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This edited volume places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war and its consequences. War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. From steeled combatants to abject victims, war occupies innumerable bodies in a multitude of ways, profoundly shaping lives and ways of being human. Giving the body an analytic recognition that it warrants and has often been denied in conventional war studies, this book brings together new interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the numerous affective, sensory and embodied practices through which war lives and breeds. It focuses on how war is prepared, enacted and reproduced through embodied action, suffering and memory. As such, the book promotes new directions in theorising war and transformations in warfare, via an explicit focus on the body. This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of war studies, security studies, sociology, anthropology, military studies, politics and IR in general.
In the mid 1970s, at the peak of the women’s movement, feminist activism and research opened the door to questions that are still pressing today. While sexual violence has gained public awareness and become a subject in academic debate, efforts to understand and strategies to prevent this form of violence remain inadequate. Who are the perpetrators? How is sexual violence tied to other forms of violence? What are the consequences for individual victims and societies? Compiled by the International Research Group ‘Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict’ (SVAC), this volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding wartime sexual violence. Its enquiry employs four key relationships:...
Battlefield Emotions in Late Antiquity is the first work to offer a comprehensive analysis of morale and fear. Różycki examines Roman military treatises to illustrate the methods of manipulating the human psyche.
Why are the political polarities of Northern Ireland so intractable? Why, in a society riven by class division, do Northern Ireland's people identify most strongly with the nationalist and religious groupings of British Protestant versus Irish Catholic? Why, after over thirty years of violence and death, is dialogue about the future so difficult to create and sustain? In The Troubles in Ballybogoin, William F. Kelleher Jr. examines the patterns of avoidance and engagement deployed by people in the western region of Northern Ireland and compares them to colonial patterns of settlement and retreat. The book shows how social memories inform and are strengthened by mundane aspects of daily life...
This book offers a study of post-9/11 anti-war organizations in the United States and their role in domestic foreign policy debates. The moment of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has been much cited in political and cultural scholarship and much attention has been paid to the promotion of "War on Terror" policies. The social mechanisms behind the circumscription and regulation of national ideals attracted critical analyses from scholars across disciplines; yet the prevalence of scholarly concern with the negative political devices of the Bush Administration at times seemed to risk reproducing the hierarchies of power that underpinned the very issue of concern, and even the War on Terror itself. B...
In the current century, games play a key role in many areas of our lives. Once thought frivolous and nerdy, videogames are now the leading global entertainment medium, and games are widely used in education, medicine, government...and war. Since 2014, the US government has directed the military to expand the use of wargames across their training, planning, and rehabilitation spheres. Combining original empirical data gathered at US military computer-assisted command post exercises (CPXs) and school-houses with a distinctive theory of immersive play, The Politics of Play offers a new critical analysis of the use of wargaming to produce soldiers in the digital age.
Examines US foreign and domestic policy through the narratives of post-9/11 US military veterans and the activism they are engaged in. While veterans are often cast as a “problem” for society, Fight to Live, Live to Fight challenges this view by focusing on the progressive, positive, and productive activism that veterans engage in. Benjamin Schrader weaves his own experiences as a former member of the American military and then as a member of the activist community with the stories of other veteran activists he has encountered across the United States. An accessible blend of political theory, international relations, and American politics, this book critically examines US foreign and dom...
This book is a sociological study of a societal grouping that has the popular title ’middle class’. It argues that it is more precise to describe the middle classes as dominant groupings, and the book draws upon a wide range of characters from such groupings. In a detailed analysis of cultural practices, those making an appearance include omnivores, carnivores, herbivores, the middle-brow, traditional culture vultures, middle class plunderers, the urban arts eclectic and the English gentleman. There is a particular focus on those expressing the ’silver disposition’; predominantly affluent, middle-aged and white, with a taste for conspicuous consumption and established cultural forms....
This is the first attempt to bring together diverse scholars, using different lenses, to study South Africa’s Border War. As a book, it is critical in approach, provides deeper reflection, and focuses specifically on the SADF experience of the war. The result is a more complex picture of the war’s dynamics and its legacies. Although South Africa is a vastly different country today, the study of the Border War opens a range of questions, also relevant to contemporary deployments such as in Lesotho (1998) and the Central African Republic (2013). It includes the debate on participation in foreign conflicts; on the deployment, design and preparation of appropriate, modern armed forces and their use as foreign policy instruments in far‑off theatres; on military planning; and, as the historical controversies regarding the battles at Cuito Cuanavale and Bangui illustrate, on the interface between foreign campaigning and domestic politics.