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In the historiography on the origins of the First World War, the visions of war among European elites remain controversial. This article examines how Austria-Hungary's military officers imagined the character and outcome of a general European war before 1914. It argues that Habsburg officers writing in military journals adhered to the idea of a short war with only limited impact on economy and society. They were optimistic about winning a major European war alongside their ally Germany. Their belief in a limited war was based on the experiences of the modern cabinet wars fought in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how the global Cold War conflict was made sense of and situated in local political, cultural and physical landscapes and communities during the 1980s in Britain and Denmark. Using civil defence as a prism, the article employs a comparative approach to explore variations within and between countries of how local authorities prepared or resisted the prospect of nuclear war. The article finds that two main imaginaries emerged that shaped shared understandings of society before, during and after the imagined future war: one emphasized the possibility of nuclear survival and even welfare, the other urged resistance and renounced the futility of civil defence preparations. The article argues that local actors used these imaginaries to empower themselves, to define how nuclear space was imagined and lived and to construct desirable (and undesirable) visions of the future. The imaginaries were multiscalar and interacted with developments at global and national levels, and the article sheds light on this three-way dynamic of understanding and articulating the nuclear age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critique of Whiggish approaches to military history. It begins with this quotation from Dennis Showalter – 'military history is arguably the last stronghold of what historiographers call the "Whig interpretation"' – and notes that Showalter's assessment was a reflection on both the general absence of theory and the linked poverty of the fallback theoretical basket of the subject, with such staples as War and Society, Face of Battle, and Military Revolutions. Recognizing the shortcomings of numerous approaches to military history, the author identifies the challenge – writing military history that incorporates multiple regions and takes a global approach. As the author concludes, the problem for the historian remains how best to address the complex interactions of, in particular, change and continuity, structure and conjuncture, the West and the wider world, and to do so to produce an account that is able to identify and probe crucial issues and key questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edele reframes the conflict by splitting it up into five "distinct" (4) but overlapping stages: the Asian land war (1937-1945); the European war (1939-1941); the north African war (1940-1943); the German-Soviet war (1941-1945); and the Pacific war (1941-1945). Clamping down on separatism and domestic opposition, Stalin supported the Chinese communists to tie down Chiang Kai-Shek's government 'to secure the eastern flank of the Soviet Union during the critical transition from war to peace' (179). Edele, Mark Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II, Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2021; 272 pp., 10 b/w illus.; 9781350153516, £25.00 (hbk); 9781350383463, £14.99 (pbk); 9781350153530, £13.49 (ebook) Anyone looking for a readable and thought-provoking primer about the Second World War need look no further. [Extracted from the article]

This study examines the legacies of large-scale armed conflict on emancipative value preferences from 1946 to 2012. The multilevel analysis indicates that people living in countries with past armed conflict are more likely to endorse less emancipative value preferences. The higher the intensity and the longer the duration of the armed conflict episodes experienced in a country, the greater the impact on values. Our evidence further suggests that the mechanism through which armed conflict shapes values is by diminishing/destructing the material, intellectual, and connective resources available to a society. These findings show that armed conflict legacies are bleaker than previous studies on individual exposure to violence have suggested. Large-scale violence diminishes people's ability and motivation to pursue a life free from domination, potentially eroding the basis of generalized tolerance and cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the military engagement in Afghanistan has been framed in the Norwegian public sphere and by veterans who have participated on the ground. Drawing on public documents and personal interview data, the analysis demonstrates how different frames were used in the public and private spheres to convey the meaning of the operation. The analysis focuses in particular on the mismatch experienced by the veterans between the official framing of the operation as a humanitarian endeavor, and their perception of having been at war. In the discussion of the findings, we argue that the study sheds light on broader questions concerning the place of contemporary soldiers in Western societies, where people in general have become largely detached from the direct experience of warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gallagher centres her study on the concept of Irish civil society in an attempt to assess support for the war effort amongst Irish Catholics. What then follows is a series of disparate chapters: "Memory, History and the Great War", "Irish Women and War-Relief on the Home Front", "The War at Sea: Encountering the German Enemy", "Greater Ireland and Catholic Loyalism", and "Irish Catholics, Britain and the Allies". [Extracted from the article]

This article addresses the interaction between policies of targeted killing and wider social forces, particularly technology, through three recently published books. I suggest that while Ian Shaw’s Predator Empire does well to draw attention to the enclosing tendency of contemporary nonhuman environments and means of technological control – particularly drones, Kyle Grayson’s Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing provides a necessary contextualisation of these technological transformations by emphasising the cultural-political underpinnings of policies of targeted killing and of the assemblage of technologies into such policies. These perspectives are replicated in Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land, which describes the political and strategic manipulation of space to implement Israeli nonterritorial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. I conclude by suggesting that these three works provide renewed avenues to reflect on the normative and conceptual impacts of lethal drones and other novel warfighting technologies, as well as on the relation between state violence and normalcy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barbara Walter’s application of reputation theory to self-determination movements has advanced our understanding of why many separatist movements result in armed conflict. Walter has shown that governments of multi-ethnic societies often respond to territorial disputes with violence to deter similar future demands by other ethnic groups. When governments grant territorial accommodation to one ethnic group, they encourage other ethnic groups to seek similar concessions. However, a number of recent empirical studies casts doubt on the validity of Walter’s argument. We address recent challenges to the efficacy of reputation building in the context of territorial conflicts by delineating the precise scope conditions of reputation theory. First, we argue that only concessions granted after fighting should trigger additional conflict onsets. Second, the demonstration effects should particularly apply to groups with grievances against the state. We then test the observable implications of our conditional argument for political power-sharing concessions. Using a global sample of ethnic groups in 120 states between 1946 and 2013, we find support for our arguments. Our theoretical framework enables us to identify the conditions under which different types of governmental concessions are likely to trigger future conflicts, and thus has important implications for conflict resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fragmentation of armed opposition movements through the rise of new rebel groups constitutes a significant challenge to conflict termination and peacebuilding. Yet, the question of why some rebel movements remain cohesive whereas others see a number of contending groups during the course of the armed conflict has received limited attention in existing research. This article addresses this gap by analyzing the determinants of the rise of rebel contenders in intrastate armed conflicts worldwide, 1975–2013. The theoretical framework focuses on barriers to entry, that is, variations in the costs and disadvantages that must be borne by nascent rebel contenders that are not borne to the same extent by incumbent rebel groups. The study proposes that strong social networks underpinning incumbent groups create structural barriers to entry for nascent groups by aggravating challenges of organization building. It further suggests that the interaction between incumbent groups and the government influences strategic barriers to entry as changes in government policies produce windows of opportunity for nascent groups to form. Consistent with these arguments, the study finds that when incumbent groups have strong networks – because rebels either tap into ethnic networks or draw on a leftist ideology – the risk of fragmentation is lower. Furthermore, when the government accommodates groups, through either negotiations or democratic concessions, the risk of fragmentation increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and why do groups participating in mass dissent choose to initiate terrorist campaigns? I argue that groups involved in civil wars and mass civil resistance might face similar organizational pressures, which encourage the initiation of terrorism due to higher tactical effectiveness. Internal organizational pressure might depend on leaders’ expectations of a decline in followers’ commitment with protracted use of mass tactics. This is likely to motivate leaders to initiate terrorist campaigns to secure organizational survival. External organizational pressures might depend on increasing dissident campaigns’ fragmentation. This intensifies competition making leaders more likely to initiate terrorism so as to establish themselves at the forefront of their movements. The findings provide empirical support consistent with my claims and indicate no significant difference between civil wars and mass civil resistance movements with regards to these effects. Contrary to the common idea that the use of conventional violence should entail a higher willingness to engage in illegal violence against non-combatants, this finding suggests that conflict dynamics affect the decision to initiate terrorism and that terrorist campaigns have a coherent strategic logic across different types of mass dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies find a strong relationship between armed conflict and gender equality, but only compare armed conflict to no armed conflict onset. However, opposition movements use different means to challenge governments, such as nonviolent or armed strategies. This study explores this variation and poses the question: How does the level of gender equality affect the onset of nonviolent campaigns and armed conflicts? It makes two contributions. First, I quantitatively test the impact of gender equality on different forms of conflict onset, and second, I propose a comprehensive gendered mobilization argument based on strategic choice theory. Nonviolent campaigns rely on mass participation, and the nonviolent conflict literature claims that they are open to a wider array of participants, including women, compared to armed conflicts. I argue that gender norms affect movements’ expectations of mobilization (mass or limited) as well as conflict norms (nonviolent or violent) in society, and subsequently, the choice of conflict strategy. I hypothesize that higher levels of gender equality, measured by fertility rate and female-to-male primary school enrolment ratio, increase the likelihood of nonviolent campaign onset, compared to both armed and no campaign onset. This study analyses country-year data from the UCDP and NAVCO datasets between 1961 and 2006 and finds that increases in gender equality are, on average, associated with an increased likelihood of nonviolent conflict onset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While we know why rebels may recruit children for their cause, our understanding of the consequences of child soldiering by non-state armed groups remains limited. The following research contributes to addressing this by examining how rebels’ child recruitment practice affects the duration of internal armed conflicts. We advance the argument that child soldiering increases the strength of rebel organizations vis-a-vis the government. This, in turn, lowers the capability asymmetry between these non-state actors and the incumbent, allowing the former to sustain dispute. Ultimately, the duration of armed conflicts is likely to be prolonged. We analyse this relationship with quantitative data on child soldier recruitment by rebel groups in the post-1989 period. The results confirm our main hypothesis: disputes are substantially longer when rebels recruit children. This work has important implications for the study of armed conflicts, conflict duration and our understanding of child soldiering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food security has attracted widespread attention in recent years. Yet, despite preliminary evidence connecting food insecurity to political violence, we lack a systematic understanding of the relationship(s) between local food resources and violence against civilians. This study develops a food-security based theory to explain the significant variation that we observe in violence against civilians across both time and subnational geographic space. We argue that combatants, be they government or rebel actors, often must turn to local agricultural resources for sustenance. During times of relative peace, armed actors and civilians have long time horizons, and the prospects of repeated interactions thereby promote a strategy of co-optation to obtain food resources. However, the existence of immediate conflict in a region leads armed actors to discount the benefits of future interactions in favor of obtaining food immediately, using violence if necessary. In estimating a series of statistical models on a sample of all African countries (1997–2009), we find robust support for our expectations: cropland increases the frequency of violence against civilians during periods of conflict, but has an added pacifying effect during times of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the local effects of internal armed conflict on postwar violent crime in Northern Ireland. It argues that exposure to wartime violence will lead to higher levels of violent crime in the aftermath of conflict. Particularly, it claims that exposure to violence committed by armed groups challenging the state (anti-government groups) will have this effect, as it erodes the legitimacy needed for local law enforcement agencies to function effectively. This, in turn, is expected to contribute to the emergence of a postwar public security gap that lowers opportunity costs to resort to violent crime for a range of local actors. To evaluate these propositions, spatial statistics on a subnational dataset covering war-related fatalities for the period 1969–98 and police crime records for the postwar period 2002–06 are employed. The results indicate that the more an area has been exposed to violence, and the larger the proportion of this violence committed by anti-government groups, the more violent crime on the local level. This study hence contributes both to the burgeoning literature on the legacies of civil war and to recent research emphasizing the need to disaggregate non-state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the persistence of the shock caused by the American Civil War on the relative city size distribution of the USA. Two features make the study of this conflict interesting. First, it took place at an earlier stage of the industrialisation and urbanisation processes than those previously analysed in the related literature. Second, the battles were fought in the open field, not in urban areas. In line with previous results for the Second World War in Japanese and German cities, our findings suggest that the effects of the shock were transitory. Furthermore, some evidence regarding the possible presence of a ‘safe harbour effect’ is reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does economic inequality cause civil war? Deviating from individualist measures of inequality such as the Gini coefficient, recent studies have found a statistical link between group-level inequalities and conflict onset. Yet, this connection remains controversial, not least because of the difficulties associated with conceptualizing and measuring group-level differences in development. In an effort to overcome weaknesses afflicting specific methods of measurement, we introduce a new composite indicator that exploits the strengths of three sources of data. The first step of our method combines geocoded data from the G-Econ project with night lights emissions data from satellites. In a second step, we bring together the combined spatial values with survey estimates in order to arrive at an improved measure of group-level inequality that is both more accurate and more robust than any one of the component measures. We evaluate the effect of the combined indicator and its components on the onset of civil violence. As expected, the combined index yields stronger results as more information becomes available, thus confirming the initial hypothesis that horizontal economic inequality does drive conflict in the case of groups that are relatively poor compared to the country average. Furthermore, these findings appear to be considerably more robust than those relying on a single data source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article1 I will discuss the question of violence in (large) groups and the relationship between the mass and the individual selves. This will be done through the concept of the ‘soldier’s matrix’2. I refer to a matrix dominating a whole society, which participates in organized aggression and suffers its emotional consequences. Everybody in the matrix becomes a soldier, and the identity or the ‘Habitus’ (Elias, 1989) of the society is influenced by soldiership. This applies not only to Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the dark days in Germany, but also to two, three or more decades after the Second World War, and for most other societies in war. The advantage as well as the disadvantage of using the term soldier’s matrix in Germany is the fact that for the new generation, the attitude towards the army has undergone a great change. For many people, soldiers represent almost a taboo or a kind of sickness. Finally I would like to contribute to the understanding of pathological relationships, with particular reference to relation disorders, which are connected to violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) recorded 40 armed conflicts with a minimum of 25 battle-related deaths, up by six from 2013. This is the highest number of conflicts reported since 1999, and 11 of these conflicts were defined as wars, that is, conflicts generating 1,000 or more battle-related deaths in one calendar year. Further, an escalation of several conflicts, coupled with the extreme violence in Syria, resulted in the highest number of battle-related deaths in the post-1989 period. Yet, compared to the large-scale interstate wars of the 20th century, the number of fatalities caused by armed conflicts in 2014 was relatively low. Additionally, seven conflicts identified in 2013 were no longer active in 2014. However, four new conflicts erupted in 2014, all of them in Ukraine, and three previously registered conflicts were restarted by new actors. Furthermore, six conflicts reoccurred with previously registered actors. A positive development, however, is the increase to ten of the number of peace agreements concluded and signed in 2014, which represents a further four compared with 2013. And although this increase is part of a positive trend since 2011, it is worth noting that several peace processes remained fragile by the end of the year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders important aspects of African participation in the First World War, both in Europe and in Africa itself, as part of the British and French empires. More specifically, it explores demobilization at the end of the war in comparison with that process in Europe, paying close attention to the particularities of the colonial context. The article argues that, although French and British Africa were integrated significantly into their metropole’s war efforts between 1914 and 1918, the experience of demobilization in these colonies does not conform to George Mosse’s ‘brutalization’ thesis, which has been so influential in understanding postwar events in parts of Europe. Africans who participated in the British and French war efforts did not emerge from their experiences to roil the political landscape with discontent and violence, even if the effects of the war were still important in many areas of the continent. Further, the story of demobilization in Africa demonstrates the importance of attending to the specific context of the colonial ‘peripheries’, even as we recognize the important links that connect them to the metropolitan ‘centres’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to this special issue is presented which addresses the post-war impact of World War I, based on the 1968 special issue of "Journal of Contemporary History" dealing with the transition from war to peace, as well as the 1990 book "Fallen Soldiers" by George Mosse and his post-war theories of "brutalization" arising from the war.

Most studies of Irish recruitment to the British forces during the Second World War have identified a desire for adventure as one of the principal motives. While this motive has existed throughout history, this article argues that its prominence among Irish recruits was due to the image of war that was diffused in independent Ireland. The interwar market for children’s literature and cinema was dominated by British boys’ weeklies and war films, which portrayed British soldiers as glamorous heroes participating in wars that were exciting and just. For some Irish youths this influenced their perception of British military service. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The impact of armed conflict may persist long after the end of war, and may include a lasting institutional legacy. We use a novel dataset from rural Burundi to examine the impact of local exposure to conflict on institutional quality, and try to ‘unbundle’ institutions by distinguishing between three dimensions of the institutional framework: property rights security, local political institutions, and social capital. We find that conflict exposure affects institutional quality, and document that the impact of conflict on institutional quality may be positive or negative, depending on the institutional measure. Specifically, exposure to violence strengthens in-group social capital and promotes tenure security. However, the appreciation for state institutions is negatively affected by exposure to violence. We find no evidence consistent with design-based theories of institutional quality, or the idea that institutional quality is enhanced by interventions of (non)state external actors. Instead our findings provide some support for the theory of parochial altruism. Our results emphasize the importance for policymakers to consider autonomous responses to conflict when designing development programs. They further imply some caution for actors seeking to reform local institutions through top-down interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If a civil war begins, it is more likely to be initiated by an ethnic group than any other type of group. We argue that ethnic groups, on average, are likely to have more grievances against the state, are likely to have an easier time organizing support and mobilizing a movement, and are more likely to face difficult-to-resolve bargaining problems. We further argue that each of these factors was likely due to three pre-existing patterns associated with ethnicity. First, when political power is divided along ethnic lines, ruling elites can disproportionately favor their own ethnic group at the expense of others. This creates grievances that fall along ethnic lines. Second, ethnic groups tend to live together in concentrated spaces, sharing the same language and customs, and enjoying deep ties with ethnic kin. This means that ethnic groups, if they are aggrieved, will have an easier time mobilizing support to demand change. Third, the fact that ethnic identity tends to be less elastic than other types of identity means that credible commitments to any bargain – before and during a conflict— will be more difficult to make. The result is that ethnic groups will have a greater number of reasons, opportunities, and incentives to mobilize and fight than non-ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article takes the Oder region as an example to demonstrate the way in which memories of the Second World War and the postwar years are cultivated by residents of the region, and furthermore, how the place of remembrance of the Oder–Neisse line was encoded by Germans and Poles respectively. The Oder region saw an almost complete population exchange, which was a result of several migration processes. On both sides of the Oder–Neisse line, the memories of these events were manipulated politically and influenced the collective memory of the respective groups. The following text is based on the results of an Oral History project (www.pyrzany-kozaki.eu) carried out under my direction in 2011, as well as on the analysis of memoirs written by Polish new settlers in the 1950s and on reports by German refugees and expellees. These sources were the main focus of my research on the topic of ‘“Poland's Wild West” – forced migration and cultural appropriation of the Oder region 1945–1948’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There have been more than 200 wars since the start of the 20th century, leading to about 35 million battle deaths. However, efforts at forecasting conflicts have so far performed poorly for lack of fine-grained and comprehensive measures of geopolitical tensions. In this article, a weekly risk index is derived by analyzing a comprehensive dataset of historical newspaper articles over the past century. News reports have the advantage of conveying information about contemporaries’ interpretation of events and not having to rely on meaning inferred a posteriori with the benefit of hindsight. I applied this new index to a dataset of all wars within and between countries recorded since 1900, and found that the number of conflict-related news items increases dramatically prior to the onset of conflict. Using only information available at the time, the onset of a war within the next few months could be predicted with up to 85% confidence and predictions significantly improved upon existing methods both in terms of binary predictions (as measured by the area under the curve) and calibration (measured by the Brier score). Predictions also extend well before the onset of war – more than one year prior to interstate wars, and six months prior to civil wars – giving policymakers significant additional warning time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, historians and doctors have claimed that the ‘army disease’ of both the Union and the Confederate armies was morphine addiction. But since drug addiction was not yet fully understood in medical texts of the mid-1860s, addiction as the army disease could have been perceived only in hindsight. Whether addiction was prevalent among veteran troops or not, one thing can be firmly ascertained: after the Civil War, every other war in American history has brought with it a drug problem, whether real or imagined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the wartime cartoons of the News of the World’s J.M.Staniforth, whose work reached substantial audiences at the time and in republications. The cartoons tell us about the cartoonist’s views and also suggest the attitudes of his readership, particularly in respect of the approach and outbreak of war; responses to British military reverses; the welfare of servicemen and their families; the controversy surrounding the ‘scorched earth’ policy. Even patriotic supporters of imperial expansion were unable to conceal their doubts and unease over both the causes of the war and the methods by which it was pursued. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents the Konstanz One-Sided Violence Event Dataset (KOSVED) which allows researchers to study the dynamics of civilian abuse in 17 civil wars. The dataset provides, based on a multitude of sources, detailed information on the number of civilians killed or harmed by government or rebel troops. Where information is available, KOSVED also documents the dates of these events as well as the identities of the perpetrators and the means used in terrorizing the civilian population. The authors argue that the content analysis of news reports offers relatively accurate figures on those events that the perpetrators cannot hide from the public and that receive prominent media attention. Presumably, such information motivates potential short-term retaliatory acts by the group that has been the target of one-sided violence. The analysis suggests that, over the course of a conflict, almost all actors attack unarmed citizens, although to radically different degrees and relying on different means. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the years that immediately preceded the outbreak of the First World War, a willingness to die, and die well, in pursuit of a noble objective was lauded as the ultimate act of courage by a diverse range of commentators across the United Kingdom. The story of the deaths of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his companions on their return from the South Pole in 1911 inspired effusive references to medieval chivalry and Christian sacrifice, and seemed to offer welcome proof that an ancient form of British courage was still very much alive in the twentieth century. This article explores British conceptions of combatant courage during the First World War as understood by the civilian population on the home front and the junior officers and men who bore the brunt of the fighting on the Western Front. Drawing on often overlooked sources that shed light on troop culture, it argues that while neither group rejected the pre-war paradigm, each embraced a conception of courage that was informed by its own distinctive needs and experiences. Chivalry and dignified self-sacrifice resonated strongly with civilians who suffered unprecedented levels of bereavement and understood their nation’s role in the war as righteous and just. For the soldiers who served in the front lines of an attritional trench war in which personal agency was greatly reduced, a robust rejection of victimhood and an emphasis on perseverance, articulately expressed through humour, became the new ideal of courage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the study of the causes of civil war is a well-established subdiscipline in international relations, the effects of civil war on society remain less understood. Yet, such effects could have crucial implications for long-term stability and democracy in a country after the reaching of a peace agreement. This article contributes to the understanding of the effects of warfare on interethnic relations, notably attitudes of ethno-nationalism. Two hypotheses are tested: first, that the prevalence of ethno-nationalism is higher after than before the war, and second, that individuals who have been directly affected by the war are more nationalist than others. The variation in ethno-nationalism is examined over time, between countries, and between ethnic groups. Three countries that did not experience conflict on their own territory serve as a control group. The effect of individual war exposure is also tested in the analysis. Sources include survey data from the former Yugoslavia in 1989, shortly before the outbreak of war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in 2003, some years after the violence in the region ended. Contrary to common beliefs, the study shows that ethno-nationalism does not necessarily increase with ethnic civil war. The individual war experiences are less important than expected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The international community has a declared intention to protect civilians from deliberate violence in civil conflicts. The optimal type of foreign intervention and its optimal timing are likely to depend on the combat strategies of the belligerents. Weak belligerents unable to provide economic incentives and security guarantees to civilians often follow a strategy of intimidation and terror. In this case, foreign financial support for one side could affect the strategies of both sides in several different ways, and the interaction between the two sides’ strategies could magnify the resulting impact on civilian casualties. Using a new monthly time-series dataset, we explore the factors associated with variations in the intensity of civilian abuse by participants in the guerrilla war in Peru during the 1980s and 1990s. We show that an increase in civilian abuse by one side was strongly associated with subsequent increases in abuse by the other. In this type of war, foreign intervention could substantially reduce the impact on civilians of a sudden rise in conflict intensity, by moderating the resulting ‘cycle of violence’. In practice, foreign interventions had a mixed record in Peru: financial support for the Peruvian military raised the level of violence against civilians, but counter-narcotics aid and development aid reduced it. These effects are consistent with a model in which different types of intervention have different effects on belligerents’ resource capacity and on the opportunity cost of fighting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Culture as an underlying factor in Australian discipline during the Great War deserves further exploration. Most accounts relate a poor disciplinary record compared with Australia’s British and Dominion allies. A new perspective, proposing a different underlying attitude to leadership and service, is offered as one element contributing to the explanation of the different attitudes to discipline. Based on the discourse in one cultural artefact, the prose literature of the war, this paper investigates how Australian egalitarian expectations contrasted with the paternal-deferential relationship between British officers and their men. Three factors in particular contributed to the Anzac attitude to discipline: the explicit egalitarian values of Australian society, the Anzac conception of the war as work rather than a crusade, and the Australians’ persistent citizen self-identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article challenges International Relations to turn its view of war around and start not with states, militaries, strategies, conventional security issues or weapons, and not with the common main aim of establishing causes of war. The challenge is to conceptualise war as a subset of social relations of experience, on the grounds that war cannot be fully apprehended unless it is studied up from people who experience it in myriad ways and not only down from abstract places of International Relations theory. To study war as experience requires that the body come into focus as a unit that has war agency and is also a prime target of war violence. It also requires exploration of the concept of experience. Using an exemplary texts approach, the article briefly reminds us where the field is in its war concerns, before noting work on contemporary wars conducted under the flag of feminist International Relations, where experience and bodies have always been front and centre, and where a social war studies emphasis is developing. The discussion then raises definitional complexities that must be addressed and suggests areas where various International Relations traditions could collaborate with feminist International Relations and fields like anthropology to study the social relations of war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Germany is one of the very few countries in the world with deserter monuments. Sparked by the Filbinger affair of 1978 and the protests of the German peace movement against NATO rearmament in the 1980s, a deserter monument movement emerged in numerous German cities, and by 2010 some 25 deserter monuments had been established across the country. These monuments fall into two main categories: those which specifically commemorate German soldiers who deserted from the Wehrmacht in the Second World War and those which are dedicated to honouring desertion as a matter of principle. Both types of monument qualify as a form of counter-monument, seeking to provoke reflection about traditional soldierly values and to challenge existing war memorials. The deserter monument movement and the monuments which it has spawned have played a significant role in shifting public perceptions about deserters from the Wehrmacht – leading to legal rehabilitation of the deserters in May 2002 – and have also contributed to the broader public debate about the role of the Wehrmacht in Hitler’s ‘war of annihilation’. The monuments occupy an important place in the evolving ‘memory culture’ (Erinnerungskultur) of contemporary Germany, representing one example of continuing German attempts to rewrite the public narrative of German war experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Notwithstanding its destructive aspects, historical sociologists have severally used their work to establish that warfare has its constructive side especially in the realm of state building. Through their work, the literature in the sub-specialty is continuously updated with narratives and accounts of war making and state building in Europe and parts of Asia during the early modern era. Such narratives and accounts are troves of information that enrich our knowledge about the trajectories and processes through which the states that we know today in Europe, China and Japan came about. But the neglect of Africa, where states were also built through warfare by indigenous political actors, remains conspicuous in the sub-specialty literature. This article, which begins the process of redressing that neglect, extends Charles Tilly’s theoretical proposition on the symbiotic interaction between war making and state making in early modern Europe to account for the emergence of states in Yorubaland during the Common Era and up until the 1800s using the wealth that accrued from slave-taking and other sources. It draws from the Eckstein-Gurr theoretical framework – or E-G scheme – to show that although those Yoruba states were monarchies, they were also constitutional monarchies that thrived on democratic sociocultural authority patterns of the Yoruba. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Armed conflicts have been a permanent feature of the northeastern region since Indian independence. Surprisingly, relentless conflicts in this remote region of India have received little attention in the literature. Although some studies on conflicts in India have made important contributions to understanding and analyzing the causes of conflicts in general, none of them has paid specific attention to the ongoing conflicts in the northeastern region of India. Relative deprivation and persistent economic and political discrimination are often identified as the major causes for armed rebellion in this region. I provide a first quantitative test of this argument, exploring whether deprivation and continual economic and political discrimination explain the probability of armed conflict incidence across nine northeastern states of India during the period 1970–2007. The main findings from probit estimations show that poverty (relative to the rest of the country) and economic and political discrimination explain conflict outbreaks, after controlling for income, population pressures, state capacity, ethnic affiliations, forest area, peace years, neighboring conflict incidence, and distance to New Delhi. The study also reports considerable support for the baseline results when controlling for potential reverse feedback effects using the generalized method of moments. These results are robust to alternative estimation techniques and sample size. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mediation is one of the few mechanisms the international community can deploy that will affect civil wars. This article introduces the dataset on mediation in civil wars – termed the Civil War Mediation (CWM) dataset. This is the first dataset to focus solely on civil war mediation. These data contribute to the present state of quantitative research on mediation in three important respects: the data are collected for the period of 1946–2004, are organized by mediation cases and by civil war episode, and provide detailed information about mediation incidences. The article first presents a few variables included in the dataset that are motivated by theoretical arguments from the literature. After a presentation of summary statistics, attention is turned to using the CWM data to explore the determinants of mediation. Mediation is shown to be a function of war type (territorial and internationalized wars are more likely to be mediated), war duration (the longer the war the higher the probability of mediation), supply-side factors (the number of democracies in the world and the global polity average), and stratum (subsequent wars are less likely to be mediated). Battle-related deaths also seem to increase the chances of mediation, though the relationship is only weakly significant. The article concludes with suggestions for future research that can benefit from the dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Several possible relationships between natural resources and civil conflict have been hypothesized and tested in the literature. The impact of resources on conflict should depend on the circumstances of the group that (potential) rebels see themselves as representing and depend upon for support. While ‘lootable’ resources such as alluvial diamonds have been shown to increase the likelihood of insurgency, among territorially concentrated ethnic groups looting by rebels recruiting from the group is counterproductive because it imposes negative externalities on the rebel constituency. However, local mineral abundance could encourage rebellion indirectly, by promoting the development of secessionist objectives, since autonomy or independence would allow the rebel constituency to enjoy a larger share of the benefits flowing from mineral revenues. On the other hand, mineral abundance could encourage the government to exercise greater surveillance and control over potentially restive minority populations. On balance, then, mineral abundance should affect ethnoregional conflict primarily by encouraging ethnic rebels to adopt limited, territorial-autonomy objectives as opposed to governmental objectives. This hypothesis is tested with a new, global dataset of substate mineral production. Local mineral resource abundance is indeed negatively associated with governmental conflict among ethnoregional groups and positively related to secessionist or territorial conflict. Moreover, it is the total value of mineral production that matters, not specific types of minerals such as oil or diamonds. The net effect of mineral abundance on the total risk of intrastate conflict onset among ethnoregions is essentially zero. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that during the 1990s, military professionals and civilian defense experts in the US used concepts and metaphors from nonlinear science to translate tenets of 1980s battlefield strategy and tactics into theories of international politics and foreign policy that posited the necessity of speed and offense in the face of a supposedly more chaotic and dangerous post-Cold War world. Ultimately, the most militaristic of the lessons supposedly learned from and justified by the ‘new sciences’ made their way to the highest reaches of the US Department of Defense under President G.W. Bush, and served as a foundation for acting quickly and preventively against ‘gathering threats’. In addition to allowing us to understand better the origins of the ‘Bush Doctrine’, this paper improves our understanding of the relationship between the sciences and the state/military in the post-Cold War US — in particular the role of scientific metaphor in national security discourses that have focused on the challenges and opportunities of new information and communication technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various published reports within the issue, including one that examines World War II, one that discusses the origins of World War I and one that explores the use of autobiographies in historical scholarship.

While the negative economic consequences of civil conflict are well known, does civil conflict have sector-specific effects that threaten food and economic security? This article surveys the effects of civil conflict on reported marine and inland fish catch, focusing on the effects of conflict through redeployment of labor, population displacement, counter-insurgency strategy and tactics, and third-party encroachment into territorial waters. Analysis of 123 countries from 1952 to 2004 demonstrates a strong, statistically robust and negative relationship between civil conflict and fisheries, with civil wars (1000+ battle deaths) depressing catch by over 16% relative to prewar levels. The magnitude of this effect is large: the cumulative contraction in total fish catch associated with civil war onset is roughly 13 times larger than the estimated effect of an extraordinarily strong El Niño, the ocean-atmosphere phenomenon associated with global declines in fisheries. Robust evidence of a Phoenix effect is lacking: post-conflict fisheries do not quickly bounce back to prewar catch levels due to more rapid growth. Analysis of conflict episodes indicates that conflict intensity, measured by battle deaths, negatively affects fish catch, while population displacement and conflict proximity to the coast do not. While these findings contribute to the growing literature on the economic effects of civil conflict, they also are important for regional fisheries management organizations, which must increasingly pay attention to sociopolitical factors that dramatically affect the utilization of aquatic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The figure of the marine is not only the embodiment of US militarism, but also a major icon of popular culture. The Marine Corps was prominently deployed in the invasion of Iraq, as it has been in all major US military enterprises. But while there has been much and ongoing discussion about that war, less attention has been paid to its increasing impact on mainstream American culture. In this groundbreaking account, the author reviews and analyses the ever-growing body of literature produced by marines themselves. The article reveals a disturbing picture of pornographic violence, certainty in US military right and, crucially, an increasing turn to rightwing Christian fundamentalism as both imperative and justification for the war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the Second World War’s socio-economic impact on the colonized populations of French North Africa’s three adjoining territories: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. It suggests that the war’s significance for the long-term political future of French colonial rule was markedly different from that typically ascribed to it both by contemporary French and Allied observers and by subsequent historians of the conflict. This argument will be developed by contrasting the signpost events usually assigned to north-west Africa in strategic histories of the Second World War with the internal episodes, socio-political trends, and local changes in the fabric of colonial rule that, arguably, held greater importance for the region’s people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editors discuss an article on racialized social structures that facilitate exploitation by Arthur Scaritt, an article on the post-modern left liberalism by John Michael Roberts and Colin Cremin, and an article on the manifestation of state decay which leads into civil war by Abu Bakkar Bah.

Why and when do states take the burden upon themselves to send peacekeepers into a civil war, rather than relying on intergovernmental organizations to do so? While there are a few empirical studies on the conditions under which the UN sends peacekeeping missions, no such analyses of state-conducted peacekeeping exist. In this study, a theoretical framework on state-conducted peacekeeping in civil wars is developed and empirically tested. Not surprisingly, when acting outside international organizations, states are able to take their own interests directly into account and select those civil wars to which they send peacekeepers accordingly. States’ interests play a much greater role here than, for example, the interests of the major powers do for UN peacekeeping. When states send peacekeepers they are more likely to choose former colonies, military allies, trade partners, or countries with which they have ethnic ties. Yet, this does not mean that state-conducted peacekeeping occurs only where states see their own interests. Contrary to conventional wisdom, states also provide peacekeeping to ‘tough’ cases, the most challenging civil wars. These are long, ethnic wars. This tendency for states to provide peacekeeping holds when civil wars produce dire effects on civilians. States are more likely to send peacekeepers into civil wars that kill or displace many people. Finally, states react to opportunities: the more previous mediation attempts, the higher the chances for state-conducted peacekeeping. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is very common to analyse the factors associated with the onset and continuation of civil wars entirely separately, as if there were likely to be no similarity between them. This is an overstatement of the theoretical position, which has established only that they may be different (i.e. less than perfectly correlated). The hypothesis that the explanatory variables are the same is not theoretically excludable and is empirically testable, both for individual variables and for combinations of them. Starting from this approach yields a rather different picture of the factors associated with the continuation of civil wars, because the relatively small sample size means that confidence intervals on individual coefficients are wide in this case. It is shown here that country size, mountainous terrain and (in most datasets) ethnic diversity seem significant for the continuation of civil wars, starting from the null hypothesis that variables affect onset and continuation probabilities identically, rather than entirely independently. One variable that affects onset and continuation significantly differently is anocracy, which we find to matter only for onset. Civil war is more likely if it occurred two years previously, as well as one year previously, which indicates that wars are more likely to restart after only one year of peace, and also more likely to stop in their first year. The combined model strengthens the result that ethnic diversity matters (it is consistently significant across datasets, whereas it is not when onset is analysed separately), although in the UCD/PRIO dataset it is significant only for onset. By contrast, if continuation is analysed independently, virtually nothing is significant except a pre-1991 dummy and a dummy for civil war two years previously. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this article is to consider what war might look like as an institution of international hierarchy. This might not seem all that challenging because we have a long history of pre-Westphalian warfare to draw on. The first section of the article examines that history to demonstrate how war was gradually transformed from an institution of hierarchy to an institution of international society. The second and third sections of the article are perhaps more challenging because they unsettle English School perspectives on war. This is not simply a reference to the use in the third section of Carl Schmitt to help us understand the evolution of irregular warfare and what that means for normative relationships between combatants. It is also a reference to the argument of the fourth section, which is that the legal regime advanced by the United States in the war on terror in effect globalises the legal hierarchy of civil war. This argument is made with reference to the Military Commissions Act and the case of Omar Khadr and Mohamed Jawad. The article concludes by noting that it is, under Obama, more likely that al Qaeda operatives will be tried in a civilian court and less likely that the detainee will be subjected to aggressive interrogation techniques. Yet to the extent that the 2009 Military Commissions Act holds open the possibility of prosecuting enemy combatants simply for engaging in hostilities, contemporary US practice continues to challenge our understanding of war as an institution of anarchical society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk in 1940 has an iconic place in British culture. This article draws on a concept of popular memory that suggests that rival versions of the past compete for cultural centrality, to ask how Dunkirk acquired this position. During the war, accounts stressed the importance of the sea in the ‘deliverance’, but while some focused on the Navy, others concentrated on the civilian small boats, and criticism was rare. Immediately postwar there was a lull in representations. In the 1950s, attention switched to the land and to the problematic place of the defeated Army in the story, culminating in Ealing Studios’ film Dunkirk (1958). Ealing attempted to synthesize previous emphases and struggled to achieve agreement about the representation of the evacuation. The film ensured the public prominence of the memory of Dunkirk, yet its reception was fractured along class and gender lines, indicating the instabilities of Ealing’s negotiated consensus. The history of the contested inscription of Dunkirk in British culture emphasizes that at no point since the events occurred has the representation of the second world war been secure; the popular memory of the war is continually subject to construction, contestation and revision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]