Anatomy of a Civil War demonstrates the destructive nature of war, ranging from the physical to the psychosocial, as well as war’s detrimental effects on the environment. Despite such horrific ...aspects, evidence suggests that civil war is likely to generate multilayered outcomes. To examine the transformative aspects of civil war, Mehmet Gurses draws on an original survey conducted in Turkey, where a Kurdish armed group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been waging an intermittent insurgency for Kurdish self-rule since 1984. Findings from a probability sample of 2,100 individuals randomly selected from three major Kurdish-populated provinces in the eastern part of Turkey, coupled with insights from face-to-face in-depth interviews with dozens of individuals affected by violence, provide evidence for the multifaceted nature of exposure to violence during civil war. Just as the destructive nature of war manifests itself in various forms and shapes, wartime experiences can engender positive attitudes toward women, create a culture of political activism, and develop secular values at the individual level. In addition, wartime experiences seem to robustly predict greater support for political activism. Nonetheless, changes in gender relations and the rise of a secular political culture appear to be primarily shaped by wartime experiences interacting with insurgent ideology.
Developed through a series of encounters with a Bosnian Serb soldier, Looking for Bosnia is a meditation on the possibilities and limitations of responding to extreme political violence in the ...context of the Bosnian war.
Civil wars pose some of the most difficult problems in the world today and the United Nations is the organization generally called upon to bring and sustain peace. Lise Morjé Howard studies the ...sources of success and failure in UN peacekeeping. Her in-depth 2007 analysis of some of the most complex UN peacekeeping missions debunks the conventional wisdom that they habitually fail, showing that the UN record actually includes a number of important, though understudied, success stories. Using systematic comparative analysis, Howard argues that UN peacekeeping succeeds when field missions establish significant autonomy from UN headquarters, allowing civilian and military staff to adjust to the post-civil war environment. In contrast, failure frequently results from operational directives originating in UN headquarters, often devised in relation to higher-level political disputes with little relevance to the civil war in question. Howard recommends future reforms be oriented toward devolving decision-making power to the field missions.
Mobilizing nature Pearson, Chris
2017, 2017., 20170901, 2012, 2017-10-03, Volume:
v.Cultural History of Modern War
eBook
Mobilizing nature traces the environmental history of war and militarisation in France. It offers a fresh perspective on the well-known conflicts whilst uncovering the largely 'hidden' history of the ...numerous military bases and other installations that pepper the French countryside.
In this new work, renowned feminist filmmaker and postcolonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha offers a lyrical, philosophical meditation on the global state of endless war and the violence inflicted by ...the imperial need to claim victory. She discusses the rise of the police state as linked, for example, to U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to China's occupation of Tibet, examining legacies of earlier campaigns and the residual effects of the war on terror. She also takes up the shifting dynamics of peoples' resistance to acts of militarism and surveillance as well as social media and its capacity to inform and mobilize citizens around the world. At once an engaging treatise and a creative gesture, Lovecidal probes the physical and psychic conditions of the world and shows us a society that is profoundly heartsick. Taking up with those who march both as and for the oppressedwho walk with the disappeared to help carry them forwardTrinh T. Minh-ha engages the spiritual and affective dimensions of a civilization organized around the rubrics of nonstop governmental subjugation, economic austerity, and highly technologized military conflict. In doing so, she clears a path for us to walk upon. Along with our every step, the world of the disappeared lives on.
Not Even Past David Fitzgerald, David Ryan, John M. Thompson / David Fitzgerald, David Ryan, John M. Thompson
03/2020
eBook
Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan: Taken together, these conflicts are
the key to understanding more than a half century of American
military history. In addition, they have shaped, in profound ways,
the ...culture and politics of the United States-as well as the
nations in which they have been fought. This volume brings together
international experts on American history and foreign affairs to
assess the cumulative impact of the United States' often halting
and conflicted attempts to end wars. It offers essential
perspectives on the Cold War and post-9/11 eras and explores the
troubling implications of the American tendency to fight wars
without end.
The politics of war reporting: Authority, authenticity and morality challenges the assumptions that reporters and their audiences have about the way the journalistic trade operates and how it sees ...the world. It unpacks the taken-for-granted aspects of the lives of war correspondents, exposing the principles of interaction and valorisation that usually go unacknowledged. Is journalistic authority really only about doing the job well? Do the ethics of war reporting emerge simply from the ‘stuff’ of journalism? This book asks why it is that the authoritative reporter increasingly needs to appear authentic, and that success depends not only on getting things right but being the right sort of journalist. This, in turn, depends on the uncalculating mastery of practices both before and during a journalist’s career. This book includes interviews with war correspondents and others with an active stake in the field and combines them with the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to construct a political phenomenology of war reporting – the power relations and unspoken ‘rules of the game’ underpinning the representation of conflict and suffering by the media. It considers the recent phenomena of pooling and embedding journalists as well as the impact of new technologies, and asks what changes in the journalistic area can tell us about authority, authenticity and morality in the cultural industries more broadly. Interdisciplinary in its approach, The Politics of War Reporting will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of media and cultural studies, sociology and political theory.
In this account of one of the worst intelligence failures in Americanhistory, James J. Wirtz explains why U.S. forces were surprised by the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive in 1968. Wirtz reconstructs ...the turning point of the Vietnam War in unprecedented detail. Drawing upon Vietcong and recently declassified U.S. sources, he is able to trace the strategy and unfolding of the Tet campaign as well as the U.S. response.
When American forces arrived in Vietnam, they found themselves embedded in historical village and frontier spaces already shaped by past conflicts. American bases and bombing targets followed spatial ...and political logics influenced by the footprints of previous wars in central Vietnam, and these militarized landscapes continue to shape postwar land-use politics. Footprints of War traces the long history of conflict-produced spaces in Vietnam, beginning with early modern wars and the French colonial invasion in 1885 and continuing through the collapse of the Saigon government in 1975. Drawing on extensive archival research and years of interviews and fieldwork in the hills and villages around the city of Huế, David Biggs integrates historical geographic information system (GIS) data and uses aerial, high-altitude, and satellite imagery to render otherwise inscrutable sites as living, multidimensional spaces. This personal and multilayered approach yields an innovative history of the lasting traces of war in Vietnam and a model for understanding other militarized landscapes. ; When American forces arrived in Vietnam, they found themselves embedded in historic village and frontier spaces already shaped by many past conflicts. American bases and bombing targets followed spatial and political logics influenced by the footprints of past wars in central Vietnam. The militarized landscapes here, like many in the world’s historic conflict zones, continue to shape post-war land-use politics. Footprints of War traces the long history of conflict-produced spaces in Vietnam, beginning with early modern wars and the French colonial invasion in 1885 and continuing through the collapse of the Saigon government in 1975. The result is a richly textured history of militarized landscapes that reveals the spatial logic of key battles such as the Tet Offensive. Drawing on extensive archival work and years of interviews and fieldwork in the hills and villages around the city of Hue to illuminate war’s footprints, David Biggs also integrates historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, using aerial, high-altitude, and satellite imagery to render otherwise placeless sites into living, multidimensional spaces. This personal and multilayered approach yields an innovative history of the lasting traces of war in Vietnam and a model for understanding other militarized landscapes. For more information visit the author's website: http://davidbiggs.net/