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This article analyses 845 posts across 78 threads on an English Defence League message board from 20 September 2013 to 4 October 2013 that examined how online activists construct and develop their racial prejudice. Through seeing whites as blameless victims, the posts highlighted the presence of hostility towards Islam and Muslims in a clear in-group and out-group racial binary, where racist comments were never contested or challenged. Rather, they were wholeheartedly supported with social and cultural division at the centre of the prejudice, scapegoating and stereotyping directed towards Islam and Muslims. For a movement that presents itself as anti-racist, the real-life everyday narrative indicates the reality of its most ardent supporters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly assumed in the foreign policy literature that narratives are uniquely persuasive and thus integral to obtaining public support for war. Yet, empirical research on “strategic narrative” is often vague on both the concept of narrative and how it persuades. Moreover, the stories publics use to interpret war are rarely examined. This paper offers a novel approach to studying “from the ground up” the war stories of individual British citizens. It examines public interpretations of war through emplotment: the way people select and link events to create a coherent story. Examining the wars people include and those they silence, it illustrates how a diverse range of citizens morally evaluates Britain’s military role, be it as aForce for Good, aForce for Illor a countryLearning from its Mistakes. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative methodological approach to studying how individual citizens understand war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Located in Birtley, County Durham, the gated community of Elisabethville housed several thousand Belgians from 1916 until the aftermath of the Great War. Most residents were conscripted Belgian soldiers who constituted the workforce at the nearby National Projectile Factory. This article focuses on the complex relationship between the ‘Birtley Belgians’ and their host population. It thus covers issues such as wartime charity, Anglo-Belgian leisure-time interactions as well as debates about the exiles’ moral and socio-economic impact. Moreover, the case of Elisabethville sheds light on several wider issues, from war-related displacement to the intersections between home front and battle front. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article tests three contentions advanced by Adrian Gregory in his book The Last Great War: first, that the reaction to the outbreak of war in 1914 was not one of universal unthinking enthusiasm; second, that the provincial press took a sober and critical view of the imminent outbreak of hostilities; and third, that volunteering was a more layered experience than a simple rush to the colours. The methodology adopted has been to review the Berrow’s Journal newspaper between January 1914 and January 1915, looking particularly at the editorial views of the paper, views expressed through the paper via ‘Letters to the Editor’, accounts of meetings and quotations from speakers and the events and information that the newspaper chose to report. Berrow’s Journal has been chosen as a weekly newspaper and as a Unionist newspaper in a strongly Unionist region, where if jingoism were to be found, a superficial reading might suggest it would be found there. The figures on enlistments quoted in the newspaper will be tested against the author’s own research using fatal casualties as a representative sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contrasting, and sometimes conflicting, narratives of early twentieth century remembrance are explored in this article. Individual personal inscriptions to Midlands men in the cemeteries of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission around the Ypres Salient are set against the prevailing motifs of remembrance as defined by Leicester’s high-profile memorials to the South African War and the First World War. This comparison sets out to explore the extent to which public memorials directed and reflected the expressions of the next-of-kin, and discovers that the public narrative of remembrance was not as straightforward as it was sometimes presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historiography of early Anzac Day in Britain has focused on the spectacular marches of troops through London streets while neglecting the more personal forms of Anzac observance. This article explores the early history of Anzac Day graveside pilgrimage in Britain as an example of how the Empire's bereaved sought to cope with their grief in the immediate postwar years. The later decline of the pilgrimage movement was the result of the growing role of the state in caring for war graves and the shifting character of Anzac Day in Britain, which increasingly centred on London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article – based on data that employs interviews conducted with British Army personnel – adopts a social theory of learning in order to examine how both formal and informal learning systems have affected organizational learning within the Army in relation to the counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan. It argues that while the Army has adopted new, or reformed existing, formal learning systems, these have not generated a reconceptualization of how to conduct counter-insurgency warfare. It, furthermore, argues that while informal learning systems have enabled units to improve their pre-deployment preparations, these have created adaptation traps that have acted as barriers to higher-level learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Clausewitz described the nature of war in terms of a trinity that could be associated to relationships between the armed forces, the government and society. This paper examines if this trinity is fundamentally affected by three current processes: the increasing use of civilians to supplement or replace military capabilities; the growing employment of unmanned systems; and the rapidly developing capabilities and potential of cyberbased operations. Each of these areas is considered in turn, highlighting how the processes bring about changes between the traditional roles in providing national security of the elements of Clausewitz’s trinity. This paper concludes that the changes wrought by the processes of civilianisation, automation and cyber operations do pose significant challenges to the armed forces, but these are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The wider issue is the increasing reliance of the government on private organisations and other nations to provide the full range of national security measures, and it is in these areas where much work is required to continue to assure security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 14th Olympiad took place in London in 1948. Post-war reconstruction had barely started in the battered host city and all the venues for the Games were lent by private or public organizations with little expenditure for rebuilding allocated. This paper addresses the emergence and after-lives of the venues of the 1948 Games and examines their significance to the United Kingdom's capital city as it prepares for its third Olympiad: the 2012 Games in Stratford. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the processes of negotiation in Afghanistan in two distinct eras in order to highlight the enduring characteristics of concluding wars and the unique specificities of history. The problem of obtaining reliable sources on the Afghan reactions to negotiations is to some extent offset by an awareness of theoretical approaches and common features of negotiations within the contexts of other conventional and civil wars. The two case studies presented in outline here suggest that there were peculiarities to Afghans based on cultural expectations, but, like their British and Soviet opponents, they took a pragmatic approach to fulfil their own interests. The article concludes with some observations on the potential for future negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Geographies are taking center stage in debates about new, contested forms of imperialism. Geographers have developed a powerful analysis of the spatial dynamics of imperialism, which remains somewhat rarefied, obscuring many of the ways in which people speak about imperialism in their daily lives. Taking seriously the postcolonial injunction to listen to colonized peoples and to those who stand with and for them, this article describes empirical research among activists who bring anti-imperialism to practical political projects and in so doing animate and renew this way of thinking and speaking. Interviews were conducted with members of three politicized communities, who mobilized distinct anti-imperial traditions in their opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These interviews-with Muslims, nationalist-separatists, and socialists in the United Kingdom-chart a series of interconnected, vernacular spaces of resistance. They show and suggest how, in the grounded and heterogeneous places of activist practice, and through imaginative and rhetorical geographies of resistance, the ideas and languages of imperialism are being mobilized and measured, sometimes found wanting, but ultimately animated and renewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, successive presidents and officials at the Board of Education made it clear that they believed there were three types of children in Britain - those who needed nursery schools to rescue them from degradation, those for whom a less expensive nursery class would do the job adequately and those who would be better off staying home with mother. However, by the time the 1944 Education Act was framed, national policy towards pre-school provision had undergone a major transformation: nursery schools could provide the best start in life for everyone, should be available for every child from three to five and, crucially, should be the only form of childcare provision available. This change of direction was initiated by the government's inspectorate, and heavily promoted by members of the civil service. Professional bodies, such as the Nursery School Association and teaching unions, had very little influence over the decision-making process. The needs of working mothers, who were likely to be adversely affected by the closure of wartime childcare facilities, were inadequately considered. Local Education Authorities, who generally favoured nursery classes, were, however, able to wring a last-minute compromise from central government so that classes could be provided where schools were 'inexpedient'. The fact that the new policy had been written in such isolation, without consideration for potential users, and had been messily hamstrung at the last moment meant that it was never implemented and must ultimately be considered a failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the British public thought that the First World War would be 'over by Christmas' in 1914 is such a common feature of war fiction, memoirs and histories that it has scarcely been questioned, let alone seriously examined. The phrase has become shorthand for naivety among a generation of young men who are supposed to have rushed to join the army rather than missing all the 'fun', the politicians and generals who sent them to the front and the journalists who cheered them on. This article investigates how common it really was and attempts to place it in the wide context of public reactions to the war, using newspapers, letters and diaries to uncover the feelings of the time rather than post-hoc reflections. As with former givens of 1914, such as 'war enthusiasm', what emerges is a more complex picture than simple naive faith in the imminent success of British and Allied arms. Treating predictions of peace as part of a coping strategy for soldiers and civilians at war, we should not be surprised to find predictions of peace by various specific dates, and particularly by Christmas, throughout the Great War and beyond. This article questions the ubiquity of the idea of the war ending before Christmas in 1914 and the singularity of that year for optimistic predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of remembrance of the First World War in contemporary Irish republicanism in Northern Ireland, both Official and Provisional, is examined in this article, which places such remembrance in a wider nationalist context. After considering the nature of nationalist engagement in the British army in 1914-1918, and all-Ireland issues around remembrance, the article focuses on Sinn Fein's involvement in Somme commemoration in 2002 and 2008. It then examines republicans' 'discovery' of ancestors with a past in the British military, focusing on the Official Republican ex-prisoners group, An Eochair. The article concludes with an examination of how far theories of memory can shed light on republican remembrance, and the extent to which changes in attitudes to remembrance are part of republicanism's 'historic compromise' with unionism. It argues that despite a significant shift, republicans have engaged with remembrance on their own terms, and that the gap between them and unionists remains large, with the possibility of genuinely shared remembrance remote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the influences of a multicultural society, the legitimacy of a government, and the news media on the perception of security threats and the development of security policy in Great Britain since the Iraq war began in 2003. Topics in the discussion include citizenship, community cohesion, the erosion of rights and freedom, and the effect of digital media on social inclusiveness. The sociocultural factors pertaining to legitimation are also discussed. The research methodologies of ethnography, news reception analysis, and discourse analysis are mentioned.

This text investigates the cultural context in which the Rushdie affair has been embedded 20 years after the event. Remembering the Rushdie affair in Britain has transformed the rupture into a suture, establishing a narrative link between this event, 9/11, the “war on terror” and the London bombings in 2005. In an emergent historiography, I propose, the discursive idiom of a globalised conflict of “the West” and “Islam” is represented within self-descriptions of British multi-ethnic society. The relationship between aspects of multiculturalism and post-secular conflict is analysed as the development of a (g)local memory culture in which globalised developments and localised representations interact. In the last part of this contribution, Jurgen Habermas's proposal for a post-secular public sphere is interrogated concerning the search for a basis for convivial exchange in the face of value pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies the principles of Foucault's (1986) concept of heterotopia to the spatial imaginaries and material realities of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), an elite organisation of British women volunteers who served on the Western Front during World War I. First, the FANY created crisis heterotopia shaped by the history and politics of the period and linked to gendered cultural anxieties at this slice in time; second, FANY space was ordered and made accessible through the interplay of class privilege and patriotic national identity; third, it involved possibilities for transgression through the heterotopic juxtaposition of material practices of domesticity within and against sites of combat; and finally, FANY space both involved an utopian element that contrasted with other real spaces available to women and helped reveal the gendered politics of those traditional sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While all cathedrals endured bouts of iconoclasm in the English civil wars, and many endured military attack, Lichfield suffered more than others, besieged twice in 1643 and for a third time in 1646. An eyewitness account of the first two sieges, in March and April 1643, written by the dean, Griffith Higgs, has been overlooked by historians because it is written in Latin. Translated for the first time here, it allows more detailed analysis not only of the 1643 the sieges, but also of the iconoclasm that the cathedral endured at the hands of the Parliament's troops after the first siege. Like other eyewitness accounts of attacks on cathedrals in 1642–3, it provides an insight into Royalist attitudes at the beginning of the war, as well as a means of assessing post-Restoration claims about the extent of damage and desecration at the hands of rebellious Parliamentarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1920 the British government of Palestine sent six officers to establish a British presence in Transjordan. Lacking military and financial support, they could not possibly control a country populated by more than 200,000 tribespeople, many of them members of powerful tribal confederacies. The key to explaining why the British chose this unorthodox way to takeover a new territory lies in the special attitude towards Arabia entertained by the British following World War One. British policy derived from an alleged cultural affinity between the British and the 'Bedouin', coupled with a colonial tradition of attributing British administrators with a 'natural' ability to rule over natives. These two myths gave the British an inflated belief in their ability to rule local society. Drawing on official reports, private papers and local accounts, this article shows that the British grossly misunderstood local conditions and could not deal with the tribal communities that frustrated their attempt to assert British influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that the city is a place of sin and immorality is as old as urban civilization. But what does anti-urban thought mean in societies which are highly urbanized under the conditions of modern industrialism? Furthermore, is anti-urbanism in the interwar period a German volkisch phenomenon--one further stride on Germany's special path? And what does rural revival and the “back-to-the-land” cult mean in Great Britain, the first industrial nation? This article seeks to provide an answer to these questions by exploring anti-urbanist writing between the End of the First World War and 1933 in Germany, and 1939 in Britain. By examining two key themes it aims to show that the clear-cut distinction between German anti-urban radicalisation and the West's coming to terms with urbanisation cannot be maintained. Firstly, attention will be drawn to the ambiguity of perceptions of the city in the writings of “Conservative Revolutionary” authors in the Weimar Republic. In a second step, the British “back-to-the-land” movement, whose advocates developed comprehensive anti-urban third-way theories in the interwar period and were themselves part of a broader popular anti-industrial movement and a rural cult throughout the 1930s, will be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the phenomena of intra-group ethnic outbidding and party political modernization during peacemaking processes in civil war situations. At first glance, ethnic outbidding may seem unconnected with 'modern' political parties that function - as their modernity suggests - without recourse to ethnic exclusivity. This article makes the case that the two processes can operate in tandem. It begins by presenting an original conceptualization of outbidding processes by examining both the strategies employed by out-bidders and the potential impacts of outbidding on peacemaking processes. It then turns to consider political party modernization theory, which suggests that parties must abandon the appeals to confessionalism and ethnic particularism (usually displayed among intra-group outbidders) as part of the modernization process. As the example of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in post Agreement Northern Ireland illustrates however, the ability of political parties in peacemaking processes to mix traditional appeals with decidedly modern discourse and campaigning tools undermines this presumed incompatibility between particularlism and modernization within political parties. Instead we find that party modernization and ethnic outbidding can co-exist in the context of a peacemaking process. Moreover, we find that the nuances of outbidding mean that hard-line positions can be maintained on identity and constitutional issues but moderation can occur on other issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wartime memories remain a strong undercurrent in British society but many of these myth/memories have been skewed by a strong southern-based perspective. One of the key requirements for the wartime population of Britain was that they carried on despite hardships and that morale was maintained. It has since entered the national consciousness that the people of Britain remained stoical throughout the war and that the community was strengthened by its shared wartime experiences. Recent historiography, however, has cast doubt on this belief, citing examples of putatively poor behaviour during the war. This article seeks to explore this myth/memory and, in a small way, to redress the North–South balance by using the experiences of wartime Tyneside as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of the Cold War, a range of historical studies have focused on the importance of liberal self-identity in the British wartime imagination. Bitter debates have taken place between Second World War scholars over the extent to which this liberal self-image reflected an historical reality. In particular, historians have argued about Britain's response to and attitude towards the Holocaust; as some scholars have grown tired of what they perceive is a tendency among their colleagues to attack Britain's war role and lay blame without justification. This article offers a new analysis of Britain's wartime policy towards minorities in the context of these ongoing historical debates about liberal self-image and Holocaust culpability. By examining British governmental attitudes towards black war volunteers and soldiers and Jewish refugees from Nazism, it contends that the idea of Britain as a liberal world power is simplistic and problematic. In this analysis, British policies on internment and Jews and blacks in the military are explored in detail. Ultimately, the article argues that high levels of ‘racial’ thinking in the British government often led to ungenerous and fundamentally illiberal responses towards immigrants and minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses wide questions about the different attitudes towards childhood in Britain and France in the 20th century. Focusing initially on the so-called Colonies de Vacances in France, the article shows that urban working-class French parents had, as early as the 1900s, got used to the idea of sending their children off for lengthy periods of time in the summer months to special camps in the French countryside. The development of the Colonies is reviewed and the consequent attitudes towards childhood compared to that in Britain, where wartime evacuation led to vocal and insistent concerns over the separation of children and their families. No such concerns were voiced in France, and the article attempts to unpick what such differences tell us about attitudes towards and experiences of childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shares insights on how the war between Iraq and the U.S. became relevant to teaching and learning in Great Britain. Social context and social change upon the cultural life of the nation; Agenda and aspects of the curriculum that reflects the relevance; Consequences brought about by the instances of alleged infringement of free speech.

Much of the writing on gender and the First World War has looked at the ways in which pre-war gender norms were reasserted in British society after the War. The article looks at the experiences of one group of women, the wives of men psychologically disabled by the experience of war, to show how disability could prevent the reassertion of pre-war gender roles. The experiences of these women, as expressed in the disability files created by the Ministry of Pensions, is then compared with the dramatisations of wives of disabled veterans in two post-war novels. This comparison highlights the ways in which such dramatisations turned the figure of the wife of the disabled veteran into a symbol of suffering that may be compared to the similarly symbolic figures of the neurasthenic veteran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the recently declassified "Strath Report" and its ramifications. Examination of the implications of a thermonuclear attack on the United Kingdom; Portrayal of widespread devastation and likely collapse of civil society; Response of politicians and government officials; Revisions in the United Kingdom's nuclear war planning; Official attempts to suppress public discussion of thermonuclear weapons and civil defense.

In this article we undertake a social model analysis of the experiences of disabled refugees and asylum seekers, who are among the most socially and economically disadvantaged members of society in the UK today. The statuses of disability, refugee and minority ethnic group are each linked to discrimination and oppression (Oliver, M. (1990) The Politics of Disablement (London, Macmillan Press); Robinson, V. (1999) Journal of Refugee Studies, 12(1), pp. 78-87; Vernon, A. (1996) in: J. Morris (Ed.) Disability Studies: past, present and future (London, Womens Press), yet little consideration has been paid to the particular cumulative constellation of oppressions experienced by disabled refugees and asylum seekers. In this article, several models are presented that demonstrate that disabled refugees and asylum seekers experience barriers to health and safety in their country of origin, such as impairment-creation through torture and war. Once in the UK barriers to social services, benefits and social contact prove similarly insurmountable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]