Suchergebnisse

The contemporary international law of war is torn between the pressure to incorporate a doctrine to legitimize limited armed humanitarian intervention and its traditional concerns for nations' sovereignty. Especially because of its organic, interconnected nature, the theoretical tradition of just war theory, when concretized through explicit linkage to specific standards of contemporary human rights law, offers an approach to resolving this dilemma that does not unduly privilege war-making. This approach is both consistent with international law and useful as an example of the relevance of drawing on humanistic reasoning about justice in international jurisprudence. The argument is illustrated by reference to the cases of the failure of humanitarian intervention in Rwanda in 1994, the armed intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and the US-led wars in Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

Twentieth-century international law was in large part a struggle to reduce the evil of war by codifying a restrictive doctrine of 'just war'. The US Administration under George W. Bush has made concerted efforts to resurrect an expansive doctrine of just war: one rooted in broad moral, rather than restrictive legal, assessments of threats & punishments. Existing rules ask us to pause & inquire whether war is necessary & just. The debate over Iraq laid bare failings in these rules, requiring action. Yet the need to limit resort to war is as great as ever. Legal rules cannot prevent the use of force; nor can they prevent violations that states perceive to be in their fundamental interests. Rather, international law provides a framework against which states' actions are assessed, & imposes a heavy burden of justification. International law requires more specific, testable claims than can be offered by the rhetoric of evil. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2004.]

This is the first paper using household survey data from two countries involved in an international war (Eritrea and Ethiopia) to measure the conflict's impact on children's health in both nations. The identification strategy uses event data to exploit exogenous variation in the conflict's geographic extent and timing and the exposure of different children's birth cohorts to the fighting. The paper uniquely incorporates GPS information on the distance between survey villages and conflict sites to more accurately measure a child's war exposure. War-exposed children in both countries have lower height-for-age Z-scores, with the children in the war-instigating and losing country (Eritrea) suffering more than the winning nation (Ethiopia). Negative impacts on boys and girls of being born during the conflict are comparable to impacts for children alive at the time of the war. Effects are robust to including region-specific time trends, alternative conflict exposure measures, and an instrumental variables strategy.

Political scientists have conducted only limited systematic research on the consequences of war for civilian populations. Here we argue that the civilian suffering caused by civil war extends well beyond the period of active warfare. We examine these longer-term effects in a cross-national (1999) analysis of World Health Organization new fine-grained data on death and disability broken down by age, gender, and type of disease or condition. We test hypotheses about the impact of civil wars and find substantial long-term effects, even after controlling for several other factors. We estimate that the additional burden of death and disability incurred in 1999, from the indirect and lingering effects of civil wars in the years 1991-97, was approximately equal to that incurred directly and immediately from all wars in 1999. This impact works its way through specific diseases and conditions and disproportionately affects women and children. (American Political Science Review / FUB)

This book analyses all relevant questions of State responsibility and attribution arising from the conduct of rebels and governments in the context of civil wars and rebellions aiming at the establishment of a new government or the creation of a new State. Based on a comprehensive analysis of both old and recent State practice, and case law, including investment awards, as well as the works of scholars and the International Law Commission, the book identifies ten basic rules which can be used by States and international tribunals. It explains the history, content and scope of application of the specific solutions adopted in Article 10 of the International Law Commission Articles on State responsibility to address particular problems. The book also critically revisits some of the solutions that have been put forward by tribunals and scholars, and examines a number of questions which have never been addressed by them before.

Around the world, following civil wars, rebel and government belligerents contest and win the founding postwar elections. Despite the prevalence of these elections and their importance in setting post-conflict environments on specific political trajectories, their outcomes have been understudied. Existing scholarship centers on the timing and institutions of the postwar elections, but not on their party and voter participants. This article introduces a dataset which traces the postwar political trajectories of civil war belligerents, identifies their successor parties, charts their electoral performance, and documents their decision to remilitarize or demilitarize. The Civil War Successor Party (CWSP) dataset covers all belligerents that have transitioned from civil conflict in the period 1970–2015. The article describes the contours of the dataset, reveals patterns of political life after wars, and outlines the potential uses of the dataset for future research. In particular, it suggests how the data may be leveraged by scholars and practitioners to understand dynamics of political behavior, patterns of governance and public goods provision, quality of democracy, and recurrence of low- and high-intensity war in the aftermath of mass violence.

Around the world, following civil wars, rebel and government belligerents contest and win the founding postwar elections. Despite the prevalence of these elections and their importance in setting post-conflict environments on specific political trajectories, their outcomes have been understudied. Existing scholarship centers on the timing and institutions of the postwar elections, but not on their party and voter participants. This article introduces a dataset which traces the postwar political trajectories of civil war belligerents, identifies their successor parties, charts their electoral performance, and documents their decision to remilitarize or demilitarize. The Civil War Successor Party (CWSP) dataset covers all belligerents that have transitioned from civil conflict in the period 1970–2015. The article describes the contours of the dataset, reveals patterns of political life after wars, and outlines the potential uses of the dataset for future research. In particular, it suggests how the data may be leveraged by scholars and practitioners to understand dynamics of political behavior, patterns of governance and public goods provision, quality of democracy, and recurrence of low- and high-intensity war in the aftermath of mass violence.

This paper attempts to sketch a 'rhetorical economy' of feminist opposition to the sex industry, via the case study of debates around Amnesty International's 2016 policy supporting decriminalisation as the best way to ensure sex workers' human rights and safety. Drawing on Ahmed's concept of 'affective economies' in which emotions circulate as capital, I explore an emotionally loaded discursive field which is also characterised by specific and calculated rhetorical manoeuvres for political gain. My analysis is situated in what Rentschler and Thrift call the 'discursive publics' of contemporary Western feminism, which encompass academic, activist, and public/media discussions. I argue that contemporary feminist opposition to the sex industry is shaped by a 'sex war' paradigm which relies on a binary opposition between radical feminist and 'sex positive' perspectives. In this framework, sex workers become either helpless victims or privileged promoters of the industry, which leaves little room for discussions of their diverse experiences and their labour rights. As Amnesty's policy was debated, this allowed opponents of the sex industry to construct sex workers' rights as 'men's rights', either to purchase sex or to benefit from its sale as third parties or 'pimps'. These opponents mobilised sex industry 'survivors' to dismiss sex worker activists supporting Amnesty's policy as privileged and unrepresentative, which concealed activists' experiences of violence and abuse and obscured the fact that decriminalisation is supported by sex workers across the world.

The end of the Cold War ushered in a challenging new era for U.S. defense planners. The certainties of planning for conventional war or, in extremis, nuclear war gave way to a new form of unconventional warfare waged by American adversaries like Al Qaeda, Somali warlords, and Iran. Iran's Qods Force examines how one nation state, the Islamic Republic of Iran, has exploited the advantages of unconventional warfare to expand its influence in the Middle East while, at the same time, limiting the impact of U.S. power in the region. At the forefront of its efforts is the Qods Force, the elite clandestine wing of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Owen Sirrs analyzes how Iran uses unconventional warfare to try to achieve one of its most cherished objectives, hegemony over the Middle East, and demonstrates how U.S. policymakers and warfighters were repeatedly stymied by Iran's unconventional warfare strategy, which straddled the threshold between conventional and covert warfare. Iran pursues its hegemonic bid even though it lacks many of the accepted attributes of national power like a strong, diversified economy; a modernized, power-projection military; and allies to balance the strength of its many adversaries. Still, as the book explains through specific examples of Iranian covert action in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, Iran is closer to regional leadership in 2021 than at any time in the last three hundred years.

Abstract
There are three overlapping objectives in the article. The first objective is to present three different Marxist perspectives, while focusing on the interpretation of the base/superstructure dialectic which is the key to the understanding of Marxian political economy. The second objective is to make sense of the first and second "Cold Wars" based on the different interpretations of the base/superstructure dialectic. The last objective is to reassert the materialist essence of the base/superstructure dialectic by evoking Marx and his concepts of "Labor" and "Capital". The three different perspectives are analyzed based on this reassertion. Through these three objectives, two deductions were made: the first deduction is that scientific Marxism requires the acknowledgement of the overdetermination of the economic base (its dominance in the last instance) in the analysis of abstractions, empirical and historical data. The "totality of the relations of production" within the economic base appears abstract in nature, but it represents the ontological category of "Labor" that defines human history since its beginning. It has a transhistorical essence. Human beings work together to produce their basic needs, according to historically specific (abstract) relations of production. The superstructure determines the specificity of the relations of production; it defines the "historical" side of the relations of production in the economic base. In the era of capitalism, "Capital" (the private appropriation of social wealth) is the dominant relation that comes to dictate the "totality of the relations of the production" within the economic base, through the superstructure. Total capital is then the real "subject" of history, and all abstractions gain purpose and practicality based on the class struggle between Labor and Capital. The second deduction relates to real history explained on the basis of the first deduction. Looking at the historical development of the class struggle against monopoly-finance capital (the centralized and concentrated capital) in the 20th century, the First Cold War never truly ended even though the global socialist ideology became weak and the ideological struggle against the imperialist superstructure watered down.

Media, as a source of information, plays a crucial role in opinion-making and perception-building. During the Iraq War (2003), the media's role was to shape the images of war while propagating specific ideas to influence the people. As a result, the world perceived propagandistic messages that appeared to take the form of fake news. The disinformation campaign was designed to profess the threat of weapons of mass destruction and explicate Saddam Hussein's affiliation with terrorist organizations as a threat to the world. The instantly shared live images, videos, recordings, and pictures across mass media platforms elicited shock, dismay, and disbelief throughout the world. With this insight, this paper attempts to comprehend the role of media propaganda which promoted the agenda of a media spectacle of the US military victory by transforming into a presentation of anarchy that destabilizes the rationale behind the invasion. It also provides an overview of the development of the Iraq War through the lens of the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda model. This model elucidates the role of propaganda in manipulating the opinion of the Iraqi people and how it was used to achieve economic, social, and political advantages.

Bibliography Entry
Javed, Huma, and Arshi Saleem Hashmi. 2021. "Corporate Media Manipulation in the US Wars: A Case Study of Iraq War." Magalla Papers 25 (1): 143-152.

Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present' examines representations of war in literature, film, photography, memorials, and the popular press. The volume breaks new ground in cutting across disciplinary boundaries and offering case studies on a wide variety of fields of vision and action, and types of conflict: from civil wars in the USA, Spain, Russia and the Congo to recent western interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of World War Two, 'Representing Wars' emphasises idiosyncratic and non-western perspectives - specifically those of Japanese writers Hayashi and Ooka.A central concern of the thirteen contributors has been to investigate the ethical and ideological implications of specific representational choices

Although the case-based literature suggests that kin groups are prominent in ethnonationalist conflicts, quantitative studies of civil war onset have both overaggregated and underaggregated the role of ethnicity, by looking at civil war at the country level instead of among specific groups and by treating individual countries as closed units, ignoring groups' transnational links. In this article the authors integrate transnational links into a dyadic perspective on conflict between marginalized ethnic groups and governments. They argue that transnational links can increase the risk of conflict as transnational kin support can facilitate insurgencies and are difficult for governments to target or deter. The empirical analysis, using new geocoded data on ethnic groups on a transnational basis, indicates that the risk of conflict is high when large, excluded ethnic groups have transnational kin in neighboring countries, and it provides strong support for the authors' propositions on the importance of transnational ties in ethnonationalist conflict.