Fills a conspicuous gap in the literature by providing an authoritative dissection of one of the more prominent features of contemporary terrorism: so-called jihadi snuff videos. Explains how ISIS harnessed social media to manipulate global opinion and communicate a carefully constructed image of the group. Written in a lively and accessible style, it interrogates why some people find terrorist atrocity films both repulsive and irresistible.

This textbook provides a thorough grounding in the vocabulary, concepts, issues and debates associated with modern land warfare. The second edition has been updated and revised, and includes new chapters on non-western perspectives and hybrid warfare. Drawing on a range of case studies spanning the First World War through to contemporary conflicts in Syria, Ukraine, and Nagorno-Karabakh, the book explores what is unique about the land domain and how this has shaped the theory and practice of military operations conducted upon it. It also looks at land warfare across the spectrum of its conduct, including conventional campaigning, counterinsurgency, and peace support and stabilisation operations. Key themes and debates identified and analysed include: the tensions between change and continuity; the role of technology in land warfare; the relevance of culture and context; the difficulties in translating theory into effective military practice; in-depth discussions on issues of immediate contemporary significance, including hybrid warfare, emerging military technologies, and the military reform processes of the US, Russian, and Chinese land forces. This book will be essential reading for military practitioners and for students of land warfare, military history, war studies and strategic studies.

Peacemaking in the Middle Ages explores the making of peace in the late-twelfth and early thirteenth centuries based on the experiences of the kings of England and the kings of Denmark. From dealing with owing allegiance to powerful neighbours to conquering the 'barbarians', this book offers a vision of how relationships between rulers were regulated and maintained, and how rulers negotiated, resolved, avoided and enforced matters in dispute in a period before nation states and international law. This is the first full-length study in English of the principles and practice of peacemaking in the medieval period. Its findings have wider significance and applications, and numerous comparisons are drawn with the peacemaking activities of other western European rulers, in the medieval period and beyond. This book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval Europe, but also those with a more general interest in kingship, warfare, diplomacy and international relations. -- .

Providing detailed and comprehensive coverage of the transitional justice field, this Research Handbook brings together leading scholars and practitioners to explore how societies deal with mass atrocities after periods of dictatorship or conflict. Situating the development of transitional justice in its historical context, social and political context, it analyses the legal instruments that have emerged. The Research Handbook is extensive in scope, with chapters discussing the concepts, actors, mechanisms and practices of transitional justice. They address the challenges of implementing a range of transitional justice mechanisms, including methods of truth recovery, criminal trials and reparation and lustration programmes. Going a step further, this book also expands the gaze of transitional justice to include underexplored areas, such as art and transitional justice, media and transitional justice and unique international case studies, such as Cambodia and Palestine. Timely and thought provoking, the Research Handbook on Transitional Justice will be of interest to both scholars and students, particularly those working in the areas of transitional justice and peace-building. It will also prove a valuable reference tool for practitioners of transitional justice and international criminal justice, helping to inform best practice. Contributors: A. Breslin, B.C. Browne, A. Davidian, S. Dezalay, P.J. Dixon, A. Fichtelberg, L.E. Fletcher J. Gallen, T. Hadden, T.O. Hansen, C. Harwood, R. Hodzic, C.M. Horne, E. Kenney, R. Killean, C. Lawther, P. McAuliffe, F. Megret, L. Moffett, C. O'Rourke, J.R. Quinn, N. Roht-Arriaza, M. Schkolne, D.N. Sharp, L. Stan, D. Tolbert, C. Turner, R. Vagliano, H. van der Merwe, H.M. Weinstein

This book, first published in 1984, analyses the critically important Cold War issue of the Soviet national security decision-making process dealing with weapons acquisition, arms control and the application of military force. It conceptualises Soviet decision-making for national security from Stalinist antecedents to 1980s modes, and examines the problems of decision-making concerning weapons development, defence research and development and SALT negotiations. It also focuses on the decision-making processes which led to the use or threatened use of military force in Czechoslovakia (1968), the Middle East (1973) and Afghanistan (1979).

This book, first published in 1985, examines the Cold War risks of superpower confrontations, mainly in the Third World, resulting in war in Europe. European security is usually analysed in the context of East-West relations in Europe, where though tensions often ran high, actual war seemed remote. The risks of war were much greater in other parts of the world, where the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other using proxies. This book analyses these proxy confrontations, and the risks that they posed to the security of Europe.

This book, first published in 1985, examines thinking around chemical weapons from the standpoint of national policy-making in a manner that integrates both defence and arms-control aspects. The process of multilateral negotiations on chemical warfare arms control is not simple, nor are the issues involved and their associated technical questions. Constraints, standards and verification are needed. This book analyses these issues, and the interplay of domestic issues and specific security requirements. This book offers an analytical framework within which a wide spread of different considerations may be located and assessed.

This book, first published in 1989, explores the ideas, proposals and counterproposals surrounding the thorny issue of Cold War conventional force disarmament in Europe. European nations acknowledged the need to reduce military tensions, but divergences remained as to the concrete ways and means for the attainment of the security objectives on the basis of mutually acceptable reductions of their respective forces. A UNIDIR-organized conference examined these issues, and presented here are the conference reports and findings, together with speaker responses.

This book, first published in 1994, analyses the changing world order at the end of the Cold War. As the East-West military axis was replaced by North-South economic polarization and global insecurity, it became clear that future wars were likely to stem from resource and environmental conflict and from the effects of mass movements of displaced people. Using case studies from around the world, the authors diagnose the problems caused by increasing militarism, and analyse the links between conflict, poverty, development and the environment.

This book, first published in 1983, analyses the debate around burden-sharing in NATO, where the main issue is the distribution amongst the allies of the burden of maintaining the security arrangement. This raises problems of defining, measuring and comparing the defence efforts of the various countries. This book examines the issues, and argues for the need to address directly the fundamental problems concerning the Cold War security relationship between the United States and Western Europe.

This book, first published in 1984, analyses the contribution of the American military presence to the security of Western Europe; examines the advantages and shortcomings of proposals for strengthening NATO's conventional capacity; and considers the consequences to the Cold War balance of power of a reduction in the American troop contingent.

This book explores the online strategies and presence of Salafi-Jihadi actors in the Nordic as well as the international context. Global Salafi-jihadism has been at the epicentre of international focus during the past decade. This book explores how the Swedish and other Nordic Salafi-jihadist sympathisers have used social digital media to radicalise, recruit, and propagate followers in relation to foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) and online communities. The chapters in this volume unpack different perspectives of Salafi-jihadi communications strategies, as well as how the international Salafi-jihadi community has constantly reconfigured and adapted to changing security conditions. The case studies of the Nordics constitute a microcosm of wider Salafi-jihadi narratives in relation to the rise and fall of the Islamic State's so-called 'digital caliphate'. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, counter-extremism and counter-terrorism, social media and security studies.

This volume illustrates how theatre arts can be used to enact peace education by showcasing the use of theatrical techniques including storytelling, testimonial and forum theatre, political humor, and arts-based pedagogy in diverse formal and non-formal educational contexts across age groups. The text presents and discusses how the use of applied theatre, especially in conflict-affected areas, can be used as an educational response to cultural and structural violence for transformation of relations, healing, and praxis as local and global peacebuilding. Crucially, it bridges performing arts and peace education, the latter of which is unfolding in schools and their communities worldwide. With contributors from countries including Northern Ireland, Denmark, Norway, the USA, Mexico, Japan, the Philippines, Pakistan, Burundi, Kenya, and South Africa, the authors identify theoretical and technical aspects of theatrical performance that support peace through transformation along with embodied and sensorial learning. This book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in teacher education, arts-based learning, peace studies, and applied theatre that consider practice with child, adolescent, and adult learners.

- fills a gap in the literature on how defence policy is made in contemporary Britain - focuses on the mechanics of policy making, by looking at a wide variety of policy actors, from cabinet ministers to mass media and public opinion - follows the Westminster model, which is the best fit for the centralised nature of defence policy formation - author is an experienced and well-known scholar of British policymaking

This book, first published in 1961, is an analysis of the great struggle of the twentieth century, the Cold War. It carefully examines the conflict's origins in the Russian Revolution of 1917, and follows the thread of antagonism between west and east all the way up to 1960. These were the key years of the Cold War, when it seemed that the prospect of nuclear confrontation was a real one, and this book offers a close reading of the main events of those years. This volume concentrates on the Cold War in the East, and Volume One focuses on the European theatre.

This book, first published in 1989, is a comprehensive examination of the profound impact of World War II on Soviet military affairs. It systematically assesses the costs and lessons of the war and their substantial impact on Soviet military and Party leaders in the Cold War era and particularly in the 1980s. Starting with the experiences of the war and its influence on the development of Soviet military thinking, the book addresses the relationship between the military and the Soviet political system, threat perception, decision making, and crisis and risk assessment. Also discussed are the war's influence on the structure and operations of the military in the 1980s, focusing on doctrine, conventional forces, the defence industry and historiography.

This collection examines the extent to which nuclear weapons modernization has become a significant point of concern and consideration in international security. Recent statements and substantial investments by nuclear weapon possessor states in the upkeep and modernization of their nuclear postures - particularly the United States, Russia and China - illustrate a return of primacy and the salience of nuclear forces in international politics. The upgrading of systems, the introduction of new capabilities, the intermingling of new technologies, and the advancement of new strategic models, are all indicative of their elevation in importance and reliance. With contributions from leading thinkers in the nuclear weapons domain, this book elucidates the global strategic and policy implications such modernization efforts by the above-mentioned states will have on international security. In unpacking and conceptualizing this developing source of potential (in)security and tension, the collection not only provides a technical context, but also frames the likely effects modernization could have on the relations between these nuclear weapon powers and the larger impact upon efforts to curb nuclear weapons - both in terms of horizontal and vertical proliferation. The chapters have been arranged so as to inform a variety of stakeholders, from academics to policy-makers, by connecting analytical and normative insights, and thereby, advancing debates pertaining to where nuclear modernization sits as a point of global security consternation in the 21st century.

Foreign and security policy have long been removed from the political pressures that influence other areas of policymaking. This has led to a tendency to separate the analytical levels of the individual and the collective. Using Lacanian theory, which views the subject as ontologically incomplete and desiring a perfect identity which is realised in fantasies, or narrative scenarios, this book shows that the making of foreign policy is a much more complex process. Emotions and affect play an important role, even where 'hard' security issues, such as the use of military force, are concerned. Eberle constructs a new theoretical framework for analysing foreign policy by capturing the interweaving of both discursive and affective aspects in policymaking. He uses this framework to explain Germany's often contradictory foreign policy towards the Iraq crisis of 2002/2003, and the emotional, even existential, public debate that accompanied it. This book adds to ongoing theoretical debates in International Political Sociology and Critical Security Studies and will be required reading for all scholars working in these areas.

Accessing human rights and justice mechanisms is a pressing issue in global politics. Although an understanding of justice is inherent in broad human rights discourses, there is no clear consensus on how to develop adequate means of accessing them in order to make a difference to people's lives. Further, expansions of the boundaries of both human rights and justice make any clear and settled understanding of the relation difficult to ascertain. This volume tackles these issues by focusing on the dilemmas of accessing and implementing human rights and justice across a range of empirical contexts while also investigating a range of conceptual approaches to, and understandings of, justice, including issues of equality, retribution, and restoration, as well as justice as a transnational professional project. The contributors, representing a range of disciplinary backgrounds and diverse voices, offer empirical examples from Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Tunisia, and Uganda to explore the issues of accessing and implementing human rights and justice in conflict, post-conflict, and transitional settings. This work will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, human rights, international criminal justice, and conflict response.

The notion of 'silence' in Politics and International Relations has come to imply the absence of voice in political life and, as such, tends to be scholastically prescribed as the antithesis of political power and political agency. However, from Emma Gonzales's three minutes of silence as part of her address at the March for Our Lives, to Trump's attempts to silence the investigation into his campaign's alleged collusion with Russia, along with the continuing revelations articulated by silence-breakers of sexual harassment, it is apparent that there are multiple meanings and functions of political silence - all of which intersect at the nexus of power and agency. Dingli and Cooke present a complex constellation of engagements that challenge the conceptual limitations of established approaches to silence by engaging with diverse, cross-disciplinary analytical perspectives on silence and its political implications in the realms of: environmental politics, diplomacy, digital privacy, radical politics, the politics of piety, commemoration, international organization and international law, among others. Contributors to this edited collection chart their approaches to the relationship between silence, power and agency, thus positing silence as a productive modality of agency. While this collection promotes intellectual and interdisciplinary synergy around critical thinking and research regarding the intersections of silence, power and agency, it is written for scholars in politics, international relations theory, international political theory, critical theory and everything in between.

This book, first published in 1982, examines the crisis of detente in Europe and between the superpowers, the crisis in arms control, and the heightening of tensions within NATO, and analyses the central precepts of Western policy and thought in these areas. These crises are examined in terms of the trends, thought and action in the area of Western security. In particular, the concept of strategic stability, the assumptions behind arms control, and between arms control and security policy, are critically analysed.

This book, first published in 1985, is the first full-length study of the Soviet Armed Forces as a social institution. Using military manpower as a substantive focus, it identifies those characteristics that the Soviet military shared with counterparts in non-communist systems and those that were unique to the society and political culture in which it was embedded. The discussion encompasses defence policy-making as a whole and focuses on conscription policy, the characteristics of the professional military, the role of the political officer, the mechanics of political socialization within the Red Army, and the experience of ethnic minorities in the armed forces. This analysis provides a window through which we can observe the broader military system at work; how that system affects, and in turn is affected by, the economic, social and political life of the Soviet Union. It contributes to our understanding of civil-military relations in communist systems and to our knowledge of Soviet political and social trends.

This book, first published in 1986, is a major study of semialignment and a review of the individual nations within NATO to which the model could be applied. Towards the end of the Cold War, there arose within NATO this intermediate category between alignment and nonalignment, whereby a member state enjoyed the status and facilities of NATO membership while disassociating itself from certain NATO programmes. This book analyses the phenomenon, and the possibility that it weakened the credibility of NATO deterrence and the defence posture versus the Soviet Union.

This book, first published in 1987, examines the defence forces of Western Europe and assesses Europe's capacity to defend itself as the 1980s saw the Cold War balance of power shift towards the Soviet Union. Soviet forces were greatly superior to NATO's in terms of tanks, artillery and combat divisions, and this book analyses the NATO response and capabilities.

This book, first published in 1981, offers an analysis of the ways in which one strategic situation in Cold War politics impinged on another, and the interplay of historical forces and trends shaping national policies and the world pattern of power. Bringing together a wealth of factual and analytical material about the alliance systems built around the two superpowers, it examines the areas that seem most dangerous to the peace of the world, particularly in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.