Download or read book Paradigm Wars written by Mark B. Woodhouse and published by Frog Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this powerful exploration of worldviews in transition, Mark Woodhouse examines current controversies in the quest for an integrative vision of reality. These include alternative medicine, holistic education, spiritual healing, and ecofeminism, as well as reincarnation, the New Physics, extraterrestrial visitations, and personal growth. In the Appendix, Fred Mills contributes a pioneering study of sacred geometry.
Download or read book War Time written by Sten Rynning and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perceptions of time contributed to recent Western military failings The “decline of the West” is once again a frequent topic of speculation. Often cited as one element of the alleged decline is the succession of prolonged and unsuccessful wars—most notably those waged in recent decades by the United States. This book by three Danish military experts examines not only the validity of the speculation but also asks why the West, particularly its military effectiveness, might be perceived as in decline. Temporality is the central concept linking a series of structural fractures that leave the West seemingly muscle-bound: overwhelmingly powerful in technology and military might but strategically fragile. This temporality, the authors say, is composed of three interrelated dimensions: trajectories, perceptions, and pace. First, Western societies to tend view time as a linear trajectory, focusing mostly on recent and current events and leading to the framing of history as a story of rise and decline. The authors examine whether the inevitable fall already has happened, is underway, or is still in the future. Perceptions of time also vary across cultures and periods, shaping socio-political activities, including warfare. The enemy, for example, can be perceived as belong to another time (being “backward” or “barbarian”). And war can be seen either as cyclical or exceptional, helping frame the public's willingness to accept its violent and tragic consequences. The pace of war is another factor shaping policies and actions. Western societies emphasize speed: the shorter the war the better, even if the long-term result is unsuccessful. Ironically, one of the Western world's least successful wars also has been America's longest, in Afghanistan. This unique book is thus a critical assessment of the evolution and future of Western military power. It contributes much-needed insight into the potential for the West's political and institutional renewal.
Download or read book The Utility of Force written by Rupert Smith and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-01-16 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a highly decorated general, a brilliant new way of understanding war and its role in the twenty-first century. Drawing on his vast experience as a commander during the first Gulf War, and in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland, General Rupert Smith gives us a probing analysis of modern war. He demonstrates why today’s conflicts must be understood as intertwined political and military events, and makes clear why the current model of total war has failed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other recent campaigns. Smith offers a compelling contemporary vision for how to secure our world and the consequences of ignoring the new, shifting face of war.
Download or read book The Politics of Myth written by Robert Ellwood and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1999-08-26 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Myth examines the political views implicit in the mythological theories of three of the most widely read popularizers of myth in the twentieth century, C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. All three had intellectual roots in the anti-modern pessimism and romanticism that also helped give rise to European fascism, and all three have been accused of fascist and anti-Semitic sentiments. At the same time, they themselves tended toward individualistic views of the power of myth, believing that the world of ancient myth contained resources that could be of immense help to people baffled by the ambiguities and superficiality of modern life. Robert Ellwood details the life and thought of each mythologist and the intellectual and spiritual worlds within which they worked. He reviews the damaging charges that have been made about their politics, taking them seriously while endeavoring to put them in the context of the individual's entire career and lifetime contribution. Above all, he seeks to extract from their published work the view of the political world that seems most congruent with it.
Download or read book Thoughts on War written by Phillip S. Meilinger and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A remarkable work that challenges the received wisdom of Clausewitz’s On War . . . [a] paradigm as to how to wage combat in our modern global environment.” —John A. English, author of Monty and the Canadian Army War is changing. Unlike when modern military doctrine was forged, the United States no longer mobilizes massive land forces for direct political gain. Instead, the US fights small, overseas wars by global mandate to overthrow dictators, destroy terrorist groups, and broker regional peace. These conflicts hardly resemble the total wars fought and expected by foundational military theorists such as Carl von Clausewitz, yet their paradigms are ingrained in modern thinking. The twenty-first-century’s new geopolitical situation demands new principles for warfare—deemphasizing decisive land victory in favor of airpower, intelligence systems, and indigenous ground forces. In Thoughts on War, Phillip S.Meilinger confronts the shortcomings of US military dogma in search of a new strategic doctrine. Inter-service rivalries and conventional theories failed the US in lengthy Korea, Vietnam, and Middle East conflicts. Jettisoning traditional perspectives and their focus on decisive battles, Meilinger revisits historical campaigns looking for answers to more persistent challenges—how to coordinate forces, manipulate time, and fight on two fronts. This provocative collection of new and expanded essays offers a fresh, if controversial, perspective on time-honored military values, one which encourages a critical revision of US military strategy. “Meilinger presents a new strategic and operational paradigm for how to fight and win tomorrow’s wars with reduced risk and cost. This book will appeal not only to military professionals, but to scholars and civilian policymakers as well.” —Colonel John Andreas Olsen, Royal Norwegian Air Force, author of Airpower Pioneers
Download or read book War s Logic written by Antulio J. Echevarria II and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveys how American strategic theorists have understood the nature and character of war in the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Evolution of Strategy written by Beatrice Heuser and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a 'Western way of war' which pursues battles of annihilation and single-minded military victory? Is warfare on a path to ever greater destructive force? This magisterial account answers these questions by tracing the history of Western thinking about strategy - the employment of military force as a political instrument - from antiquity to the present day. Assessing sources from Vegetius to contemporary America, and with a particular focus on strategy since the Napoleonic Wars, Beatrice Heuser explores the evolution of strategic thought, the social institutions, norms and patterns of behaviour within which it operates, the policies that guide it and the cultures that influence it. Ranging across technology and warfare, total warfare and small wars as well as land, sea, air and nuclear warfare, she demonstrates that warfare and strategic thinking have fluctuated wildly in their aims, intensity, limitations and excesses over the past two millennia.
Download or read book War Winning Paradigms and Visions for High End Warfare written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In February 2000, the NDU QDR 01 Working Group concluded an in-depth background study of the future security environment. In comparing and analyzing over thirty significant future estimates, forecasts, and scenarios, there became apparent a general consensus among prominent civil-military thought on the character of the future. It is postulated that during the next 25 years, the United States will be challenged by a regional competitor or rogue state who will use anti-access and area denial strategies. US military operations overseas will be conducted in urban terrain and under increasingly "chaotic" conditions, while back in the continental United States we can expect attempts to attack our homeland by asymmetric means. Advanced military technology will become more diffuse, allowing significant tactical intelligence to become more commercially available. Large-scale land combat is likely to include the use of weapons of mass destruction, and control of the air and seas will be challenged. Space will become increasingly more vulnerable and not proprietary to the United States, while information warfare will rise to become a significant tool of war, shattering traditional definitions of targets and effects. As we prepare for the future, we foresee the need to hedge against an eventual military near-peer competitor, as well as against potential alliances by regional competitors. It is also possible a collapse of a key ally or regional support could occur, bringing about our inevitable involvement.
Download or read book The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars written by Robert Gilpin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-02-24 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This analysis of the origins of major wars, since the development of the modern state system in Europe centuries ago, also considers the problems involved in preventing a contemporary nuclear war.
Download or read book Cities at War written by Mary Kaldor and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Warfare in the twenty-first century goes well beyond conventional armies and nation-states. In a world of diffuse conflicts taking place across sprawling cities, war has become fragmented and uneven to match its settings. Yet the analysis of failed states, civil war, and state building rarely considers the city, rather than the country, as the terrain of battle. In Cities at War, Mary Kaldor and Saskia Sassen assemble an international team of scholars to examine cities as sites of contemporary warfare and insecurity. Reflecting Kaldor’s expertise on security cultures and Sassen’s perspective on cities and their geographies, they develop new insight into how cities and their residents encounter instability and conflict, as well as the ways in which urban forms provide possibilities for countering violence. Through a series of case studies of cities including Baghdad, Bogotá, Ciudad Juarez, Kabul, and Karachi, the book reveals the unequal distribution of insecurity as well as how urban capabilities might offer resistance and hope. Through analyses of how contemporary forms of identity, inequality, and segregation interact with the built environment, Cities at War explains why and how political violence has become increasingly urbanized. It also points toward the capacity of the city to shape a different kind of urban subjectivity that can serve as a foundation for a more peaceful and equitable future.
Download or read book Just War Against Terror written by Jean Bethke Elshtain and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2003-04-14 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The University of Chicago political philosopher applies "just war theory" to the war on terror and concludes that pacifism is an inappropriate response to the events of September 11, 2001. 35,000 first printing.
Download or read book Ethics and War written by Steven P. Lee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of war ethics sensitive to the historical just war theory, informed by the contemporary concerns of war.
Download or read book War and Media written by Andrew Hoskins and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The trinity of government, military and publics has been drawn together into immediate and unpredictable relationships in a "new media ecology" that has ushered in new asymmetries in the waging of war and terror. To help us understand these new relationships, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin here provide a timely, comprehensive and highly readable survey of the field of war and media. War is diffused through a complex mesh of our everyday media. Paradoxically, this both facilitates and contains the presence and power of enemies near and far. The conventions of so-called traditional warfare have been splintered by the availability and connectivity of the principal locus of war today: the electronic and digital media. Hoskins and O'Loughlin identify and illuminate the conditions of what they term "diffused war" and the new challenges it raises for the actors who wage and counter warfare, for their agents and mechanisms of the new media and for mass publics. This book offers an invaluable review of the key literature and presents a fresh approach to the understanding of the dynamic relationships between war and media. It will be welcomed by a broad range of students taking courses on war and media and related modules, especially in media, communication and cultural studies, politics and international relations, sociology, journalism, and security studies.
Download or read book Paradigms Lost written by Heather Stuart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paradigms Lost challenges key paradigms currently held about the prevention or reduction of stigma attached to mental illness using evidence and the experience the authors gathered during the many years of their work in this field. Each chapter examines one currently held paradigm and presents reasons why it should be replaced with a new perspective. The book argues for enlightened opportunism (using every opportunity to fight stigma), rather than more time consuming planning, and emphasizes that the best way to approach anti-stigma work is to select targets jointly with those who are most concerned. The most radical change of paradigms concerns the evaluation of outcome for anti-stigma activities. Previously, changes in stigmatizing attitudes were used as the best indicator of success. Paradigms Lost and its authors argue that it is now necessary to measure changes in behaviors (both from the perspective of those stigmatized and those who stigmatize) to obtain a more valid measure of a program's success. Other myths to be challenged: providing knowledge about mental illness will reduce stigma; community care will de-stigmatize mental illness and psychiatry; people with a mental illness are less discriminated against in developing countries. Paradigms Lost concludes by describing key elements in successful anti stigma work including the recommended duration of anti-stigma programmes, the involvement of those with mental illness in designing programmes, and the definition of programmes in accordance with local circumstances. A summary of weaknesses of currently held paradigms and corresponding lists of best practice principles to guide future anti-stigma action and research bring this insightful volume to an apt conclusion.
Download or read book Peacebuilding Paradigms written by Henry Carey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peacebuilding is explained by combining interpretive frameworks (paradigms) that have evolved from the subfields of international relations and comparative politics.
Download or read book Interpretations of Conflict written by Richard B. Miller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1991-11-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With today's world torn by violence and conflict, Richard B. Miller's study of the ethics of war could not be more timely. Miller brings together the opposed traditions of pacifism and just-war theory and puts them into a much-needed dialogue on the ethics of war. Beginning with the duty of nonviolence as a point of convergence between the two rival traditions, Miller provides an opportunity for pacifists and just-war theorists to refine their views in a dialectical exchange over a set of ethical and social questions. From the interface of these two long- standing and seemingly incompatible traditions emerges a surprisingly fruitful discussion over a common set of values, problems, and interests: the presumption against harm, the relation of justice and order, the ethics of civil disobedience, the problem of self-righteousness in moral discourse about war, the ethics of nuclear deterrence, and the need for practical reasoning about the morality of war. Miller pays critical attention to thinkers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, as well as to modern thinkers like H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Douglass, the Berrigans, William O'Brien, Michael Walzer, and James Childress. He demonstrates how pacifism and just-war tenets can be joined around both theoretical and practical issues. Interpretations of Conflict is a work of massive scholarship and careful reasoning that should interest philosophers, theologians, and religious ethicists alike. It enhances our moral literacy about injury, suffering, and killing, and offers a compelling dialectical approach to ethics in a pluralistic society. Richard B. Miller is assistant professor of religious studies at Indiana University.
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.
