Download or read book Lawmaking under Pressure written by Giovanni Mantilla and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lawmaking under Pressure, Giovanni Mantilla analyzes the origins and development of the international humanitarian treaty rules that now exist to regulate internal armed conflict. Until well into the twentieth century, states allowed atrocious violence as an acceptable product of internal conflict. Why have states created international laws to control internal armed conflict? Why did states compromise their national security by accepting these international humanitarian constraints? Why did they create these rules at improbable moments, as European empires cracked, freedom fighters emerged, and fears of communist rebellion spread? Mantilla explores the global politics and diplomatic dynamics that led to the creation of such laws in 1949 and in the 1970s. By the 1949 Diplomatic Conference that revised the Geneva Conventions, most countries supported legislation committing states and rebels to humane principles of wartime behavior and to the avoidance of abhorrent atrocities, including torture and the murder of non-combatants. However, for decades, states had long refused to codify similar regulations concerning violence within their own borders. Diplomatic conferences in Geneva twice channeled humanitarian attitudes alongside Cold War and decolonization politics, even compelling reluctant European empires Britain and France to accept them. Lawmaking under Pressure documents the tense politics behind the making of humanitarian laws that have become touchstones of the contemporary international normative order. Mantilla not only explains the pressures that resulted in constraints on national sovereignty but also uncovers the fascinating international politics of shame, status, and hypocrisy that helped to produce the humanitarian rules now governing internal conflict.

Download or read book Advance to Barbarism written by Frederick J Veale and published by . This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proves, with clinical detail, that it was the Allies, and not the Germans, who started the "blitz" and once underway, carried it to the most extreme murderous ends. The author is meticulous in his arguments and cites cabinet meeting transcripts, and memoirs of those involved in the decision-making.

Download or read book The Second World War written by Nick Smart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The significant and sustained popular interest in the Second World War is matched by the scale and scope of scholarly engagement in the subject. The articles selected for this volume cover a wide range of topics reflecting the fact that the largest recorded war in history and the most intense period of global instability in the twentieth century, was fought by many different states, large and small, over differing periods of time and for many different reasons. In an area where there is no shortage of material to choose from, the articles presented here are distinguished for their depth of scholarship, stylistic elegance and inter-disciplinary confidence.

Download or read book Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross 1939 1945 written by J. Crossland and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Crossland's work traces the history of the International Committee of the Red Cross' struggle to bring humanitarianism to the Second World War, by focusing on its tumultuous relationship with one of the conflict's key belligerents and masters of the blockade of the Third Reich, Great Britain.

Download or read book The Dawn Of Universal History written by Raymond Aron and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-06-16 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays written over a period of almost forty years, Raymond Aron explores the rise of nationalism in Europe through the two world wars and the subsequent disintegration of her empires. With a richness of detail and sweeping breadth of historical examples, he chronicles and analyzes the history of the opposite ideological extremes of Fascism and Marxism and their descent into totalitarianism via secular religiosity. Aron also examines French imperialism through the examples of Algeria and Indochina, as well as America's role as an "imperial republic" during and after World War II. Aron was never orthodox in his ideology; neither his republican political penchants nor his dialectical intellectual orientation ever gained the upper hand over his devotion to empirical reality. The result here is an intellectual history that seems less concerned about where it falls on the political spectrum than about getting it right.

Download or read book Prisoners of the Empire written by Sarah Kovner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pathbreaking account of World War II POW camps, challenging the longstanding belief that the Japanese Empire systematically mistreated Allied prisoners. In only five months, from the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to the fall of Corregidor in May 1942, the Japanese Empire took prisoner more than 140,000 Allied servicemen and 130,000 civilians from a dozen different countries. From Manchuria to Java, Burma to New Guinea, the Japanese army hastily set up over seven hundred camps to imprison these unfortunates. In the chaos, 40 percent of American POWs did not survive. More Australians died in captivity than were killed in combat. Sarah Kovner offers the first portrait of detention in the Pacific theater that explains why so many suffered. She follows Allied servicemen in Singapore and the Philippines transported to Japan on “hellships” and singled out for hard labor, but also describes the experience of guards and camp commanders, who were completely unprepared for the task. Much of the worst treatment resulted from a lack of planning, poor training, and bureaucratic incoherence rather than an established policy of debasing and tormenting prisoners. The struggle of POWs tended to be greatest where Tokyo exercised the least control, and many were killed by Allied bombs and torpedoes rather than deliberate mistreatment. By going beyond the horrific accounts of captivity to actually explain why inmates were neglected and abused, Prisoners of the Empire contributes to ongoing debates over POW treatment across myriad war zones, even to the present day.

Download or read book The Endtimes of Human Rights written by Stephen Hopgood and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We are living through the endtimes of the civilizing mission. The ineffectual International Criminal Court and its disastrous first prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, along with the failure in Syria of the Responsibility to Protect are the latest pieces of evidence not of transient misfortunes but of fatal structural defects in international humanism. Whether it is the increase in deadly attacks on aid workers, the torture and 'disappearing' of al-Qaeda suspects by American officials, the flouting of international law by states such as Sri Lanka and Sudan, or the shambles of the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Phnom Penh, the prospect of one world under secular human rights law is receding. What seemed like a dawn is in fact a sunset. The foundations of universal liberal norms and global governance are crumbling."—from The Endtimes of Human RightsIn a book that is at once passionate and provocative, Stephen Hopgood argues, against the conventional wisdom, that the idea of universal human rights has become not only ill adapted to current realities but also overambitious and unresponsive. A shift in the global balance of power away from the United States further undermines the foundations on which the global human rights regime is based. American decline exposes the contradictions, hypocrisies and weaknesses behind the attempt to enforce this regime around the world and opens the way for resurgent religious and sovereign actors to challenge human rights.Historically, Hopgood writes, universal humanist norms inspired a sense of secular religiosity among the new middle classes of a rapidly modernizing Europe. Human rights were the product of a particular worldview (Western European and Christian) and specific historical moments (humanitarianism in the nineteenth century, the aftermath of the Holocaust). They were an antidote to a troubling contradiction—the coexistence of a belief in progress with horrifying violence and growing inequality. The obsolescence of that founding purpose in the modern globalized world has, Hopgood asserts, transformed the institutions created to perform it, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and recently the International Criminal Court, into self-perpetuating structures of intermittent power and authority that mask their lack of democratic legitimacy and systematic ineffectiveness. At their best, they provide relief in extraordinary situations of great distress; otherwise they are serving up a mixture of false hope and unaccountability sustained by "human rights" as a global brand.The Endtimes of Human Rights is sure to be controversial. Hopgood makes a plea for a new understanding of where hope lies for human rights, a plea that mourns the promise but rejects the reality of universalism in favor of a less predictable encounter with the diverse realities of today's multipolar world.

Download or read book A Guide to the Sources of British Military History written by Robin HIgham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designed to fill an overlooked gap, this book, originally published in 1972, provides a single unified introduction to bibliographical sources of British military history. Moreover it includes guidance in a number of fields in which no similar source is available at all, giving information on how to obtain acess to special collections and private archives, and links military history, especially during peacetime, with the development of science and technology.

Download or read book Order within Anarchy written by James D. Morrow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Order within Anarchy examines treaty law, focusing on international law, laws of war and how effective such limitations truly are.

Download or read book Barbed Wire Diplomacy written by Neville Wylie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how the UK government protected the lives, interests, and well-being of its POWs in Nazi Germany. The comparatively good treatment of British POWs in Germany has been explained in terms of self-interest. Wylie presents a more nuanced picture of Anglo-German relations and the politics of prisoners of war.

Download or read book Confronting Captivity written by Arieh J. Kochavi and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was it possible that almost all of the nearly 300,000 British and American troops who fell into German hands during World War II survived captivity in German POW camps and returned home almost as soon as the war ended? In Confronting Captivity, Arieh J. Kochavi offers a behind-the-scenes look at the living conditions in Nazi camps and traces the actions the British and American governments took--and didn't take--to ensure the safety of their captured soldiers. Concern in London and Washington about the safety of these POWs was mitigated by the recognition that the Nazi leadership tended to adhere to the Geneva Convention when it came to British and U.S. prisoners. Following the invasion of Normandy, however, Allied apprehension over the safety of POWs turned into anxiety for their very lives. Yet Britain and the United States took the calculated risk of counting on a swift conclusion to the war as the Soviets approached Germany from the east. Ultimately, Kochavi argues, it was more likely that the lives of British and American POWs were spared because of their race rather than any actions their governments took on their behalf.

Download or read book The British Empire and its Italian Prisoners of War 1940 1947 written by B. Moore and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-03-13 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Second World War, British and Imperial forces captured more than half a million Italian soldiers, sailors and airmen. Although a symbol of military success, these prisoners created a multitude of problems for the authorities throughout the war. This book looks at how the British addressed these problems and turned liabilities into assets by using the Italians as a labour force, a source of military intelligence and as a political warfare tool before their final repatriation in 1946-47.

Download or read book A History of the Laws of War Volume 3 written by Alexander Gillespie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-07 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique work of reference traces the origins of the modern laws of warfare from the earliest times to the present day. Relying on written records from as far back as 2400 BCE, and using sources ranging from the Bible to Security Council Resolutions, the author pieces together the history of a subject which is almost as old as civilisation itself. The author shows that as long as humanity has been waging wars it has also been trying to find ways of legitimising different forms of combatants and ascribing rules to them, protecting civilians who are either inadvertently or intentionally caught up between them, and controlling the use of particular classes of weapons that may be used in times of conflict. Thus it is that this work is divided into three substantial parts: Volume 1 on the laws affecting combatants and captives; Volume 2 on civilians; and Volume 3 on the law of arms control. This third volume deals with the question of the control of weaponry, from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age. In doing so, it divides into two parts: namely, conventional weapons and Weapons of Mass Destruction. The examination of the history of arms control of conventional weapons begins with the control of weaponry so that one side could achieve a military advantage over another. This pattern, which only began to change centuries after the advent of gunpowder, was later supplemented by ideals to control types of conventional weapons because their impacts upon opposing combatants were inhumane. By the late twentieth century, the concerns over inhumane conventional weapons were being supplemented by concerns over indiscriminate conventional weapons. The focus on indiscriminate weapons, when applied on a mass scale, is the core of the second part of the volume. Weapons of Mass Destruction are primarily weapons of the latter half of the twentieth century. Although both chemical and biological warfare have long historical lineages, it was only after the Second World War that technological developments meant that these weapons could be applied to cause large-scale damage to non-combatants. thi is unlike uclear weapons, which are a truly modern invention. Despite being the newest Weapon of Mass Destruction, they are also the weapon of which most international attention has been applied, although the frameworks by which they were contained in the last century, appear inadequate to address the needs of current times. As a work of reference this set of three books is unrivalled, and will be of immense benefit to scholars and practitioners researching and advising on the laws of warfare. It also tells a story which throws fascinating new light on the history of international law and on the history of warfare itself.

Download or read book Making the Voice of Humanity Heard written by Liesbeth Lijnzaad and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HRH Princess Margriet of the Netherlands has made her mark in the annals of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. In this anthology prominent members of the world community and global experts and practitioners come together to pay tribute to Princess Margriet for her decades of dedicated service to the Movement and the Netherlands Red Cross Society. This tribute takes place on the occasion of the end of her eight-year tenure as Chair of the Standing Commission of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. Under the Princess’s guidance, the Standing Commission has come to play a strong and unifying role in the Movement. This unique collection of scholarly and inspirational essays offers a wealth of information on the constituent components and statutory bodies of the Movement and contemplates its mission to help victims and improve the lives of vulnerable people. It addresses the humanitarian concerns and challenges of our time. The anthology further provides a unique forum for the current debates on the application and development of international humanitarian law. It also discusses the Movement’s relations with governments and external partners and the contribution of volunteers. This is the first book to bring the relatively unknown Standing Commission of the Red Cross and Red Crescent and its work prominently to the fore. Making the Voice of Humanity Heard is essential and accessible reading for anyone interested in the daunting tasks and fundamental role of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement as well as the contemporary threats and challenges to humanitarian assistance and international humanitarian law.

Download or read book Objects of Concern written by Jonathan F. Vance and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen thousand Canadians were captured during Canada's twientieth-century wars. They experienced the bewilderment that accompanied the moment of capture, the humiliation of being completely in the captor's power, and the sense of stagnating in a backwater while the rest of the world moved forward. Jonathan Vance provides the first comprehensive account of how the Canadian government and non-governmental organizations have dealt with the problems of prisoners of war, examining Canada's role in the formation of aspects of international law, the growth and activities of national and local philanthropic agencies, and the efforts of ex-prisoners to secure compensation for the long-term effects of captivity.

Download or read book European Powers in the First World War written by Spencer Tucker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1996. The First World War was the single most important event of the twentieth century. This volume concentrates on non-U.S. aspects of the conflict. Organized alphabetically, its more than 600 detailed entries offer information and insight on such subjects as the causes of the conflict, major battles and campaigns, weapons systems (including military aviation, chemical warfare, the submarine, and the tank), and the terms of the peace. Some 350 biographies provide information on the roles played in the conflict by generals, admirals, and civilian leaders. There are also biographies of individuals who were shaped by the war, such as Charles De Gaulle, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin; essays on each of the countries involved in the conflict; new appraisals of such subjects as military medicine and artillery tactics; and essays on such diverse subjects as art, literature, and music in the war. Each entry has references for additional reading, and a subject index provides easy access. The volume is an excellent reference source for scholar and neophyte alike.

Download or read book Democracy and Peace Making written by Philip Towle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-01-14 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy and Peace Making is an invaluable and up-to-date account of the process of peace making, which draws on the most recent historical thinking. It surveys the post-war peace settlements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including: * the Vienna congress of 1815 * the Treaty of Versailles * the peace settlements of the Second World War * peace talks after the Korean War * the Paris Peace Accords of 1973.