Since the infamous events of 9/11, the fear of terrorism and the determination to strike back against it has become a topic of enormous public debate. The 'war on terror' discourse has developed not ...only through American politics but via other channels including the media, the church, music, novels, films and television, and therefore permeates many aspects of American life. Stuart Croft suggests that the process of this production of knowledge has created a very particular form of common sense which shapes relationships, jokes and even forms of tattoos. Understanding how a social process of crisis can be mapped out and how that process creates assumptions allows policy-making in America's war on terror to be examined from new perspectives. Using IR approaches together with insights from cultural studies, this 2006book develops a dynamic model of crisis which seeks to understand the war on terror as a cultural phenomenon.
This book examines the role of war in shaping the African state, society, and economy. Richard J. Reid helps students understand different patterns of military organization through Africa's history; ...the evolution of weaponry, tactics, and strategy; and the increasing prevalence of warfare and militarism in African political and economic systems. He traces shifts in the culture and practice of war from the first millennium into the era of the external slave trades, and then into the nineteenth century, when a military revolution unfolded across much of Africa. The repercussions of that revolution, as well as the impact of colonial rule, continue to this day. The frequency of coups d'états and civil war in Africa's recent past is interpreted in terms of the continent's deeper past.
Media at War Tumber, Howard; Palmer, Jerry
2004, 2004-03-05
eBook
The Iraq war provoked widespread public debate, and media coverage of the events have also been the subject of scrutiny. Embedded reporters, 24-hour news and ′live on the spot′ reports have had a ...huge impact on the news we receive. The Media at War offers a critical overview of the war coverage, and provides a context for examining questions that emerged about the role of journalists: · What experience, training and protection do war reporters have? · What is the relationship between journalists and their sources? · Are embedded journalists able to deliver balanced news coverage? Howard Tumber and Jerry Palmer examine the pre-war phase, the military campaign and the post-war phase, as well as attitudes and interpretations of these events. Their comprehensive analysis includes both news page and comment page material.
Heroes and Victims explores the cultural power of war memorials in 20th-century Romania through two world wars and a succession of radical political changes-from attempts to create pluralist ...democratic political institutions after World War I to shifts toward authoritarian rule in the 1930s, to military dictatorships and Nazi occupation, to communist dictatorships, and finally to pluralist democracies with populist tendencies. Examining the interplay of centrally articulated and locally developed commemorations, Maria Bucur's study engages monumental sites of memory, local funerary markers, rituals, and street names as well as autobiographical writings, novels, oral narratives, and film. This book reveals the ways in which a community's religious, ethnic, economic, regional, and gender traditions shaped local efforts at memorializing its war dead.
Covering the years of Japanese invasion during World War II from
1937 to 1945, this essay collection recounts Chinese experiences of
living and working under conditions of war. Each of the regimes
...that ruled a divided China-occupation governments, Chinese
Nationalists, and Chinese Communists-demanded and glorified the
full commitment of the people and their resources in the
prosecution of war. Through stories of both everyday people and
mid-level technocrats charged with carrying out the war, this book
brings to light the enormous gap between the leadership's demands
and the reality of everyday life. Eight long years of war exposed
the unrealistic nature of elite demands for unreserved commitment.
As the political leaders faced numerous obstacles in material
mobilization and retreated to rhetoric of spiritual resistance, the
Chinese populace resorted to localized strategies ranging from
stoic adaptation to cynical profiteering, articulated variously
with touches of humor and tragedy. These localized strategies are
examined through stories of people at varying classes and levels of
involvement in living, working, and trying to work through the war
under the different regimes. In less than a decade, millions of
Chinese were subjects of disciplinary regimes that dictated the
celebration of holidays, the films available for viewing, the
stories told in tea houses, and the restrictions governing the
daily operations and participants of businesses-thus impacting the
people of China for years to come. This volume looks at the
narratives of those affected by the war and regimes to understand
perspectives of both sides of the war and its total outcomes.
Living and Working in Wartime China depicts the brutal
micromanaging of ordinary lives, devoid of compelling national
purposes, that both undercut the regimes' relationships with their
people and helped establish the managerial infrastructure of
authoritarian regimes in subsequent postwar years.
When do states choose to adopt a penitent stance towards the past? When do they choose to offer apologies for historical misdeeds, offer compensation for their victims and incorporate the darker ...sides of history into their textbooks, public monuments and museums? When do they choose not to do so? And what are the political consequences of how states portray the past? This book pursues these questions by examining how governments in post-1945 Austria, Germany and Japan have wrestled with the difficult legacy of the Second World War and the impact of their policies on regional politics in Europe and Asia. The book argues that states can reconcile over historical issues, but to do so requires greater political will and imposes greater costs than is commonly realized. At the same time, in an increasingly interdependent world, failure to do so can have a profoundly disruptive effect on regional relations and feed dangerous geopolitical tensions.
Exhibiting War Wellington, Jennifer
09/2017, Volume:
v.Series Number 53
eBook
What does it mean to display war? Examining a range of different exhibitions in Britain, Canada and Australia, Jennifer Wellington reveals complex imperial dynamics in the ways these countries ...developed diverging understandings of the First World War, despite their cultural, political and institutional similarities. While in Britain a popular narrative developed of the conflict as a tragic rupture with the past, Australia and Canada came to see it as engendering national birth through violence. Narratives of the war's meaning were deliberately constructed by individuals and groups pursuing specific agendas: to win the war and immortalise it at the same time. Drawing on a range of documentary and visual material, this book analyses how narratives of mass violence changed over time. Emphasising the contingent development of national and imperial war museums, it illuminates the way they acted as spaces in which official, academic and popular representations of this violent past intersect.
This "excellent, wonderfully-researched" chronicle of WWII journalism explores the lives and work of embedded reporters across every theater of war (Chris Ogden, former Time magazine bureau chief in ...London). Luminary journalists Ed Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, Walter Cronkite, and Clare Hollingworth were among the young reporters who chronicled World War II's daily horrors and triumphs for Western readers. In Reporting War, fellow foreign correspondent Ray Moseley mines their writings to create an exhilarating parallel narrative of the war effort in Europe, Pearl Harbor, North Africa, and Japan. This vivid history also explores the lives, methods, and motivations of the courageous journalists who doggedly followed the action and the story, often while embedded in the Allied armies. Moseley's sweeping yet intimate history draws on newly unearthed material to offer a comprehensive account of the war. Reporting War sheds much-needed light on an abundance of individual stories and overlooked experiences, including those of women and African-American journalists, which capture the drama as it was lived by reporters on the front lines of history.
This book focuses on one of the most remarkable phenomena of World War II: the mass participation of women, including numerous female combatants, in the communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance. ...Drawing on an array of sources - archival documents of the Communist Party and Partisan army, wartime press, Partisan folklore, participant reminiscences, and Yugoslav literature and cinematography - this study explores the history and postwar memory of the phenomenon. More broadly, it is concerned with changes in gender norms caused by the war, revolution, and establishment of the communist regime that claimed to have abolished inequality between the sexes. The first archive-based study on the subject, Women and Yugoslav Partisans uncovers a complex gender system in which revolutionary egalitarianism and peasant tradition interwove in unexpected ways.
The Second World War was filled with many terrible crimes, such as genocide, forced migration and labour, human-made famine, forced sterilizations, and dispossession, that occurred on an ...unprecedented scale. Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War examines victim groups constructed in the twentieth century in the aftermath of these experiences. The collection explores the concept of authenticity through an examination of victims’ histories and the construction of victimhood in Europe and East Asia. Chapters consider how notions of historical authenticity influence the self-identification and public recognition of a given social group, the tensions arising from individual and group experiences of victimhood, and the resulting, sometimes divergent, interpretation of historical events.
Drawing from case studies on topics including the Holocaust, the siege of Leningrad, American air raids on Japan, and forced migrations from Eastern Europe, Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War demonstrates the trend towards a victim-centred collective memory as well as the interplay of memory politics and public commemorative culture.
