Download or read book Making Sense of Proxy Wars written by Michael A. Innes and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the cutting edge of current research on surrogacy and proxy warfare
Download or read book Proxy War written by Albert Bertilsson and published by Albert Bertilsson. This book was released on 2024-08-17 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawn into a conflict in a country far away from An Arath, our adventurers battle against humans in the service of evil. Strong allies are found… but will they remain victorious when deadlier supernatural enemies are discovered? Will victories on new battlefields prove decisive, or are the conflicts merely a distraction, hiding a greater plan? Discover a world ruled by sorceresses and join them in their struggle to make the world a better place. Who'll ultimately decide the fate of the world—and what will that future look like?
Download or read book The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations written by Garrett W Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-06 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bestselling dictionary contains over 1,700 entries on all aspects of politics and international relations. Written by a leading team of political scientists, it embraces the multi-disciplinary spectrum of political theory including political thinkers, history, institutions, theories, and schools of thought, as well as notable current affairs that have shaped attitudes to politics. Fully updated for its fourth edition, the dictionary has had its coverage of international relations heavily revised and expanded, reflected in its title change, and it includes a wealth of new material in areas such as international institutions, peace building, human security, security studies, global governance, and open economy politics. It also incorporates recommended web links that can be accessed via a regularly checked and updated companion website, ensuring that the links remain relevant. The dictionary is international in its coverage and will prove invaluable to students and academics studying politics and related disciplines, as well as politicians, journalists, and the general reader seeking clarification of political terms.
Download or read book A Great Place to Have a War written by Joshua Kurlantzick and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.
Download or read book Proxy Warfare written by Andrew Mumford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-07-10 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proxy wars represent a perennial strand in the history of conflict. The appeal of ‘warfare on the cheap’ has proved an irresistible strategic allure for nations through the centuries. However, proxy wars remain a missing link in contemporary war and security studies. In this timely book Andrew Mumford sheds new light on the dynamics and lineage of proxy warfare from the Cold War to the War on Terror, whilst developing a cogent conceptual framework to explain their appeal. Tracing the political and strategic development of proxy wars throughout the last century, they emerge as a dominant characteristic of contemporary conflict. The book ably shows how proxy interventions often prolong existing conflicts given the perpetuity of arms, money and sometimes proxy fighters sponsored by third party donors. Furthermore, it emphasizes why, given the direction of the War on Terror, the rise of China as a global power, and the prominence now achieved by non-state actors in the ‘Arab Spring’, the phenomenon of proxy warfare is increasingly relevant to understandings of contemporary security. Proxy Warfare is an indispensable guide for students and scholars interested in the evolution and potential future direction of war and conflict in the modern world.
Download or read book Brave New War written by John Robb and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “For my money, John Robb, a former Air Force officer and tech guru, is the futurists' futurist.” --"Slate" The counterterrorism expert John Robb reveals how the same technology that has enabled globalization also allows terrorists and criminals to join forces against larger adversaries with relative ease and to carry out small, inexpensive actions--like sabotaging an oil pipeline--that generate a huge return. He shows how combating the shutdown of the world's oil, high-tech, and financial markets could cost us the thing we've come to value the most--worldwide economic and cultural integration--and what we must do now to safeguard against this new method of warfare.
Download or read book White House Warriors How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War written by John Gans and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The NSC, part star chamber, part gladiator arena, and part Game of Thrones drama is expertly revealed to us in the pages of Gans’ primer on Washington power.” — Kurt Campbell, Chairman of the Asia Group, LLC Since its founding more than seventy years ago, the National Security Council has exerted more influence on the president’s foreign policy decisions—and on the nation’s conflicts abroad—than any other institution or individual. And yet, until the explosive Trump presidency, few Americans could even name a member. “A must-read for anyone interested in how Washington really works” (Ivo H. Daalder), White House Warriors finally reveals how the NSC evolved from a handful of administrative clerks to, as one recent commander-in-chief called them, the president’s “personal band of warriors.” When Congress originally created the National Security Council in 1947, it was intended to better coordinate foreign policy after World War II. Nearly an afterthought, a small administrative staff was established to help keep its papers moving. President Kennedy was, as John Gans documents, the first to make what became known as the NSC staff his own, selectively hiring bright young aides to do his bidding during the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, the fraught Cuban Missile Crisis, and the deepening Vietnam War. Despite Kennedy’s death and the tragic outcome of some of his decision, the NSC staff endured. President Richard Nixon handed the staff’s reigns solely to Henry Kissinger, who, given his controlling instincts, micromanaged its work on Vietnam. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s NSC was cast into turmoil by overreaching staff members who, led by Oliver North, nearly brought down a presidency in the Iran-Contra scandal. Later, when President George W. Bush’s administration was bitterly divided by the Iraq War, his NSC staff stepped forward to write a plan for the Surge in Iraq. Juxtaposing extensive archival research with new interviews, Gans demonstrates that knowing the NSC staff’s history and its war stories is the only way to truly understand American foreign policy. As this essential account builds to the swift removals of advisors General Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon in 2017, we see the staff’s influence in President Donald Trump’s still chaotic administration and come to understand the role it might play in its aftermath. A revelatory history written with riveting DC insider detail, White House Warriors traces the path that has led us to an era of American aggression abroad, debilitating fights within the government, and whispers about a deep state conspiring against the public.
Download or read book Making Sense of Proxy Wars written by Michael A. Innes and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public debate over surrogate forces and proxy warfare has been largely dormant since the end of the Cold War. The conventional wisdom has been that with the end of the U.S.- Soviet rivalry, state sources of support for proxy guerrilla, insurgent, and terrorist organizations dried up, forcing them to look to criminal activity to survive and precipitating the growth of dangerously independent and well-resourced militants, mercenaries, and warlords. But in the few years since 2001, a wide range of issues raised to prominence by wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere suggest that armed proxies, and the forces that drive and shape their use, are part of a larger dynamic. From the legacies of the wars in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Kashmir, to the growth of privatized security and military companies, and to increased reliance on intermediaries of all kinds, these surrogate forces bear further study. Making Sense of Proxy Wars is the first book to seriously challenge Cold War assumptions about terrorism and proxy warfare, offering an alternative view of armed surrogates—whether they are private armies, indigenous militias, or unwilling victims—as complex, selfinterested actors on the international stage.
Download or read book Proxy Wars written by Eli Berman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most common image of world politics involves states negotiating, cooperating, or sometimes fighting with one another; billiard balls in motion on a global pool table. Yet working through local proxies or agents, through what Eli Berman and David A. Lake call a strategy of "indirect control," has always been a central tool of foreign policy. Understanding how countries motivate local allies to act in sometimes costly ways, and when and how that strategy succeeds, is essential to effective foreign policy in today's world. In this splendid collection, Berman and Lake apply a variant of principal-agent theory in which the alignment of interests or objectives between a powerful state and a local proxy is central. Through analysis of nine detailed cases, Proxy Wars finds that: when principals use rewards and punishments tailored to the agent's domestic politics, proxies typically comply with their wishes; when the threat to the principal or the costs to the agent increase, the principal responds with higher-powered incentives and the proxy responds with greater effort; if interests diverge too much, the principal must either take direct action or admit that indirect control is unworkable. Covering events from Denmark under the Nazis to the Korean War to contemporary Afghanistan, and much in between, the chapters in Proxy Wars engage many disciplines and will suit classes taught in political science, economics, international relations, security studies, and much more.
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 New Explorations Into International Relations written by Seung-Whan Choi and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a range of issues surrounding the search for scientific truths in the study of international conflict and international political economy. Unlike empirical studies in other disciplines, says Seung-Whan Choi, many political studies seem more competent at presenting theoretical conjecture and hypotheses than they are at performing rigorous empirical analyses. When we study global issues like democratic institutions, flows of foreign direct investment, international terrorism, civil wars, and international conflict, we often uncritically adopt established theoretical frameworks and research designs. The natural assumption is that well-known and widely cited studies, once ingrained within the tradition of the discipline, should not be challenged or refuted. However, do such noted research areas reflect scientific truth? Choi looks closely at ten widely cited empirical studies that represent well-known research programs in international relations. His discussions address such statistical and theoretical issues as endogeneity bias, model specification error, fixed effects, theoretical predictability, outliers, normality of regression residuals, and choice of estimation techniques. In addition, scientific progress made by remarkable discoveries usually results from finding a new way of thinking about long-held scientific truths, therefore Choi also demonstrates how one may search for novel ideas at minimal cost by developing new research designs with original data. Here is a valuable resource for students, scholars, and policy makers who want to quickly grasp the evolutionary pattern of scientific research on democracy, foreign investment, terrorism, and conflict; build their research designs and choose appropriate statistical techniques; and identify their own agendas for the production of cutting-edge research.
Download or read book Drafted written by Adam Sampson and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-13 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Peter finds himself on a strange planet, drafted into a war by alien abductors, his only goal is to be one of the few to survive the war and return home to Earth.Peter is one of thousands who get abducted every year, as payment to the aliens. The aliens have given humans portal travel, healing serums, and other advanced alien technology. The quality of life has improved, but everything has a price.Along with a group of strangers Peter is trained for war by going up against literal monsters. The troll-like aliens won't give them modern weapons. Humans have to battle monsters with swords and shields, and that is just to get out of boot camp. His only chance to survive is to use the alien device he is given. The device can increase his strength and speed to superhuman levels. It can even grant him powers that seem like magic. Complicating things is that the device's interface is written in an ever-changing alien language. He will have to figure out its secrets if he wants to keep himself and his team alive.A Science Fantasy novel with LitRPG elements.
Download or read book Good Muslim Bad Muslim written by Mahmood Mamdani and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2005-06-21 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen? Mamdani dispels the idea of “good” (secular, westernized) and “bad” (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are “good” Muslims readily available to be split off from “bad” Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. This book argues that political Islam emerged as the result of a modern encounter with Western power, and that the terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America’s embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam. Mamdani writes with great insight about the Reagan years, showing America’s embrace of the highly ideological politics of “good” against “evil.” Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the “moral equivalents” of America’s Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq. And there, as in Vietnam, America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism, a battle that cannot be won by occupation. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a provocative and important book that will profoundly change our understanding both of Islamist politics and the way America is perceived in the world today.
Download or read book Warlike and Peaceful Societies written by Agner Fog and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are humans violent or peaceful by nature? We are both. In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, Agner Fog presents a ground-breaking new argument that explains the existence of differently organised societies using evolutionary theory. It combines natural sciences and social sciences in a way that is rarely seen. According to a concept called regality theory, people show a preference for authoritarianism and strong leadership in times of war or collective danger, but desire egalitarian political systems in times of peace and safety. These individual impulses shape the way societies develop and organise themselves, and in this book Agner argues that there is an evolutionary mechanism behind this flexible psychology. Incorporating a wide range of ideas including evolutionary theory, game theory, and ecological theory, Agner analyses the conditions that make us either strident or docile. He tests this theory on data from contemporary and ancient societies, and provides a detailed explanation of the applications of regality theory to issues of war and peace, the rise and fall of empires, the mass media, economic instability, ecological crisis, and much more. Warlike and Peaceful Societies: The Interaction of Genes and Culture draws on many different fields of both the social sciences and the natural sciences. It will be of interest to academics and students in these fields, including anthropology, political science, history, conflict and peace research, social psychology, and more, as well as the natural sciences, including human biology, human evolution, and ecology.
Download or read book Ghost Wars written by Steve Coll and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2005-03-03 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The news-breaking book that has sent schockwaves through the White House, Ghost Wars is the most accurate and revealing account yet of the CIA's secret involvement in al-Qaeada's evolution. Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll has spent years reporting from the Middle East, accessed previously classified government files and interviewed senior US officials and foreign spymasters. Here he gives the full inside story of the CIA's covert funding of an Islamic jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, explores how this sowed the seeds of bn Laden's rise, traces how he built his global network and brings to life the dramatic battles within the US government over national security. Above all, he lays bare American intelligence's continual failure to grasp the rising threat of terrrorism in the years leading to 9/11 - and its devastating consequences.
Download or read book Future War written by Christopher Coker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will tomorrow's wars be dominated by autonomous drones, land robots and warriors wired into a cybernetic network which can read their thoughts? Will war be fought with greater or lesser humanity? Will it be played out in cyberspace and further afield in Low Earth Orbit? Or will it be fought more intensely still in the sprawling cities of the developing world, the grim black holes of social exclusion on our increasingly unequal planet? Will the Great Powers reinvent conflict between themselves or is war destined to become much 'smaller' both in terms of its actors and the beliefs for which they will be willing to kill? In this illuminating new book Christopher Coker takes us on an incredible journey into the future of warfare. Focusing on contemporary trends that are changing the nature and dynamics of armed conflict, he shows how conflict will continue to evolve in ways that are unlikely to render our century any less bloody than the last. With insights from philosophy, cutting-edge scientific research and popular culture, Future War is a compelling and thought-provoking meditation on the shape of war to come.
