This original book describes the behavior of tropical cyclones in the South Pacific. It investigates the broad range of disturbance effects these violent storms have on the physical environments of the islands that lie in their path and the people who live on them. It is the first book to link these two themes the characteristics of cyclones and their landscape impacts. Examples and illustrations are drawn widely from across the region, resulting in a highly readable volume.

A former Marine judge advocate and legal counsel to General Colin Powell, James Terry explores the genesis of the United States approach to terror violence and the legal foundation for the nation's response to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Terry first reviews the entire spectrum of legal issues that arise before offering creative and practical legal and political solutions to counter terrorist activities. The author examines the development of rules of engagement and their application in the terrorist environment while differentiating the law of self-defense in this environment from more traditional conflicts. He also addresses the role of interrogation, and the line between harsh interrogation and torture, and the jurisdictional claims that arise. This volume examines a large number of topics related to the struggle and in a remarkably concise exploration, makes them understandable to experts in international law as well as those who do not have a strong background in the field. This text provides a serious but concise review of the legal issues in 20 interrelated chapters. All constitutional law scholars and political scientists will greatly benefit from reading this book. No other text offers such a comprehensive or detailed review of the issues arising from the War on Terror.

The primary goal here is to present a treatise on the significance and value of coarse clastic carbonate sediments (i.e. large coral boulders) on tropical coastlines for understanding both modern and pre-historical (Holocene) high-magnitude marine inundation events. There has been a rapid groundswell of interest in large carbonate blocks on tropical coasts over the last decade, yet it is not widely appreciated that such features were observed and recorded back in the early explorations of Matthew Flinders on the Great Barrier Reef in the 1800s. This book will illuminate how various characteristics of datable carbonate blocks torn up from coral reefs and deposited on reef platforms yield importance evidence about the storms and tsunamis that emplaced them over decadal and centennial timescales. No comprehensive review has so far been published. A need now exists for a 'definitive reference' on coral boulder research, which details the earliest observations, changing terminology, sedimentology, and relevance for coastal hazard research in the tropics. A wide range of examples will be incorporated from across Asia, Australia, the Pacific and the Americas, as well as a full up-to-date review of the existing literature.

This original book describes the behavior of tropical cyclones in the South Pacific. It investigates the broad range of disturbance effects these violent storms have on the physical environments of the islands that lie in their path and the people who live on them. It is the first book to link these two themes - the characteristics of cyclones and their landscape impacts. Examples and illustrations are drawn widely from across the region, resulting in a highly readable volume.

The causes of armed conflict have historically been viewed in primarily sociological terms, with political, religious, economic, and military factors sharing primacy. Few have examined the causes of warfare in the context of a deterrence model or, specifically, the deterrence factors inherent in the checks and balances of a democratic state and the absence of such factors in the nondemocratic state. More significantly, none before Prof. John Norton Moore has argued the value of democratic principles in deterrence and conflict avoidance. In this important book, Dr. Gary Sharp analyzes the concepts in Moore's seminal work The War Puzzle (2005), which describes Moore's incentive theory of war avoidance. Sharp carefully dissects Moore's deterrence model and examines those incentives that discourage nondemocratic governments from pursuing violent conflicts. Arguing that existing democracies must make an active effort to foster the political environment in which new democracies can develop, Sharp discusses the elements critical to promoting democratization and thus strengthening systemwide deterrence at the state and international levels. Sharp also examines the incentives for conflict avoidance (internal checks and balances) inherent in the democratic state and their relationship to war avoidance. In examining current democracies and comparing them statistically to nondemocratic states, Sharp calculates an aggregated index value of democracy based upon respected databases that rank the jurisdictions of the world on political rights, civil liberties, media independence, religious freedom, economic freedom, and human development. Demonstrating through his analysis that democracies are inherently more peaceful because of the internal checks and balances on the aggressive use of force, Sharp similarly demonstrates how nondemocracies require external checks and balances to preclude aggression. Sharp's analysis and validation of Moore's incentive theory of war avoidance is critical to an understanding of those foreign policy strategies that the United States and other democratic nations must embrace as they attempt to reverse a course of history in which 38.5 million war deaths were recorded in the twentieth century alone.

The study of international law has been an element of the curriculum of the Naval War College since the founding of the College, and it was to fill the need for textbooks focusing on practical, law-related naval issues that the College published its first book, in 1895. That work-a collection of edited and expanded lectures given in Newport by Freeman Snow, professor of international law at Harvard, published as International Law: A Manual Based upon Lectures Delivered at the Naval War College-was seminal in two ways. First, it was for its compiler, Commander Charles Stockton of the Naval War College's faculty, that the College's prestigious chair in international law is named. Second, the book itself, which was soon canonical, was the forerunner of the International Law Series, of which seventy-nine volumes by, or collecting the work of, major scholars have appeared, with more in preparation. The Naval War College Review in its time took up the challenge. In the May 1949 issue (Information Service for Officers, as it was first known, having been founded only in October 1948), its editors published "Legal Foundations of International Relations," by Manley O. Hudson. At this writing, the index of the journal contains seventy-one entries under the heading "International Law," and the continual flow of manuscripts from international lawyers testifies that the Review is well established in that field. It is no surprise, then, that when the Naval War College Press established the Newport Papers monograph series in the early 1990s, international law quickly found a place there. The third Newport Paper, published in October 1992, was Horace B. Robertson, Jr.'s, The "New" Law of the Sea and the Law of Armed Conflict at Sea; the eleventh, by Frank Gibson Goldman, was The International Legal Ramifications of United States Counter-Proliferation Strategy: Problems and Prospects (April 1997), and number fifteen was International Law and Naval War: The Effect of Marine Safety and Pollution Conventions during International Armed Conflict, by Dr. Sonja Ann Jozef Boelaert-Suominen (December 2000). So it is with particular satisfaction that we sustain that commitment with this Newport Paper, the twenty-fifth in the series, and the first of our 2006 program. James P. Terry-a former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State; former legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then General Colin Powell; a retired colonel, U.S. Marine Corps; and today chairman of the Board of Veterans' Appeals, in the Department of Veterans Affairs-is familiar to Press subscribers as the author of four articles (going back to 1986) in the Review. In The Regulation of International Coercion Colonel Terry has undertaken a major task, an assessment-from a U.S. policy perspective and in an international-law framework-of "representative instances where force has recently been used in international relations, the circumstances under which it was used, the instructive international policy and legal constructs that can be applied, and the relationship of these policies to the minimum world order system established in . . . the United Nations Charter." He is eminently fitted to meet the challenge, and the value of his argument befits the century long tradition of publishing in international law at the Naval War College.