What law of armed conflict (LOAC) or its civilian counterpart, international humanitarian law (IHL), applies in a particular armed conflict? Are terrorists bound by that law? What constitutes a war crime? What (or who) is a lawful target and how are targeting decisions made? What are 'rules of engagement' and who formulates them? How can an autonomous weapon system be bound by the law of armed conflict? Why were the Guantanamo military commissions a failure? Featuring new chapters, this book takes students through these topics and more, employing real-world examples and legal opinions from the US and abroad. From Nuremberg to 9/11, from courts-martial to the US Supreme Court, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, the law of war is explained, interpreted, and applied with clarity and depth.

The rhetoric of armed social welfare has become prominent in military and counterinsurgency circuits with profound consequences for the meanings of democracy, citizenship, and humanitarianism in conflict zones. By focusing on the border district of Kargil, the site of India and Pakistan's fourth war in 1999, this book analyses how humanitarian policies of healing and heart warfare infused the logic of democracy and militarism in the post-war period. Compassion became a strategy to contain political dissension, regulate citizenship, and normalize the extensive militarization of Kargil's social and political order. The book uses the power of ethnography to foreground people's complex subjectivities and the violence of compassion, healing, and sacrifice in India's disputed frontier state. Based on extensive research in several sites across the region, from border villages in Kargil to military bases and state offices in Ladakh and Kashmir, this engaging book presents new material on military-civil relations, the securitization of democracy and development, and the extensive militarization of everyday life and politics. It is of interest to scholars working in diverse fields including political anthropology, development, and Asian Studies.

International criminal adjudication, together with the prosecution and appropriate punishment of offenders at a national level, remains the most effective means of enforcing International Humanitarian Law. This book considers the various issues emanating from present-day breaches of norms of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and the question of how impunity for such breaches can be tackled. Honouring the work of Timothy McCormack, Professor of International Law at the University of Melbourne and a world renowned expert on IHL and International Criminal Law, contributors of the book explore the interplay between the rules governing accountability for violations of IHL and other areas of law that impact the prosecution of war crimes, including international criminal law, human rights law, arms control law, constitutional law and national criminal law. In providing a contemporary consideration of the various issues emerging from present-day breaches of norms of IHL, especially in light of growing interest in 'fragmentation' and 'normative pluralism', this book will be of great use and interest to students and researchers in public international law, international law, and conflict studies.

This work explains how wars are most likely to escalate when the effects of warfare are limited. The author demonstrates that total wars during the modern era were very violent and were far less likely to spread, yet the cost of warfare is falling making future conflicts more likely to spread.

Based on recently declassified documents, this book provides the first examination of the Truman Administration's decision to employ covert operations in the Cold War. Although covert operations were an integral part of America's arsenal during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the majority of these operations were ill conceived, unrealistic and ultimately doomed to failure. In this volume, the author looks at three central questions: Why were these types of operations adopted? Why were they conducted in such a haphazard manner? And, why, once it became clear that they were not working, did the administration fail to abandon them? The book argues that the Truman Administration was unable to reconcile policy, strategy and operations successfully, and to agree on a consistent course of action for waging the Cold War. This ensured that they wasted time and effort, money and manpower on covert operations designed to challenge Soviet hegemony, which had little or no real chance of success. US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy will be of great interest to students of US foreign policy, Cold War history, intelligence and international history in general.

Between 1991 and 2002, Sierra Leone was wracked by a devastating civil war and the complete collapse of state institutions. Since then, however, the UK's contribution to post-war reconstruction has been widely held up as an example of successful stabilisation and state-building - particularly of the country's security and justice institutions. Securing Sierra Leone, 1997-2013 examines how the process of state-building through security-sector reform developed in Sierra Leone, and the impact of this experience on international conceptualisations of such reform as well as on international interventions more broadly. The study is the most detailed of its kind, based on a comprehensive analysis of UK engagement in Sierra Leone between 1997 and 2013, including a host of first-hand accounts from key local and international actors. This monograph shows why the UK intervention in Sierra Leone has been a relative success. However, it also questions the sustainability of state-building efforts that are driven by concepts of the liberal state. In Sierra Leone, critical challenges remain, not least in the combination of a particular vision of what a state should look like and the unrealistic expectations of progress on the part of the international community.

This book explores the moral complexity of statecraft in the context of decision-making on armed intervention in the post-Cold War era. This book adds to the debate on humanitarian intervention by analyzing the moral complexity of statecraft when confronted with situations of severe human rights violations. Through a comparative case study of President Bill Clinton administration's failure to intervene in the Rwanda genocide (1994), the George W. Bush administration's tepid response to the Darfur atrocities (2003-07), and the Barack Obama administration's leadership behind the limited U.N. intervention in Libya (2011), it explores the factors - domestic and international - that influence decision-making about humanitarian intervention. These cases show, not only how international moral concerns often compete with interest-based and domestic concerns, but how decision-makers are often confronted by competing moral imperatives. In such situations, it is often not clear which imperatives should be followed. In an increasingly interconnected world, this book examines how we expect state leaders to balance different moral responsibilities. This book will be of much interest to students of humanitarian intervention, the Responsibility to Protect, human rights, US foreign policy, African politics and IR in general.

This collection explores the concepts and practices of masquerade as they apply to concepts and practices of war. The contributors insist that masquerades are everyday aspects of the politics, praxis, and experiences of war, while also discovering that finding masquerades and tracing how they work with war is hardly simple. With a range of theories, innovative methodologies, and contextual binoculars, masquerade emerges as a layered and complex phenomenon. It can appear as state deception, lie, or camouflage, as in the population-centric American warfare in Iraq that was sold as good for the local people, or the hidden violence Russian military forces used on each other and on local men in Chechnya. Masquerade can also be part of a people's war logic as exemplified by the Maoist movement in India. Yet masquerade can also be understood as a normal social mask that people don to foreground an identity or belief from one's cluttered repertoire in order to gain agency. Elements of masquerade can appear in texts that proclaim seemingly unequivocal positions while simultaneously yet subtly suggesting opposing positions. Masquerades of all kinds also seem ubiquitous in fieldwork research and in resistance movements in war zones. Perhaps masquerade, though, is ultimately the denial of death lurking behind the clarion call of security, a call that bolsters war by making militarized policing normal to secure populations from terrorists. These interpretations and others comprise Masquerades of War. This book will be of much interest to students of critical war studies, critical security, conflict studies and IR in general.

Most students of the history of Arab-Jewish relations have come to take for granted the stubborn resistance of the continuing dispute to any form of lasting and 'reasonable' solution. This book, first published in 1983, examines early Arab-Zionist negotiating experience with the assumption that this has direct relevance to our understanding of the possible outcomes of diplomatic approaches to resolving the conflict. Its main purpose is to assemble (half of the book consists of original souce documents) and discuss some of the raw material which may help readers focus more clearly on the origins of the conflict, and perhaps to eliminate some recurring fallacies about its development and the prospects for its resolution. An examination of the period 1913 to 1931 reveals of wealth of previous negotiating experience which is today largely forgotten, and indicates that there was little or no movement of any of the parties in the direction of modifying its basic minimum demands and aspirations.

With half of this book, first published in 1986, being given over to Neil Caplan's detailed analysis and half to the collection of the original documents, the second volume in Futile Diplomacy provides another essential resource for the understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In Arab-Zionist Negotiations and the End of the Mandate a key period in the negotiations between the two parties is examined, as attempts were made by both sides to reach a peaceful, negotiated settlement.

This book, first published in 1997, provides a careful and balanced behind-the-scenes account of the intricate diplomatic activity of the period between the first and second Arab-Israeli wars. The author examines the recurring deadlocks in terms of the motives and calculations of the various parties, and reveals how new incentives of pressures offered by outsiders proved incapable of reversing the serious deterioration of Arab-Israeli relations as the region headed for war at Suez. The text of this volume comprises both an in-depth analysis of the period and events, and a selection of primary documents from archival sources.

This book, first published in 1997, focuses on the Anglo-American cooperation which began during the relatively uneventful years 1953 and 1954, and which led to a covert operation, code-named 'Alpha', which aimed - unsuccessfully - at convincing Egyptian and Israeli leaders to consider a settlement through secret negotiations. As with the other three volumes that make up Futile Diplomacy, this volume comprises Dr Caplan's expert in-depth analysis with a wealth of primary source documents, making this a key reference source in the study of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This book seeks to understand the obligation of the international community to implement the principles of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). With a focus on the humanitarian crisis in Syria, the volume examines what formal responsibility and actual capability international institutions have to protect and prevent civilians from systematic mass atrocities and presents an analysis of several prominent international organizations (IOs). Each chapter focuses on a specific organization and explores their formal responsibilities and how these pertain to the obligations of the R2P. Existing capabilities and actual abilities to address the challenges of R2P are analysed by looking at these issues before, during, and after the occurrence of the humanitarian crisis in Syria. With the UN not fully engaged in the Syrian conflict, the systematic human rights abuses have engendered greater attention on other organizations. This volume argues that if the UN Security Council's inactions result in an abdication of responsibilities under the UN Charter, there should not only be a discussion of how the UN must alter its approach, but also an examination of whether there are alternative R2P paths for other MNOs to take in the name of international peace and human security. This book will be of much interest to students of R2P, humanitarian intervention, international organisations, Middle Eastern politics and security studies.

This edited volume empirically examines key theoretical and practical issues relevant to the promotion of local ownership in contemporary international peacebuilding. This book attempts to provide comprehensive understanding of the issue of local ownership in international peacebuilding. By providing an empirical analysis of nine case studies, the volume aims to supplement contemporary academic discussions on local ownership, which have thus far mainly focused on its normative or theoretical dimensions. The case studies included here examine the peace operations in a wide range of countries - Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Cyprus, Kenya, Uganda, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Sri Lanka. The book seeks to address the weaknesses of conventional studies by:,empirical review of the achievements and limitations of previous attempts to promote local ownership; examination of the key concepts of local ownership; and analysis of structural and practical challenges. The volume concludes by presenting practical proposals for addressing the limitations of contemporary local ownership promotion. Through these means, the book aims to explore a key research question from both theoretical and empirical perspectives: How can international peacebuilding facilitate effective, active local community participation? This volume will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, development studies, global governance, peace and conflict studies, security studies and IR.

This book critically examines the Western approach to counter-insurgency in the post-colonial era and offers a series of recommendations to address current shortfalls. The author argues that current approaches to countering insurgency rely too heavily on conflicts from the post-World War II years of waning colonialism. Campaigns conducted over half a century ago - Malaya, Aden, and Kenya among them - remain primary sources on which the United States, British, Australian, and other militaries build their guidance for dealing with insurgent threats, this though both the character of those threats and the conflict environment are significantly different than was the case in those earlier years. This book addresses the resulting inconsistencies by offering insights, analysis, and recommendations drawn from campaigns more applicable to counter-insurgency today. Eight post-colonial conflicts; to include Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Colombia and Iraq; provide the basis for analysis. All are examples in which counterinsurgents attained or continue to demonstrate considerable progress when taking on enterprises better known for disaster and disappointment. Recommendations resulting from these analyses challenge entrenched beliefs to serve as the impetus for essential change. Rethinking Western Approaches to Counterinsurgency will be of much interest to students of counter-insurgencies, military and strategic studies, security studies and IR in general.

Every large nation in the world was directly or indirectly affected by the impact of war during the course of the twentieth century, and while the historical narratives of war of these nations are well known, far less is understood about how small islands coped. These islands - often not nations in their own right but small outposts of other kingdoms, countries, and nations - have been relegated to mere footnotes in history and heritage studies as interesting case studies or unimportant curiosities. Yet for many of these small islands, war had an enduring impact on their history, memory, intangible heritage and future cultural practices, leaving a legacy that demanded some form of local response. This is the first comprehensive volume dedicated to what the memories, legacies and heritage of war in small islands can teach those who live outside them, through closely related historical and contemporary case studies covering 20th and 21st century conflict across the globe. The volume investigates a number of important questions: Why and how is war memory so enduring in small islands? Do factors such as population size, island size, isolation or geography have any impact? Do close ties of kinship and group identity enable collective memories to shape identity and its resulting war-related heritage? This book contributes to heritage and memory studies and to conflict and historical archaeology by providing a globally wide-ranging comparative assessment of small islands and their experiences of war. Heritage of War in Small Island Territories is of relevance to students, researchers, heritage and tourism professionals, local governments, and NGOs.

This book analyses security strategies in the American world order, systematically comparing Russian, Middle Eastern and European policies. The main finding is that the loss of relative power has decisive importance for the security strategies of states, but that particular strategies can only be explained when relative power is combined with ideology and the probability of military conflict. Research on the unipolar world order has focused largely on the general dynamics of the system and the actions of the American unipole. By contrast, this book focuses on states that lost out relatively as a consequence of unipolarity, and seeks to explain how this loss has affected their security strategies. Thus, in essence, the book tells 'the other side of the story' about the contemporary world order. In addition, it makes an important theoretical contribution by systematically coupling relative ideology and relative security with relative power and exploring their explanatory value. This book will be of great interest to students of international relations, security studies and foreign policy.