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Recent critical interventions challenge the Enlightenment critique of war as the radical antithesis of 'peace'. The negation of war as an epitome of unreason is, indeed, dangerous to the extent that it tends to excite pacifying 'wars against war'. Yet, what follows from this? The article argues that a popular counter-perspective, which conceives of war as a 'tamed' and reasonable exercise, itself premised on the imagination of an essentially antagonistic and generative political space, is just as dangerous. It constructs war as a real object of knowledge, a social reality. Asking whether the critique of 'police war' can be reconciled with a critique of the ontology of war proper, the article reads Walter Benjamin and concludes that we should return to the Enlightenment's view of war as unknowable chaos and disorder. Only instead of negating and fighting war, a fundamental critique ought turn this perspective on its head and affirm war in its unintelligibility, its impossibility. - KEYWORDS: philosophy of war, critique of war, critical war studies, Immanuel Kant, Carl von Clausewitz, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin

Terrorism is defined as use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to indulge fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, social or religious. Bioterrorism is terrorism by intentional release or dissemination of biological agents, mainly bacteria or viruses. Use of biological weapons is attractive from the terrorists' point of view because of low production costs, major range and easiness of transmission. The first mention of the use of primitive biological weapons date back to the 6th century. Use of plague-infested corpses as offensive means in the 14th century caused a spread of bubonic plague through the whole Europe. The biggest development of biological weapons took place in the interwar period and in the cold war era. Biological weapon trails and research were conducted by super powers such as USSR, UK, USA and Japan. At the beginning of the 20th century a new form of bioterrorism occurred, which put humanity in the face of a terrifying threat.

We investigate whether female political empowerment is conducive to civil peace, drawing on global data on female political empowerment over a 200-year period, from the Varieties of Democracy database. We augment previous research by expanding the temporal scope, looking at a novel inventory of female political empowerment measures, attending to reverse-causality and omitted variable issues, and separating between relevant causal mechanisms. We find a strong link between female political empowerment and civil peace, which is particularly pronounced in the twentieth century. We find evidence that this relationship is driven both by women's political participation—particularly the bottom-up political participation of women, e.g., in civil society—and the culture that conduces it. This is the strongest evidence to date that there is a robust link between female political empowerment and civil peace, stemming from both institutional and cultural mechanisms.

This Working Paper examines military interventions by precision strikes from a distance as a means to avoiding ground combat with own troops. A prominent strand of the literature argues that this is a particularly Western phenomenon; a consequence of the casualty aversion of democratic states and their riskaverse political leaders. In contrast to this line of argument, this Paper argues that precision-strike warfare is not a particularly Western phenomenon, but that it follows from the proliferation of precision-strike technologies prompted by military modernization processes and the transformation of power in what Bauman calls "liquid modernity". In liquid modernity, the major technique of power is the rejection of territorial confinement and the related responsibilities and costs of order-building. Based on these thoughts, this Paper argues that we have to understand precision-strike warfare with its hit-and-run characteristics as liquid warfare: a way of war that shuns the direct control of territory, focusing instead on the destruction of enemy forces and/or infrastructure, copying certain characteristics of guerrilla warfare.

Nationalist & ethnic conflicts are a continuing source of tension in the post-Cold War period. The underlying factors affecting such conflicts are threat perception, ethnic security dilemmas, & lack of trust between nationalist/ethnic groups. The challenge is to find solutions to these conflicts. International institutions can establish trust & reduce the ethnic security dilemma by providing multiple forums of representation, promoting overlapping identities, & pooling sovereignty. Pooling sovereignty across a number of international representative bodies leads to increased access to governmental policy making, with each party having a stake in government & leads to a reduction in political tension & conflict. Thus, international parliamentary institutions may provide a solution to these conflicts. The British-Irish Peace Agreement (Good Friday Agreement) of 1998 is examined as an illustration of this argument. 67 References. Adapted from the source document.