Download or read book Foreign Fighters written by David Malet and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreign Fighters is the comprehensive study of foreign fighters examines patterns of recruitment using original data sets and detailed diverse case studies, and how recruiters use frames of existential threat to strengthen rebel groups.

Download or read book War of Visions written by Francis M. Deng and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The civil war that has intermittently raged in the Sudan since independence in 1956 is, according to Francis Deng, a conflict of contrasting and seemingly incompatible identities in the Northern and Southern parts of the country. Identity is seen as a function of how people identify themselves and are identified in racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious terms. The identity question related to how such concepts determine or influence participation and distribution in the political, economic, social, and cultural life of the country. War of Visions aims at shedding light on the anomalies of the identity conflict. The competing models in the Sudan are the Arab-Islamic mold of the North, representing two-thirds of the country in territory and population, and the remaining Southern third, which is indigenously African in race, ethnicity, culture, and religion, with an educated Christianized elite. But although the North is popularly defined as racially Arab, the people are a hybrid of Arab and African elements, with the African physical characteristics predominating in most tribal groups. This configuration is the result of a historical process that stratified races, cultures, and religions, and fostered a "passing" into the Arab-Islamic mold that discriminated against the African race and cultures. The outcome of this process is a polarization that is based more on myth than on the realities of the situation. The identity crisis has been further complicated by the fact that Northerners want to fashion the country on the basis of their Arab- Islamic identity, while the South is decidedly resistant. Francis Deng presents three alternative approaches to the identity crisis. First, he argues that by bringing to the surface the realities of the African elements of identity in the North-- thereby revealing characteristics shared by all Sudanese--a new basis for the creation of a common identity could be established that fosters equitable

Download or read book Military Integration after Civil Wars written by Florence Gaub and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the role of multiethnic armies in post-conflict reconstruction, and demonstrates how they can promote peacebuilding efforts. The author challenges the assumption that multiethnic composition leads to weakness of the military, and shows how a multiethnic army is frequently the impetus for peacemaking in multiethnic societies. Three case studies (Nigeria, Lebanon and Bosnia-Herzegovina) determine that rather than external factors, it is the internal structures that make or break the military institution in a socially challenging environment. The book finds that where the political will is present, the multiethnic military can become a symbol of reconciliation and coexistence. Furthermore, it shows that the military as a professional identity can supersede ethnic considerations and thus facilitates cooperation within the armed forces despite a hostile post-conflict setting. In this, the book challenges widespread theories about ethnic identities and puts professional identities on an equal footing with them. The book will be of great interest to students of military studies, ethnic conflict, conflict studies and peacebuilding, and IR in general Florence Gaub is a Researcher and Lecturer at the NATO Defence College in Rome. She holds a PhD in International Politics from Humboldt University, Berlin.

Download or read book Civil War Citizens written by Susannah J. Ural and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2010-11-22 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At its core, the Civil War was a conflict over the meaning of citizenship. Most famously, it became a struggle over whether or not to grant rights to a group that stood outside the pale of civil-society: African Americans. But other groups--namely Jews, Germans, the Irish, and Native Americans--also became part of this struggle to exercise rights stripped from them by legislation, court rulings, and the prejudices that defined the age. Grounded in extensive research by experts in their respective fields, Civil War Citizens is the first volume to collectively analyze the wartime experiences of those who lived outside the dominant white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant citizenry of nineteenth-century America. The essays examine the momentous decisions made by these communities in the face of war, their desire for full citizenship, the complex loyalties that shaped their actions, and the inspiring and heartbreaking results of their choices-- choices that still echo through the United States today. Contributors: Stephen D. Engle, William McKee Evans, David T. Gleeson, Andrea Mehrländer, Joseph P. Reidy, Robert N. Rosen, and Susannah J. Ural.

Download or read book Identities in Civil Conflict written by Eva Bernauer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eva Bernauer predicts civil conflicts based upon the political exclusion of identity groups and their transnational links to external governments. The innovation lies in a simultaneous consideration of three identities – ethnicity, religion, and class-based ideology – thus extending previous studies with merely an ethnic focus. Most importantly, such a perspective implies a shift towards a society’s unique three-dimensional identity setup, upon which the excluded population and their transnational links can be determined. The author presents original data on the three-dimensional identity setup for 57 countries and introduces a formal model where rebel leaders strategically use identities to garner the support of the population. Key quantities of interest, such as the largest excluded subgroup or the number of identity links to external governments, are tested in several quantitative analyses as predictors for the onset of civil conflicts. The author shows that there is an added value of extending the mere ethnic perspective to also encompass religion and class-based ideology.

Download or read book The Logic of Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa written by John F. McCauley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-03 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is aimed at students and scholars of conflict, Africa, ethnic politics, and religion. It may also appeal to religious and political leaders. It proposes a new perspective on how ethnicity and religion shape political outcomes and violence in Africa, adding psychological elements to standard political science arguments.

Download or read book Alliance Formation in Civil Wars written by Fotini Christia and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the most brutal and long-lasting civil wars of our time involve the rapid formation and disintegration of alliances among warring groups, as well as fractionalization within them. It would be natural to suppose that warring groups form alliances based on shared identity considerations - such as Christian groups allying with Christian groups - but this is not what we see. Two groups that identify themselves as bitter foes one day, on the basis of some identity narrative, might be allies the next day and vice versa. Nor is any group, however homogeneous, safe from internal fractionalization. Rather, looking closely at the civil wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia and testing against the broader universe of fifty-three cases of multiparty civil wars, Fotini Christia finds that the relative power distribution between and within various warring groups is the primary driving force behind alliance formation, alliance changes, group splits and internal group takeovers.

Download or read book The Logic of Violence in Civil War written by Stathis N. Kalyvas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-01 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.

Download or read book Mobilizing in Uncertainty written by Anastasia Shesterinina and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do ordinary people navigate the intense uncertainty of the onset of war? Different individuals mobilize in different ways—some flee, some pick up arms, and some support armed actors as civil war begins. Drawing on nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with participants and nonparticipants in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992–1993, Anastasia Shesterinina explores Abkhaz mobilization decisions during that conflict. Her fresh approach underscores the uncertain nature of the first days of the war when Georgian forces had a preponderance of manpower and arms. Mobilizing in Uncertainty demonstrates, in contrast to explanations that assume individuals know the risk involved in mobilization and make decisions based on that knowledge, that the Abkhaz anticipated risk in ways that were affected by their earlier experiences and by social networks at the time of mobilization. What Shesterinina uncovers is that to make sense of the violence, Abkhaz leaders, local authority figures, and others relied on shared understandings of the conflict and their roles in it—collective conflict identities—that they had developed before the war. As appeals traveled across society, people consolidated mobilization decisions within small groups of family and friends and based their actions on whom they understood to be threatened. Their decisions shaped how the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict unfolded and how people continued to mobilize during and after the war. Through this detailed analysis of Abkhaz mobilization from prewar to postwar, Mobilizing in Uncertainty sheds light on broader processes of violence, which have lasting effects on societies marked by intergroup conflict.

Download or read book Away Down South written by James C. Cobb and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their African American counterparts in the "Harlem Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South? Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.

Download or read book Understanding Peace and Conflict Through Social Identity Theory written by Shelley McKeown and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together perspectives on social identity and peace psychology to explore the role that categorization plays in both conflict and peace-building. To do so, it draws leading scholars from across the world in a comprehensive exploration of social identity theory and its application to some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as intrastate conflict, uprising in the middle east, the refugee crisis, global warming, racism and peace building. A crucial theme of the volume is that social identity theory affects all of us, no matter whether we are currently in a state of conflict or one further along in the peace process. The volume is organized into two sections. Section 1 focuses on the development of social identity theory. Grounded in the pioneering work of Dr. Henri Tajfel, section 1 provides the reader with a historical background of the theory, as well as its current developments. Then, section 2 brings together a series of country case studies focusing on issues of identity across five continents. This section enables cross-cultural comparisons in terms of methodology and findings, and encourages the reader to identify general applications of identity to the understanding of peace as well as applications that may be more relevant in specific contexts. Taken together, these two sections provide a contemporary and diverse account of the state of social identity research in conflict situations and peace psychology today. It is evident that any account of peace requires an intricate understanding of identity both as a cause and consequence of conflict, as well as a potential resource to be harnessed in the promotion and maintenance of peace. Understanding Peace and Conflict Through Social Identity Theory: Contemporary Global Perspectives aims to help achieve such an understanding and as such is a valuable resource to those studying peace and conflict, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, public policy makers, and all those interested in the ways in which social identity impacts our world.

Download or read book Identity Citizenship and Political Conflict in Africa written by Edmond J. Keller and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-19 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Engaging…detailed with current information about the situation in many African countries.” —African Studies Quarterly Reflecting on the processes of nation-building and citizenship formation in Africa, Edmond J. Keller believes that although some deep parochial identities have eroded, they have not disappeared—and may be more assertive than previously thought, especially in instances of political conflict. Keller reconsiders how national identity has been understood in Africa and presents new approaches to identity politics, intergroup relations, state-society relations, and notions of national citizenship and citizenship rights. Focusing on Nigeria, Ethiopia, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Rwanda, he lays the foundation for a new understanding of political transition in contemporary Africa. “This book would certainly be useful in graduate seminars on African politics, African history or ethnic politics. It is written in a clear, straightforward style that also makes it appropriate for use in advanced undergraduate classes. Keller also offers insights for policymakers and development practitioners who continue to grapple with the real-world consequences of citizenship conflicts.”—Journal of Modern African Studies

Download or read book Mosaic Fictions written by Emily Robins Sharpe and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mosaic Fictions reveals the tensions between national and global affiliations in Spanish Civil War literature, highlighting writers such as Leonard Cohen, Dorothy Livesay, and Mordecai Richler.

Download or read book The Creation of Confederate Nationalism written by Drew Gilpin Faust and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1989-12-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, historians have debated the meaning and significance of Confederate nationalism and the role it played in the outcome of the Civil War. Yet they have paid little attention to the actual development and content of this Confederate ideology. In The Creation of Confederate Nationalism, Drew Gilpin Faust argues that coming to a fuller understanding of southern thought during the Civil War period offers a valuable refraction of the essential assumptions on which the Old South and the Confederacy were built. She shows the benefits of exploring Confederate nationalism “as the South’s commentary upon itself, as its effort to represent southern culture to the world at large, to history, and perhaps most revealingly, to its own people.”

Download or read book Uncivil Agreement written by Lilliana Mason and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The psychology behind political partisanship: “The kind of research that will change not just how you think about the world but how you think about yourself.” —Ezra Klein, Vox Political polarization in America has moved beyond disagreements about matters of policy. For the first time in decades, research has shown that members of both parties hold strongly unfavorable views of their opponents. This is polarization rooted in social identity, and it is growing. The campaign and election of Donald Trump laid bare this fact of the American electorate, its successful rhetoric of “us versus them” tapping into a powerful current of anger and resentment. With Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason looks at the growing social gulf across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently come to divide neatly between the two major political parties. She argues that group identifications have changed the way we think and feel about ourselves and our opponents. Even when Democrats and Republicans can agree on policy outcomes, they tend to view one other with distrust and to work for party victory over all else. Although the polarizing effects of social divisions have simplified our electoral choices and increased political engagement, they have not been a force that is, on balance, helpful for American democracy. Bringing together theory from political science and social psychology, Uncivil Agreement clearly describes this increasingly “social” type of polarization, and adds much to our understanding of contemporary politics.

Download or read book Inequality Grievances and Civil War written by Lars-Erik Cederman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-26 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that political and economic inequalities following group lines generate grievances that in turn can motivate civil war. Lars-Erik Cederman, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and Halvard Buhaug offer a theoretical approach that highlights ethnonationalism and how the relationship between group identities and inequalities are fundamental for successful mobilization to resort to violence. Although previous research highlighted grievances as a key motivation for political violence, contemporary research on civil war has largely dismissed grievances as irrelevant, emphasizing instead the role of opportunities. This book shows that the alleged non-results for grievances in previous research stemmed primarily from atheoretical measures, typically based on individual data. The authors develop new indicators of political and economic exclusion at the group level, and show that these exert strong effects on the risk of civil war. They provide new analyses of the effects of transnational ethnic links and the duration of civil wars, and extended case discussions illustrating causal mechanisms.

Download or read book Partition and Peace in Civil Wars written by Carter R. Johnson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-09 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines whether partition is an effective means to resolve ethnic and sectarian civil wars. It argues that partition is unlikely to end ongoing ethnosectarian civil wars, but it can increase the likelihood of preventing civil war recurrence, as long as the partition separates civilians and militaries. The book presents in-depth case studies of Georgia–Abkhazia and Moldova–Transnistria, in addition to cross-national comparisons of all ethnosectarian civil wars between 1945 and 2004. This analysis demonstrates when partitioning a country can help transform an identity-based civil war into a lasting peace. Highlighting practical and moral challenges of separating ethnosectarian groups, the book contends that complete partitions cannot be easily implemented by the international community, and this limits their applicability. It also demonstrates that ethnosectarian civil wars are driven less by inter-group antagonisms and more by state breakdown, meaning displaced minorities can reintegrate peacefully after partition as long as a minimal level of state-building has been completed. The book ends by examining whether partition would be useful for five contemporary conflicts: Iraq, Ukraine–Donbass, Afghanistan, Sudan–South Sudan, and Serbia–Kosovo. This book will be of much interest to students of civil wars, ethnic conflict, peace and conflict studies, and international relations.