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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Peace studies > General
In the next few years the US government will make decisions regarding the renewal of its triad of air-, land- and sea-based nuclear weapons that will have huge implications for the security of the country and its allies, its public finances, and the salience of nuclear weapons in global politics. Current plans provide for spending an estimated US$1 trillion over 30 years to modernise or replace the full triad. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate viable alternatives to the current US plan to modernise or replace its full triad of air-, land- and sea-based nuclear weapons. These alternatives would allow the US to maintain deterrence at a lower cost, thereby freeing up funds to ease pressing shortfalls in spending on conventional procurement and nuclear security. Moreover, these alternative structures - which propose a reduction in the size and shape of the US arsenal - offer distinct advantages over the existing plan with regard to maintaining strategic stability vis-a-vis Russia and China; upholding existing arms-control treaties, in particular New START and the INF Treaty; and boosting the security of US nuclear forces and supporting the global non-proliferation regime, including the NPT. They would also endow the US with a nuclear force better suited to the strategic environment of the twenty-first century and mark an advance on the existing triad with regard to supporting conventional military operations.
As the RtoP moves from norm to operationalization, greater analysis of action to halt crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and ethnic cleansing is needed. This uncovers opportunities and challenges associated with third pillar interventions by looking at legal, economic, political, military and alternative interventions in third-countries.
Often, violent behavior or harassment from a soldier is dismissed by the military as unacceptable acts by individuals termed, "rotten apples." In this study, the author argues that this dismissal is unsatisfactory and that there is an urgent need to look at the (mis)behavior of soldiers from a structural point of view. When soldiers serve as an occupational force, they find themselves in a particular situation influenced by structural circumstances that heavily influence their behavior and moral decision-making. This study focuses on young Israeli men and their experiences as combat soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), particularly those who served in the "Occupied Palestinian Territories" (OPT) during the "Al Aqsa Intifada," which broke out in 2000. In describing the soldiers' circumstances, especially focusing on space, the study shows how processes of numbing on different levels influence the (moral) behavior of these soldiers.
Drawing on fieldwork in the Herat area, Afghanistan, this book addresses migration patterns throughout three decades of war. It launches a framework for understanding the role of social networks for peoples responses to war and disaster as well as mobilizing or maintaining material resources for security and gathering information.
Military power and conflict have fuelled economic growth throughout
history. Money matters to the military; it is needed to finance war
and the desire to acquire it is often the motive for fighting. This
book examines the interaction of economics and conflict, it
explains the economic concepts used, and illustrates them with a
range of military examples, both contemporary and historical. Among
the many links explored lies the undeniable fact that fighting and
finance are often both driven by the same basic human motives, fear
and greed.
At the end of World War II in Europe, peace had finally come but at a terrible price: its cities and countryside were devastated, 35 million lay dead, and those who did survive faced extreme economic hardship and the threat of starvation. Ending the war was more than a matter of defeating the German army; it was about a new world order emerging in fits and starts from the smoldering ruins of a continent. In this provocative collection, eleven senior scholars explore the transition from war to uneasy peace. Authorities such as Warren Kimball, Randall Woods, and Garry Clifford examine how and why the war ended as it did, whether a different resolution was possible, and what the victors actually won. They also consider whether the circumstances surrounding war termination made inevitable the ensuing Cold War. Some examine the often-tragic results of actions taken to deal with such immediate circumstances as the food crisis. Others assess the roles of key players, such as the joint chiefs of staff, during the transition from shooting war to cold war. Still others explore issues that have preoccupied scholars and policy makers since 1945 regarding the chaotic termination of the war, such as Eisenhower's decision to stop at the Elbe. Here readers will relive VE Day from the perspective of Soviet-occupied Poland and neutral Ireland, get a glimpse of Russian society at war's end, and experience Holland's brutal "hunger winter." The authors also re-examine ties between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. and show how such factors as inept diplomacy, mutual anxieties, Stalin's heavy-handedness, and Truman's bravado led to decades of standoff. We always know more about how wars begin than how they end, and five decades after this important event many questions about the end of World War II remain unanswered. Victory in Europe 1945 offers a case study in war termination that examines choices made and opportunities lost as it considers the transition from coalition cooperation to mutual suspicion in the face of new political realities. It brings to life a pivotal moment in history with new insights for specialists, students, and general readers alike.
One of the outstanding mysteries of the twentieth century, and one with huge political resonance, is the death of Dag Hammarskjold and his UN team in a plane crash in central Africa in 1961. Just minutes after midnight, his aircraft plunged into thick forest in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), abruptly ending his mission to bring peace to the Congo. Across the world, many suspected sabotage, accusing the multi-nationals and the governments of Britain, Belgium, the USA and South Africa of involvement in the disaster. These suspicions have never gone away. British High Commissioner Lord Alport was waiting at the airport when the aircraft crashed nearby. He bizarrely insisted to the airport management that Hammarskjold had flown elsewhere - even though his aircraft was reported overhead. This postponed a search for so long that the wreckage of the plane was not found for fifteen hours. White mercenaries were at the airport that night too, including the South African pilot Jerry Puren, whose bombing of Congolese villages led, in his own words, to 'flaming huts . . . destruction and death'. These soldiers of fortune were backed by Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Rhodesian Federation, who was ready to stop at nothing to maintain white rule and thought the United Nations was synonymous with the Nazis. The Rhodesian government conducted an official inquiry, which blamed pilot error. But as this book will show, it was a massive cover-up that suppressed and dismissed a mass of crucial evidence, especially that of African eyewitnesses. A subsequent UN inquiry was unable to rule out foul play - but had no access to the evidence to show how and why. Now, for the first time, this story can be told. Who Killed Hammarskjoeld? follows the author on her intriguing and often frightening journey of research to Zambia, South Africa, the USA, Sweden, Norway, Britain, France and Belgium, where she unearthed a mass of new and hitherto secret documentary and photographic evidence.
There are many compelling reasons for policymakers to pay more attention to forested regions and invest more resources there. Forests provide valuable products and en- ronmental services and several hundred million extremely poor people live near them. Perhaps the most compelling reason of all, however, is that unless policymakers take forest governance seriously and respond better to the needs of the people living there, these regions will continue to be breeding grounds for violent con?ict, banditry, and illicit crops. From Nicaragua s Atlantic Coast to the jungles of Cambodia, there are several dozen countries around the world that have experienced severe breakdowns in law and order in their forested regions. In many of these cases those breakdowns had widespread economic, social, and political consequences that have threatened entire societies. You would think that after all of the suffering over the last few decades in the forested regions of Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, the two Congo s, Liberia, Mozambique, Philippines, Solomon Islands, Nepal, Angola, Rwanda, Nicaragua, Cote d Ivoire, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Sudan, Uganda, and Vietnam people would begin to take note. After all, they don t call it jungle warfare for nothing."
Kuhlman explores the reasons so many antiwar progressive reformers ended up forming the most vocal faction favoring U.S. intervention in World War I. She argues that conceptualizations of gender and their relations to militarism, democracy, and citizenship were central to creating support for war. U.S. intervention in World War I occurred in an historical context of widespread anxiety about masculine identity produced by the suffrage movement and highlighted by the election of suffragist Jeannette Rankin, the only woman present in Congress during the debate over President Wilson's War Message. The progressive peace movement-which had reached its zenith of popularity in the U.S. on the eve of intervention-experienced similar disruption as women formed their own pacifist organization. Kuhlman explores the reasons so many progressive lawmakers and pacifists ended up forming the most vocal faction in favor of war. Concepts of femininity and masculinity and their relations to militarism, democracy, and citizenship were central to creating support for war. Initially opposed to military intervention, most male progressive pacifists came to view war as an opportunity to reinvigorate the nation's sagging manhood and nationhood. Some suffragists supported war because they saw war relief work as a way to prove themselves manly enough to withstand the rigors of citizenship during war, and therefore worthy of the vote. After the U.S. declared war, however, New York City feminists' critique of militarism undermined the unity of the progressives' support for war. The New Yorkers' type of feminism, which was based on the linked oppressions of racism, class bias, and sexism, differed from other feminist arguments based on women's moral difference from men. An important study to scholars and researchers of American progressivism, pacifism, and feminism.
This book offers a detailed examination of the effectiveness of the peacekeeping operations of the African Union. Despite its growing reputation in peacekeeping and its status as the oldest continental peacekeeper, the performance of the African Union (AU) has hitherto not been assessed. This book fills that gap and analyses six case studies: Burundi, Comoros, Somalia, Mali, Darfur and the Central African Republic. From a methodological perspective it takes a problem-solving approach and utilises process tracing in its analysis, with its standard for success resting on achieving negative peace (the cessation of violence and provision of security). Theoretically, this study offers a comprehensive list of factors drawn from peace literature and field experience which influence the outcome of peacekeeping. Beyond the major issues, such as funding, international collaboration and mandate, this work also examines the impact of largely ignored factors such as force integrity and territory size. The book modifies the claim of peace literature on what matters for success and advocates the indispensability of domestic elite cooperation, local initiative and international political will. It recognises the necessity of factors such as lead state and force integrity for certain peace operations. In bringing these factors together, this study expands the peacekeeping debate on what matters for stability in conflict areas. This book will be of much interest to students of peacekeeping, African politics, war and conflict studies, and International Relations in general.
This book examines Nordic relations with the superpowers, 1947-61, within the context of regional integration and cooperation theory. The Nordic region balanced security through a combination of NATO ties, neutralism, and special treaties, and low-voltage diplomacy to keep both superpowers at length. The book uses materials from U.S. and Norwegian archives, summarizes the findings of Nordic secondary literature on security, and utilizes concepts borrowed from international relations theory in order to describe Nordic regional security cooperation and to provide a useful model of peaceful security. To test for applicability in the Third World, the Nordic model is then compared to the regional integration system in Southeast Asia--the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
This book contributes to an increasingly important branch of critical security studies that combines insights from critical geopolitics and postcolonial critique by making an argument about the geographies of violence and their differential impact in contemporary security practices, including but not limited to military intervention. The book explores military intervention in Libya through the categories of space and time, to provide a robust ethico-political critique of the intervention. Much of the mainstream international relations scholarship on humanitarian intervention frames the ethical, moral and legal debate over intervention in terms of a binary, between human rights and state sovereignty. In response, O'Sullivan questions the ways in which military violence was produced as a rational and reasonable response to the crisis in Libya, outlining and destabilising this false binary between the human and the state. The book offers methodological tools for questioning the violent institutions at the heart of humanitarian intervention and asking how intervention has been produced as a rational response to crisis. Contributing to the ongoing academic conversation in the critical literature on spatiality, militarism and resistance, the book draws upon postcolonial and poststructural approaches to critical security studies, and will be of great interest to scholars and graduates of critical security studies and international relations.
Due to the increase of security challenges in the proximity of Europe, the prominence of the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) has augmented. This book is a systematic effort to empirically approach the democratic deficit of CSDP, to understand its social construction and propose ways to remedy it. The book uses Foucault's approach of governmentality to unravel the social construction of this deficit and to illuminate the power relations between the different actors participating in CSDP governance and the constraints upon them. Finally, applying the normative reading of agonistic democracy, the author suggests concrete ways for EU citizens to have a say in the political choices of statesmanship in CSDP governance. The Democratic Quality of European Security and Defence Policy will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of EU foreign and security policy and more broadly of European governance, European Politics and democracy.
Many of the peace processes and peace accords over the past decade have ushered in poor quality of peace that makes little difference to the security and standard of living of citizens in post-peace accord societies. This book investigates stalled and dysfunctional peace processes and peace accords in societies experiencing civil wars. Using a critical and comparative perspective, it offers strategies for rejuvenating and re-orientating stalled peace processes and peace accords so that they are more able to foster sustainable and inclusive peace.
Security experts from North Africa, Europe and the US explore confidence-building measures in the CSCE/OSCE for the Mediterranean. They review the Northern debate and Southern perceptions of four dialogues (OSCE, NATO, WEU, EU). Case-studies on Bosnia-Hercegovina and Cyprus discuss confidence-building measures for conflict resolution. The book offers proposals for conflict prevention, short- and long-term partnership-building measures and a code of conduct and prospects for CBMs and PBMs in Euro-Mediterranean relations for the twenty-first century.
Examining American foreign policy towards the Horn of Africa between 1945 and 1991, this book uses Ethiopia and Somalia as case studies to offer an evaluation of the decision-making process during the Cold War, and consider the impact that these decisions had upon subsequent developments both within the Horn of Africa and in the wider international context. The decision-making process is studied, including the role of the president, the input of his advisers and lower level officials within agencies such as the State Department and National Security Council, and the parts played by Congress, bureaucracies, public opinion, and other actors within the international environment, especially the Soviet Union, Ethiopia and Somalia. Jackson examines the extent to which influences exerted by forces other than the president affected foreign policy, and provides the first comprehensive analysis of American foreign policy towards Ethiopia and Somalia throughout the Cold War. This book offers a fresh perspective on issues such as globalism, regionalism, proxy wars, American aid programmes, anti-communism and human rights. It will be of great interest to students and academics in various fields, including American foreign policy, American Studies and Politics, the history of the Cold War, and the history of the Horn of Africa during the modern era.
Centred on the dramatic premiership of Terence O'Neill, Northern Ireland at the Crossroads examines the most hopeful decade for Ulster Unionism this century. O'Neill's bold ambition to reach out to catholics inspired optimism but also massive political instability. Though concerned with the drama and personalities of high politics, this book has much to say on popular attitudes in one of the world's most politicised societies. New light is shed on Paisleyism, discrimination and the civil rights movement.
Part of a series of books which provides practitioners and scholars with up-to-date analyses of historical case material, insights based on field experience and imaginative applications for future third-party roles in Third World conflicts. "Soldiers, Peacekeepers and Disasters" features articles on the use of soldiers in disasters by Leon Gordenker and Thomas Weiss, the role of military forces by John Mackinlay and the UN capacity for humanitarian support organizations by James Jonah.
This edited volume presents selected papers capturing Herbert Kelman's unique and seminal contributions to the social psychology of conflict analysis and resolution, with a special emphasis on the utility of concepts for understanding and constructively addressing violent and intractable conflicts. Central concepts covered include perceptual processes, basic human needs, group and normative processes, social identity, and intergroup trust, which form the basis for developing interactive methods of conflict resolution.
As proven by the recent discovery of ongoing research and tests in India and Pakistan, the nuclear age is not dead. Nuclear weapons, deployed in plentiful numbers during the Cold War by the Americans and Soviets, and, in lesser numbers, by others, were nevertheless controlled in their use by the essential equivalence, of U.S. and Soviet strategic power and by the ability of the U.S. and the Soviet Union to dominate the international security environment by means of their global military power. Now the setting within which nuclear weapons exist has been transformed. Now that the Cold War has ended, and the Soviet Union has vanished, states seeking nuclear weapons operate under decision making rules that are sometimes opaque to Western observers. If the end of the Cold War leads to the unrestrained spread of nuclear weapons, Cimbala stresses that a combination of military hubris and arms control insolvency could lead to new nuclear crises or worse. The author provides a provocative analysis for policy makers and professional military staff as well as scholars and researchers involved with international relations, security studies, and arms control.
"Understanding Collective Political Violence" offers a unique view on contemporary processes of violent political mobilization across continents: Africa, Latin America, South East Asia and the Middle East. It pays particular attention to unconventional combatants such as women or children and details the drivers of their violent engagement.
Late modern wars are legitimized through invocations of humanity; variously the rescue and protection of populations, the re-shaping of entire societies, and the re-constitution of the sphere of the international into a pacified cosmopolitan arena. Drawing on critical social and political thought, the book explores the implications, arguing that these same wars, often referred to as 'liberal', may be interpreted as perpetuating forms of exclusion and domination that render war a tool of control now articulated in global terms.
As international attention focuses on the rebuilding of
Afghanistan, this collection looks critically at the evolution and
meaning of the core concepts underpinning aims and strategies for
recovery: the key role of institutional development and capacity
building in establishing good governance, based on collaboration
between state, civil society and market; the empirical consensus,
over many decades, for best practice in development; the
acknowledgement that recovery of war-torn societies is a
development challenge. It is also shown that, despite this
understanding, operational practice continues to contradict these
principles and lessons learned from proven experience.
This book examines the negotiations between the USA and the USSR on the limitation of strategic arms during the Cold War, from 1969 to 1979. The negotiations on the limitation of strategic arms, which were concluded in two agreements SALT I and SALT II (with only the first ratified), marked a major change in the history of arms control negotiations. For the first time, in the relatively short history of nuclear weapons and negotiations over nuclear disarmament, the two major nuclear powers had agreed to put limits on the size of their nuclear strategic arms. However, the negotiations between the US and USSR were the easy part of the process. The more difficult part was the negotiations among the Americans. Through the study of a decade of negotiations on the limitation of strategic arms in the Cold War, this book examines the forces that either allowed US presidents and senior officials to pave a path toward a US arms limitation policy, or prevented them from doing so. Most importantly, the book discusses the meaning of these negotiations and agreements on the limitation of strategic arms, and seeks to identify the intention of the negotiators: Were they aiming at making the world a safer place? What was the purpose of the negotiations and agreements within US strategic thinking, both militarily and diplomatically? Were they aimed at improving relations with the Soviet Union, or only at enhancing the strategic balance as one component of the strategic nuclear deterrence between the two powers? This book will be of much interest to students of Cold War history, arms control, US foreign policy and international relations in general.
Ethnic conflict now presents the thorniest problems for military and civilian strategists of all stripes. This book presents a new general theory of strategy, encompassing studies of the relationship between values, interest, and strategy as these relate to ethnic conflicts. It focuses on the relationship between values and strategy, building a theory on the hypothesis that national values influence national strategy. Paquette's research reveals that national values influence national strategy through three mechanisms: cognition, appreciation, and evaluation. Each mechanism, and indeed the whole value-focused approach to strategic thinking, is described using a network of interrelated statements. Paquette develops a methodology specific to the issues of international security and ethnic considerations. She tests this theory extensively for internal consistency before applying it to a single historical case: French decision-making on national strategy between 1955 and 1970; however, because of its generality, this same theory could easily be applied to other cases. As with any theory, it is possible to vary successively or simultaneously assumptions or conditions and to derive new predictions. This process of deriving variations has the potential to help in the training of strategists, both military and civilian. |
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