Scholars have long debated the nature of the Roman frontier. From linear defense systems designed to hold back barbarian tides to arteries of communication and exchange, rivers have been at the ...forefront of this discussion. This paper focuses on the Lower Danube frontier and argues that Rome’s most enduring enemy in the Balkans was not a barbarian tribe, but the river itself. The Danube frequently froze in wintertime facilitating the passage of massive raiding parties. Indeed, the most devastating attacks recorded by ancient observers took place during the dead of winter, when the ice on the Danube was hard enough to allow the crossing of large number of horsemen. These attacks set in motion events and long-term processes that forever changed the cultural fabric of the region. Unable to contain the threat, early Roman emperors led campaigns north of the Danube and ultimately conquered Dacia, which allowed them to control both sides of the river. In Late Antiquity, Constantine and Justinian dramatically altered the cultural landscape with their massive programs of fortification designed to finally secure the Balkan provinces. Centuries after the fall of Rome, Byzantine emperors still relied on a combination of brute force, consolidation and diplomacy in order to prevent winter attacks. In the end, all attempts at devising a permanent solution failed and the frozen Danube remained a barbarian ally slowly eroding the empire’s control in the Balkans.
Abstract
This article publishes and examines a newly discovered charter drafted in the Holy Land during the time of the fourth crusade, bringing the number of such original documents to four. In ...addition to shedding light on the nature of donations made by minor crusaders to the Templars while in Outremer, the witness list also reveals for the first time documentary evidence of the progress of a group of crusaders who departed from the main host of the fourth crusade after the attack on Zara and their connections with wider events such as the Grandmontine crisis and the conquest of Normandy.
Researchers and policymakers have increasingly recognized foreign fighter mobilization as a national security threat to foreign states and domestic populations. Yet, scholars remain divided on the ...motivations of foreign combatants, arguing that fighters may be motivated by grievances, opportunity, or material incentives. The motivations of foreign fighters may be especially complex, as they are engaging in a conflict outside of their state. I analyze how historical and present-day group exclusionary policies and opportunity shape mobilization. To do so, I leverage novel data consisting of individual fighter data of Islamic State volunteers fighting in Iraq and Syria. Consistent with my theoretical framework, I find that a higher rate of Islamic State fighters come from areas where Sunni Muslims were denied access to political power and have greater state capacity.
Academic dissent in a post COVID-19 world Schweinsberg, Stephen; Fennell, David; Hassanli, Najmeh
Annals of tourism research,
November 2021, 2021-11-00, Volume:
91
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Tourism academia owes its legitimacy to an established process whereby we employ methodologies rigorously to issues within our sphere of interest to apply, test or generate theories. However, what of ...instances where there are ideological disagreements between scholars, instances where the future of tourism is not set but rather will be framed by scholars on the basis of their own values-based positions? In the present paper an argument is made that scholars should not solely focus on assessing the technical merits of knowledge. Instead we must grapple with what might constitute a ‘reasonable dissent’ in the context of the “wider habitual in tourism and its scholarship” (Tribe & Liburd, 2017, p. 227).
•A discussion of the interplay of dissenting traditions in society and academic knowledge formation•Frameworks for ‘reasonable dissent’ as evidenced in tourism academia•The benefits and challenges in framing ‘reasonable’ dissents for both the dissenter(s) and the wider tourism academy
In ethno-territorial civil wars, which factors influence whether rebels choose and retain conventional warfare as their primary military strategy throughout the conflict, or whether they use ...guerrilla warfare as a primary strategy during periods judged to be less advantageous to conventional warfare? The existing literature almost exclusively emphasizes relative power as the determining factor: rebels use guerrilla warfare because they typically lack the capability to fight conventional wars effectively against states. I find some support for this hypothesis: ethno-territorial rebels are much more likely to fight exclusively conventional wars when external states intervene conventionally on the rebel side. I also find that rebel leaders with more intense, far-reaching nationalist goals are more likely to employ guerrilla warfare as a primary war strategy. For such leaders, the higher costs of using guerrilla methods pending an eventual transition to conventional warfare are made more acceptable by a higher valuation of the far-reaching gains delivered by military victory-gains expected to be made more likely by interim periods in which guerrilla warfare is the primary strategy. Turning to other factors, I do not find that status quo conditions or a high level of state democracy have a significant influence.
In this article, we provide an introduction to the Special Issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution devoted to the impact of violent conflict on entrepreneurship in developing countries. First we ...note that there is insufficient attention in the literature on the impact of violent conflict on the firm or entrepreneur level. Then, after we define entrepreneurship and violent conflict, we provide a summary of the existing literature and give an overview of the contributions in this Special Issue. We conclude by noting policy implications and areas for further research.
It is still unknown whether there is some deep structure to modern wars and terrorist campaigns that could, for example, enable reliable prediction of future patterns of violent events. Recent war ...research focuses on size distributions of violent events, with size defined by the number of people killed in each event. Event size distributions within previously available datasets, for both armed conflicts and for global terrorism as a whole, exhibit extraordinary regularities that transcend specifics of time and place. These distributions have been well modelled by a narrow range of power laws that are, in turn, supported by some theories of violent group dynamics. We show that the predicted event-size patterns emerge broadly in a mass of new event data covering all conflicts in the world from 1989 to 2016. Moreover, there are similar regularities in the events generated by individual terrorist organizations, 1998-2016. The existence of such robust empirical patterns hints at the predictability of size distributions of violent events in future wars. We pursue this prospect using split-sample techniques that help us to make useful out-of-sample predictions. Power-law-based prediction systems outperform lognormal-based systems. We conclude that there is indeed evidence from the existing data that fundamental patterns do exist, and that these can allow prediction of size distribution of events in modern wars and terrorist campaigns.
Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions investigates some of the most historically important political and social issues raised by the Genpei War (1180-1185). This epic civil conflict, which ushered in ...Japan’s age of the warriors, is most famously articulated in the monumental narrative Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike). Elizabeth Oyler’s ambitious work lays out the complex interconnections between the numerous variant texts of the Heike and the historical events they describe. But Oyler’s innovative methodology also brings other texts and genres—the Gikeiki, the Soga monogatari, the Azuma kagami, and pieces from the kōwakamai (ballad-dramas) repertoire—into her analysis. Rather than concentrating on individual texts, Oyler focuses on the inter-textual relationships within this larger body of narrative and drama and the collective role of these works in creating and disseminating stories about some of the Genpei War’s most contentious events. In so doing, she works toward a new understanding of the underlying cultural problems of which these tales are symptomatic and which they attempt to address.
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