THE STORY OF BRITAIN'S LEADING FORENSIC EXPLOSIVES SCIENTIST, WHO FOR NEARLY THREE-DECADES INVESTIGATED SOME OF THE MOST PROMINENT NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL BOMB ATTACKS IN HISTORY. Cliff Todd devoted his life to bringing bomb makers to justice. He and his colleagues at the Ministry of Defence's Forensic Explosives Laboratory are the unsung heroes of terrorist bomb attacks - the men and women in white suits who piece together who planted the bombs, what a device consisted of and how the perpetrators might give themselves away. They played a pivotal role in uncovering the secrets behind some of the world's most horrifying terrorist outrages. Explosive tells the stories of these high-profile cases and details, for the first time, the contribution Todd and his team made in tracking down bombers during a time when Britain was under attack first by the IRA and then by Islamic extremists inspired by al-Qaeda. Explosive takes the reader into the murky world of the amateur bomb maker, and reveals what Todd's department achieved in many now infamous attacks, including the device concealed in a radio cassette player that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, the IRA attacks on Warrington in Cheshire, the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002, and the 7/7 onslaught in central London that claimed 56 lives and injured 784 others in 2005. In Explosive, Todd takes us step by step through the investigations, explaining the chemistry, the forensic work and the emotional toll on him and his staff as they sought to recreate and understand what had happened at some of the most shocking tragedies in modern peacetime history.

Black Ops is a skirmish wargame of tactical espionage combat that recreates the tension and excitement of modern action-thrillers such as the Bond and Bourne films. The fast-play rules keep all the players in the thick of the action, while the mission generator provides a wide range of options for scenarios - from stealthy extraction or surveillance missions to more overt raids and assaults. Stealth, combat, and technical expertise all have a role to play, and players may recruit a number of different operative types - spies, mercenaries, criminals, hackers, special forces, and many more - to recruit the best possible team for the job. Players may also choose to join a faction - powerful organizations, intelligence agencies, criminal syndicates, militaries, or rebel groups, each with a stake in international affairs. By doing so, their team may receive certain benefits, but may also find itself limited at a crucial time. With the variety offered by the characters, factions, and scenarios, no two games of Black Ops should ever be the same!

Over the course of World War II, guerrillas from across the Philippines opposed Imperial Japan's occupation of the archipelago. Although the guerrillas never possessed the combat strength to overcome the Japanese occupation on their own, they disrupted operations, kept the spirit of resistance alive, provided important intelligence to the Allies, and assumed frontline duties fighting the Japanese. By examining the organization, motivations, capabilities, and operations of the guerrillas, James Villanueva argues that the guerrillas were effective because Japanese punitive measures, along with a strong sense of obligation and loyalty to the United States, pushed most of the population to support the guerrillas. Unlike their predecessors opposing the Americans in 1899, the guerrillas during World War II benefited from the leadership of US and Filipino military personnel and received significant aid and direction from General Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) Headquarters, conducting one of the most effective and sophisticated resistance campaigns in World War II.Awaiting MacArthur's Return is the first comprehensive comparative analysis of the major World War II guerrilla groups across the Philippine Archipelago, providing a fuller picture of the nature of the war in the Southwest Pacific and revealing the extent to which the guerrilla movement affected operations for both Allied and Imperial Japanese forces. Analyzing the organizational effectiveness of the guerrillas resisting the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, this book alternates narrative chapters with thematic chapters examining the guerrillas' organization, logistics, administration, intelligence gathering, and the support they received from Allied forces and provided the Allies in turn. Villanueva offers the most in-depth analysis of the guerrillas' military organization and effectiveness in the context of existing theories of insurgency and counterinsurgency while using an extensive body of memoirs, archival guerrilla and US Army and Navy records, and translations of Japanese documents and interviews with Japanese officers.

In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek - the head of China's military academy and leader of the Kuomintang (KMT) - began the `northern expeditions' to bring China's northern territories back under the control of the state. It was during this period that the KMT purged communist activities, fractured the army and sparked the Chinese Civil War - which would rage for over twenty years. The communists, led by General Mao Tse-Tsung, were for much of the period forced underground and concentrated in the Chinese countryside. As the author argues, this resulted in China's war featuring unusually high levels of espionage and sabotage, and increased the military importance of information gathering. Based on newly declassified material, Panagiotis Dimitrakis charts the double-crossings, secret meetings and bloody assassinations which would come to define China's future. Uniquely, The Secret War for China gives equal weighting to the role of foreign actors: the role of British intelligence in unmasking Communist International (Comintern) agents in China, for example, and the allies' attempts to turn nationalist China against the Japanese. The Secret War for China also documents the clandestine confrontation between Mao and Chiang and the secret negotiations between Chiang and the Axis Powers, whose forces he employed against the CCP once the Second World War was over. In his turn, Mao employed nationalist forces who had defected - during the last three years of the civil war about 105 out of 869 KMT generals defected to the CCP. This book is an urgent and necessary guide to the intricacies of the Chinese Civil War, a war which decisively shaped the modern Asian world.

The Law of Non-International Armed Conflict brings together and critically analyses the disparate conventional, customary, and soft law relating to non-international armed conflict. All the relevant bodies of international law are considered, including international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and international human rights law. The book traces the changes to the legal framework applicable to non-international armed conflict from ad hoc regulation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, to systematic regulation through the 1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Additional Protocols, to the transformation of the law in the mid-1990s. Armed conflicts ranging from the US civil war, the Algerian War of Independence, and the attempted secession of Biafra, through to the current conflicts in the Colombia, the Philippines, and Sudan are all considered. The identification and analysis of the law is complemented by a consideration of the practice, allowing both violations of, and respect for, the law, to be ascertained. Given that non-international armed conflicts are fought between states and non-state armed groups, or between armed groups, particular attention is paid to the oft-neglected views of armed groups. This is done through an analysis of hundreds of statements, unilateral declarations, internal regulations, and bilateral agreements issued by armed groups. Equivalent material emanating from states parties to conflicts is also considered. The book is thus an essential reference point for the law and practice of non-international armed conflicts.

In late 1940 a group of five young Australian soldiers set out on a secret mission: one of the Second World War's most daring operations and the first for Britain's legendry Special Operations Executive. Leading a small force of Ethiopian freedom fighters on an epic trek across the harsh African bush from the Sudan, the small incursion force entered Italian-occupied Ethiopia and began waging a guerilla war against the 250,000-strong Italian army. One of these men, Ken Burke, was Duncan McNab's uncle. Using a combination of original research and personal anecdotes, McNab tells the little known story of Mission 101, and how a small group of Australians under British command helped to free a nation.

Few island nations have stirred the soul like Cuba. From Hemingway's intoxicating Havana to Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club, outsiders have persistently been fascinated by Cuba for its music (jazz to rumba), its rich literature, its art and dance (danzon to mambo) and perhaps above all for its bold experiment of a socialist revolution in action. Antoni Kapcia shows how the thaw in relations between Cuba and the USA now makes a fresh appraisal of the country and its modern history essential. He authoritatively explores the `essence' of the Cuban revolution, revealing it to be a maverick phenomenon tied not so much to socialism or Communism for their own sakes but instead to an idealistic vision of postcolonial nationalism. Reassessing the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the author examines the central personalities: not just the famous trio of Che Guevara, Fidel and Raul Castro in shaping the ideas of the revolution but, still further back, the visionary ideology of Jose Marti. Kapcia's book reflects on the future of the revolution as Raul and his government begin to cede power to a new generation.

'A magnificent story, brilliantly told. Read it!' ANTHONY HOROWITZ SIX GENTLEMEN, ONE GOAL - THE DESTRUCTION OF HITLER'S WAR MACHINE. In the spring of 1939, a top secret organisation was founded in London: its purpose was to plot the destruction of Hitler's war machine through spectacular acts of sabotage. The guerrilla campaign that followed was to prove every bit as extraordinary as the six gentlemen who directed it. One of them, Cecil Clarke, was a maverick engineer who invented a lethal bomb. Another, William Fairbairn, was the world's leading expert in silent killing. Led by dapper Scotsman Colin Gubbins, and aided by a group of formidable women, these six men and their sabotage attacks single-handedly changed the course of the war. 'Terrific . . . a great read' IAN HISLOP 'Could not be faster-moving or more exciting' LITERARY REVIEW Previously published in hardback as The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

At peak utilization, private security contractors (PSCs) constituted a larger occupying force in Iraq and Afghanistan than did U.S. troops. Yet, no book has so far assessed the impact of private security companies on military effectiveness. Filling that gap, Molly Dunigan reveals how the increasing tendency to outsource missions to PSCs has significant ramifications for both tactical and long-term strategic military effectiveness--and for the likelihood that the democracies that deploy PSCs will be victorious in warfare, both over the short- and long-term.
She highlights some of the ongoing problems with deploying large numbers of private security contractors alongside the military, specifically identifying the deployment scenarios involving PSCs that are most likely to have either positive or negative implications for military effectiveness. She then provides detailed recommendations to alleviate these problems. Given the likelihood that the U.S. will continue to use PSCs in future contingencies, this book has real implications for the future of U.S. military and foreign policy.

In this book, Ariel Ahram offers a new perspective on a growing threat to international and human security--the reliance of 'weak states' on quasi-official militias, paramilitaries, and warlords.
Tracing the history of several "high profile" paramilitary organizations, including Indonesia's various militia factions, Iraq's tribal "awakening," and Iran's Revolutionary Guard and Basij corps, the book shows why and how states co-opt these groups, turning former rebels into state-sponsored militias. Building on an historical and comparative empirical approach that emphasizes decolonization, revolution, and international threat, the author offers a new set of policy prescriptions for addressing this escalating international crisis--with particular attention to strategies for mitigating the impact of this devolution of violence on the internal and international stability of states.

This book examines the complex practice of counter-insurgency warfare through the prism of British military experiences in the post-war era and endeavours to unpack their performance. During the twentieth century counter-insurgency assumed the status of one of the British military's fortes. A wealth of asymmetric warfare experience was accumulated after the Second World War as the small wars of decolonisation offered the army of a fading imperial power many opportunities to deploy against an irregular enemy. However, this quantity of experience does not translate into quality. This book argues that the British, far from being exemplars of counter-insurgency, have in fact consistently proved to be slow learners in counter-insurgency warfare. This book presents an analysis of the most significant British counter-insurgency campaigns of the past 60 years: Malaya (1948-60), Kenya (1952-60), South Arabia (1962-67), the first decade of the Northern Irish 'Troubles' (1969-79), and the recent British counter-insurgency campaign in southern Iraq (2003-09). Colonial history is used to contextualise the contemporary performance in Iraq and undermine the commonly held confidence in British counter-insurgency. Blending historical research with critical analysis, this book seeks to establish a new paradigm through which to interpret and analyse the British approach to counter-insurgency, as well as considering the mythology of inherent British competence in the realm of irregular warfare. It will be of interest to students of counter-insurgency, military history, strategic studies, security studies, and IR in general.

In his third book, David Kilcullen takes us out of the mountains: away from the remote, rural guerrilla warfare of Afghanistan, and into the marginalised slums and complex security threats of the world's coastal cities, where almost 75 per cent of us will be living by mid-century. Scrutinising major environmental trends - population growth, coastal urbanisation - and increasing digital connectivity he projects a future of feral cities, urban systems under stress, and increasing overlaps between crime and war, internal and external threats, and the real and virtual worlds. Informed by Kilcullen's own fieldwork in the Caribbean, Somalia, the Middle East and Afghanistan, and that of his field research teams in cities in Central America and Africa, Out of the Mountains presents detailed, on-the-ground accounts of the new faces of modern conflict - - from the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, to transnational drug networks, local street gangs, and the uprisings of the Arab Spring.

Rupert Wieloch has seen more than his share of front-line military action, having served as a platoon commander during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, before leading a squadron during the Gulf War in 1990. Deploying to Bosnia with the United Nations, his troops became renowned by the press as "Saviours of the Children" after he planned and executed the largest defensive battle fought by a Commonwealth combat force for 20 years. Having worked as a spokesperson for the Army Board, Wieloch's role moved to planning and strategy at the highest level. He played a key role in Operation Veritas, the UK's response to 9/11, as part of the team which developed the UK's campaign against international terrorism. With this wealth of experience, he went on to command the British contingent in the NATO mission to Iraq and later to serve as the Senior British Military Commander in Libya following the fall of Gaddafi. As the author puts it: "I hope this book opens eyes to a few unheralded escapades and adds colour to some historic events".

This book tells the story-for the first time-of the United States government's response to Guevara's ill-starred insurgency in Bolivia in 1967. Henry Butterfield Ryan argues that Guevara's life must be re-evaluated in light of secret documents only recently released by the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council. Ryan's dramatic account of the last days of Che Guevara is sure to appeal to scholars and students of United States foreign policy, Latin American history, military history, and to all others interested in this modern revolutionary's remarkable life. "Ryan offers a thoughtful critique of both the operational and intelligence-gathering aspects of the US intervention against the Cuban intervention in Bolivia....[He] enlivens his narrative with vivid portraits of the two American officials who played key parts in the hunt for Guevara....[This] is a welcome addition to the literature on both Che Guevara and US intervention in Latin America."-The Washington Monthly

This volume explores the nature of civil war in the modern world and in historical perspective. Civil wars represent the principal form of armed conflict since the end of the Second World War, and certainly in the contemporary era. The nature and impact of civil wars suggests that these conflicts reflect and are also a driving force for major societal change. In this sense, Understanding Civil Wars: Continuity and change in intrastate conflict argues that the nature of civil war is not fundamentally changing in nature. The book includes a thorough consideration of patterns and types of intrastate conflict and debates relating to the causes, impact, and 'changing nature' of war. A key focus is on the political and social driving forces of such conflict and its societal meanings, significance and consequences. The author also explores methodological and epistemological challenges related to studying and understanding intrastate war. A range of questions and debates are addressed. What is the current knowledge regarding the causes and nature of armed intrastate conflict? Is it possible to produce general, cross-national theories on civil war which have broad explanatory relevance? Is the concept of 'civil wars' empirically meaningful in an era of globalization and transnational war? Has intrastate conflict fundamentally changed in nature? Are there historical patterns in different types of intrastate conflict? What are the most interesting methodological trends and debates in the study of armed intrastate conflict? How are narratives about the causes and nature of civil wars constructed around ideas such as ethnic conflict, separatist conflict and resource conflict? This book will be of much interest to students of civil wars, intrastate conflict, security studies and international relations in general.

This is the comprehensive account of the long and difficult road traveled to end the fifty-year armed conflict with the FARC, the oldest guerrilla army in the world; a long war that left more than eight million victims. The obstacles to peace were both large and dangerous. All previous attempts to negotiate with the FARC had failed, creating an environment where differences were irreconcilable and political will was scarce. The Battle for Peace is the story not only of the six years of negotiation and the peace process that transformed a country, its secret contacts, its international implications, and difficulties and achievements but also of the two previous decades in which Colombia oscillated between warlike confrontation and negotiated solution. In The Battle for Peace Juan Manuel Santos shares the lessons he learned about war and peace and how to build a successful negotiation process in the context of a nation which had all but resigned itself to war and the complexities of twenty-first-century international law and diplomacy. While Santos is clear that there is no handbook for making peace, he offers conflict-tested guidance on the critical parameters, conditions, and principles as well as rich detail on the innovations that made it possible for his nation to find common ground and a just solution.

Far from being an anachronism, much less a kit-bag of techniques, people's war raises what has always been present in military history, irregular warfare, and fuses it symbiotically with what has likewise always been present politically, rebellion and the effort to seize power. The result is a strategic approach for waging revolutionary warfare, the effort "to make a revolution." Voluntarism is wedded to the exploitation of structural contradiction through the building of a new world to challenge the existing world, through formation of a counterstate within the state in order ultimately to destroy and supplant the latter. This is a process of far greater moment than implied by the label "guerrilla warfare" so often applied to what Mao and others were about. This volume deals with the continuing importance of Maoist and post-Maoist concepts of people's war. Drawing on a range of examples that include Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan, the collection shows that the study of people's war is not just an historical curiosity but vital to the understanding of contemporary insurgent and terrorist movements. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Winston Churchill authorised the creation of a new wartime secret service, the Special Operations Executive(SOE), with the order "And now set Europe ablaze". On behalf of the Secret WW2 Network, an educational charity dedicated to revealing hitherto-secret operations to the current generation, Paul McCue tells a main story of four Brighton and Hove-born agents honoured with blue plaques. He details the organisation's creation and post-war demise, its training methods and the missions of the four chief subjects. He also covers three other agents, a special duties RAF pilot and the inspiration for 'Q', the inspired 'boffin' of the James Bond books and films - all of whom had links with the city.Some enjoyed great success, others were doomed to failure and death, but all displayed the volunteer spirit and courage that saw Britain through the darkest days of the Second World War. Their stories, largely little known,deserve to be told.

Ranging from war journalism to crime stories to profiles on influential leaders to pieces on sports, gambling and the impending impact of supercomputers on the practice of medicine, this collection is Bowden at his best. Pieces that will appear in the collection include, "The Three Battles of Wanat", which tells the story of a bloody engagement in Afghanistan and the extraordinary years-long fallout within the US military, "The Drone Warrior," in which Bowden examines the strategic, legal and moral issues surrounding armed drones, and "The Case of the Vanishing Blonde," which first appeared in Vanity Fair and recounts the chilling story of a woman who went missing from a Florida hotel only to turn up near the Everglades, brutally beaten, raped and still alive. Also included are profiles on a diverse range of notable and influential people such as Joe Biden, Kim Jong-un, Judy Clarke who is well known for defending America's worst serial killers and David Simon, the creator of the successful HBO series The Wire.

Since the earliest recorded military history, scouting and reconnaissance have been key tools employed by military commanders to obtain a picture of the tactical situation and make informed decisions. Scouts known as sciritae were deployed by the Spartans and had a privileged position in their order of battle. The Spartans were so aware of the advantage their scouting operations gave them that they went to great lengths to keep them secret. As military tactics, weapons and equipment developed over the centuries, methods of scouting and reconnaissance evolved and adapted but always remained true to the spirit of the scout - light on their feet, taking only what they need and returning with the information that could turn potential defeat into victory. Military Reconnaissance provides a concise but revealing picture of the art of military scouting and reconnaissance from the highly toned Spartan warriors, the scouts employed by Julius Caesar, through the middle ages to the Napoleonic Wars to the role of the scout in modern warfare.

Staging Dissent: Young Women of Color and Transnational Activism seeks to interrupt normative histories of girlhood dominated by North American contexts and Western feminisms to offer an alternative history of girlhoods produced by and through globalization. Weems does this by offering three case studies that exemplify how transnational and indigenous youth dissent against capitalism and colonialism through situated "guerilla pedagogies."

Detention and confinementOCoof both combatants and large groups of civiliansOCohave become fixtures of asymmetric wars over the course of the last century. Counterinsurgency theoreticians and practitioners explain this dizzying rise of detention camps, internment centers, and enclavisation by arguing that such actions protect populations. In this book, Laleh Khalili counters these arguments, telling the story of how this proliferation of concentration camps, strategic hamlets, security walls, and offshore prisons has come to be.
"Time in the Shadows" investigates the two major liberal counterinsurgencies of our day: Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. War on Terror. In rich detail, the book investigates Abu Ghraib, Guantinamo Bay, CIA black sites, the Khiam Prison, and Gaza, among others, and links them to a history of colonial counterinsurgencies from the Boer War and the U.S. Indian wars, to Vietnam, the British small wars in Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus, and the French pacification of Indochina and Algeria.
Khalili deftly demonstrates that whatever the form of incarcerationOCovisible or invisible, offshore or inland, containing combatants or civiliansOColiberal states have consistently acted illiberally in their counterinsurgency confinements. As our tactics of war have shifted beyond slaughter to elaborate systems of detention, liberal states have warmed to the pursuit of asymmetric wars. Ultimately, Khalili confirms that as tactics of counterinsurgency have been rendered more humane, they have also increasingly encouraged policymakers to willingly choose to wage wars."

The tourism industry has evolved and maturated over the recent years. Today, tourism is not only a leading industry but also a consolidated commercial activity worldwide. Unfortunately, the turn of the century has accelerated a number of global risks, placing the tourism industry in jeopardy. Scholars adopted an economics-based paradigm, which has focused on the commercial nature of tourism as a benefactor of local economies, while terrorists are depicted as the enemies of democracy. This begs the question: are tourists cultural ambassadors of their respective societies? Tourism, Terrorism and Security explores the current limitations of specialized literature to frame an all-encompassing understanding of tourism and security today. The main thesis of this book explores the idea that while tourists are workers who need to validate their political institutions through the articulation of leisure practices, terrorists are natives from the societies they hate. Terrorism has imposed a climate of mistrust, whereby tourists are targeted and killed to impose a political message. This book explores the semantics of this message. Tourism, Terrorism and Security is a must-read for students and scholars of tourism, hospitality, security, and cultural studies.

This Element introduces the concept of oligopoly of coercion to interpretate the interaction between drug trafficking and reconfiguration of the state in Colombia. Three elements are central to this interpretation: corruption in oligopolies of coercion must be understood as a payment by drug traffickers for acting like a parallel state; the state criminalizes more drug as merchandise than drug as capital - its equivalent in money; the politics and war around drug trafficking in Colombia should be understood as the way in which peripheral societies access global markets through the ruling institutions of private armies. With these elements, the author focuses on the dynamics of the reconfiguration of the state in Colombia after the cocaine boom in the mid-70s and the evolution of the private armies in Colombia.