Download or read book Mercenaries Pirates and Sovereigns written by Janice E. Thomson and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary organization of global violence is neither timeless nor natural, argues Janice Thomson. It is distinctively modern. In this book she examines how the present arrangement of the world into violence-monopolizing sovereign states evolved over the six preceding centuries.

Download or read book Mercenaries Pirates and Sovereigns written by Janice E. Thomson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-07-22 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary organization of global violence is neither timeless nor natural, argues Janice Thomson. It is distinctively modern. In this book she examines how the present arrangement of the world into violence-monopolizing sovereign states evolved over the six preceding centuries.

Download or read book Mercenaries Pirates Bandits and Empires written by Alejandro Colás and Bryan Mabee and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mercenaries Pirates Bandits and Empires written by Alejandro Colás and published by Hurst & Company. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world dominated by nation-states, expressions of private violence have generally been neglected: either as relics of a more disorganised world or as marginal nuisances to states themselves. The prevalence and centrality of private violence in the past and present warns against such complacency. An increasing academic interest in 'non-state' or private violence in International Relations has been mirrored in the world of policy as terrorists, insurgents, private military companies, and more recently pirates, have all become the focus of international security. Despite the increasing interest, the historical analysis of such actors has not been at a premium. This volume seeks to rectify this gap. Setting private violence in an historical context the contributors consider the development of private violence in time, as well as offering a comparative analysis of its unfolding across different geographical planes. The nine chapters that form the volume critically explore the lives of pirates, privateers, mercenaries, warlords, bandits and smugglers - groups of men (and occasionally women) that have sustained themselves and their kin principally through recourse to violence, but generally from outside or on the margins of public, state authority. They underline ways in which private violence acts both as a threat to existing forms of social order, and as a vehicle of empowerment for the established political authorities.

Download or read book Private Military and Security Companies PMSCs and the Quest for Accountability written by George Andreopoulos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) have constituted a perennial feature of the security landscape. Yet, it is their involvement in and conduct during the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have transformed the outsourcing of security services into such a pressing public policy and world-order issue. The PMSCs’ ubiquitous presence in armed conflict situations, as well as in post-conflict reconstruction, their diverse list of clients (governments in the developed and developing world, non-state armed groups, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, and international corporations) and, in the context of armed conflict situations, involvement in instances of gross misconduct, have raised serious accountability issues. The prominence of PMSCs in conflict zones has generated critical questions concerning the very concept of security and the role of private force, a rethinking of "essential governmental functions," a rearticulation of the distinction between public/private and global/local in the context of the creation of new forms of "security governance," and a consideration of the relevance, as well as limitations, of existing regulatory frameworks that include domestic and international law (in particular international human rights law and international humanitarian law). This book critically examines the growing role of PMSCs in conflict and post-conflict situations, as part of a broader trend towards the outsourcing of security functions. Particular emphasis is placed on key moral, legal, and political considerations involved in the privatization of such functions, on the impact of outsourcing on security governance, and on the main challenges confronting efforts to hold PMSCs accountable through a combination of formal and informal, domestic as well as international, regulatory mechanisms and processes. It will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, practitioners and advocates for a more transparent and humane security order. This book was published as a special issue of Criminal Justice Ethics.

Download or read book Pirates The Politics of Plunder 1550 1650 written by Claire Jowitt and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an insight to the cultural work involved in violence at sea in this period of maritime history. It is the first to consider how 'piracy' and representations of 'pirates' both shape and were shaped by political, social and religious debates, showing how attitudes to 'piracy' and violence at sea were debated between 1550 and 1650.

Download or read book The Libertine Colony written by Doris L Garraway and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-08 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting incisive original readings of French writing about the Caribbean from the inception of colonization in the 1640s until the onset of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s, Doris Garraway sheds new light on a significant chapter in French colonial history. At the same time, she makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of the cultural contact, creolization, and social transformation that resulted in one of the most profitable yet brutal slave societies in history. Garraway’s readings highlight how French colonial writers characterized the Caribbean as a space of spiritual, social, and moral depravity. While tracing this critique in colonial accounts of Island Carib cultures, piracy, spirit beliefs, slavery, miscegenation, and incest, Garraway develops a theory of “the libertine colony.” She argues that desire and sexuality were fundamental to practices of domination, laws of exclusion, and constructions of race in the slave societies of the colonial French Caribbean. Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation—including the Code noir—that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds 1400 1800 written by Claire Jowitt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book has been nominated for The Mountbatten Award for Best Book in the Maritime Media Awards 2021. The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400‒1800 explores early modern maritime history, culture, and the current state of the research and approaches taken by experts in the field. Ranging from cartography to poetry and decorative design to naval warfare, the book shows how once-traditional and often Euro-chauvinistic depictions of oceanic ‘mastery’ during the early modern period have been replaced by newer global ideas. This comprehensive volume challenges underlying assumptions by balancing its assessment of the consequences and accomplishments of European navigators in the era of Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan, with an awareness of the sophistication and maritime expertise in Asia, the Arab world, and the Americas. By imparting riveting new stories and global perceptions of maritime history and culture, the contributors provide readers with fresh insights concerning early modern entanglements between humans and the vast, unpredictable ocean. With maritime studies growing and the ocean’s health in decline, this volume is essential reading for academics and students interested in the historicization of the ocean and the ways early modern cultures both conceptualized and utilized seas.

Download or read book Rethinking the New Medievalism written by R. Howard Bloch and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years after Stephen Nichols transformed the study of medieval literature, leaders in the field pay tribute to his work and expand on it. In the early 1990s, Stephen Nichols introduced the term "new medievalism" to describe an alternative to the traditional philological approach to the study of the romantic texts in the medieval period. While the old approach focused on formal aspects of language, this new approach was historicist and moved beyond a narrow focus on language to examine the broader social and cultural contexts in which literary works were composed and disseminated. Within the field, this transformation of medieval studies was as important as the genetic revolution to the study of biology and has had an enormous influence on the study of medieval literature. Rethinking the New Medievalism offers both a historical account of the movement and its achievements while indicating—in Nichols’s innovative spirit—still newer directions for medieval studies. The essays deal with questions of authorship, theology, and material philology and are written by members of a wide philological and critical circle that Nichols nourished for forty years. Daniel Heller-Roazen’s essay, for example, demonstrates the conjunction of the old philology and the new. In a close examination of the history of the words used for maritime raiders from Ancient Greece to the present (pirate, plunderer, bandit), Roazen draws a fine line between lawlessness and lawfulness, between judicial action and war, between war and public policy. Other contributors include Jack Abecassis, Marina Brownlee, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Andreas Kablitz, and Ursula Peters.

Download or read book The New Dogs of War written by Ward Thomas and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Ward Thomas details in The New Dogs of War, militias and paramilitary groups wield greater power than national governments in many countries, while in some war zones private contractors perform missions previously reserved for uniformed troops. Most ominously, terrorist organizations with global reach have come to define the security landscape for even the most powerful nations. Across the first decades of the twenty-first century we have witnessed a dramatic rise in the use of military force by these nonstate actors in ways that have impacted the international system, leading Thomas to undertake this valuable assessment of the state of play at this critical moment. To understand the spread of nonstate violence, Thomas focuses on the crucial role played by an epochal transformation in international norms. Since the eighteenth century, the Westphalian model of sovereignty has reserved the legitimate use of force to states. Thomas argues that normative changes in the decades after World War II produced a "crisis of coherence" for formal and informal rules against nonstate violence. In detailed case studies of nonstate militias, transnational terrorist networks, and private military contractors, Thomas explains how forces contesting state prerogatives exploited this crisis, which in turn reshaped international understandings of who could legitimately use force. By considering for the first time all three purveyors of nonstate violence as aspects of the same phenomenon, The New Dogs of War explains this fundamental shift in the norm that for centuries gave states the monopoly on military force.

Download or read book A History of the Laws of War Volume 1 written by Alexander Gillespie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique new 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 regulating the treatment of captives. This first book on warfare deals with the broad question of whether the patterns of dealing with combatants and captives have changed over the last 5,000 years, and if so, how? In terms of context, the first part of the book is about combatants and those who can 'lawfully' take part in combat. In many regards, this part of the first volume is a series of 'less than ideal' pathways. This is because in an ideal world there would be no combatants because there would be no fighting. Yet as a species we do not live in such a place or even anywhere near it, either historically or in contemporary times. This being so, a second-best alternative has been to attempt to control the size of military forces and, therefore, the bloodshed. This is also not the case by which humanity has worked over the previous centuries. Rather, the clear assumption for thousands of years has been that authorities are allowed to build the size of their armed forces as large as they wish. The restraints that have been applied are in terms of the quality and methods by which combatants are taken. The considerations pertain to questions of biology such as age and sex, geographical considerations such as nationality, and the multiple nuances of informal or formal combatants. These questions have also overlapped with ones of compulsion and whether citizens within a country can be compelled to fight without their consent. Accordingly, for the previous 3,000 years, the question has not been whether there should be a limit on the number of soldiers, but rather who is or is not a lawful combatant. It has rarely been a question of numbers. It has been, and remains, one of type. The second part of this book is about people, typically combatants, captured in battle. It is about what happens to their status as prisoners, about the possibilities of torture, assistance if they are wounded and what happens to their remains should they be killed and their bodies fall into enemy hands. The theme that ties all of these considerations together is that all of the acts befall those who are, to one degree or another, captives of their enemies. As such, they are no longer masters of their own fate. As a work of reference this first volume, as part of a set of three, 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 Routledge Handbook of Private Security Studies written by Rita Abrahamsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of current research on private security and military companies, comprising essays by leading scholars from around the world. The increasing privatization of security across the globe has been the subject of much debate and controversy, inciting fears of private warfare and even the collapse of the state. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the range of issues raised by contemporary security privatization, offering both a survey of the numerous roles performed by private actors and an analysis of their implications and effects. Ranging from the mundane to the spectacular, from secretive intelligence gathering and neighbourhood surveillance to piracy control and warfare, this Handbook shows how private actors are involved in both domestic and international security provision and governance. It places this involvement in historical perspective, and demonstrates how the impact of security privatization goes well beyond the security field to influence diverse social, economic and political relationships and institutions. Finally, this volume analyses the evolving regulation of the global private security sector. Seeking to overcome the disciplinary boundaries that have plagued the study of private security, the Handbook promotes an interdisciplinary approach and contains contributions from a range of disciplines, including international relations, politics, criminology, law, sociology, geography and anthropology. This book will be of much interest to students of private security companies, global governance, military studies, security studies and IR in general.

Download or read book The Pirate Encyclopedia written by Arne Zuidhoek and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 900 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pirate Encyclopedia, as the essential companion for scholars, students, and a general audience intrigued by tales and facts, offers the most complete body of data available on the legitimacy of more than 7.000 adventurers as subjects of investigation.

Download or read book Rights of Passage written by Mark B. Salter and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores shifting notions of sovereignty, citizenship, and identity, as well as changing concerns with issues of race, class, gender, and nation. Ranging from topics such as health, war, and migration, the text sheds light on the role of borders in the age of globalization.

Download or read book Globalization and War written by Tarak Barkawi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the interconnections between globalization and war, Barkawi (Centre of International Studies, U. of Cambridge, UK) first analyzes how war interconnects and reshapes places and how developments in the nature and utility of military force shape transregional and worldwide contexts, utilizing the relations among India, the British empire, and the Indian Army is illustrative material. He then examines cultural dimensions of war and globalization such as "geographic imaginaries" of a modern and advance West and a barbarous Orient. The themes developed in these chapters are then applied to the "War on Terror."

Download or read book The Mercenary written by Kinsey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since the French Revolution and the rise of the rise of national armies, the mercenary has been viewed as a maligned and marginalized actor in international relations. The Mercenary challenges this view, suggesting instead that while delegated to the periphery of Great Power politics, the mercenary remained a coercive instrument of state power who was willing to discretely promote the client's foreign policy when called upon to do so. Never has this been more evident than today. This book offers fresh insight into the future of the mercenary as an instrument of state coercion and explains why there is a mercenary renaissance in the 21st century. The start of the 21st century has seen renewed interest in the mercenary from across the political spectrum. The growing reliance by the US, Russia, and China on military and security contractors suggests that the mercenary remains a key player in International Politics, now emerging from the shadows to help expand state influence on the world stage by serving as an important actor in the conduct of conflict and the winning of small wars. Far from being marginalized, the future of the mercenary is set to be increasingly active.

Download or read book American Slaves and African Masters written by C. Sears and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether by falling prey to Algerian corsairs or crashing onto the desert shores of Western Sahara, a handful of Americans in the first years of the Republic found themselves enslaved in a system that differed so markedly from nineteenth century U.S. slavery that some contemporaries and modern scholars hesitate to categorize their experiences as 'slavery.' Sears uses a comparative approach, placing African enslavement of Americans and Europeans in the context of Mediterranean and Ottoman slaveries, while individually investigating the system of slavery in Algiers and Western Sahara. This work illuminates the commonalities and peculiarities of these slaveries, while contributing to a growing body of literature that showcases the flexibility of slavery as an institution.