People are different in their way of being. Some differ according to their origin, race, spoken language, nationality, and other criteria, and others differ according to their ambitions, that is, ...according to their wishes and visions of the future. Some wishes or visions of the future can be obtained in a short way, but others are more difficult to obtain. Thus, in order to achieve their visions and goals, some people resort to military attacks, which turn into a battlefield. These struggles are carried out in serious violation of all the values of human society. A regrettable part of these fights is the participation of mercenaries in these illegal activities. Therefore, in the present scientific approach, we propose to analyze the participation role of mercenaries on the battlefield.
This article sets out to probe the peculiar nexus between democracy and the military use of unmanned systems. To this end, it draws on a critical, 'antinomic' reading of democratic peace theory. ...Tying into the theoretical scope of research conducted within the democratic distinctiveness programme that emerged out of the democratic peace debate, this entails fathoming out the ways in which democracies are distinct from other regime types. It includes acknowledging that democracies deal with conflicts aggressively too, rather than naïvely taking their supposed general peacefulness at face value. We demonstrate that the same distinctly democratic set of interests and norms that is conventionally taken to be pivotal for democratic peacefulness yields both peaceful and belligerent behavior. That same democracy-specific set of interests and norms is also constitutive of the special appeal unmanned systems hold for democracies. While armed and eventually autonomous systems may thus seem like a 'silver bullet' for democratic decisionmakers today, we argue that, by relying on these systems in an attempt to satisfy the said interests and norms, democracies may end up thwarting them in the long run and render themselves only more war-prone.
The aim of the article is to study the Ukrainians' understanding of social collective and individual responsibility in the context of the Russia-Ukraine military conflict. Research methods and ...materials. Discourse analysis was selected as the most suitable method. The research material was publications and comments posted on Facebookin the period from 24.02.2022 to 15.05.2022 by Ukrainian social media users. Results and discussion. Although in the Ukrainian sector of social networks responsibility for military aggression is undoubtedly seen as collective, it is unequally shared among groups. During sharing of collective responsibility Ukrainians distinct two approaches: 1) all citizens of the aggressor country are equally to blame; 2) citizens of the aggressor country may be related to the crime on different scales, so they have different levels of responsibility. In the view of Ukrainians, the main responsibility should be ascribed to those who can be called a "random collection of individuals." After the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine military conflict the concept of personal responsibility has been losing its meaning, and the relationship between an individual, social group and society as a whole is prioritized by collective responsibility. Herewith, it is not the culpable event or action that is emphasized, but the "metaphysical guilt" that is imposed on all citizens of the aggressor country on the basis of membership in a "vicious" community.
Military power Biddle, Stephen
2004., 20101216, 2010, 2004
eBook
In war, do mass and materiel matter most? Will states with the largest, best equipped, information-technology-rich militaries invariably win? The prevailing answer today among both scholars and ...policymakers is yes. But this is to overlook force employment, or the doctrine and tactics by which materiel is actually used. In a landmark reconception of battle and war, this book provides a systematic account of how force employment interacts with materiel to produce real combat outcomes. Stephen Biddle argues that force employment is central to modern war, becoming increasingly important since 1900 as the key to surviving ever more lethal weaponry. Technological change produces opposite effects depending on how forces are employed; to focus only on materiel is thus to risk major error--with serious consequences for both policy and scholarship.
In clear, fluent prose, Biddle provides a systematic account of force employment's role and shows how this account holds up under rigorous, multimethod testing. The results challenge a wide variety of standard views, from current expectations for a revolution in military affairs to mainstream scholarship in international relations and orthodox interpretations of modern military history.
Military Powerwill have a resounding impact on both scholarship in the field and on policy debates over the future of warfare, the size of the military, and the makeup of the defense budget.
This article analyses a range of problems faced by the NATO member states in the Baltic region in connection with Russian aggression in Ukraine. It is indicated that the Russian Federation boosts its ...military presence in the Kaliningrad Oblast: it deploys advanced missile systems and armored fighting vehicles to the region, increases its military contingent and rearms its Navy in the Baltic Sea. It is stressed that Russia has violated the 1987 Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-range and Shorter-range Missiles (the INF Treaty) and in recent years has been conducting large-scale military exercises.
It is pointed out that amid the growing threat from Russia, the countries of the Baltic region have to reconsider their military strategies, to join their efforts in order to prevent any possible aggression. The NATO member states, the United States of America in particular, take part in the military drills in the region. Sweden’s military cooperation with NATO and the United States of America – a controversial issue in Swedish political circles – is discussed. The question of enhancing military interaction between the members of NATO – Germany and Norway, the Unites States and Poland – is addressed too. The advantages of building collective missile defense capability in the Baltic region and taking other steps to restrain Russia’s aggressive actions are indicated.
The lack of temporal disaggregation in conflict data has so far presented a strong obstacle to analyzing the short-term dynamics of military conflict. Using a novel data set of hourly dyadic conflict ...intensity scores drawn from Twitter and other social media sources during the Gaza Conflict (2008-2009), the author attempts to fill a gap in existing studies. The author employs a vector autoregression (VAR) to measure changes in Israel's and Hamas's military response dynamics immediately following two important junctures in the conflict: the introduction of Israeli ground troops and the UN Security Council vote. The author finds that both Hamas's and Israel's response to provocations by the other side increase (both by about twofold) immediately after the ground invasion, but following the UN Security Council vote, Israel's response is cut in half, while Hamas's slightly increases. In addition, the author provides a template for researchers to harness social media to capture the micro-dynamics of conflict.
The burgeoning literature on civil conflicts seldom considers why some civil wars are so much deadlier than others. This article investigates that question using a new data set of the number of ...combat deaths in internal conflicts from 1946 to 2002. The first section presents descriptive statistics on battle deaths by era, conflict type, and region. The article then tests state strength, regime type, and cultural characteristics as predictors of the number of combat deaths in civil war. The determinants of conflict severity seem to be quite different from those for conflict onset. Democracy, rather than economic development or state military strength, is most strongly correlated with fewer deaths; wars have also been less deadly on average since the end of the cold war. Religious heterogeneity does not explain the military severity of internal violence, and surprisingly, ethnic homogeneity may be related to more deadly conflicts.
This article addresses the question of Ukraine's societal polarization along the East-West line and the state of cohesion and endurance of its political community. In both political and academic ...discourses, Ukraine is often characterized as a country split between Western and Eastern regional and societal parts belonging to some wider geopolitical and cultural entities. Moreover, the recent upheavals in the life of the country - Euromaidan Revolution, illegal annexation of Crimea and Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas - have actualized the allegations about Ukraine as a feeble state structure on the brink of disintegration and collapse. The findings in this study challenge both of these claims and it is argued that Ukraine is not a deeply divided or failed state. In practice, the East-West political polarization line is not clearly defined, but to the extent that it does surface in the political and electoral contests, this line has been moving from west to east since the early 1990s. The shifting of the polarization line implies that political and cultural identities in Ukraine are not fixed and, at the same time, reflects a strengthening cohesion of Ukraine's political and cultural space. These findings are confirmed by the improved and ever-increasing convergence of Ukrainian society following the Euromaidan and Russian military aggression.
This article adds to recent research that has begun to systematically analyze the varied conflict propensities of autocracies. Using political incentive theory, we develop hypotheses on the ...diversionary proclivities of three distinct types of autocratic regimes that contradict conventional wisdom and the findings of recent empirical studies. To provide a full rendering of autocracies' diversionary tendencies, we test our hypotheses with Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) models that capture reciprocal relationships among external military force and four of its potential domestic causes from 1950 to 2005. Although our results provide only partial support for political incentive theory, they demonstrate the utility of using properly identified reciprocal models and of analyzing refined conceptualizations of autocratic regimes. We find that certain types of autocracies are more prone to use diversionary force and to benefit from it than others.
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