Before the twenty-first century, there was little legal precedent for the prosecution of sexual violence as a war crime. Now, international tribunals have the potential to help make sense of ...political violence against both men and women; they have the power to uphold victims' claims and to convict the leaders and choreographers of systematic atrocity. However, by privileging certain accounts of violence over others, tribunals more often confirm outmoded gender norms, consigning women to permanent rape victim status. InSex and International Tribunals, Chiseche Salome Mibenge identifies the cultural assumptions behind the legal profession's claims to impartiality and universality. Focusing on the postwar tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, Mibenge mines the transcripts of local and supranational criminal trials and truth and reconciliation commissions in order to identify and closely examine legal definitions of forced marriage, sexual enslavement, and the conscription of children that overlook the gendered experiences of armed conflict beyond the mass rape of women and girls. In many cases, a single rape conviction constitutes sufficient proof that gender-based violence has been mainstreamed into the prosecution of war crimes. Drawing on anthropological research in African conflicts, and feminist theory, Mibenge challenges legal narratives that reinscribe essentialized notions of gender in the conduct and resolution of violent conflict and uncovers the suppressed testimonies of men and women who are unwilling or unable to recite the legal scripts that would elevate them to the status of victimhood recognized by an international and humanitarian audience. At a moment when international intervention in conflicts is increasingly an option,Sex and International Tribunalspoints the way to a more nuanced and just response from courts.
InDeceit on the Road to War, John M. Schuessler examines how U.S. presidents have deceived the American public about fundamental decisions of war and peace. Deception has been deliberate, he ...suggests, as presidents have sought to shift blame for war onto others in some cases and oversell its benefits in others. Such deceit is a natural outgrowth of the democratic process, in Schuessler's view, because elected leaders have powerful incentives to maximize domestic support for war and retain considerable ability to manipulate domestic audiences. They can exploit information and propaganda advantages to frame issues in misleading ways, cherry-pick supporting evidence, suppress damaging revelations, and otherwise skew the public debate to their benefit. These tactics are particularly effective before the outbreak of war, when the information gap between leaders and the public is greatest.When resorting to deception, leaders take a calculated risk that the outcome of war will be favorable, expecting the public to adopt a forgiving attitude after victory is secured. The three cases featured in the book-Franklin Roosevelt and World War II, Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, and George W. Bush and the Iraq War-test these claims. Schuessler concludes that democracies are not as constrained in their ability to go to war as we might believe and that deception cannot be ruled out in all cases as contrary to the national interest.
InDeceit on the Road to War, John M. Schuessler examines how U.S. presidents have deceived the American public about fundamental decisions of war and peace. Deception has been deliberate, he suggests, as presidents have sought to shift blame for war onto others in some cases and oversell its benefits in others. Such deceit is a natural outgrowth of the democratic process, in Schuessler's view, because elected leaders have powerful incentives to maximize domestic support for war and retain considerable ability to manipulate domestic audiences. They can exploit information and propaganda advantages to frame issues in misleading ways, cherry-pick supporting evidence, suppress damaging revelations, and otherwise skew the public debate to their benefit. These tactics are particularly effective before the outbreak of war, when the information gap between leaders and the public is greatest.
When resorting to deception, leaders take a calculated risk that the outcome of war will be favorable, expecting the public to adopt a forgiving attitude after victory is secured. The three cases featured in the book-Franklin Roosevelt and World War II, Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, and George W. Bush and the Iraq War-test these claims. Schuessler concludes that democracies are not as constrained in their ability to go to war as we might believe and that deception cannot be ruled out in all cases as contrary to the national interest.
During and especially after World War I, the millions of black-clad widows on the streets of Europe’s cities were a constant reminder that war caused carnage on a vast scale. But widows were far more ...than just a reminder of the war’s fallen soldiers; they were literal and figurative actresses in how nations crafted their identities in the interwar era. In this extremely original study, Erika Kuhlman compares the ways in which German and American widows experienced their postwar status, and how that played into the cultures of mourning in their two nations: one defeated, the other victorious. Each nation used widows and war dead as symbols to either uphold their victory or disengage from their defeat, but Kuhlman, parsing both German and U.S. primary sources, compares widows’ lived experiences to public memory. For some widows, government compensation in the form of military-style awards sufficed. For others, their own deprivations, combined with those suffered by widows living in other nations, became the touchstone of a transnational awareness of the absurdity of war and the need to prevent it.
The World in World Wars Liebau, Heike; Bromber, Katrin; Lange, Katharina ...
2010, Volume:
5
eBook
The volume contributes to the growing field of research on the global social history of the World Wars. Focusing on social and cultural aspects, it discusses the broader implications of the wars for ...African and Asian societies which resulted in significant social and political transformations.
Year of the locust Tamari, Salim; Turjman, Ihsan Salih
2011., 20110802, 2011, 2011-09-01
eBook
Year of the Locust captures in page-turning detail the end of the Ottoman world and a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. In the diaries of Ihsan Hasan al-Turjman (1893–1917), the first ordinary ...recruit to describe World War I from the Arab side, we follow the misadventures of an Ottoman soldier stationed in Jerusalem. There he occupied himself by dreaming about his future and using family connections to avoid being sent to the Suez. His diaries draw a unique picture of daily life in the besieged city, bringing into sharp focus its communitarian alleys and obliterated neighborhoods, the ongoing political debates, and, most vividly, the voices from its streets—soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds. Salim Tamari's indispensable introduction places the diary in its local, regional, and imperial contexts while deftly revising conventional wisdom on the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
When US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003, they occupied a country that had been at war for 23 years. Yet in their attempts to understand Iraqi society and history, few policy makers, analysts and ...journalists took into account the profound impact that Iraq's long engagement with war had on the Iraqis' everyday engagement with politics, the business of managing their daily lives, and their cultural imagination. Drawing on government documents and interviews, Dina Rizk Khoury traces the political, social and cultural processes of the normalization of war in Iraq during the last twenty-three years of Ba'thist rule. Khoury argues that war was a form of everyday bureaucratic governance and examines the Iraqi government's policies of creating consent, managing resistance and religious diversity, and shaping public culture. Coming on the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, this book tells a multilayered story of a society in which war has become the norm.
Bush's Wars H. Anderson, Terry
2011, 2011-05-14
eBook
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush told advisor Karl Rove, "I am here for a reason, and this is how we're going to be judged." Anderson provides this ...judgment in this sweeping, authoritative account of Bush's War on Terror and his twin interventions. Carefully researched and briskly narrated, Bush's Wars provides the single-volume balanced history that we have waited for. This new paperback edition takes the story through the first Obama term, covering our exit from Iraq and the ongoing drawdown in Afghanistan.
This innovative study of remembrance in Weimar Germany analyses how experiences and memories of the Great War were transformed along political lines after 1918. Examining the symbolism, language and ...performative power of public commemoration, Benjamin Ziemann reveals how individual recollections fed into the public narrative of the experience of war. Challenging conventional wisdom that nationalist narratives dominated commemoration, this book demonstrates that Social Democrat war veterans participated in the commemoration of the war at all levels: supporting the 'no more war' movement, mourning the fallen at war memorials and demanding a politics of international solidarity. It describes how the moderate Socialist Left related the legitimacy of the Republic to their experiences in the Imperial army and acknowledged the military defeat of 1918 as a moment of liberation. This is the first comprehensive analysis of war remembrances in post-war Germany and a radical reassessment of the democratic potential of the Weimar Republic.
Karen Petrone shatters the notion that World War I was a forgotten war in the Soviet Union. Although never officially commemorated, the Great War was the subject of a lively discourse about religion, ...heroism, violence, and patriotism during the interwar period. Using memoirs, literature, films, military histories, and archival materials, Petrone reconstructs Soviet ideas regarding the motivations for fighting, the justification for killing, the nature of the enemy, and the qualities of a hero. She reveals how some of these ideas undermined Soviet notions of military honor and patriotism while others reinforced them. As the political culture changed and war with Germany loomed during the Stalinist 1930s, internationalist voices were silenced and a nationalist view of Russian military heroism and patriotism prevailed.
NBC Goes to War Cassidy, James; Sweeney, Michael
03/2022
eBook
The diary of radio correspondent James Cassidy presents
a unique view of World War II as this reporter followed the Allied
armies into Nazi Germany. James Joseph Cassidy was one of
362 American ...journalists accredited to cover the European Theater
of Operations between June 7, 1944, and the war's end. Radio was
relatively new, and World War II was its first war. Among the
difficulties facing historians examining radio reporters during
that period is that many potential primary documents-their live
broadcasts-were not recorded. In NBC Goes to War ,
Cassidy's censored scripts alongside his personal diary capture a
front-line view during some of the nastiest fighting in World War
II as told by a seasoned NBC reporter. James Cassidy was ambitious
and young, and his coverage of World War II for the NBC radio
network notched some notable firsts, including being the first to
broadcast live from German soil and arranging the broadcast of a
live Jewish religious service from inside Nazi Germany while
incoming mortar and artillery shells fell 200 yards away. His diary
describes how he gathered news, how it was censored, and how it was
sent from the battle zone to the United States. As radio had no
pictures, reporters quickly developed a descriptive visual style to
augment dry facts. All of Cassidy's stories, from the panic he felt
while being targeted by German planes to his shock at the deaths of
colleagues, he told with grace and a reporter's lean and engaging
prose. Providing valuable eyewitness material not previously
available to historians, NBC Goes to War tells a
"bottom-up" narrative that provides insight into war as fought and
chronicled by ordinary men and women. Cassidy skillfully placed
listeners alongside him in the ruins of Aachen, on icy back roads
crawling with spies, and in a Belgian bar where a little girl
wailed "Les Américains partent!" when Allied troops retreated to
safety, leaving the town open to German re-occupation. With a
journalistic eye for detail, NBC Goes to War unforgettably
portrays life in the press corps. This newly uncovered perspective
also helps balance the CBS-heavy radio scholarship about the war,
which has always focused heavily on Edward R. Murrow and his
"Murrow's Boys."
