Download or read book Illusions of Conflict written by Joseph Smith and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first comprehensive treatment of Anglo-American rivalry over Latin America in the late nineteenth century, who battled for economic and political influence in the region from the Civil War until 1895, when the Venezuelan boundary dispute came to a head and the Monroe Doctrine was finally recognized by the British. Yet author Joseph Smith posits that this was only an illusion of conflict, that the two major powers has shared objectives all along in the region.
Download or read book Overconfidence and War written by Dominic D. P. Johnson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opponents rarely go to war without thinking they can win--and clearly, one side must be wrong. This conundrum lies at the heart of the so-called "war puzzle": rational states should agree on their differences in power and thus not fight. But as Dominic Johnson argues in Overconfidence and War, states are no more rational than people, who are susceptible to exaggerated ideas of their own virtue, of their ability to control events, and of the future. By looking at this bias--called "positive illusions"--as it figures in evolutionary biology, psychology, and the politics of international conflict, this book offers compelling insights into why states wage war. Johnson traces the effects of positive illusions on four turning points in twentieth-century history: two that erupted into war (World War I and Vietnam); and two that did not (the Munich crisis and the Cuban missile crisis). Examining the two wars, he shows how positive illusions have filtered into politics, causing leaders to overestimate themselves and underestimate their adversaries--and to resort to violence to settle a conflict against unreasonable odds. In the Munich and Cuban missile crises, he shows how lessening positive illusions may allow leaders to pursue peaceful solutions. The human tendency toward overconfidence may have been favored by natural selection throughout our evolutionary history because of the advantages it conferred--heightening combat performance or improving one's ability to bluff an opponent. And yet, as this book suggests--and as the recent conflict in Iraq bears out--in the modern world the consequences of this evolutionary legacy are potentially deadly.
Download or read book Daring to Win written by Dominic Dunphy Pawley Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Liberal Illusion written by Katherine Barbieri and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-12-18 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A very important and long-awaited major contribution to the debate . . . Her work cannot be ignored." --Nils Petter Gleditsch, Journal of Peace Research "Barbieri builds on a solid foundation of work on trade and conflict and specifies the conditions under which trade reduces and increases conflict. . . . The bottom line is that this is an important book in the study of trade and conflict because of its comprehensive approach." --Kathy L. Powers, Perspectives on Politics "Barbieri's analysis reveals the fundamental and intellectual weaknesses of the various arguments on this topic. [A] solid and timely contribution to the literature" --Choice The Liberal Illusion sheds light on an increasingly important question in international relations scholarship and the domain of policy making-whether international trade promotes peace. By examining a broad range of theories about trade's impact on interstate relations and undertaking a set of empirical analyses of the trade-conflict puzzle, Katherine Barbieri provides a comprehensive assessment of the liberal view that trade promotes peace. Barbieri's stunning conclusions depart from conventional wisdom in international relations. Consequently, The Liberal Illusion serves as an important counterargument and a warning call to policymakers who rely upon trade-based strategies to promote peace, strategies that appear to offer little hope of achieving their goals.
Download or read book Is Conflict Adaptation an Illusion written by James R Schmidt and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2015-05-20 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conflict adaptation theory is one of the most popular theories in cognitive psychology. The theory argues that participants strategically modulate attention away from distracting stimulus features in response to conflict. Although results with proportion congruent, sequential congruency, and similar paradigms seem consistent with the conflict adaptation view, some researchers have expressed scepticism. The paradigms used in the study of conflict adaptation require the manipulation of stimulus frequencies, sequential dependencies, time-on-task regularities, and various other task regularities that introduce the potential for learning of conflict-unrelated information. This results in the unintentional confounding of measures of conflict adaptation with simpler learning and memory biases. There are also alternative accounts which propose that attentional adaptation does occur, but via different mechanisms, such as valence, expectancy, or effort. A significant (and often heated) debate remains surrounding the question of whether conflict adaptation exists independent of these alternative mechanisms of action. The aim of this Research Topic is to provide a forum for current directions in this area, considering perspectives from all sides of the debate.
Download or read book The Illusion of Courage in Confronting Interpersonal Conflict written by Melanie G. Blunt and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Illusions of Emancipation written by Joseph P. Reidy and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly. In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals' sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits, causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle for freedom would result in victory.
Download or read book Myths Illusions and Peace written by Dennis Ross and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-06-11 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A trenchant and often pugnacious demolition of the numerous misconceptions about strategic thinking on the Middle East" -The New York Times Now updated with a new chapter on the current climate, Myths, Illusions, and Peace addresses why the United States has consistently failed to achieve its strategic goals in the Middle East. According to Dennis Ross-special advisor to President Obama and senior director at the National Security Council for that region-and policy analyst David Makovsky, it is because we have repeatedly fallen prey to dangerous myths about this part of the world-myths with roots that reach back decades yet persist today. Clearly articulated and accessible, Myths, Illusions, and Peace captures the reality of the problems in the Middle East like no book has before. It presents a concise and far-reaching set of principles that will help America set an effective course of action in the region, and in so doing secure a safer future for all Americans.
Download or read book The End of Illusions written by Andreas Reckwitz and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-06-28 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we’ve been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.
Download or read book The Illusion Of Victory written by Ian Bickerton and published by Melbourne University Publishing. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Illusion of Victory demonstrates that most of the rewards of victory in modern warfare are either exaggerated or false. When the ostensible benefits of victory are examined a generation after a war, it becomes inescapably evident that the defeated belligerent rarely conforms to the demands and expectations of the victor. Consequently, long-term political and military stability is denied to both the victorious power and to the defeated one. As a result, neither victory nor defeat deter further outbreaks of war. This sobering reality is increasingly the case in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ian Bickerton persuasively argues that as the rhetoric of victory becomes more hollow all countries must adopt creative new approaches to resolving disputes.
Download or read book Identity and Violence written by Amartya Sen and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007-01-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The violence of illusion -- Making sense of identity -- Civilizational confinement -- Religious affiliations and Muslim history -- West and anti-west -- Culture and captivity -- Globalization and voice -- Multiculturalism and freedom -- Freedom to think.
Download or read book Surrogate Warfare written by Andreas Krieg and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surrogate Warfare explores the emerging phenomenon of “surrogate warfare” in twenty-first century conflict. The popular notion of war is that it is fought en masse by the people of one side versus the other. But the reality today is that both state and non-state actors are increasingly looking to shift the burdens of war to surrogates. Surrogate warfare describes a patron's outsourcing of the strategic, operational, or tactical burdens of warfare, in whole or in part, to human and/or technological substitutes in order to minimize the costs of war. This phenomenon ranges from arming rebel groups, to the use of armed drones, to cyber propaganda. Krieg and Rickli bring old, related practices such as war by mercenary or proxy under this new overarching concept. Apart from analyzing the underlying sociopolitical drivers that trigger patrons to substitute or supplement military action, this book looks at the intrinsic trade-offs between substitutions and control that shapes the relationship between patron and surrogate. Surrogate Warfare will be essential reading for anyone studying contemporary conflict.
Download or read book City of Illusions written by Helen Rodgers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Granada is a deceptive city, concealing a layered past and a complex character. The last Muslim capital in Western Europe, over the centuries it has captured hearts and imaginations, inspiring countless myths and legends. Yet its history reveals even more fascinating tales: secrets and follies, victory and failure, poetry and art. City of Illusions brings together Granada's many stories--the archaeological forger, the renegade French general, the garrotted liberal heroine, the Jewish poet who served two Muslim rulers. This colourful cast of characters takes us from the founding eleventh-century dynasty and the building of the Alhambra, through the Reconquista, French occupation and Spanish Civil War, right up to the present day. Granada's history has long been fought over, rewritten, idealised or buried. This rich, elegant book sets the record straight on a beautiful, elusive city, with all its quirks, mysteries, intrigues and triumphs.
Download or read book Identity and Violence written by Amartya Sen and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2006 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contends that the violence of today's world is as much a result of misunderstanding as it is of cultural differences and explains that modern conflicts have origins in illusions about factors such as identity and morality.
Download or read book Ideal Illusions written by James Peck and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a noted historian and foreign-policy analyst, a groundbreaking critique of the troubling symbiosis between Washington and the human rights movement The United States has long been hailed as a powerful force for global human rights. Now, drawing on thousands of documents from the CIA, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and development agencies, James Peck shows in blunt detail how Washington has shaped human rights into a potent ideological weapon for purposes having little to do with rights—and everything to do with furthering America's global reach. Using the words of Washington's leaders when they are speaking among themselves, Peck tracks the rise of human rights from its dismissal in the cold war years as "fuzzy minded" to its calculated adoption, after the Vietnam War, as a rationale for American foreign engagement. He considers such milestones as the fight for Soviet dissidents, Tiananmen Square, and today's war on terror, exposing in the process how the human rights movement has too often failed to challenge Washington's strategies. A gripping and elegant work of analysis, Ideal Illusions argues that the movement must break free from Washington if it is to develop a truly uncompromising critique of power in all its forms.
Download or read book Essence of Conflict written by William P. Bottom and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experimental studies consistently indicate that human information processing and decision making violate basic precepts of rationality. Yet rational choice theory is increasingly used to model organizations, politics, and international relations. Experimental evidence of cognitive bias is often discounted as a methodological artifact because analysis, organization, specialization, and the presence of strong incentives are presumed to eliminate bias outside the laboratory. A controversy in the historiography of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 provides an opportunity to address that assumption. Did "the vindictiveness of the British and French peace terms; the exclusion of Germany and Russia from the peace conferences . . . the foolish attempts to draw the blood of reparations and war debts . . . usher in a second vast military conflagration" (Kennan, 1996)? Or, was the peace treaty "a flexible instrument crafted by relatively well intentioned and rational leaders" (Ikenberry, 2000)? The extensive record of primary and secondary sources was used to reconstruct beliefs, strategies, and actions of the decision makers over an extended time frame. That pattern was tested against three conceptions of rationality: The pure form of noncooperative game theory, the semi-strong form of Williamson's "contractual man", and the strongly bounded form of behavioral theory. Hypotheses regarding the structure and implementation of the Treaty derived from these three paradigms were tested. Both semistrong and strongly bounded conceptions of rationality accounted for the structure of the Treaty. Only the behavioral conception of rationality could account for the systematic failure in treaty implementation and the evolution of the Allied policy of appeasement. This strategy permitted the Hitler regime to repeatedly and unilaterally deviate from the provisions of the Treaty to improve its political, economic, territorial, and military position at the direct expense of the Allies. The tragic course of the war that followed is directly attributable to policy errors of the 1930's which derived from earlier errors in the initial construction of the Treaty.
Download or read book Political Visions Illusions written by David T. Koyzis and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this freshly updated, comprehensive study, political scientist David Koyzis surveys the key political ideologies of our era, unpacking the worldview issues inherent to each and pointing out essential strengths and weaknesses. Writing with broad international perspective, Koyzis is a sensible guide for Christians working in the public square, culture watchers, and all students of modern political thought.
