Download or read book Trust and Fear in Civil Wars written by Shanna Kirschner and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-11-14 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do some civil wars last a long time, while others end relatively quickly? Trust and Fear in Civil Wars examines the conditions under which individuals are willing to lay down their weapons under a settlement agreement. The author argues that wars are easiest to resolve when combatants believe that their adversaries will uphold a deal or that the costs of renewed war will be low. Several key sources of information inform this calculation. Drawing on both cross-national and case study data, including detailed interviews, the book demonstrates that when information suggests either that a peace agreement is likely to break down orthat the results of a broken deal will be especially deadly, a settlement leaves combatants too vulnerable to countenance, resulting in wars lasting longer.
Download or read book Rape during Civil War written by Dara Kay Cohen and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rape is common during wartime, but even within the context of the same war, some armed groups perpetrate rape on a massive scale while others never do. In Rape during Civil War Dara Kay Cohen examines variation in the severity and perpetrators of rape using an original dataset of reported rape during all major civil wars from 1980 to 2012. Cohen also conducted extensive fieldwork, including interviews with perpetrators of wartime rape, in three postconflict counties, finding that rape was widespread in the civil wars of the Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste but was far less common during El Salvador's civil war.Cohen argues that armed groups that recruit their fighters through the random abduction of strangers use rape—and especially gang rape—to create bonds of loyalty and trust between soldiers. The statistical evidence confirms that armed groups that recruit using abduction are more likely to perpetrate rape than are groups that use voluntary methods, even controlling for other confounding factors. Important findings from the fieldwork—across cases—include that rape, even when it occurs on a massive scale, rarely seems to be directly ordered. Instead, former fighters describe participating in rape as a violent socialization practice that served to cut ties with fighters’ past lives and to signal their commitment to their new groups. Results from the book lay the groundwork for the systematic analysis of an understudied form of civilian abuse. The book will also be useful to policymakers and organizations seeking to understand and to mitigate the horrors of wartime rape.
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 Next Civil War written by Stephen Marche and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Should be required reading for anyone interested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.” —The New York Times Book Review * “Well researched and eloquently presented.” —The Atlantic * “Delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary.” —The New York Times Book Review A celebrated journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds. The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how. On a small two-lane bridge in a rural county that loathes the federal government, the US Army uses lethal force to end a standoff with hard-right anti-government patriots. Inside an ordinary diner, a disaffected young man with a handgun takes aim at the American president stepping in for an impromptu photo-op, and a bullet splits the hyper-partisan country into violently opposed mourners and revelers. In New York City, a Category 2 hurricane plunges entire neighborhoods underwater and creates millions of refugees overnight—a blow that comes on the heels of a financial crash and years of catastrophic droughts—and tips America over the edge into ruin. These nightmarish scenarios are just three of the five possibilities most likely to spark devastating chaos in the United States that are brought to life in The Next Civil War, a chilling and deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction. Drawing upon sophisticated predictive models and nearly two hundred interviews with experts—civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists—journalist Stephen Marche predicts the terrifying future collapse that so many of us do not want to see unfolding in front of our eyes. Marche has spoken with soldiers and counterinsurgency experts about what it would take to control the population of the United States, and the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Not by novelists, but by colonels. No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe—of one kind or another. Relevant and revelatory, The Next Civil War plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its land, and its government.
Download or read book Forbidden Secrets written by R.L. Stine and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-07-17 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dark power of the Fear family consumes all those connected with it. No one can escape the evil of the family’s curse—not even the Fears themselves. Savannah Gentry doesn’t believe that. She marries Tyler Fear. But then she goes with him to Blackrose Manor. That’s when the deaths begin. That’s when she learns his terrible secret....
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 Realism and Fear in International Relations written by Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the fascinating story of how the chief architects of realism (Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer) dealt with some of the most pressing political issues of our time through the lenses of fear. Pashakhanlou conducts the most comprehensive evaluation of their works to date, compromising of a meticulous analysis of 400 of their publications. As such, this book is an invaluable resource for practitioners, students and concerned citizens that seek to understand how three of the most influential International Relations scholars thought about the implications of fear at the global level. ‘In this important book, the author gets to the heart of the underlying emotional condition on which so much rational political thought in International Relations is built. By uncovering the role of fear within the modern classics of realism, the book sheds light on the role that fear plays in producing otherwise rational decision-making.’ David Galbreath, Professor of International Security, University of Bath, UK ‘The role played by fear in Realist international theory is under-explored and poorly theorised. This book addresses this lacuna and provides a thorough and systematic analysis of the significance of fear in Realism. In doing so, Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou makes a major contribution to International Relations theory, and the ‘emotional turn’ in the study of contemporary international politics’. Adrian Hyde-Price, Professor of International Politics, Gothenburg University, Sweden
Download or read book Societies of Fear written by Kees Koonings and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 1999-08 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As cities sprawl across Latin America, absorbing more and more of its people, crime and violence have become inescapable. From the paramilitary invasion of Medell¡n in Colombia, the booming wealth of crack dealers in Managua, Nicaragua and police corruption in Mexico City, to the glimmers of hope in Lima, this book provides a dynamic analysis of urban insecurity. Based on new empirical evidence, interviews with local people and historical contextualization, the authors attempts to shed light on the fault-lines which have appeared in Latin American society. Neoliberal economic policy, it is argued, has intensified the gulf between elites, insulated in gated estates monitored by private security firms, and the poor, who are increasingly mistrustful of state-sponsored attempts to impose order on their slums. Rather than the current trend towards government withdrawal, the situation can only be improved by co-operation between communities and police to build new networks of trust. In the end, violence and insecurity are inseparable from social justice and democracy.
Download or read book Kurdish Studies Archive written by Martin van Bruinessen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kurdish Studies Archive publishes the content of volumes 1 to 10 of Kurdish Studies. This interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed journal was dedicated to publishing high-quality research and scholarship. Since 2023 the journal has been continued as the new Kurdish Studies Journal, published by Brill, and focuses on research, scholarship, and debates in the field of Kurdish studies in a multidisciplinary fashion covering a wide range of topics including, but not limited to, economics, history, society, gender, minorities, politics, health, law, environment, language, media, culture, arts, and education.
Download or read book Reconciliation After Violent Conflict written by David Bloomfield and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a newly democratized nation constructively address the past to move from a divided history to a shared future? How do people rebuild coexistence after violence? The International IDEA Handbook on Reconciliation after Violent Conflict presents a range of tools that can be, and have been, employed in the design and implementation of reconciliation processes. Most of them draw on the experience of people grappling with the problems of past violence and injustice. There is no "right answer" to the challenge of reconciliation, and so the Handbook prescribes no single approach. Instead, it presents the options and methods, with their strengths and weaknesses evaluated, so that practitioners and policy-makers can adopt or adapt them, as best suits each specific context. Also available in a French language version.
Download or read book Things Not Seen written by Jon Bloom and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True faith is hard. More than mere sentimentalism, faith often calls for a deep and resilient trust in God—especially when the going gets tough and the road is dark. In Things Not Seen, author Jon Bloom encourages readers with 35 imaginative retellings of stories from the Bible that illustrate the importance of living by faith. A follow-up to the author's previous book, Not by Sight: A Fresh Look at Old Stories of Walking by Faith, this inspiring volume explores the lives of Abraham, Moses, Saul, John the Baptist, and more—helping readers remember God's promises, rely on his grace, and follow his leading regardless of the circumstances. The book includes a foreword by popular author and blogger Ann Voskamp.
Download or read book Breach of Trust written by Andrew J. Bacevich and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A blistering critique of the gulf between America's soldiers and the society that sends them off to war. As war has become normalized, armed conflict has become an "abstraction" and military service "something for other people to do." Bacevich takes stock of a nation with an abiding appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a standing army demonstrably unable to achieve victory.
Download or read book Himalayan People s War written by Michael Hutt and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides authoritative background and interpretation of the Maoist insurgency in Nepal.
Download or read book For Cause and Comrades written by James M. McPherson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-04-03 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that." Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ? Why did the conventional wisdom -- that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses -- not hold true in the Civil War? It is to this question--why did they fight--that James McPherson, America's preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism. Soldiers on both sides harkened back to the Founding Fathers, and the ideals of the American Revolution. They fought to defend their country, either the Union--"the best Government ever made"--or the Confederate states, where their very homes and families were under siege. And they fought to defend their honor and manhood. "I should not lik to go home with the name of a couhard," one Massachusetts private wrote, and another private from Ohio said, "My wife would sooner hear of my death than my disgrace." Even after three years of bloody battles, more than half of the Union soldiers reenlisted voluntarily. "While duty calls me here and my country demands my services I should be willing to make the sacrifice," one man wrote to his protesting parents. And another soldier said simply, "I still love my country." McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities, and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war. Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the highest order." For Cause and Comrades deserves similar accolades, as McPherson's masterful prose and the soldiers' own words combine to create both an important book on an often-overlooked aspect of our bloody Civil War, and a powerfully moving account of the men who fought it.
Download or read book Committing to Peace written by Barbara F. Walter and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do some civil wars end in successfully implemented peace settlements while others are fought to the finish? Numerous competing theories address this question. Yet not until now has a study combined the historical sweep, empirical richness, and conceptual rigor necessary to put them thoroughly to the test and draw lessons invaluable to students, scholars, and policymakers. Using data on every civil war fought between 1940 and 1992, Barbara Walter details the conditions that lead combatants to partake in what she defines as a three-step process--the decision on whether to initiate negotiations, to compromise, and, finally, to implement any resulting terms. Her key finding: rarely are such conflicts resolved without active third-party intervention. Walter argues that for negotiations to succeed it is not enough for the opposing sides to resolve the underlying issues behind a civil war. Instead the combatants must clear the much higher hurdle of designing credible guarantees on the terms of agreement--something that is difficult without outside assistance. Examining conflicts from Greece to Laos, China to Columbia, Bosnia to Rwanda, Walter confirms just how crucial the prospect of third-party security guarantees and effective power-sharing pacts can be--and that adversaries do, in fact, consider such factors in deciding whether to negotiate or fight. While taking many other variables into account and acknowledging that third parties must also weigh the costs and benefits of involvement in civil war resolution, this study reveals not only how peace is possible, but probable.
Download or read book International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2000-11-07 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of the Cold War has changed the shape of organized violence in the world and the ways in which governments and others try to set its limits. Even the concept of international conflict is broadening to include ethnic conflicts and other kinds of violence within national borders that may affect international peace and security. What is not yet clear is whether or how these changes alter the way actors on the world scene should deal with conflict: Do the old methods still work? Are there new tools that could work better? How do old and new methods relate to each other? International Conflict Resolution After the Cold War critically examines evidence on the effectiveness of a dozen approaches to managing or resolving conflict in the world to develop insights for conflict resolution practitioners. It considers recent applications of familiar conflict management strategies, such as the use of threats of force, economic sanctions, and negotiation. It presents the first systematic assessments of the usefulness of some less familiar approaches to conflict resolution, including truth commissions, "engineered" electoral systems, autonomy arrangements, and regional organizations. It also opens up analysis of emerging issues, such as the dilemmas facing humanitarian organizations in complex emergencies. This book offers numerous practical insights and raises key questions for research on conflict resolution in a transforming world system.
Download or read book Rebel Governance in Civil War written by Ana Arjona and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to examine and compare how rebels govern civilians during civil wars in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from a variety of disciplinary traditions, including political science, sociology, and anthropology, the book provides in-depth case studies of specific conflicts as well as comparative studies of multiple conflicts. Among other themes, the book examines why and how some rebels establish both structures and practices of rule, the role of ideology, cultural, and material factors affecting rebel governance strategies, the impact of governance on the rebel/civilian relationship, civilian responses to rebel rule, the comparison between modes of state and non-state governance to rebel attempts to establish political order, the political economy of rebel governance, and the decline and demise of rebel governance attempts.
