Search

In the aftermath of a lost war, a lucky few who escaped reflect on what was left behind. The last time I saw Mansour, I was ending his job. My [...]

The Thirty Years' War, while still regarded as primarily a European war, also has, as some historians recognize, an Atlantic dimension. (1) That Atlantic dimension in turn is widely recognized [...]

Anyone who has done even a little reading about the theory and practice of war--whether in political theory, international relations, theology, history, or common journalistic commentary--has encountered a sentence of [...]

You will probably never see Ralph Raico, professor emeritus of history at Buffalo State College, holding forth on the History Channel surrounded by wide-eyed naifs eager to improve their mastery [...]

ONE OF THE MORE popular local myths to come out of World War II was that the Germans planned to attack and possibly occupy parts of Newfoundland. This paper seeks [...]

FEATURING SUJATA PATEL TOM VANDERBILT SASKIA SASSEN RICHARD DOBBS SHIRISH SANKHE DICKSON DESPOMMIER RICHARD MATTHEW JOHN DAHLSEN We shape our buildings and they shape us ...--Winston Churchill Our future existence [...]

This article seeks to reimagine peace against the backdrop of a Foucauldian understanding of politics. Most conventional accounts are based on a sharp distinction between war and peace and alternate [...]

Public opinion data toward war in Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Turkey is analyzed. Educational attainment is also shown to have no links with believing that war is needed for obtaining justice and that UN approval is needed before using military force to deal with an international threat. Concerns that education may not be helping in peaceful conflict resolution are also verified.

The nation's recent experience with war and economic crisis would hardlyshock Thorstein Veblen. America's most original radical voice, Veblen has much to teach us about the common predatory origins of war and finance and the tragic consequences of their pursuit. This brief survey of the contemporary relevance of Veblen's observations about war and economic collapse emphasizes the political foundation of his critical theory. Though widely regarded as an economic thinker, Veblen's critique of modern business enterprise and its alliance with government rests on an essentially political dissection of what he termed barbaric exploit, the ancient root of war, power politics, the state, and latter day financial conquest. For Veblen, barbarism did not end with the coming of liberal democracy, rule of law or capitalism; its habits of exploit, waste and destruction go marching on. Keywords Veblen * War * Exploit * Barbarism * Conflict * The state * Politics * Financial crisis * Credit, Americans are misled into war; their government sponsors torture and sweeping domestic surveillance. The US economy, riding high on inflated real estate and stock prices, collapses into financial crisis, to [...]

War does not always arise from mere wickedness or folly. It sometimes arises from mere growth and movement. Humanity will not stand still. Gilbert Murray International politics is a realm [...]

My work has often been presented as a discussion of archaic religion through comparative anthropology. Its goal is to shed light on the process of hominization: the fascinating passage from [...]

As the United States is currently prosecuting two wars, it is important to consider whether those wars, and the resulting noncombatant casualties, can be morally justified. Such consideration can be initiated by considering some of Alan Donagan's work in his book The Theory of Morality. In that book Donagan sets out to develop, as a philosophical system, that part of the common morality according to the Hebrew-Christian tradition, which does not depend on any theistic beliefs. According to that tradition it is sometimes morally permissible to resort to war. This poses a problem because also part of the tradition is a near absolute prohibition on harming innocent people. Since innocent people die in war, there is a tension here. Donagan claims that this problem can be solved by assigning the blame for some such deaths to the aggressor, thereby permitting (some) resorts to war. This paper shows that this solution is inadequate; and defends a more plausible (and more traditional) justification for some innocent deaths. This justification is consistent with the system Donagan develops, and thus may have application in the consideration of the justification of the two wars currently being prosecuted by the United States.

This article describes a tendency of news to isolate war policy outcomes from each other and from strategic goals and official responses. These predictable patterns of press coverage and policy developments are referred to as accountability gaps. We argue that professional norms and commercial pressures overwhelm whatever hesitancy news organizations have to alter their organizational and professional behavioral patterns that lead to predictable reoccurrences of accountability gaps. Habitual deference to White House officials means that positive frames are likely to prevail, regardless of conditions on the ground, while declining attention to the costs of war as they accumulate--and becoming less newsworthy-diminishes the weight of counterframes. As casualties and other consequences of policy in Iraq became routine, their news value diminished. As casualties became routine and other costs of war mounted in ways difficult to convey, official good news frames tended to dominate news narratives. Keywords: Iraq War; media and war; accountability; media and foreign policy

Part of preparing for war is to understand it. What is the nature of war? What is the character of war? Will war in the future be like war in [...]

In this article, I examine the role of the 'Indian Country' heritage metaphor in U.S. military activities in the Middle East from a critical anthropological perspective. Research has revealed the proliferation of such discourse among soldiers, military strategists, reporters, and World Wide Web users to refer to hostile, unsecured, and dangerous territory in Iraq and Afghanistan. The salience of this symbol in 21st-century U.S. armed conflicts attests to its staying power in national narratives of colonialism at home and abroad. Summoning the 'Indian wars' of the 19th century in the U.S. West as malleable symbolic parallels to the current war in Iraq serves to offer combat lessons in guerilla warfare while reinscribing epic stories of U.S. military imperialism and renarrating uncritically the struggles and conflicts of Native Americans, past and present, through the lens of contemporary perspectives on terrorism. [Keywords: Indian Country, war, heritage, Iraq]

The concept of war is clearly not its old self. The recent debate indicates with considerable clarity that there no longer exists a superior position from which to authoritatively enforce [...]

India's relations with Pakistan and China are central to its grand strategic concerns. These two neighbours of India have fought five wars with it--India and Pakistan fought in 1948, 1965, [...]

The extent to which religion and principles of morality of war influence US foreign policy is examined.

A team of Russia- and U.S.-based geographers presents and discusses the economic and demographic consequences of the conflicts in Chechnya on that republic, on the neighboring ethnic republics of the North Caucasus, as well as on the adjoining region of Stavropol' with a majority of Russian inhabitants. Formal economic indicators, which generally exhibit negative trends since 1991, are contrasted with the large, diverse shadow economy that tends to absorb federal development funding diverted from the formal sector to the benefit of local elites. The authors explore the extent to which economic activity once based in Chechnya is dispersed to contiguous regions, discuss changes in the ethnic composition of the republics ('de-Russification'), and consider whether Chechnya and the adjoining republics will ever regain the close economic, political, and social ties with Russia that prevailed during the Soviet period. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: I31, O15, O18, R12.3 figures, 1 table, 73 references. Key words: North Caucasus, Chechnya, Russia, terrorism, Kabardino-Balkaria, jihadists, Dagestan, Ingushetia, shariat, corruption, Stavropol' Kray, clans, shadow economy, Russo-Chechen wars, money laundering.

Abstract World War II made it clear that the realization of the potential of existing military technology and methods for using it--along with the extraction of natural resources during the [...]

Most scholarship on aging is based on cohorts born early in the 20th century, and these cohorts have had significant experience with war. Wartime experiences may therefore be critical but largely hidden variables underlying current scientific knowledge about aging. Evidence marshaled in this article illustrates the powerful insights gained when research on this topic is guided by life-course propositions and data. It reveals how wartime military service, especially during World War II, affected the short- and long-ranging development of recruits. It also highlights the need to better account for the potential legacies of service for physical, psychological, and social functioning in late life. These matters will become increasingly important as sizable World War II and Korean veteran populations move through advanced old age, and as the Vietnam veteran population moves into old age. Systematic attention to the effects of wartime service is necessary to determine the degree to which contemporary knowledge about aging can be generalized to future cohorts. Keywords: cohort; combat; historical events; veterans; war; World War H; Korean War; Vietnam War

This study aimed to provide preliminary evidence for, and explore potential antecedents and correlates of, a phenomenon observed in aging combat veterans termed late-onset stress symptomatology (LOSS). LOSS is a hypothesized phenomenon among older veterans who (a) experienced highly stressful combat events in early adulthood; (b) functioned successfully throughout their lives, with no chronic stress-related disorders; but (c) begin to register increased combat-related thoughts, feelings, reminiscences, memories, or symptoms commensurate with the changes and challenges of aging, sometimes decades after their combat experiences. Using a qualitative focus group methodology with 47 World War II, Korean Conflict, and Vietnam War veterans, the authors obtained preliminary evidence for the presence of LOSS as defined, identified some of its features, revealed some normative late-life stressors that may precipitate LOSS, and uncovered potential intrapersonal risk and resilience factors for LOSS. The authors present illustrative quotations from the group discussions and discuss the implications and future directions of this research. Keywords: aging; combat veterans; combat trauma; life-course effects of trauma; focus group research

An attempt to formulate and validate the problem associated with the elaboration of a theory of stand-off wars (1) has attracted sufficiently much attention in the military scientific circles in [...]

How the First World War has come to be remembered has, over the past two decades; become a major concern for British historians, eclipsing earlier scholarly preoccupations with war guilt and its political consequences, the impact of the war on social structure and the status of women, and the conflict's role in the rise of the modernist aesthetic. This article surveys both scholarship on the cultural legacy of the First World War in Britain and the debates about how the memory of this war--the ' Great War'--has either retarded its consideration 'as history' or spurred new, if not always entirely successful, modes of inquiry into the relationships among war, society, and culture. The article argues that memory of the Great War must itself be treated as history; that the meaning of that memory should be placed within the context of the changing events, ideas, and identities of the entire twentieth century; and that more scholarly attention needs to be directed at the popular reception of representations of the Great War by the population at large, and at the power of the various forms of media by which those representations have been conveyed to their audience and have thereby shaped memory of the conflict.

This article departs from traditional writing on British economic warfare against the Axis during the Second World War by highlighting the efforts made by the British government to evade German 'counter-blockade' measures and secure access to European sources of supply. It does so by examining British efforts to obtain Swiss industrial equipment and manufactures after June 1940, when German military success effectively severed normal communications between the two countries. In practical terms, Britain's smuggling operations were enormously successful. Some 1.8m [pounds sterling] worth of Swiss contraband reached British hands by October 1944. They also, however, exercised considerable influence over the development of Anglo-Swiss relations and Switzerland's relations with its neighbours. In illuminating the scale of Britain's commercial interest in Switzerland after June 1940, the article lends weight to new writing on the Second World War, which emphasizes the neutrals' importance to the war economies and political ambitions of the two belligerent camps.

The invasion of Iraq was justified to the American people by a sophisticated propaganda campaign that reflected a think tank's vision for a new foreign policy. One objective of this article is to set forth a theoretical argument for analyzing modern propaganda campaigns as a feature of mass-mediated discourse crafted by think tanks and highly organized claims makers. We propose that the current structure of policy and critique is now institutionalized and formatted as War Programming, which connects criticism within a narrative sequence, including critiques and reflections about journalistic failings. The scope of the action is so immense that it precludes and preempts its critique. The second objective is to show how the rationale for the invasion was developed as a 'public conspiracy' over a decade by the members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The third aim of this article is to describe and clarify why the PNAC plans for Iraq and an imperialist foreign policy received very little news media coverage. Qualitative content analysis of news materials suggests that the news sources and media shared a logic and perspective about 'timely and entertaining news' The PNAC plan was not publicized by the major news media because it fell outside the focus of the Bush administration's propaganda campaign to demonize Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein, who was held to be responsible for attacks on the United States. The implications of such a well-organized propaganda campaign for future news coverage of war are discussed.