![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues
In essays written specifically for this volume, distinguished contributors assess highly charged and fundamental questions about the Holocaust: Is it unique? How can it be compared with other instances of genocide? What constitutes genocide, and how should the international community respond? On one side of the dispute are those who fear that if the Holocaust is seen as the worst case of genocide ever, its character will diminish the sufferings of other persecuted groups. On the other side are those who argue that unless the Holocaust's uniqueness is established, the inevitable tendency will be to diminish its abiding significance. The editor's introductions provide the contextual considerations for understanding this multidimensional dispute and suggest that there are universal lessons to be learned from studying the Holocaust. The third edition brings this volume up to date and includes new readings on the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, common themes in genocide ideologies, and Iran's reaction to the Holocaust. In a world where genocide persists and the global community continues to struggle with the implications of international crime, prosecution, justice, atonement, reparation, and healing, the issues addressed in this book are as relevant as ever.
This book highlights how, and why, torture is such a compelling tool for states and other powerful actors. While torture has a short-term use value for perpetrators, it also creates a devastating legacy for victims, their families and communities. In exposing such repercussions, this book addresses the questions ?What might torture victims need to move forward from their violation and ?How can official responses provide truth or justice for torture victims Building on observations, documentary analysis and over seventy interviews with both torture victims and transitional justice workers this book explores how torture was used, suffered and resisted in Timor-Leste. The author investigates the extent to which transitional justice institutions have provided justice for torture victims; illustrating how truth commissions and international courts operate together and reflecting on their successes and weaknesses with reference to wider social, political and economic conditions. Stanley also details victims? experiences of torture and highlights how they experience life in the newly built state of Timor-Leste Tracking the past, present and future of human rights, truth and justice for victims in Timor-Leste, Torture, Truth and Justice will be of interest to students, professionals and scholars of Asian studies, International Studies, Human Rights and Social Policy.
Winner, Prix Litteraire Paris-Liege 2021 Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation When we speak of mass killers, we may speak of radicalized ideologues, mediocrities who only obey orders, or bloodthirsty monsters. Who are these men who kill on a mass scale? What is their consciousness? Do they not feel horror or compassion? Richard Rechtman's Living in Death offers new answers to a question that has haunted us at least since the Holocaust. For Rechtman, it is not ideologies that kill, but people. This book descends into the ordinary life of people who execute hundreds every day, the same way others go to the office. Bringing philosophical sophistication to the ordinary, the book constitutes an anthropology of mass killers. Turning away from existing psychological and philosophical accounts of genocide's perpetrators, Rechtman instead explores the conditions under which administering death becomes a job like any other. Considering Cambodia, Rwanda, and other mass killings, Living in Death draws on a vast array of archival research, psychological theory, and anecdotes from the author's clinical work with refugees and former participants in genocide. Rechtman mounts a compelling case for reframing and refocusing our attempts to explain-and preempt-acts of mass torture, rape, killing, and extermination. What we must see, Rechtman argues, is that for genocidaires (those who carry out acts that are or approach genocide), there is nothing extraordinary, unusual, or world-historical about their actions. On the contrary, they are preoccupied with the same mundane things that characterize any other job: interactions with colleagues, living conditions, a drink and a laugh at the end of the day. To understand this is to understand how things came to be the way they are-and how they might be different.
This book examines the emergence of new international norms to
govern the spread of small arms, and the extent to which these
norms have been established in the policies and practices of
states, regions and international organizations. It also attempts
to establish criteria for assessing norm emergence, and to assess
the process of norm development by comparing what actually happens
at the multilateral level.
This edited volume explores competing perspectives on the impact of nuclear weapons proliferation on the South Asian security environment. The spread of nuclear weapons is one of the world's foremost security concerns. The effect of nuclear weapons on the behaviour of newly nuclear states, and the potential for future international crises, are of particular concern. As a region of burgeoning economic and political importance, South Asia offers a crucial test of proliferation's effects on the crisis behaviour of newly nuclear states. This volume creates a dialogue between scholars who believe that nuclear weapons have stabilized the subcontinent, and those who believe that nuclear weapons have made South Asia more conflict prone. It does so by pairing competing analyses of four major regional crises: the 1987 "Brasstacks" crisis, the Indo-Pakistani crisis of 1990, the 1999 Kargil war, which occurred after the nuclear tests; and the 2001-2 Indo-Pakistani militarized standoff. In addition, the volume explores the implications of the South Asian nuclear experience for potential new nuclear states such as North Korea and Iran.
Between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge carried out genocide in Cambodia unparalleled in modern history. Approximately 2 million died - almost one quarter of the population. Taking an explicitly geographical approach, this book argues whether the Khmer Rouge's activities not only led to genocide, but also terracide - the erasure of space. In the Cambodia of 1975, the landscape would reveal vestiges of an indigenous pre-colonial Khmer society, a French colonialism and American intervention. The Khmer Rouge, however, were not content with retaining the past inscriptions of previous modes of production and spatial practices. Instead, they attempted to erase time and space to create their own utopian vision of a communal society. The Khmer Rouge's erasing and reshaping of space was thus part of a consistent sacrifice of Cambodia and its people - a brutal justification for the killing of a country and the birth of a new place, Democratic Kampuchea. While focusing on Cambodia, the book provides a clearer geographic understanding to genocide in general and insights into the importance of spatial factors in geopolitical conflict.
Since the end of the Cold War, globalization has brought new actors to the political arena. One of those which has attracted considerable attention in academic research is civil society or NGOs. Claudia Kissling addresses the topic of civil society participation in the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The regime qualifies well for this objective since it features, given its characteristics as a treaty regime in the international security field, notable legal avenues for civil society participation. The study takes on a twofold perspective. It addresses the empirical question of whether civil society can contribute to the evolution of regimes in the security field, especially when it comes to security cooperation. It also questions whether civil society can, under certain conditions, contribute to the democratic quality of international decision-making. Here, empirical findings are used in order to test normative political theories on the legitimacy and democracy of global institutions.
This book documents the development of Israel's nuclear option, undoubtedly the most ambitious strategic project ever undertaken by the Jewish state. In the early 1950s, Israel secretly pursued a nuclear deterrent strategy. Initially supported by France, this daring project would engineer a dramatic change in Israel's strategic position vis-a-vis neighboring Arab states and the wider international community. A nuclear programme was pursued in line with the firm conviction of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's visionary leader, that Israel's existence could only be guaranteed with the aid of a nuclear option. A nuclear defense strategy, based on some aspects the Cold War theory of deterrence, was undertaken by successive Israeli governments. Drawing on extensive source material, including recently declassified defense information, Zaki Shalom's book examines the sequence of events and character of the dialogue between Israel and the United States on Israel's nuclear option and strategy. Opposed to America's request to allow external supervision of its nuclear activity, Israel labored to avert a potentially disastrous rift with its one superpower ally. The dialogue that took place during the
This book offers a broader theory of nuclear deterrence and examines the way nuclear and conventional deterrence interact with non-military factors in a series of historical case studies. The existing body of literature largely leans toward the analytical primacy of nuclear deterrence and it is often implicitly assumed that nuclear weapons are so important that, when they are present, other factors need not be studied. This book addresses this omission. It develops a research framework that incorporates the military aspects of deterrence, both nuclear and conventional, together with various perceptual factors, international circumstances, domestic politics, and norms. This framework is then used to re-examine five historical crises that brought two nuclear countries to the brink of war: the hostile asymmetric nuclear relations between the United States and China in the early 1960s; between the Soviet Union and China in the late 1960s; between Israel and Iraq in 1977-1981; between the United States and North Korea in 1992-1994; and, finally, between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The main empirical findings challenge the common expectation that the threat of nuclear retaliation represents the ultimate deterrent. In fact, it can be said, with a high degree of confidence, that it was rather the threat of conventional retaliation that acted as a major stabilizer. This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear proliferation, cold war studies, deterrence theory, security studies and IR in general.
Over the last twenty years the world has witnessed four major genocides. There was the genocide in Iraq (1988), in Rwanda (1994), in Srebrenica (1995), and in Darfur (2003 and continuing). Most observers agree there is an urgent need to assess the international community's efforts to prevent genocide and to intervene (once a genocide is under way) in an effective and timely manner. This volume, the latest in a widely respected series on the subject of genocide, provides an overview of a host of issues germane to this task. The book begins with a cogent discussion of the issues of prevention and intervention during the Cold War years. The second chapter discusses the abject failures and moderate (though, in some cases, highly controversial) successes at prevention and intervention carried out in the 1990s and early 2000s. Further chapters examine latest efforts to develop an effective genocide early warning system and examine the complexity of and barriers to prevention. The pros and cons of sanctions and the problems of enforcement and evaluation their effectiveness are then discussed. Conflicts between state sovereignty and the protection of threatened populations are examined both in historical context and by incorporating the latest thinking. Later chapters treat the issue of intervention; why and how it has met with only limited success. Concentrating on Rwanda and Srebrenica, chapter 8 discusses various peace operations that were abject failures and those that were moderately successful. The concept of an anti-genocide regime is examined in terms of progress in developing such a regime as well as what the international community must do in order to implement it. Chapters discuss key issues related to post-genocidal periods, those that need to be addressed in order to establish stability in a wounded land and populace as well as to prevent future genocides. The final chapter asks whether bringing perpetrators to justice has any impact in breaking impunity, ensuring deterrence, and bringing about reconciliation. The contributors to the volume are all noted scholars, some of whom specialize in the study of genocide, and others who specialize in such areas as early warning, peacekeeping, and sanctions.
Born out of the need to recover, analyze, and present physical evidence on thousands of individual victims of large-scale human rights violations, multi-national, multi-disciplinary forensic teams developed a sophisticated system for the examination of human remains and set a precedent for future investigations. Codifying this process, Skeletal Trauma: Identification of Injuries Resulting from Human Rights Abuse and Armed Conflict describes an epidemiological framework for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting evidence for use at trial. It pieces together fragments of skeletal tissue and associated physical evidence to determine a mechanism of trauma that is factually based, methodologically scripted, and scientifically interpreted. Providing a contextual background, the opening chapter discusses international forensic investigations into Human Rights violations through international tribunals and other emerging judicial systems. The second chapter presents protocols for systemic data collection and methods for the differential diagnosis of wounds to classify and interpret mechanisms of injury. Organized topically, the remaining chapters evaluate blasting injuries, blunt force trauma, skeletal evidence of torture, sharp force trauma, and gunfire injuries. Each chapter discusses wounding mechanisms, wound pathophysiology, relevant legal examples, and case studies. Twenty-six leading scholars and practitioners from anthropology, pathology, and forensics contribute their research, cases, photographs, and extensive fieldwork experience to provide 16 representative case studies. Taken from human rights violations, ethnic and armed conflict, and extra-judicial executions throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, all evidence in the examples is interpreted through an epidemiological model and set in a legal framework. Several of the exemplary studies, including those from the Balkans, have already been presented as evidence in criminal trials.
In this highly controversial and original work, Damien Short systematically rethinks how genocide is and should be defined. Rather than focusing solely on a narrow conception of genocide as direct mass-killing, through close empirical analysis of a number of under-discussed case studies - including Palestine, Sri Lanka, Australia and Alberta, Canada - the book reveals the key role played by settler colonialism, capitalism, finite resources and the ecological crisis in driving genocidal social death on a global scale.
This book dispels two common myths about the American-Israeli patron-client relationship -- that arms transfers to Israel have been motivated by American domestic politics rather than national interests and that these arms transfers have come without any political strings attached to them. The first part of the book describes and analyses the institutionalisation of the American-Israeli arms pipeline during the Johnson administration, demonstrating conclusively in the process that arms transfers to the Jewish state were based primarily on American national interests. The second part of the book consists of four case studies that clearly reveal that American arms transfers to Israel, whether in wartime or in peacetime, have always come with a diplomatic price tag attached to them. The book is based largely on American government documents from the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, from the Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library, and from the United States National Archives.
This book brings together transcripts of the round table discussions from the historic International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide and emphasizes proposals for the prevention of future acts of genocide.
Experiences of captivity in Japanese-occupied Asia varied enormously. Some prisoners of war (POWs) were sent to work in Japan, others to toil on the 'Death Railway' between Burma and Thailand. Some camps had death rates below 1 per cent, others of over 20 per cent. While POWs were deployed far and wide as a captive labour force, civilian internees were generally detained locally. This book explores differences in how captivity was experienced between 1941 and 1945, and has been remembered since: differences due to geography and logistics, to policies and personalities, and marked by nationality, age, class, gender and combatant status.Part One has at least one chapter for each 'National Memory', Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, Indian and American. Part Two moves on to forgotten captivities. It covers women, children, camp guards, internee experiences upon the end of the war, and local heroines who fought back. By juxtaposing such a wide variety of captivity experiences - differentiated both by category of captive and by approach - this book transcends place, to become a collection about captivity as a category. It will interest scholars working on the Asia-Pacific War, on captivities in general, and on the individual histories of the countries and groups covered.
As counter-profileration is expected to become the central element in the new national security policy of the US, such actions will constitute a central element of every major international conflict in the first decades of the 21st century. One of the most important geostrategic phenomena of the past decade has been the extraordinary diffusion of war-making capabilities from the developed North to the developing South. In the eyes of some proliferant states, possessing nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons would not only add to their regional stature, but would also offer an asymmetrical counter to the West's massive superiority in conventional forces. In the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, a number of countries are assumed to possess varying levels of NBC-weapons capabilities. Reasons for concern include the fact that such weapons have been used in the past; the region's geographic proximity to Europe and the vital interests of the West(which is prepared, under certain circumstances, to use force to protect them); the multiplicity of conflicts and other security problems; and the general instability in the region (including the spread of religious extremism). This important and timely book assesses, in detail, the accuracy of predictions, and perceptions, about a possible military threat from the Southern Mediterranean (Muslim) world; and their impact on NATO's political and military posture. Thanos P. Doxos presents an assessment of the Alliance's options for dealing with the problem. This book represents an invaluable, topical resource for researchers and policy makers.
Drawing on the author's personal experience, this book presents an insider's chronology and policy analysis of the EU's role in the nuclear negotiations with Iran. The European Union strives to be a global player, a "soft power" leader that can influence international politics and state behavior. Yet critics argue that the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) remains largely ineffective and incoherent. The EU's early and continuous involvement in the effort to dissuade Iran from developing nuclear weapons can be viewed as a test case for the EU as a global actor. As Chair of the European Parliament's delegation for relations with Iran, Tarja Cronberg had a ringside seat in the negotiations to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Drawing on her experiences leading a parliamentary delegation to Iran and interviews with officials, legislators and opposition leaders in nearly every country participating in the negotiations, as well as reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency, parliaments and independent experts, the author illustrates an insider's strategic understanding of the negotiations. Intersecting history, politics, economics, culture and the broader security context, this book not only delivers a unique analysis of this historic deal and the twelve-year multilateral pursuit of it, but draws from it pertinent lessons for European policy makers for the future. This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear proliferation, EU policy, diplomacy and international relations in general.
Donna Seto investigates why children born of wartime sexual violence are rarely included in post-conflict processes of reconciliation and recovery. The focus on children born of wartime sexual violence questions the framework of understanding war and recognizes that certain individuals are often forgotten or neglected. This book considers how children are neglected sites for the reproduction of global norms. It approaches this topic through an interdisciplinary perspective that questions how silence surrounding the issue of wartime sexual violence has prevented justice for children born of war from being achieved. In considering this, Seto examines how the theories and practices of mainstream International Relations (IR) can silence the experiences of war rape survivors and children born of wartime sexual violence and explores the theoretical frameworks within IR and the institutional structures that uphold protection regimes for children and women.
***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021*** During the 1948 war more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to 'disaster' or 'catastrophe' - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight. Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it. The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.
This book focuses on the Middle East arms control process as it unfolded during the years 1992-1995, as part of the multilateral track of the Arab-Israeli peace process initiated in Madrid, October 1991. This was the story of a regional process in the making: from the very concept of arms control as applied to the region, through the innovative regional forum and format for discussion that was devised for the talks, to the dynamics of the talks and the question of Egypt's position within this novel regional setting. The result was that what seemed at the outset to be a most likely unpromising forum became the setting of unprecedented regional dynamics. The in-depth examination of ACRS -- Arms Control Regional Security working group -- engenders important insights into a number of concepts that lie at the heart of international relations studies: the notion of the strategic game, the meaning of power, the definition of security threats, the notions of hegemony and leadership, state identity, the conduct of regional politics, and the significance of cooperative processes in international relations.
This book examines the most polemical atrocity of the Spanish civil war: The massacre of 2,500 political prisoners by Republican security forces in the villages of Paracuellos and Torrejon de Ardoz near Madrid in November/December 1936. The atrocity took place while Santiago Carrillo -- later Communist Party leader in the 1970s -- was responsible for public order. Although Carrillo played a key role in the transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975, he passed away at the age of 97 in 2012 still denying any involvement in 'Paracuellos' (the generic term for the massacres). The issue of Carrillo's responsibility has been the focus of much historical research. Julius Ruiz places Paracuellos in the wider context of the 'Red Terror' in Madrid, where a minimum of 8,000 'fascists' were murdered after the failure of military rebellion in July 1936. He rejects both 'revisionist' right-wing writers such as Cesar Vidal who cite Paracuellos as evidence that the Republic committed Soviet-style genocide and left-wing historians such as Paul Preston, who in his Spanish Holocaust argues that the massacres were primarily the responsibility of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The book argues that Republican actions influenced the Soviets, not the other way round: Paracuellos intensified Stalin's fears of a 'Fifth Column' within the USSR that facilitated the Great Terror of 193738. It concludes that the perpetrators were primarily members of the Provincial Committee of Public Investigation (CPIP), a murderous all-leftist revolutionary tribunal created in August 1936, and that its work of eliminating the 'Fifth Column' (an imaginary clandestine Francoist organisation) was supported not just by Carrillo, but also by the Republican government. In Autumn 2015 the book was serialised in El Mundo, Spain's second largest selling daily, to great acclaim.
Except for Soviet citizens, no people in this century have endured so much mass killing as have the Chinese. They have been murdered by rebels conniving with their own rulers, and then, after the defeat in war of the imperial dynasty, by soldiers of other lands. They have been killed by warlords who ruled one part of China or another. They have been executed by Nationalists or Communists because they had the wrong beliefs or attitudes or were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In China's Bloody Century, R.J. Rummel's careful estimate of the total number of killings exceeds 5 million. How do we explain such killings, crossing ideological bounds and political conditions? According to Rummel, the one constant factor in all the Chinese mass murder, as it was in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, is arbitrary power. It was the factor that united warlords, Nationalists, Communists, and foreign armies. The author argues that whenever such undisciplined power is centralized and unchecked, the possibility exists that it will be used at the whim of dictators to kill for their own ends, whether the aim is ethnic-racial purity, national unity, development, or utopia. The book presents successive periods in modern Chinese history, with each chapter divided into three parts. Rummel first relates the history of the period within which the nature and the amount of killings are presented. He then provides a detailed statistical table giving the basic estimates with their sources and qualifications. The final part offers an appendix that explains and elaborates the statistical computations and estimates. While estimates are available in the literature on the number of Chinese killed in Communist land reform, or in Tibet, or by the Nationalists in one military campaign or another, until this book no one has tried to systematically accumulate, organize, add up, and analyze these diverse killings for all of China's governments in this century. For the first time in one place, hundreds of published estimates of Chinese genocide and mass murder are listed with sources, analyzed, and their historical context presented. This book will be of central interest to Sinologists, Sovietologists, and those interested in comparative politics and society.
Conflict resolution and promotion of regional cooperation in South Asia has assumed a new urgency in the aftermath of the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, and underlined by the outbreak of fighting in Kargil in 1999, full mobilization on the border during most of 2002, and continued low-intensity warfare and terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. The stability of nuclear deterrence between the two countries is therefore a matter of great urgency and has found a place on the scholarly agenda of security studies in South Asia. Several books have been written on Indiaa (TM)s nuclear programme, but these have been mostly analytical histories. The India-Pakistan Nuclear Relationship is a new departure in that it is the first time that a group of scholars from the South Asian subcontinent have collectively tried to apply deterrence theory and international relations theory to South Asia.
"A compelling read." Richard J. Goldstone, former Chief Prosecutor of the UN tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda "A very important contribution." Princeton N. Lyman, Council on Foreign Relations "A powerful reminder that dealing with the legacy of wartime atrocities is not simply a matter of bringing perpetrators to justice. It also means overcoming the divisions within the society and healing the victims." Marina Ottaway, Senior Associate, Democracy and Rule of Law Project, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace In Amnesty after Atrocity? veteran journalist Helena Cobban examines the effectiveness of different ways of dealing with the aftermath of genocide and violence committed during intergroup conflicts. She traveled to Rwanda, Mozambique, and South Africa to assess the various ways those nations tried to come to grips with their violent past: from war crimes trials to truth commissions to outright amnesties for perpetrators. She discovered that in terms of both moving forward and satisfying the needs of survivors, war crimes trials are not the most effective path. This book provides historical context and includes interviews with a cross-section of people: community leaders, victims, policymakers, teachers, rights activists, and even some former abusers. These first-person accounts create a rich, readable text, and Cobban's overall conclusions will surprise many readers in the West. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Simpsons Forensic Medicine
Jason Payne-James, Richard Martin Jones
Paperback
R831
Discovery Miles 8 310
|