In the 25 years since the revelation of the so-called 'Ultra secret', the importance of codebreaking and signals intelligence in the diplomacy and military operations of the Second World War has become increasingly evident. Studies of wartime signals intelligence, however, have largely focused on Great Britain and the United States and their successes against, respectively, the German Enigma and Japanese Purple cipher machines. Drawing upon newly available sources in Australia, Britain, China, France and the United States, the articles in this volume demonstrate that the codebreaking war was a truly global conflict in which many countries were active and successful. They discuss the work of Australian, Chinese, Finnish, French and Japanese codebreakers, shed new light on the work of their American and British counterparts, and describe the struggle to apply technology to the problems of radio intercept and cryptanalysis. The contributions also reveal that, for the Axis as well as the Allies, success in the signals war often depended upon close collaboration among alliance partners.

In the 25 years since the revelation of the so-called 'Ultra secret', the importance of codebreaking and signals intelligence in the diplomacy and military operations of the Second World War has become increasingly evident. Studies of wartime signals intelligence, however, have largely focused on Great Britain and the United States and their successes against, respectively, the German Enigma and Japanese Purple cipher machines. Drawing upon newly available sources in Australia, Britain, China, France and the United States, the articles in this volume demonstrate that the codebreaking war was a truly global conflict in which many countries were active and successful. They discuss the work of Australian, Chinese, Finnish, French and Japanese codebreakers, shed new light on the work of their American and British counterparts, and describe the struggle to apply technology to the problems of radio intercept and cryptanalysis. The contributions also reveal that, for the Axis as well as the Allies, success in the signals war often depended upon close collaboration among alliance partners.

Nazi Germany considered the Catholic Church to be a serious threat to its domestic security and its international ambitions. In Germany, Hitler's agents recruited informants to provide intelligence on Church finances, and on the political views and activities of bishops, priests and lay Catholics. In Rome, however, German attempts to penetrate the Papacy were less successful, with the efforts of the local Gestapo office proving largely futile. For example, a plan to use a Roman seminary as a secret radio station and cover for German intelligence officers masquerading as seminarians had to be abandoned, in part because the first group of officers proved to be more interested in women that in the cloistered life.

This volume takes stock of the seminal contribution of Charles Beitz to the so-called "political turn" in the philosophy of human rights, whose origins are in the work of the late Rawls. In his already classic book The Idea of Human Rights (2009), Beitz proposes that human rights are better understood from the vantage point of their practice in the contemporary world. Instead of looking at these rights as legal and political instantiations of fully justified moral rights, Beitz reconstructs the idea of human rights as being part of a global discursive practice that can only be understood in the framework of the international system of states in which we live. In this system of interdependent states, with the consequent dispersion of political authority, human rights constitute an array of internal justifications and criticisms, rather than a blueprint of the ideal society. All the chapters in this volume draw on these fundamental ideas elaborated by Beitz and propose to extend them further in their connection with humanistic accounts of human rights, with the plurality of contexts in which the practice of human rights takes place, and finally, with the interconnections between these rights and global justice or intergenerational justice. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

On the eve of the 2007 general elections in Morocco, writer, academic, and former cabinet minister Abdallah Saaf embarked on several road trips across the country to get a feel for how its citizens had fared since Mohammed VI's accession to the throne. A Significant Year is the result: an analysis of the political and sociological state of the Moroccan nation on the eve of a crucial moment in the post-Hassan II period, but also a travelogue that describes what the author saw and heard on his travels in the summer months leading up to the epochal vote. Through Saaf's eyes, we see the country's varied regions and its urban and rural landscapes. We meet Moroccans from all walks of life, such as a waiter at a favorite cafe, a car-park attendant who recognizes the author from TV, and fellow writer and intellectual Abdelkabir Khatibi. Behind the deceptive simplicity of the book's narrative structure, readers will find in A Significant Year an insightful and nuanced portrayal of modern Morocco's many complexities.

Nazi Germany considered the Catholic Church to be a serious threat to its domestic security and its international ambitions. In Germany, Hitler's agents recruited informants to provide intelligence on Church finances, and on the political views and activities of bishops, priests and lay Catholics. In Rome, however, German attempts to penetrate the Papacy were less successful, with the efforts of the local Gestapo office proving largely futile. For example, a plan to use a Roman seminary as a secret radio station and cover for German intelligence officers masquerading as seminarians had to be abandoned, in part because the first group of officers proved to be more interested in women that in the cloistered life.

Most students of history assume that the age of the "warlord popes" ended with the Renaissance, but, long after the victory of Catholic powers at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Papacy continued to entangle itself in martial affairs. The Vatican participated in six major military campaigns between 1796 and 1870, flew the papal flag over a warship as late as 1878, and during the Second World War mobilized more than 2,000 of its own troops to defend the Pope.

David Alvarez now opens up this little-known aspect of the Papacy in the first general history of the papal armed forces. His is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive chronicle of the modern Vatican's military and security forces from 1796, when the armies of revolutionary France invaded the Papal States, through the wars for unification, to the present-day deployment of modern weapons, technology, and skills to protect the Holy Father and the Vatican from terrorists and assassins.

Most papal histories make little reference to military affairs, while the few that address them do so only in passing or focus narrowly on particular units or campaigns. Alvarez's history expands our understanding of the Papacy's military through the exceptional research he has done as the first American scholar to gain access to the archive of the Pontifical Swiss Guard and the modern military records in the Vatican Secret Archive. He is also the first historian of any nationality to use the records of the Vatican Gendarmeria.

Alvarez chronicles the exploits of the Vatican's military leaders and soldiers in their campaigns and battles, focusing on how those units under the Pope's authority--including the Vatican navy--engaged in actual military operations. He also deals extensively with the Vatican Gendarmeria as well as the Pope's Noble Guards, Palatine Guards, and Swiss Guards, describing their distinctive responsibilities and revealing the competition and internal tensions that sometimes undermined the morale, preparedness, and cohesion of the Pope's guards.

Filled with information that will surprise scholars of the Papacy and military historians alike, Alvarez's highly original work illuminates a shadowy corner of Vatican history and will fascinate all readers interested in the role of the church in the broader world.

Revered by millions, the Papacy is an international power that many nations have viewed with suspicion, some have tried to control, and not a few have spied upon. Ranging across two centuries of world history, David Alvarez's fascinating study throws open the Vatican's doors to reveal the startling but little-known world of espionage in one of the most sacred places on earth.

Reviewing the pontificates of ten popes--from Pius VII, Napoleon's nemesis, to Pius XII, maligned by some as "Hitler's pope"--Alvarez provides the first history of the intelligence operations and covert activities that reached the highest levels of the Vatican. Populated with world leaders, both famous and infamous, and a rogue's gallery of professional spies, fallen priests, and mercenary informants, his work casts a bright light into the darker corners of papal history and international diplomacy, a light that often sparkles with a witty appreciation of the foibles of the espionage trade.

Alvarez reveals that the Vatican itself occasionally entered this clandestine world through such operations as a network of informants to spy on liberal Catholics or a covert mission to establish an underground church in the Soviet Union. More frequently, however, the Vatican was the target for hostile intelligence services seeking to expose the secrets of the Papacy. During World War I, for example,
Pope Benedict XV's personal assistant was a secret German agent. During World War II, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States sent spies into the Vatican to discover the pope's intentions. The Nazis were especially resourceful, securing the services of apostate priests, such as Herbert Keller, an unscrupulous monk who exposed Pope Pius XII's involvement in a plot against Hitler, and devising a plan to establish a "seminary" in Rome with agents posing as student priests. Alvarez recounts these operations and many more, including the methods by which the Vatican learned about the Holocaust.

Based on diplomatic and intelligence records in Britain, France, Italy, Spain, the United States, and the Vatican--with the latter including documents sealed after the author had access to them--"Spies in the Vatican" reveals that the Papacy often was hindered by its inability to collect timely and relevant intelligence and that it made little effort to improve its intelligence capabilities after 1870. Challenging the long-held notion that the pope is the world's best-informed leader, Alvarez illuminates not only the inner workings of the Vatican but also the global events in which it was inextricably involved.

For the period between World War II and the full onset of the Cold War, histories of American intelligence seem to go dark. Yet in those years a little known clandestine organization, the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), emerged from the remnants of wartime American intelligence to lay the groundwork for what would become the CIA and, in ways revealed here for the first time, conduct its own secret warof espionage and political intrigue in postwar Europe. Telling the full story of this early and surprisingly effective espionage arm ofthe United States, Spying through a Glass Darkly brings a critical chapter in the history of Cold War intelligence out of the shadows. Constrained by inadequate staff and limited resources, distracted by the conflicting demands of agencies of the US government,and victimized by disinformation and double agents, the Strategic Services Unit struggled to maintain an effective Americanclandestine capability after the defeat of the Axis Powers. Never viscerally anti-communist, the Strategic Services Unit was slow torecognize the Soviet Union as a potential threat, but gradually it began to mount operations, often in collaboration with the intelligence services of Britain, France, Italy, Denmark, and Sweden, to throw light into the darker corners of the Soviet regime. Bringing to bear a wealth of archival documents, operational records, interviews, and correspondence, David Alvarez and Eduard Mark chronicle SSU's successes and failures in procuring intelligence on the capabilities and intentions of the Soviet Union, a chronicle that delves deeply into the details of secret operations against Soviet targets throughout Europe: not only in the backstreets of the divided cities of Berlin and Vienna, but also the cafes, hotels, offices, and salons of such cosmopolitan capitals as Paris, Rome, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw.