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The document provides a detailed list of members of Oxford University mentioned in the letters, including notable Dons and undergraduates from various colleges. The Dons section includes scholars, historians, philosophers, and jurists from Balliol, Magdalen, and other colleges. The undergraduates section lists individuals from Balliol, Exeter, and other colleges, highlighting their educational background, war service, and subsequent careers in law, academia, and public service. The document offers a comprehensive overview of the diverse academic and professional paths pursued by members of Oxford University during the early 20th century. [Extracted from the article]

One of the most pronounced features of the war in Ukraine has been the heavy reliance of the Russian forces on convict-soldiers, most notably by the private military and security company (PMSC) the Wagner Group. In this essay, I explore the ethical problems with using convict-soldiers and assess how using them compares to other military arrangements, such as conscription or an all-volunteer force. Overall, I argue that the central issue with using prisoners to fight wars is their perceived expendability. To do this, I present three arguments. First, although many prisoners have been under major duress, using convict-soldiers may be somewhat preferable to using conscripts in this regard. Second, convict-soldiers are more likely to be subject to human rights abuses than other types of soldiers and this should be seen as the main problem with their use. Third, convict-soldiers' liability to lethal force for fighting in an unjust war does not render it permissible to treat them as expendable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japanese empire's occupation of China during the Second World War left a complex and bitter legacy in postwar Chinese society. This article examines the occupation and its legacies at the grassroots, taking university students in Nanjing as a case study in occupation history and 'bottom-up' wartime commemoration. These young people, who studied at National Central University (NCU) under the Japanese-backed Reorganized National Government of Wang Jingwei, organized three protest movements between 1940 and 1945, defying puppet authorities, Japanese forces, and, after the war, the returning Chongqing Nationalist government, as they campaigned against corruption, opium sales, and discriminatory treatment over their status as 'bogus students' who supposedly received Japanese 'enslavement education' from a collaborationist regime. In the 1980s, after decades of marginalization under the People's Republic of China, these former protestors began holding reunions, documenting their experiences, and campaigning for recognition from Nanjing University, which eventually recognized them as alumni. Drawing primarily on privately printed alumni memoirs and commemorative volumes, this article positions the protests in the history of youth activism in Nanjing. That NCU students were able to rehabilitate themselves was due to their own organizational prowess and a sympathetic reception from the leadership of a cash-strapped Nanjing University, though the interests of fellow alumnus Jiang Zemin and the Communist Party-state still set the parameters of historical memory. In this, the example of the Nanjing students complicates the top-down role of the state, as described in much previous scholarship on Chinese wartime commemoration, in producing politically motivated nationalist narratives of wartime history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fate of captives designated as 'communist' prisoners during the Vietnam War has largely been overshadowed by that of US POWs detained north of the Seventeenth Parallel. This article, based on newly released archival sources in multiple languages, considers their classification and treatment in captivity. In particular, civilian captives and members of the National Liberation Front were often categorised as 'civil defendants' by South Vietnam and thus deprived of their rights as POWs, as codified in the Geneva Conventions. Yet, as representatives of a state dealing with both an insurgency and an invasion at the same time, South Vietnamese officials realised the significance of enemy captives. By illustrating the complex policies and practices of prisoner taking and incarceration, this article interprets and explains the gap between civilian and military law and informal and oftentimes self-serving practices on the ground. Thus, the Second Indochina War foreshadowed a global trend of excluding captured irregular combatants from the laws of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I explore the cultural impact of the First World War by analysing the work of libraries and librarians in different settings, from German-occupied Belgium and prisoner-of-war camps to Germany's own public and private libraries. By examining the work of German, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and American librarians, the article makes a case for applying the notion of a 'long' First World War to cultural and intellectual history. Considering ephemeral and established libraries, along with new types of collections generated by the war itself, the article sheds light on the changes to library work as a result of mobilization, censorship, and the growth of mass readership. While these changes concerned librarians in all belligerent states, German librarians were particularly affected after the burning of the Leuven library during the city's occupation by German forces. This singular event damaged Germany's national reputation and thereby laid the groundwork for a significant politicization of library work all the way to the Second World War. In addition to tracing the importance of librarians for German foreign policy, the article reconstructs how this professional community, whose intellectual formation was ultimately supranational, responded to the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research project 'Science for society, society for science at the Site of National Remembrance in Tambinowice'. It presents the material traces of prisonerof- war, resettlement and forced labour camps that functioned between 1870 and 1946 in Lamsdorf (now Tambinowice, Poland) and explains their modern social significance. Keywords: Poland, Germany, PoW camp, campscape, material culture, community, heritage, History of the site The earliest record of imprisonment in Lamsdorf dates to 1870-1871 when numerous French soldiers were taken captive by Prussian troops in the Franco- Prussian War and [...]

Under the recurring headline 'the Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches', several British newspapers reported in early 1900 that, during the ongoing siege of Mafeking, British army concertina players were capturing enemy soldiers by simply playing strains of the concertina to distract them out of their hiding places. 'One is sorry to learn that the art of music should be pressed into service to lure persons to destruction', a commentator in the Musical News noted, but then, it was rationalized, 'all's fair in war'. This hybrid use of the concertina during the South African War was further employed as a metaphor for the decay of the physical body itself: as has been noted by Elizabeth van Heyningen, food in Boer concentration camps was so meagre that the meat served to prisoners was once described as coming from a 'carcase [who] looks like a concertina drawn out fully with all the wind knocked out'. Likewise, Krebs (1999) has discussed the presence of the concertina in the trenches as an example of contemporaneous stereotypes about the susceptibility of Boer soldiers to music in relation to perceived notions that they were backwards and easily manipulated. Drawing upon references to music – particularly the ubiquitous, anthropomorphised, instrument of the concertina – in concentration camps during the South African War, this paper will situate the use of British military music at the dawn of the twentieth century within the framework of trauma studies, proposing that the soundscapes of imperial war were implicitly tinged with traces of physical suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional interpretations of Maya warfare have focused on the ritual aspects of war, including the necessity of taking captives for sacrifice. Captives are a common theme on carved stone monuments in the Late Classic period, and images like the murals at Bonampak suggest that captives taken in battle were ultimately sacrificed. Textual information from hieroglyphs and historical records, however, suggests a variety of fates for prisoners of war. Considering this information, the iconography of carved stone monuments is a poor indicator of historical outcomes for captives. What, then, was the function of captive imagery? In this article, I suggest that images of captives on carved stone monuments worked to prepare elite viewers for warfare by creating embodied social identities for warriors. Sculptures constructed a warrior identity that encompassed both victor and victim and emphasized the importance of elite bodies in the maintenance of political and ritual power. Understanding the ways in which images of captives were communicating allows a more robust view of how the practice of warfare differed from polity to polity and suggests that context is key to using art to learn about war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The aim of this study was to examine whether exposure to previous traumatic events is a risk factor for stress reactions during this pandemic. Capitalizing on a 29-year longitudinal study of Israeli ex-prisoners of war (ex-POWs) and combat veterans, we examined whether captivity is a risk factor for fear of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and COVID-19-induced acute stress disorder (COVID-19 ASD) beyond the effects of combat exposure and other stressful life events. In addition, we examined the contribution of captivity experiences (severity of captivity, experience of solitary confinement, and suffering during captivity) and veterans' appraisal of the impact of their war-related experiences on adjustment to the current quarantine and isolation to fear of COVID-19 and COVID-19 ASD. Methods: One-hundred-and-twenty Israeli ex-POWs from 1973 Yom Kippur War and 65 matched controls (combat veterans from the same war) filled out self-report questionnaires 18 (T1), 35 (T2), 42 (T3), and 47 (T4) years after the war. Results: Findings revealed that although ex-POWs and controls did not differ in their level of exposure to COVID-19, ex-POWS reported higher levels of fear of COVID-19 and COVID-19 ASD than controls. Suffering during captivity, measured at 1991, and participants' appraisal of the extent to which their war-related experiences affected adjustment to COVID-19 were significantly associated with fear of COVID-19 and COVID-19 ASD. Conclusions: The findings of the study demonstrate the long-term effects of exposure to traumatic experiences (captivity) during young adulthood on adjustment to an unrelated collective stress, such as COVID-19, 40 years later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This global microhistorical analysis of the Swede Brigitta Scherzenfeldt's capture in Russia and her subsequent enslavement in the Dzungar khanate stresses actors and regions needed to nuance the history of globalisation. The early globalisation process is commonly exemplified with maritime contacts, involving free and often male West European actors. In contrast, this study combines multilingual source material to trace and discuss economic integration, cross-border trade, forced migration, the circulation of knowledge, literary depictions, and diplomatic contacts in the Central Asian borderlands between China and Russia. In the process, I clarify the importance of female, coerced actors, and overland connections between non-European empires for the history of early modern globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Battle of the Atlantic threatened Britain's importation of food and forestry supplies, authorities intensified plans to rapidly increase domestic production. In Scotland, this was a herculean task in rural communities decimated by land clearances, economic depression, and population decline. Against the odds, the mobilisation of a range of workers enabled Scottish agriculture and forestry to make impressive gains in production, and significantly impacted Scotland's ability to meet wartime production targets. This article examines the contributions of four diverse groups of labourers that toiled in Scottish fields and forests: compelled labourers, including conscientious objectors and prisoners of war; adult and child volunteers; women; and foreign lumberjacks from Canada, Newfoundland, and British Honduras. This original research supplements our knowledge of the British rural workforce during the Second World War, and raises the issue of wartime migration and its effects on rural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether the interpretation of Article 30 of Geneva Convention III that allows the use of solitary confinement for prisoners of war with psychosocial disabilities is still valid in light of the new standards of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It proposes two alternative interpretations of Article 30 to demonstrate why isolation based on disability is unlawful and concludes that the use of solitary confinement on prisoners of war with psychosocial disabilities should be prohibited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the general obligation of the Detaining Power to exercise the greatest leniency towards prisoners of war may be used in interpreting the provisions of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 (GC III) related to the sanction regime to fulfil the obligation of humane treatment and to preserve the persons and honour of prisoners of war. The International Committee of the Red Cross updated Commentary on GC III is placed at the core of the arguments of this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animals are the unknown victims of armed conflict. They are regularly looted, slaughtered, bombed or starved on a massive scale during such hostilities. Their preservation should become a matter of great concern. However, international humanitarian law (IHL) largely ignores this issue. It only indirectly, and often ambiguously, provides animals with the minimum protection afforded to civilian objects, the environment, and specially protected objects such as medical equipment, objects indispensable for the survival of civilian population or cultural property. This regime neither captures the essence of animals as sentient beings experiencing pain, suffering and distress, nor takes into account their particular needs during wartime. To address these challenges, two strategies are possible: the first strategy would be to apply existing IHL more effectively to animals, if necessary by creative interpretation in line with the animals' needs. This strategy comprises two options: animals could be included into the categories of combatant/prisoners of war or of civilians. Animals would thus benefit from many guarantees given to human beings in armed conflict. Alternatively, and perhaps more realistically, animals could be equated with "objects" under IHL, while the relevant rules would be reinterpreted to cater for the fact that animals are living beings, experiencing pain, suffering and distress. The second strategy, which could be envisaged as a long-term objective, would be to adopt a new international instrument specifically aimed at granting rights to animals, notably in relation to prohibiting the use of animals as weapons of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enemy combatants captured in wartime are both a potential resource for their captors and a logistical and security nightmare. This has long been reflected in their treatment. Over the centuries, captured enemy combatants have been sold as slaves (or simply used as slave labour), forced to switch sides, ransomed for money, swapped for other prisoners, physically maimed to ensure they could no longer fight, starved to death, imprisoned under abysmal conditions, or outright massacred. And yet, surprisingly, at other times (including in the period covered by this book), most prisoners of war – though not, as Morieux shows, all – have not only had a protected status but, especially in the case of officers, been allowed a degree of freedom of movement that seems extraordinary by modern-day standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is an honour and a pleasure to be able to converse with four such generous and thoughtful readers. I am relieved that Guillaume Calafat agrees with me, rather than with Julien Duvivier, that prisoners of war are, as the saying goes, good to think with! I also appreciate their suggestions for future research avenues, which I think open up a number of exciting possibilities. In order to give those readers who have not read the book a sense of what they will get out of it, my response will focus on issues on chronology, historiography, and methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late twentieth century, the American prison system expanded in ways that denied women, and especially working-class and women of color, adequate medical care with regard to HIV-AIDS and their reproductive, chronic, and other illnesses. The experience of living within a racist, misogynistic, and privatized prison system shaped women's organizing on the inside, inspiring forms of mutual aid among prisoners and compelling the formation of inside–outside alliances. Activists not only addressed HIV-AIDS, but also the absence of all the healthcare that incarcerated women failed to receive. Their efforts highlight the systemic and cyclical problems diverse groups of women have faced within the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the United States, as well as women's interpersonal, organizational, and legal efforts to overcome them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the experiences of Jethro, an enslaved African man who was captured by the Narragansetts during King Philip's War. While captive, Jethro used his bilingualism to gather information about the Narragansett's war plans and then escaped and relayed them to the English. Jethro was granted freedom for this wartime service and went on to purchase property in the North End of Boston. He was representative of the charter generation of enslaved persons who showed that attitudes about race in seventeenth-century Massachusetts were still being formed. This essay further demonstrates how Jethro's story was appropriated by colonial writers at the time for their own unique purposes. Analyzing Jethro's story provides an opportunity to foreground Africanness in American captivity narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2016 to 2019, the University of Hawai'i West O'ahu conducted archaeological field schools at Honouliuli National Historic Site to teach our students basic archaeological skills. Because the site was the largest Japanese and Japanese American concentration camp on O'ahu, the field school initiated a program related to social justice and democratic principles for the imprisonment of US citizens and legal residents based on racial and national profiling. The demography of O'ahu created a special bond to the incarcerees' stories and the students of Asian and Hawaiian descent. Through field trips, student discussion, and curriculum development, we focused on the pedagogical benefit of experiential learning. Field trips to the National Park Service's World War II Valor in the Pacific Park System on O'ahu, King Kamehameha V Judiciary History Center, and the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i allowed the students to see and understand the historical context of the Japanese internment from the mid-nineteenth century, with the development of plantations and early colonialism, to the beginning of World War II and the internment of the more than 300 Japanese and Japanese American—as well as European and Okinawan—civilians and the imprisonment of over 4,000 prisoners of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 1982, Great Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falkland Islands/Malvinas. On 14 June, the defeated Argentine military began the evacuation of the Islands. Most Argentines came to view this short war as an absurd adventure entered into by a military dictatorship in decline trying to cling on to power. Yet by analysing Argentine songs about the Malvinas from 1941 to 1982, this article shows that the national imaginary had long included ideas of sovereignty usurped and captive islands awaiting redemption. Argentine songs about the Malvinas, I maintain, can be analysed as expressions of an 'emotional community' around the Islands. By examining the emphases, constants and changes in the songs emerging from that community, we get a clearer picture of how ideas about the territory and its recovery changed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the causal relationship between POW assignments and labor productivity for a vital sector of the German World War I economy, namely coal mining. Prisoners of war (POWs) provided significant labor. Combining data on all Ruhr mines with a treatment-effects approach, I find that POW employment alone accounted for 36 percent of the average POW-employing mine's annual productivity decline over wartime. Estimates also suggest that the representative POW's productivity averaged 32 percent of the representative regular miner's productivity and that POWs' contribution to wartime coal output amounted to 3.9 percent. Violence did not serve as a powerful work incentive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using received texts and excavated funerary epitaphs, this article examines the intricacies of gender and migration in early medieval China by exploring women's long-distance mobility from the fourth century to the sixth century, when what is now known as China was divided by the Northern Wei and a succession of four southern states—the Eastern Jin, Liu-Song, Southern Qi, and Liang. I focus on three types of migration in which women participated during this period: war-induced migration, family reunification, and religious journeys. Based on this analysis, I propose answers to two important questions: the connection between migration and the state, and textual representations of migrants. Though the texts under consideration are usually written in an anecdotal manner, the references to women, I argue, both reveals nuances in perceptions of womanhood at the time and elucidates the contexts within—and through—which long-distance travel became possible for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon the 2014 State of Palestine's accession to Geneva Convention III, captured Palestinians who took part in belligerent acts against the occupier should be treated as prisoners of war due to the fact that they belong to a party to an armed conflict. These individuals fall under three categories: members of security forces, affiliates of armed resistance groups, and uprisers who fight the occupant spontaneously on an individual basis. Contrary to established rules of IHL, Israel does not make any distinction regarding the status of these three types. Unilateral Israeli treatment of its captives does not hold water under international law. Such actions may trigger liability based on international criminal law, particularly as the ICC decided in 2021 that it possesses jurisdiction to investigate crimes occurring in the territory of Palestine. The mere fact of confining prisoners of war after the cessation of hostilities may constitute a ground for criminal prosecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2020 the International Criminal Court opened the trial in the Al Hassan case. For the first time in the history of international criminal justice a defendant is being tried with the charge of the war crime of sentencing or execution without due process in the context of a non-international armed conflict. Together with its equivalent in international armed conflicts – the war crime of denying a fair trial – this offence falls within the category of the war crimes of denying judicial guarantees. Although there are differences in their constitutive elements, both offences prohibit states and armed non-state actors from depriving prisoners of war and civilians of certain minimum judicial guarantees. The provisions that regulate these two crimes, however, present interpretative and practical issues which, so far, have not received sufficient consideration. Most notably, the material elements of the offences raise a range of interpretative doubts and are of cumbersome application. The objectives of the article are (i) to identify the issues posed by the material elements of the war crimes of denying judicial guarantees, (ii) to warn of the pitfalls hidden by the interpretation of the offences, and (iii) to trigger the debate on the issues that the crimes raise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of new technologies might challenge our assumptions about biomedical research: medical progress may not only cure but enhance human capacities. In particular, the emergence of brain-machine interfaces will admittedly allow disabled people to move or communicate again, but also has various military applications, such as remote control of drones and avatars. Although there is no express legal framework pertaining to the experimental phase of human enhancement techniques, they are actually constrained by international law. According to international humanitarian law, civilians and prisoners of war may be subjected to experiments only when required by their state of health or for medical treatment. According to international human rights law, experimentations are permissible when they meet two conditions: (i) free consent, and (ii) proportionality (that is, the adequacy of risk and benefit). In light of these conditions, this article assesses the situations in which experimentation involving brain-computer interfaces would be lawful. It also gives specific attention to those experimentations carried out on members of the armed forces. In fact, owing to the military hierarchy and the unique nature of its mission (to protect national security at the risk of their own lives), it is necessary to determine how the military may comply with this legal framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain and France were at war with each other for over half of the long eighteenth century. This period of sustained conflict produced immense changes, in both countries, in the character of the state and the course of economic development. Yet one of the most obvious ways in which contemporaries would have encountered the war was in the presence of large numbers of prisoners of war held by their country. Early in the century there were thousands of such captives, and by its end they numbered in the tens of thousands. Renaud Morieux takes this neglected topic for the focus of his multifaceted study. These prisoners created challenges that were legal and diplomatic, as well as administrative and financial. The citizens of each country found themselves having to learn to live with captives of a nation with which they were at war. In a work that is both theoretically informed and exhaustively researched, Morieux offers fresh insight into the consequences of war for European society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'No one's going to be interested in a story about prisoners of war!' This is the withering comment that the director Julien Duvivier supposedly made to Charles Spaak, the scriptwriter of one of the greatest films of all times, La grande illusion (1937), which was ultimately directed by Jean Renoir. Fortunately for his readers, Renaud Morieux is well aware that stories about prisoners of war can be of interest to everyone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1756, the young John Howard set out for Portugal. His ship was taken by a privateer, and Howard became a prisoner of war in France. Twenty years later, he launched the movement for prison reform in Britain. Renaud Morieux challenges historians to more fully connect war imprisonment and the debates it engendered about prisoners' rights to the emergence of prison reform in the 1770s and 1780s (p. 92). In this article, I take up that challenge. I suggest, however, that the connections are complex and twisted. Concerns about prisoners of war may have inspired prison reform, but they also made the project more confusing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the issue of whether individuals who join enemy forces during international armed conflicts are entitled to prisoner of war status upon capture. It presents the long-running debate on the topic through a study of divided scholarly opinions and judicial decisions. An original analysis of the competing theories is conducted on the basis of available state practice, treaty interpretation methodology, and novel critical arguments and proposals. The article seeks to challenge the value attributed to mainstream academic opinions and judicial precedents and open the debate in an area of international humanitarian law that is still under development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since their publication in the 1950s and 1980s respectively, the Commentaries on the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977 have become a major reference for the application and interpretation of those treaties. The International Committee of the Red Cross, together with a team of renowned experts, is currently updating these Commentaries in order to document developments and provide up-to-date interpretations of the treaty texts. This article highlights key points of interest covered in the updated Commentary on the Third Geneva Convention. It explains the fundamentals of the Convention: the historical background, the personal scope of application of the Convention and the fundamental protections that apply to all prisoners of war (PoWs). It then looks at the timing under which certain obligations are triggered, those prior to holding PoWs, those triggered by the taking of PoWs and during their captivity, and those at the end of a PoW's captivity. Finally, the article summarizes key substantive protections provided in the Third Convention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recently released updated ICRC Commentary on the Second Geneva Convention (GC II) recognizes significant changes in both the conduct of naval conflicts and interpretations of the governing law. One such significant change is the addition of cyber operations to the conduct of naval operations. Modern vessels increasingly utilize computer networks to control critical ship systems, but discussions of how potential cyber operations should be viewed under GC II are understandably limited. This article aids in addressing that gap by analyzing how cyber operations could have implications for certain provisions of GC II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christin Möllenbeck's book on institutional slavery in temple and palace in southern Mesopotamia during the Old Babylonian period (2000-1595 bc) is the first comprehensive study devoted to that subject. Möllenbeck thus defines slavery as a matter of property rights (p. 19). Naturally, quantities, qualities, characteristics and distribution of the sources are uneven, which affects the results of the inquiries, as Möllenbeck duly notes. [Extracted from the article]

The Battle of the Dardanelles is one of the key episodes of World War I on the Ottoman front between the British, the French, the Australians and New Zealanders on the one side, and the Ottoman army under German command on the other. Immediately after the Great War, the former belligerents engaged in another war, which protracts up until the present day: allegations of violations of the rules of war are mutually addressed, in order to become a salient element of political propaganda. Through the analysis of the major controversial issues (use of dum-dum bullets and asphyxiating gases, attacks on non-military objects and sites, treatment of prisoners of war) and the study of various sources (official documents, correspondence and reports issued by belligerent forces, memoirs of Dardanelles’ veterans, ICRC reports) this article scrutinizes two crucial questions. Were the rules of war taken seriously on the battlefield? Was the law instrumentalized by the belligerents? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great War was globalized and totalized1 by the inclusion of colonial and newly independent people from all over the world and of civilians, old people, women and children. The European war became a laboratory for all the suffering of the century, from the extermination of the Armenians to the refugee crisis, the internments, and the unending modernization of warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides insight into how, during the First World War, the ICRC handled the oversight of the respect of the 1906 Convention on the Wounded and Sick and the 1907 Hague Convention on Maritime Warfare, steadfastly working to uphold the law. It examines the ICRC's view on the applicability of the Conventions, describes its handling of accusations of violations of international humanitarian law and, finally, shows how the ICRC engaged in a legal dialogue with States on the interpretation of various provisions in the 1906 Convention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the release of Bowe Bergdahl, former prisoner of war in Afghanistan, in 2014. Topics include Bergdahl's five year detention in Afghanistan, the conflicting reports on how Bergdahl was captured, and the restrictions that are applied for one year to prisoners of war that return to the U.S.

The Authors apologise for two errors within their published Article. These appear on pages 391 and 416. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the increasingly frequent acts of non-compliance with, and grievous violations of, international humanitarian law around the world, especially in non-international armed conflicts, attacks on objects and persons enjoying special protection, and their abuse, as well as the misuse of the distinctive emblems of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, come as no surprise. Although a repressive approach to the problem – through the prosecution and punishment of perpetrators – cannot completely prevent such occurrences, an effective and appropriate judicial stigmatisation can significantly contribute to making them as rare as possible. In this regard, the court proceedings held before the War Crimes Chamber in Belgrade and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague in connection with the events in and around the Vukovar Hospital and Ovčara farm have provided an appropriate judicial response. This is notwithstanding the fact that, at least for now, not all perpetrators have been prosecuted for their acts (or failure to act) at the time of the commission of these grave crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the wars of the eighteenth century, French prisoners on parole in Britain were placed in a paradoxical situation of captives with privileges. Instead of studying these men as if they dwelt in a world apart, this article focuses on captivity zones as a social laboratory, where people of different status would socialize. These spaces accordingly provide a lens through which to glimpse the repercussions of international conflicts at the level of local communities. The disputes which opposed these captives to the English population, which were the object of letters of complaints sent by the French prisoners to the authorities, shed light on the normative and moral resources which were used by eighteenth-century Englishmen and Frenchmen to legitimize themselves in situations of social conflict. As a configuration characterized by shifting social relations, the parole zone brought together local, national, and international issues, intertwined primarily in the rhetoric of honour. In these incidents, there was no systematic alignment of class and national discourses and actions, while the precise standing of these Frenchmen on the social ladder was constantly challenged and debated. The resulting quarrels therefore reveal a series of social inversions: dominant groups in France were in many respects dominated in England. Rather than being a mere reflection of pre-existing social hierarchies, such micro-incidents reinvented them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A sharp debate has emerged about the importance of humanitarian organisations speaking out against misdeeds and, more generally, on the ethical and moral aspects of doing humanitarian work in the face of mass violence. That debate has pushed out of the spotlight a number of essential questions regarding the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) during the Second World War. The aim of this text is to scrutinize the ICRC's humanitarian operations for detainees of Nazi concentration camps during the final phase of the war in Europe. We look beyond the risks faced by ICRC delegates working in Germany to show how difficult the organisation found it to carry out a humanitarian operation for concentration-camp detainees in the very particular circumstances that prevailed in Europe at that time. The ICRC was an organisation designed to collect information on and to protect and assist prisoners of war, and its hastily mounted response is indicative of the strenuous task it faced in re-inventing itself during the final stages of the war and the minor role it was assigned in the occupation programmes imposed by the Allied forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian civil war was a fratricidal climax of seven years of war and revolution that fractured Russian society. Its traumatic effects on post-revolutionary life are beyond measure. In this article Sean Guillory examines memoirs of Komsomol civil war veterans to illuminate the ways the war shaped their sense of self. Guillory argues that veterans' memoirs reveal a shattering of the self where their efforts to narrate their experience as agents of war was overshadowed by their transformation on the battlefield into instinctual beings, imprisoned by emotions, senses, nerves, and muscles. Guillory engages the scholarship on the Soviet self and subjectivity by calling attention to the ways trauma produces a "darker side" of the self, and in particular, how the body serves as a long-term depository for experiences of loss, disorientation, and deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship concerning the Wehrmacht leadership in Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union (1941–1945) has provided a much more nuanced picture of the motivation and responsibility of the uppermost strata of general for the brutalization of the conflict. The generals just outside this inner military circle, however, continue to be largely ignored. Questions on the mentality of lower-ranking, frontline commanders toward the war of annihilation and what latitude they reserved for themselves in carrying out orders remain, like the war on the front itself, one of the least researched topics of World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Armed groups frequently issue ad hoc commitments that contain a law of armed conflict component. These commitments detail the obligation of the relevant armed group to abide by international humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions, or particular rules set out in the commitment. They commit the group to abide by international standards, sometimes exceed international standards, or in certain respects violate international standards. Although these commitments are often overlooked, they offer certain lessons for the law of armed conflict. This article considers the commitments of armed groups with respect to two specific areas of the law that are either of contested interpretation or seemingly inapplicable to non-international armed conflicts, namely the identification of legitimate targets and the prisoners of war regime. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an examination into the domestic social aspects of World War I in Germany, focusing on the challenges of prisoners of war and policing their interactions with native Germans. Accounts are given describing the particular problem of marital infidelity among German women with prisoners of war due to the tension of their husbands' prolonged service on the battlefronts. Analysis is also provided addressing the social and economic changes in gender identity which impacted German women of the period.

The article discusses the interpretation of Hanna Pitkin about the notion of collective moral responsibility (CMR) which people are held responsible for the government's policies. It outlines Pitkin's interpretation of CMR in various context including the actions where democratic government authorizes the unjustifiable torture of prisoners of war. It also explains Pitkin's use of somewhat ambiguous notion of people to participate in the state political processes.

The article offers an analysis on the variety of ways that loud music has been used in the detention camps. It states that surveys at several detention camps in the U.S., Afghanistan, Baghdad, and Iraq reveals that loud music is commonly used as an openly acknowledged component of harsh interrogation. Accordingly, the approach is known as "futility" techniques and its purpose is to persuade a detainee that resistance to interrogation is futile.

In 1964 the West German government agreed to provide ?1 million in financial compensation to British victims of National Socialism. The distribution of the money, organised by the British foreign office, turned into a major public scandal, as a number of British POWs, among them survivors of the ?great escape?, had their claims rejected. By examining the refusal of several British POWs to accept their exclusion from the scheme, the article addresses the interplay of political pressure and public opinion that led to a parliamentary inquiry into what became known as ?the Sachsenhausen affair? in 1967. Given that provisions of the agreement with West Germany had precluded indemnification to mistreated POWs, the distribution of the money almost inevitably led to bitterness and discontent. From this perspective, the article explores the impact of the Great Escape on British memory of the war, the public reception of the film The Great Escape(1963), and the way in which public memory influenced the debate on compensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the contradictions between the bracero program and the temporary labor program using German prisoners of war in the United States during World War II. Despite the bilateral agreement between Mexico and the United States aimed at protecting the braceros, "who came as allies," they remained alien workers and outsiders. In contrast, German prisoners of war, who came as enemies, were often transformed into personal friends "like our own boys." This article uses archival records, in-depth interviews with former prisoners of war, and secondary sources to analyze several structural factors that help explain these divergent outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]