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Considers war initiation, wartime politics, war policies and war termination through the complex roles played by citizen wartime casualties.
How do military organizations assess strategic policy in war? In this book Scott Gartner develops a theory to explain how military and government leaders evaluate wartime performance, how much they change strategies in response to this evaluation, and why they are frequently at odds when discussing the success or failure of strategic performance. Blending history, decision theory, and mathematical modeling, Gartner argues that military personnel do reevaluate their strategies and that they measure the performance of a strategy through quantitative, "dominant" indicators. But different actors within a government use different indicators of success: some will see the strategy as succeeding whe...
This book examines how new empirical approaches to mediation can shed fresh light on the effectiveness of different patterns of conflict management, and offers guidelines on the process of international mediation. International conflict mediation has become one of, if not the most prominent and important conflict resolution methods of the early 21st century. This book argues that traditional approaches to mediation have been inadequate, and that in order to really understand how the process of international mediation works, studies need to operate within an explicit theoretical framework, adopt systematic empirical approaches and use a diversity of methods to identify critical interactions, contexts and relationships. This volume captures recent important changes in the field of international conflict mediation, and includes essays by leading scholars on a variety of critical aspects of conflict management, using state of the art analytical tools and up to date data. This book will of great interest to scholars of peace and conflict studies, methods in social science, and of International Relations in general.
The United States and its allies have been fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan for a decade in a war that either side could still win. While a gradual drawdown has begun, significant numbers of US combat troops will remain in Afghanistan until at least 2014, perhaps longer, depending on the situation on the ground and the outcome of the US presidential election in 2012. Given the realities of the Taliban’s persistence and the desire of US policymakers—and the public—to find a way out, what can and should be the goals of the US and its allies in Afghanistan? Afghan Endgames brings together some of the finest minds in the fields of history, strategy, anthropology, ethics, an...
Mediation has become a common technique for terminating violent conflicts both within and between states; while mediation has a strong record in reducing hostilities, it is not without its own problems. In The Mediation Dilemma, Kyle Beardsley highlights its long-term limitations. The result of this oft-superficial approach to peacemaking, immediate and reassuring as it may be, is often a fragile peace. With the intervention of a third-party mediator, warring parties may formally agree to concessions that are insupportable in the long term and soon enough find themselves at odds again. Beardsley examines his argument empirically using two data sets and traces it through several historical ca...
The SAGE Handbook of Tourism Management is a critical, authoritative review of tourism management, written by leading international thinkers and academics in the field. Arranged over two volumes, the chapters are framed as critical synoptic pieces covering key developments, current issues and debates, and emerging trends and future considerations for the field. The two volumes focus in turn on the theories, concepts and disciplines that underpin tourism management in volume one, followed by examinations of how those ideas and concepts have been applied in the second volume. Chapters are structured around twelve key themes: Volume One Part One: Researching Tourism Part Two: Social Analysis Pa...
Peace and Conflict is a biennial publication that provides key data and follows trends in national and international conflicts ranging from isolated acts of terrorism to internal civil strife to full-fledged inter-country war. A major trend it tracks is the incidence of wars beyond the protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Peace and Conflict 2012 focuses on the theme of policy guidance for preventing conflict. It covers special topics with original contributions that focus on mediation, economic recovery, and the impact of elections. Peace and Conflict is a large-format reference book including numerous graphs, tables, maps, and appendices dedicated to the visual presentation of data. Crisp narratives are highlighted with box quote extracts that summarise trends and major findings such as the continuing increase in high casualty terrorist acts and risk of genocide in certain areas.
The nineteenth century marked the high point of imperialism, when tsarist Russia expanded to the Pacific and the sun was said never to set on the British Empire. Imperialism remains a perennial issue in international relations today, and nowhere is this more evident than in the intensifying competition for global resources. Leo J. Blanken explains imperialism through an analysis of the institutions of both the expanding state and its targets of conquest. While democratic states favoring free trade generally resort to imperialism only to preempt aggressive rivals—or when they have reason to believe another state’s political institutions will not hold up when making bargains—authoritaria...
Assessing War spans two centuries of US military history to examine the challenge of measuring progress in wartime. Expert contributors examine wartime assessment in both theory and practice, and through alternative dimensions of assessment such as justice and proportionality, the war of ideas, and economics.
The Vietnam War was, in the words of a preeminent scholar of the conflict (George C. Herring), "America's longest war." The Indochina conflict spanned the first generation of the larger Cold War and lasts to this day in American memory and cultural representation. Although the war remains a sensitive subject for many, a consensus exists that would echo the words of former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in his memoir, In Retrospect, "We were wrong, we were terribly wrong." The six volumes in this series pull together the best article literature on the History of American Involvement in Vietnam. The scholars writing in the first volume explore the roots of U.S. intervention, which fol...