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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Peace studies > General
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.
Great-power conflict and great-power war are still the most dangerous risks the international community is facing today. This edited volume investigates the feasibility of a modern day concert of powers as a way for managing the risk of great power conflicts in the 21st century. The volume takes its inspiration from history. The 19th century European Concert was not only able to ensure a period of exceptional peacefulness among the European great powers, it also limited the scope and duration of the few wars that did break out. The chapter authors discuss the achievements and limits of the historical concert, define the requirements that a new concert would have to meet, critically evaluate obstacles and risks of the approach and indicate how a 21st century concert of powers could complement, and fit into, the present legal and institutional setting of global politics. This volume offers a systematic examination of the norms and tools of the historical template and scrutinizes these tools for their utility in our time. It will be of great interest to a wide range of scholars and students in areas such as International Relations, History and International Law.
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.
Results of the 2007 Nuremberg Conference on Peace and Justice: Tensions between peace and justice have long been debated by scholars, practitioners and agencies including the United Nations, and both theory and policy must be refined for very practical application in situations emerging from violent conflict or political repression. Specific contexts demand concrete decisions and approaches aimed at redress of grievance and creation of conditions of social justice for a non-violent future. There has been definitive progress in a world in which blanket amnesties were granted at times with little hesitation. There is a growing understanding that accountability has pragmatic as well as principled arguments in its favour. Practical arguments as much as shifts in the norms have created a situation in which the choice is increasingly seen as "which forms of accountability" rather than a stark choice between peace and justice. It is socio-political transformation, not just an end to violence, that is needed to build sustainable peace. This book addresses these dilemmas through a thorough overview of the current state of legal obligations; discussion of the need for a holistic approach including development; analysis of the implications of the coming into force of the ICC; and a series of "hard" case studies on internationalized and local approaches devised to navigate the tensions between peace and justice.
This ground-breaking book examines how and why the much-vaunted Oslo Peace Accords between the Israelis and Palestinians collapsed. The author analyzes the players on both sides of the accords, pointing out the attitudes and actions that serve to undermine peace and promote conflict. On the one hand, she criticizes the Islamist organizations Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for not tolerating the idea of any true long-term peace with Israel. On the other hand, she scrutinizes the factions for and against Oslo that developed within Israeli government circles, and she calls into question the ability of Israeli intelligence to correctly assess the Palestinian negotiators. By means of such examination, this book poses a fundamental question: Can Islamic fundamentalism ever accept the existence of Israel or will it short-circuit any prospect of peace between majority-Muslim states and their non-Muslim counterparts?
This book offers a detailed examination of the counter-insurgency operations undertaken by the Nigerian military against Boko Haram between 2011 and 2017. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted with military units in Nigeria, Counter-Insurgency in Nigeria has two main aims. First, it seeks to provide an understanding of the Nigerian military's internal role - a role that today, as a result of internal threats, pivots towards counter-insurgency. The book illustrates how organizational culture, historical experience, institutions, and doctrine, are critical to understanding the Nigerian military and its attitudes and actions against the threat of civil disobedience, today and in the past. The second aim of the book is to examine the Nigerian military campaign against Boko Haram insurgents - specifically, plans and operations between June 2011 and April 2017. Within this second theme, emphasis is placed on the idea of battlefield innovation and the reorganization within the Nigerian military since 2013, as the Nigerian Army and Air Force recalibrated themselves for COIN warfare. A certain mystique has surrounded the technicalities of COIN operations by the Army against Boko Haram, and this book aims to disperse that veil of secrecy. Furthermore, the work's analysis of the air force's role in counter-insurgency is unprecedented within the literature on military warfare in Nigeria. This book will be of great interest to students of military studies, counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, African politics and security studies in general.
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.
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.
Effective peace agreements are rarely accomplished by idealists. The process of moving from situations of entrenched oppression, armed conflict, open warfare, and mass atrocities toward peace and reconciliation requires a series of small steps and compromises to open the way for the kind of dialogue and negotiation that make political stability, the beginning of democracy, and the rule of law a possibility. For over forty years, Charles Villa-Vicencio has been on the front lines of Africa's battle for racial equality. In "Walk with Us and Listen," he argues that reconciliation needs honest talk to promote trust building and enable former enemies and adversaries to explore joint solutions to the cause of their conflicts. He offers a critical assessment of the South African experiment in transitional justice as captured in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and considers the influence of "ubuntu," in which individuals are defined by their relationships, and other traditional African models of reconciliation. Political reconciliation is offered as a cautious model against which transitional politics needs to be measured. Villa-Vicencio challenges those who stress the obligation to prosecute those allegedly guilty of gross violation of human rights, replacing this call with the need for more complementarity between the International Criminal Court and African mechanisms to achieve the greater goals of justice and peace building.
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.
Through US military history, Lavender directly confronts the dominant US viewpoint of redemptive violence, the concept that a nation can use its military to improve the human condition. Alternatives are presented in order to encourage the current recessive worldview that supports conflict resolution, cooperation, collaboration and peaceful efforts.
This is the first scholarly study of late Victorian and Edwardian peace activism, the precursor to the pacifism of the 1930s and later. The movement's activists included Richard Cobden, Herbert Spencer, Keir Hardie, J. A. Hobson, and Norman Angell, and it made a significant impact on public debate over issues such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 and the international crisis leading up to the First World War.
In the space of a generation, Cyprus - the island of Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love - has experienced an anti-colonial struggle, post-colonial chaos, internecine fighting and hatred, civil war, invasion, population displacements and physical partition. The narrative of Cyprus' recent history has created numerous attitudes and prejudices which run deep but which have never before been explored on a human level. Now for the first time Yiannis Papadakis, firmly planted in the Greek Cypriot world, sets out to discover 'The Other' - the much maligned Turks. Papadakis decided with some trepidation to travek to Constantinople (to his Greek worldview it was still Constantinople) to learn Turkish. There he discovered that actually it is Istanbul, and that Turkey is not the place of his once imagined demonology. Armed with new insights he returned to Cyprus and delved into the two communities, locked in their mutually contemptuous embrace, to explore their common humanity and to understand what has divided them. He focused on Nicosia where the people who used to live together in one neighbourhood found themselves separated by a 'Dead Zone', two armies and a UN force. His was a journey to the various sides of the Dead Zone and to the various zones of the dead, the realms of memory and history. This book is the moving, sometimes humorous and always fascinating account of that journey.
Germany and the Future of European Security examines the impact of unification on German foreign and security policy, providing the first comprehensive analysis of how the unified Germany has adapted to the post-Cold War security environment. The book considers the development of Germany's understanding of the European security environment, Germany's national interests, its role in Europe and the international system and the policy instruments at its disposal. This provides a context for testing various views about the future of European security more generally.
This 12-volume set of previously out-of-print tiles examines many aspects of conflict and security in the Middle East. Works on the first Gulf War (including one on its environmental impact) sit alongside books about the superpowers, nuclear rivalry and attempts at peacemaking.
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.
This study outlines the emerging cultural turn in Peace Studies and provides a critical understanding of the cultural dimension of reconciliation. Taking an anthropological view on decentralization and peacebuilding in Indonesia, it sets new standards for an interdisciplinary research field.
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.
This dictionary provides information on the writers, editors, and publications that have carried on a strong American tradition of peace advocacy that goes back to colonial times. The only work of its kind, the dictionary contains entries for some 400 individuals and more than 200 periodicals that represent viewpoints ranging from radical nonresistance, religious pacifism, and racial nonviolence, to selective anti-war positions and advocacy of world government. Professor Roberts' introduction presents an interpretive overview of peace advocacy and the various print media that became vehicles for it, including mainstream magazines and church or peace movement publications such as tracts, books, and pamphlets. Each entry summarizes the individual's literary contributions and lists known affiliations with periodicals, peace organizations, and religious groups. The bibliographic section documents a representative selection of periodicals that have sought to promote peace at various times in America's history. The volume also includes information on peace organizations and the writers and editors affiliated with them. The product of meticulous research, this reference dictionary brings together a rich collection of material on the writers, social reformers, and publications that have shaped American pacifist tradition. Of interest for the fields of American social history, journalism and communication history, and religion, as well as peace studies.
Humanitarian action confronts us with the dilemmas of international relations in the age of globalization. The approach in this book is holistic, comparative and analytical. Humanitarian intervention is considered from the point of view of political economy, public administration, international relations, international law, the military, political theory, sociology, culture and media studies. Chapters discuss experiences across Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Iraq, Haiti and other cases, if we are moving towards global governance humanitarian intervention is part of this motion. It is a harbinger of a new global politics, which is all the more reason to consider it scrupulously.
This book evaluates American foreign policy actions from the perspective of great power responsibility, with three case studies: Operation Iraqi Freedom, American drone strikes in Pakistan and the post- 9/11 practice of extraordinary rendition. This book argues that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, American drone attacks in Pakistan and the practice of extraordinary rendition are the examples of irresponsible actions undertaken by the U.S. acting as a great power in international society. Focusing on a major theoretical approach of International Relations, the English School, this book considers the responsibilities of great powers in international society. It points to three obligations of great powers: to act according to the norm of legality, to act according to the norm of legitimacy, and to adhere to the principles of prudence. The author applies the criteria of legality, legitimacy and prudence, to analyse the three foreign policy endeavours of the U.S., and, developing a normative framework, clarifies the implications for future U.S. foreign policy. This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory, American politics, foreign policy studies, international law, South Asian studies and Middle Eastern studies.
Nimmo examines Japanese and Russian attempts to resolve outstanding differences lingering since the end of World War II. He provides an in-depth analysis of Japanese efforts to regain control of the Northern Territories and explores attitudes of both Japanese and Russians at the grass roots level. As the end of the twentieth century approaches, lingering shadows of the devastating mid-century conflict witnessed in World War II are reflected in a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia over possession of the South Kurile Islands, known as the Northern Territories in Japan. For more than four decades, Kremlin leaders contended there was no territorial problem--the 1945 Yalta Agreement resolved the issue, they claimed--but Japan doggedly insisted the islands were Japanese territory. Yet, even with the major changes that have taken place since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia and Japan have been unable to reach an agreement. Nimmo examines the attempts of the two countries and their statesmen to resolve their differences. He provides an in-depth analysis of Japanese efforts to regain control of the Northern Territories and explores attitudes of both Japanese and Russians at the grass roots level. Nimmo provides an overview of the historical perspectives while giving an extended examination of changing relationships in the post-1991 era. This book will be of interest to diplomatic and military historians, Japanese and Russian (Soviet) Studies scholars, and students of the contemporary East Asia.
This book looks at the Guatemalan peace process, which was successful in providing a development program to modernize the economy and national infrastructure with the support of international organizations and negotiating parties. Short draws on the political theory of Antonio Gramsci to analyze the extent to which peace processes offer opportunity for progressive social transformation.
This book examines Winston Churchill's role in the creation and development of the Anglo-American special relationship. Drawing together world leading and emergent scholars, this volume offers a critical celebration of Churchill's contribution to establishing the Anglo-American special relationship. Marking the seventieth anniversary of Churchill's pronouncement in 1946 of that special relationship in his famous Iron Curtain speech, the book provides new insights into old debates by drawing upon approaches and disciplines that have hitherto been marginalised or neglected. The book foregrounds agency, culture, values, ideas and the construction and representation of special Anglo-American relations, past and present. The volume covers two main themes. Firstly, it identifies key influences upon Churchill as he developed his political career, especially processes and patterns of Anglo-American convergence prior to and during World War Two. Second, it provides insights into how Churchill sought to promote a post-war Anglo-American special relationship, how he discursively constructed it and how he has remained central to that narrative to the present day. From this analysis emerges new understanding of the raw material from which Churchill conjured special UK-US relations and of how his conceptualisation of that special relationship has been shaped and re-shaped in the decades after 1946. This book will be of much interest to students of Anglo-American relations, Cold War Studies, foreign policy, international history and IR in general. |
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