The concept of apocalypse is well established in all the major religions of the world, be they Semitic religions or Hinduism. The underlying idea behind the concept in all the religions remains the same, that is, the world will come to an end. The end itself, which has been called the Judgment Day, Day of Resurrection, or the Day of Retribution or Reckoning will be preceded by some signs. It has also been called the day of Apocalypse, the day when (...) the whole world will be destroyed. One of the distinct forms of it is Muslim Apocalypse about which a lot has been written. However, the argument of the present research paper shall be to examine the concept of the Mahdi primarily from the Shi’te Muslim point of view. The premise of the argument is that Shi’te argument or concept of the Mahdi is far more substantial having a solid theoretical foundation than the other perspectives about it. No wonder, therefore, the concept of the Mahdi has manifested itself in literature across cultures and ages. There are so many poets, primarily, Muslim poets who have highlighted this concept in their poetry and thus the research paper shall make an attempt to look at some of those poets and their understanding of it. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyze the issue of trauma and literature in the context of the Algerian war, as presented in two novels by Algerian writers who use French in a multicultural way: Un regard blessé [Shattered vision] by Rabah Belamri and La Malédiction by Rachid Mimouni [the Malediction]. It will answer the following question:is it possible to see in the francophone Literature a tendency to de-structure the text in order to make it possible for a new (...) plurality to emerge? Literature re-members culture as it points out the dark side of the Algerian history, it makes the readers understand the current situation and the heritage of the past. (shrink)

Medicine and the humanities have been exploring new ways to improve the quality of healthcare. One such collaboration is the practice of narrative medicine which uses literature to teach physicians to better meet their patients’ needs. Narrative medicine, however, draws primarily from Anglophone literature, yet post-war French literature, philosophy and criticism have much to add to the theoretical and practical underpinnings of narrative medicine. As well, such scholarship provokes a number of questions that expose certain weaknesses in narrative medicine as (...) it is practiced currently. As this paper demonstrates, drawing post-war French literature into narrative medicine opens new ways to think about life, narrative and the place of the patient in the modern healthcare system. (shrink)

House raids represent the genre of military acts which fall within the grey zone of war and peace ? counterinsurgency, post-conflict operations, or phase IV operations (a.k.a. Operations Other Than War) ? in which the Geneva Conventions and their Protocols may reveal protection gaps. This article reviews accounts of the execution of house raids contained in the military literature and compares them to the testimony of soldiers and observers recorded in the media. It assesses the relevant provisions of humanitarian law (...) as pertaining to the necessity, distinction, and proportionality of actions. Further, it highlights the specific human rights and humanitarian standards addressing terror, arbitrary intrusion into the home, violations of honor, and humiliation. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of taking into account gender and cultural considerations to properly address the interests of family members ? i.e., women, children, and the elderly who are most affected by house raids. (shrink)

In Sin Sick, Joshua Pederson draws on the latest research about identifying and treating the pain of perpetration to advance and deploy a literary theory of moral injury that addresses fictional representations of the mental anguish of those who have injured or killed others. Pederson's work foregrounds moral injury, a recent psychological concept distinct from trauma that is used to describe the psychic wounds suffered by those who breach their own deeply held ethical principles. Complementing writings on trauma theory that (...) posit the textual manifestation of trauma as absence, Sin Sick draws argues that moral injury appears in literature in a variety of forms of excess. Pederson closely reads works by Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment), Camus (The Fall), and veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Brian Turner's Here, Bullet; Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds; Phil Klay's Redeployment; and Roy Scranton's War Porn), contending that recognizing and understanding the suffering of perpetrators, without condoning their crimes, enriches the experience of reading—and of being human. (shrink)

While there is a budding literature on media ethics in the light of characteristic sub-Saharan moral values, there is virtually nothing on wartime reporting more specifically. Furthermore, the literature insofar as it has a bearing on wartime reporting suggests that embedded journalism and patriotic journalism are ethically justified during war. In this essay, I sketch a prima facie attractive African moral theory, grounded on a certain interpretation of the value of communal relationship, and bring out what it entails for the (...) ways journalists should report on war. My aims are the normative ones of showing how this Afro-communal ethic can provide a unitary foundation for a wide array of plausible conclusions about reporting on war, and, in particular, can avoid objectionable implications such as support for embedded and patriotic journalism. (shrink)

Die Apokalypse und apokalytische Denkbilder haben seit Jahren und Jahrzehnten Konjunktur. In einer immer neuen 'Lust am Untergang' wurden und werden in schöner Regelmäßigkeit Endzeiten beschworen und Katastrophen prognostiziert. Ganz augenfällig greifen diese Konjunkturen dabei auf Bildtraditionen zurück, die ihre Herkunft aus der biblischen Überlieferung kaum verbergen. Der Band versammelt die Vorträge einer Ringvorlesung, die an der Universität Koblenz-Landau in Landau veranstaltet wurde. Ziel war die Zusammenführung von Forschungsinteressen, die in den verschiedenen Fachrichtungen in der einen oder anderen Weise auf (...) das Themenfeld sowie im engeren Sinne auf die Johannesoffenbarung und die unterschiedlichen Wahrnehmungen dieses wirkungsmächtigen Kulturdokuments gerichtet waren. Besonderes Gewicht galt den Untergangsszenarien und deren Wahrnehmung in der Moderne. Aus dem Blickwinkel der Theologien werden die biblisch-antiken Grundlagen des apokalyptischen Denkens und deren Fortschreibung in der gelehrten Diskussion bis in die Gegenwart vorgestellt. Die Bildersprache der Johannesoffenbarung und die vielfältig anschließenden Bildtraditionen werden in literatur- und kunstgeschichtlichen Überblicksdarstellungen entwickelt und in Einzelstudien vertieft. Analysen zur produktiven Aufnahme und Verarbeitung der biblischen Muster in der Literatur, Musik, Graphik, im Film und nicht zuletzt in der jüngeren Klimadiskussion zeigen die Apokalypse und das Apokalyptische als Deutungsmuster, auf die bei der Beschreibung von Untergangsszenarien in der Moderne bis heute immer wieder zurückgegriffen wird. (shrink)

This book argues that the risk of harm in armed conflict should be divided equally between combatants and enemy non-combatants. International law requires that combatants in war take 'all feasible precautions' to minimise damage to civilian objects, injury to civilians, and incidental loss of civilian life. However, there is no clear explanation of what 'feasible precautions' means in this context, or what would count as sufficiently minimised incidental harm. As a result, it is difficult to judge whether a particular war (...) or offensive actually satisfies this requirement. Just war theorists often consider it common sense that merely not intending to harm innocent civilians is not sufficient, but there is little clarity in the literature regarding what this means. One crucial question that is almost always overlooked is that of what the appropriate baseline distribution of risk should be. This book defends the Minimal Harm Requirement, which states that combatants should make an effort to reduce merely foreseen harm to enemy non-combatants to the lowest reasonable level. In order to assess which risk impositions are reasonable, and which are not, an egalitarian baseline should be adopted, suggesting that other things being equal risk of harm should be distributed equally between just combatants and unjust non-combatants. This book will be of much interest to students of just war theory, ethics, security studies, and international relations. (shrink)

Sustainability has been the subject of prolonged debate within both academic and mainstream literature, rendered all the more heated because many of the disagreements come down to deep differences in values. These "value wars'' play out in decisions made about issues ranging from development and investment to livelihoods and agriculture. Using rural communities as the context for discussion, this article proposes new directions for this contested concept, based on the life code of values. These life values ground sustainability in a (...) multi-scalar web of everyday acts of human community. From this life-values perspective, compound terms such as sustainable agriculture and sustainable rural communities gain new meaning and offer the potential for the basis of a rural renaissance. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary series "Law & Literature" takes a systematic look at the correlation between literature and the law. The studies presented in this series analyze the complex interrelation between two cultural spheres which are not only at the basis of Western Culture and Society, but share in a common focus on texts. Bringing together contributions by jurists, historians of law, legal philosophers, and specialists in literary and cultural studies, this series reflects a trend in current inter- and transdisciplinary research which (...) has recently shown rapid growth both in Europe and the United States. (shrink)

War and peace in the Bible -- Theoretical aspects of war in rabbinic thought -- War and peace in modern Jewish thought and practice -- Israel, war, ethics and the media.

This paper analyses how the Cold War influenced the discourses on basic research and on Science and Technology Policies of some leaders of the Argentine research community. It explores two key intersections to study the Cold War: the first between politics and policies; the second between the global and the regional/national. The basic assumption is that, just as there was no one Cold War, specific regional and national traits lent specific meanings to basic research. In dialogue with the literature on (...) Latin American history of STPs, on Cold War and on the conceptual history of science, the paper identifies three discursive configurations around S&T: the first refers to the semi-peripheral scientific context; the second is associated with the ‘democracy-totalitarianism’ dichotomy, and the third is linked to the ‘development-dependence’ dichotomy. Finally, the paper also traces some connections between these discourses and the institutional models proposed by different key actors of the research community to implement STPs. (shrink)

Summary The recovery of the Camp Century deep ice core in 1966 – the first ice core to reach all the way through a polar ice sheet to bedrock – marked a shift from an era of United States military dominated glaciological research in Greenland to an era of climate oriented research on the island. This paper aims to provide an understanding of this shift. I show that the Camp Century ice core was at the heart of a complex blend (...) of environmental, military and scientific interests. By deconstructing these interests, I ultimately show that the island of Greenland underwent two reimaginings during the early Cold War. First, the island was reimagined as part of the US Cold War military sphere: driven by the need to secure the North American continent, the US established a hegemonic military colonization of Greenland. In the second reimagining of the island, environmental geography led the way: the scientific results of the Camp Century ice core and political concern about climatic change converged in the early 1970s to build Greenland into a unique location for pursuing research on climate questions. This paper adds to the literature by contextualizing the Camp Century ice core at the interface between the history of science, environmental history and Cold War history, and thereby illuminating Greenland as a dual geopolitical entity and environmental space. By highlighting the interaction of climatic change, geophysical sciences and national security narratives, it responds to recent historiographic calls to unite a set of narratives which, too often, talk past one another. (shrink)

Contemporary global events, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unresolved conflict in the Middle East, and the pessimistic relationships with Muslim countries, pose challenges for Muslims living in the United States in all walks of life. In addition, Muslims encounter daily struggles to live within a society that follows considerably dissimilar beliefs, norms, and way of life. Therefore, Islamic schools and other organizations emerged in response to those challenges. There are several debates in the literature about Islamic (...) schools; among those debates is whether Islamic schools segregate Muslim students, inspire religious intolerance, and rejection of social pluralism's ideals. In addition, there are debates of whether Islamic schools are capable of developing a strong Muslim identity skilled to tackle future challenges. Discussing these debates is considered the first step to critically tackling the challenges meeting Islamic schools, their relevance, and their continuity in a way that benefits Muslim generations and the American society. Furthermore, such debates draw attention to the impediments facing the success of these schools and the possible strategies to resolve problematic issues. This article explores each of these debates in detail. (shrink)

Fanny Bré was a volunteer nurse in the International Brigades, who fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) on the side of the democratically elected Republican government. The objective of this study is to understand the relationship between Bré's antifascist ideas, her conception of care and the activities she carried out in the Spanish hospitals of Casa Roja (Murcia), Villa Paz (Selices, Cuenca) and Vic (Barcelona). We use narrative biography to describe Bré's personal, political and professional trajectory. To do so, (...) we conducted a content analysis of primary sources archived in Spain, Russia and France and secondary sources that emerged from a thorough literature review. We identified three thematic axes: (1) a concept of nursing in the service of the antifascist struggle, (2) nursing activity for high‐quality care and (3) political action for improving hospital organisation and care. The interest of Bré's texts transcends the war in Spain because, in them, Bré questions the neutrality of care by revealing that care can itself be a political act. (shrink)

A leading scholar of humanitarian intervention, Brown (2002) refers to British internal politics to satisfy the influential church and other non-conformist libertarian community leaders, and above all ?undermining Britain's competitors, such as Spain and Portugal, who were still reliant on slave labour to power their economies, as the principal motivation for calls to end the slave trade than any genuine humanitarian concerns of racial equality or global justice?. Drawing on an empirical exploration, this article seeks to draw a parallel between (...) this politics of humanitarian intervention which characterised the abolition movement, albeit rarely recognised in the academic literature, and the British intervention to end the almost 11 year civil war in Sierra Leone. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of this politics of humanitarian intervention in the reconstruction of post-conflict Sierra Leone. (shrink)

War metaphors are ubiquitous in discussions of everything from political campaigns to battles with cancer to wars against crime, drugs, poverty, and even salad. Why are warfare metaphors so common, and what are the potential benefits and costs to using them to frame important social and political issues? We address these questions in a detailed case study by reviewing the empirical literature on the subject and by advancing our own theoretical account of the structure and function of war metaphors in (...) public discourse. We argue that war metaphors are omnipresent because they draw on basic and widely shared schematic knowledge that efficiently structures our ability to reason and communicate about many different types of situations, and they reliably express an urgent, negatively valenced emotional tone that captures attention and motivates action. Nevertheless, we find that the meaning of war metaphors is intimately tied to the context in which they are used, which may result in either positive or negative outcomes, depending on the situation. Thus, blanket statements about whether or not a war frame is useful are misguided or overly constraining. Here we situate our case study results in relation to popular theories of metaphoric representation and processing and offer some guidelines for using a war framing effectively. This work helps illuminate the complex, dynamic, and nuanced functions of metaphor in cognition in general, and in public discourse in particular. (shrink)

Socrates’ war experiences have been overshadowed by his philosophical achievements, and thus the implications of his experiences and philosophical research into war has received scant attention. The aim of this paper is to take note of Socrates’ activities and statements concerning war that have been to date somewhat neglected in the literature, and thereby build a better picture of his contributions to the ethics of war discourse. While little academic research has been carried out into Socratic ethics of war, it (...) is in fact possible to work through the reference literature on military systems and the war literature of ancient Greece, in order to build a fairly robust picture of Socrates’ perspective. Furthermore, it is possible to draw upon studies on Socrates’ statements as to hoplites, the citizen-soldiers of Ancient Greek city-states. Finally, this paper draws on the Dialogs of Plato and books written by contemporary writers as sources for the construction of Socrates’ ethics of war. This paper contends, therefore, that the lost essence of Socratic ideals, is to embrace both literary and military accomplishments concurrently. (shrink)

This book argues that the negotiation of agency is central not only to the experience of war but also to its representation in cultural expressions, ranging from a notion of disablement, expressed in victimization, immobilization, traumatization, and death, to enablement, expressed in the perpetration of heroic, courageous, skillful, and powerful actions of assertion and dominance. In order to illustrate this thesis, it provides a comprehensive analysis of literary representations of the American War of Independence from 1775, the beginning of the (...) war, up until roughly 1860, when the Civil War marked a decisive historical turning point. As the first national war, it has an unquestionably exemplary status for the development of American conceptions of war. The in-depth study of exemplary texts from a variety of genres and by authors like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, and Herman Melville, demonstrates that the overall character of Revolutionary War literature presents the war as a forum in which collective and individual agency is expressed, defended, and cultivated. It uses the military environment in order to teach the values of discipline and self-subordination to a communal good, which are perceived as basic principles of a Republican virtue to guide the actions of the autonomous individual in a popular democracy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:In Defence of War by Nigel BiggarMyles WerntzIn Defence of War Nigel Biggar oxford: oxford university press, 2013. 371 pp. $55.00Nigel Biggar’s recent work, In Defence of War, is, from the first page, a provocative work. Theological defense of military intervention has fallen on hard times in recent decades, though historically the tradition of Christian ethics tilts decidedly in this direction. Over seven chapters, Biggar offers not a (...) comprehensive analysis of just war but in many ways a theological apologia and retrieval of some of its more salient aspects. [End Page 202]Biggar opens his book by taking on the most well-known proponents of Christian pacifism (Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, and Richard Hays), finding their collective work wanting on empirical and moral grounds, naming the “Anabaptist distinctive” as “theologically incoherent and morally hypocritical” (60). In the next chapter Biggar begins to unpack his realist account for Christian participation in war, exploring the role of love in combat, arguing that a form of “forgiving retribution” is intrinsic to a Christian account of forgiveness (71). This ethic, central to the moral deliberations of the just war tradition, is a scriptural ethic routinely ignored by pacifists.Throughout the work, Biggar defends against pacifisms of various types, both theological and philosophical. Chapter 5, for example, attends to the philosophical work of David Rodin, a contemporary critic of the just war theory; criticisms against both philosophical and theological pacifism likewise under-gird his chapters on double effect and interventionism. While Biggar gives a good deal of attention to philosophical and political pacifism, his Christian pacifist target seems to be quite narrow. The opening chapter, “Against Christian Pacifism,” focuses on the work of Hauerwas, Hays, and Yoder with the implicit assumption that, having dealt with them, Christian pacifism as such can be shown to be untenable. The reduction of the polyphony of Christian pacifism, however, to this recent Anabaptist-influenced work was not entirely persuasive.Later chapters take up various and often undiscussed aspects of the just war tradition, including the principle of double effect, proportionality, and the relation between the just war tradition and international positive law. In each of these chapters Biggar offers a theological account of war that is rich and multidisciplinary, with analysis that is not strictly analytical but deeply historical. Throughout the book, this reviewer was reminded of Michael Walzer’s classic Just and Unjust Wars, as Biggar peppers his comments with military history and firsthand accounts by soldiers in wars both modern and ancient. As the work unfolds, various case studies such as Kosovo and Iraq ground his discussions, avoiding much of the abstract argumentation that pervades so much literature on war ethics.In the end the virtues of Biggar’s volume lie not with a defeat of pacifism as an alternative approach to Christian ethics but with his careful descriptions and robust assessment of the contours of a Christian realist account of participation in war. Biggar rightly directs us to view just war not as a pragmatic concession but as a complicated facet of the moral life. The chapters on double effect, legal positivism, and especially his defense of the Iraq war as justifiable, are particularly worth the read and should be carefully debated. Biggar has done the discipline a great service by pushing ethicists beyond sloppy tropes and into the deeper waters of careful analysis of what a Christian account of war might look like. [End Page 203]Myles WerntzPalm Beach Atlantic UniversityCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The article is devoted to reception of Austrian literature before the Second World War in Wiadomości Literackie. It was the most popular letter, whose aim was to educate society, and popularize foreign literature and culture. The literature that was most often promoted was French literature, but also German-speaking authors were discussed. Austrian literature was not treated as distinct from German literature during that time but nontheless, the articles presents artists, of Austrian origin: Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo (...) von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Odon von Horváth, Franz Werfel and others. The article examines interviews with these writers as well as reviews their books and other texts which appeared in Wiadomości Literackie. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fear and Loathing in Academe:Gonzo Scholarship and the War Against TourismDaniel StempelIWhen I retired in 1985 I chose as my mantra an academic version of a famous general's farewell to his troops: "Old scholars never die—they just fade away into the stacks." Now that I am an octogenarian, I have faded away into total invisibility, but, like Tithonus, I am not inaudible. I hope my voice will be strident (...) enough to disturb the utopian dreams of a new generation, although I doubt that it will wake them from their dogmatic slumbers. My decision to return to the wars of intellect was occasioned by a chance discovery as I haunted the periodical stacks. I noted the name of an old friend in the title of an article and was surprised to find him pilloried as both a "liberal white Protestant" and a "white supremacist," terms which do not, in my experience, necessarily go together.The article, "Pacific Scholarship, Literary Criticism, and Touristic Desire: The Specter of A. Grove Day," written by Paul Lyons, a member of the University of Hawai'i English department's Cultural Studies group, uses bell, book, and candle of the new postcolonial faith in a rite of exorcism to dispel the evil influences of commercial tourism.1 As every exorcist knows, the rite demands that a demon must be called by his name and Lyons has chosen to demonize a deceased member of the English department. Grove Day came to Hawaii in 1944 and retired in 1969. He served as chairman from 1948 to 1953 and taught the course in Literature of the Pacific until his retirement in 1969. He began as a freelance writer long before he decided to enter graduate school at [End Page 95] Stanford and continued to publish more than fifty books on Hawaii and the Pacific. In 1979 he received the State Award for Literature. He died in 1994 in a plunge from an upper floor of a retirement home. Paul Lyons, by his own admission, came to Hawaii in 1990 knowing nothing of its history and culture but soon became a self-appointed authority on Hawaii, its colonial past and present, and its postcolonial future, eagerly embracing the ideas disseminated by the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the university.His article begins with a pretentious elaboration of the method he plans to use to raze the Potemkin village of tourism. Invoking the authority of Hegel on appearance and reality in a passage he has found cited by Žižek, he follows Dean MacCannell, who has adapted Erving Goffman's distinction between dramatic front and back: the entertaining scene presented to the tourist public contrasts with the backstage machinery of the stagehands who put it all together to deceive gullible visitors.2 He combines this with a quotation he has found in a book by William V. Spanos, the founder and former editor of Boundary 2, taken from a journalist's view of the Vietnam War, complaining that they had all been "deeply backgrounded." These are enlisted in the service of MacCannell's quest for "authenticity" as the touchstone of all encounters with other cultures, including the tourist experience.Had Lyons, instead of accepting MacCannell's interpretation of Goffman's early work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), taken a closer look at this witty and ironic study of social behavior in a small community in the Shetland Islands, he would have found that Goffman makes no judgment on the comparative authenticity of either front or back. He utilizes what may be called the J. Alfred Prufrock theory of interaction between individuals and the groups in which they find themselves: "There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet...." MacCannell, in contrast, sees the tourist as a Tennysonian Ulysses in pursuit of a horizon of authenticity that recedes into infinity, "whose margin fades / Forever and forever as I move."Of course, the front/back and foreground/background binary oppositions and the insistence on authenticity are commonplaces rooted in the ubiquitous literary and philosophical tradition of "All the world's a stage" and require no... (shrink)

The war in Vietnam claimed the lives of five million of its citizens, many of whom died in ways thought to have turned them into malevolent spirits who prey on the living. These angry ghosts are held responsible for a host of physical ailments and other misfortunes suffered by survivors of the war and their descendants. Known in the anthropological literature as possession illness, the cross‐cultural treatment for such maladies is typically provided by practitioners like mediums and exorcists, who cure (...) victims by interacting with noncorporeal entities. In Vietnam, such spirit healers were banned after the communist takeover of the North in 1945. This has posed a problem for the large numbers of Vietnamese who suffer from ghost‐induced sickness. This paper focuses on three victims of angry ghosts, presenting the common origin, context, and resolution of their suffering. In doing so, it provides an overview of Vietnamese beliefs about death and the after‐life, the ideal relationship between the living and the dead, and the connection between state politics and spirit practice. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the collection of the Northern Irish poet Frank Ormsby entitled A Northern Spring published in 1986. On the basis of selected poems, the author of this paper aims to examine the poet’s reflections about World War II, the lives of the soldiers, and the things that remain after a military combat, which are both physical and illusive. The poems included in the volume present the author’s reflections upon the senselessness of war and dying, short lives of the (...) soldiers, the awareness of their own meaninglessness in comparison to the broader picture, and the contradictory and desperate need to be remembered nevertheless. They also show what is left of the soldiers and the war, as well as how life goes on, with or without them. (shrink)

That much goes without saying. What is controversial, however, is how we might understand and respond to these new wars. This book offers a new approach.

Surgeons have often been portrayed in literature on one of two extremes: the cold, distant scientist or the benign, caring humanist. Two characters in American literature who illustrate those extremes, both surgeons in the military, are Herman Melville's Cadwallader Cuticle and Richard Hooker's Hawkeye Pierce. Cuticle is interested only in the science of his craft, while Pierce maintains the compassion so central to the art of healing, even in the midst of war.

I propose a dynamical analysis of interaction in anarchy, and argue that this kind of dynamical analysis is a more promising route to predicting the outcome of anarchy than the more traditional a priori analyses of anarchy in the literature. I criticize previous a priori analyses of anarchy on the grounds that these analyses assume that the individuals in anarchy share a unique set of preferences over the possible outcomes of war, peace, exploiting others and suffering exploitation. Following Hobbes' classic (...) analysis of anarchy, I maintain that typically in anarchy some moderate individuals will most desire mutual cooperation while other dominators will most desire to exploit others' cooperation. I argue that once one allows for different types of individuals in anarchy, any a priori analysis of anarchy requires unrealistic assumptions regarding the agents' common knowledge of their situation. However, this move also suggests a dynamical analysis of anarchy, one that assumes no common knowledge. In the Variable Anticipation threshold model developed here, individuals modify their behavior as they learn from repeated interactions. I present specific instances of this model where the individuals in anarchy converge to different equilibria corresponding to either peace or war, depending on the initial conditions. I show that individuals are liable to converge to Hobbes' war of all against all even if only a small percentage of are dominators. The presence of only a few “nasty” individuals gradually drives all, including those inclined to be “nicer”, to imitate the “nasty” conduct of these few. This dynamic analysis suggests that the Hobbesian war in anarchy is indeed inevitable in most realistic circumstances. You have the same propension, that I have, in favor of what is contiguous above what is remote. You are, therefore, naturally carry'd to commit acts of injustice as well as I. Your example both pushes me forward in this way by imitation, and also affords me a new reason for any breach of equity, by showing me, that I shou'd be the cully of my integrity, if I alone shou'd impose on myself a severe restraint amidst the licentiousness of others. (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature) (Published Online July 11 2006) Footnotes1 Thanks to Luc Bovens, Sharon Lloyd, Brian Skyrms, Susanne Sreedhar and an anonymous referee for many helpful comments of early versions of this essay. (shrink)

The article explores the representation of psychological traumas afflicted by war in contemporary literary writing by Burundian (African) and Ukrainian (European) authors who were witnesses of the events described in their works. Based on the existing linguistic and psychological theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of a mental wound, a comparative perspective is provided on the nature, literary, and linguistic manifestations of psychological trauma in Burundian novels by Antoine Kaburahe and Marie-Therese Toyi, presenting the tragic, but stoic experience during the civil (...) war in the East African country, and the shocked, but resilient experience of Ukrainian civilians during the full-scale aggression of the russian federation in the Ukrainian diary (Serhiy Zhadan) and essay writing (Ilya Kaminsky, Ludmila Khersonsky, Zarina Zabrisky, Elena Andreychykova, Andrei Krasniashikh) available in English translation. The implemented analysis allows for a deeper understanding of the effects of wartime psychological trauma on the lives of an individual. Due to a more distant time perspective, the protagonists of Burundian texts reveal both the tragedy of the interethnic civil war conflict and the importance of addressing the causes of the conflict to prevent its replication in the future. In the Ukrainian texts, the initial stage of psychological trauma obtaining can be observed, which accounts for a range of the related emotional states among the characters who do not fully realize yet the traumatization process they have been going through during the first days and weeks of the russian military invasion. The narrative structure of the Burundian and Ukrainian texts was also highlighted, which helped identify traces of oral story-telling tradition (African texts) and broad allusions to the historical and cultural phenomena (Ukrainian texts). (shrink)

This book explores the changing tactics, technologies and terrains of 21st century war. It argues that the world in 2049 is unlikely to look like the climate change/AI dystopia depicted in Blade Runner 2049; but nor will it be a world where conflict and war has been transformed by a 'civilizing process' that eradicates violence and conflict from the human condition. 2049 is also the year that the US Department of Defense has suggested China will become a world-shaping military power. (...) All states will be engaged in 'arms races' across a variety of new tools and technologies - from drones, robotics, AI and quantum computing - that will transform politics, economy, society and war. Drawing on thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman and Paul Virilio, the book suggests that future war will be shaped by three broad tendencies that include a broad range of tactics, technologies and trends; the Impure, the Granular and the Machinic. Through discussions of cybersecurity, urban war, robotics, AI, climate change, science fiction and new strategic concepts, it examines how these tendencies might evolve in the different geopolitical futures and types of war ahead of us. The book provides a thought-provoking and distinctive framework through which to think about the changing character of war. It concludes that for all the novel and dangerous challenges ahead, the futuristic possibilities of warfare will likely continue to be shaped by problems familiar to students of international relations and the history of war - albeit problems that will play out in geopolitical and technological contexts that we have never encountered before. This book will be of much interest to students of critical war studies, security studies, science and technology studies, and International Relations in general. (shrink)

War crimes are being committed in Ukraine today, but who should be held responsible? By looking at the literature on responsibility and violence by Philippa Foot and John Harris, this article argues that there are grounds for holding Vladimir Putin responsible for war crimes in Ukraine, even if he did not give the command for these crimes and other atrocities to be carried out.

In 1626, the Neapolitan Ottavio Sammarco published the Discorso politico intorno la conseruatione della pace dell'Italia in which the author referred to the King of Spain as arbiter among the Italian princes and his ministers in Italy as efficient instruments to ensure the stability. This piece of political literature shows an explicit practical orientation, through which the author carries out a systematisation of the political means to achieve quietness in Italy. In articulating the praxis into formal language, Sammarco looks to (...) the past searching for the wisdom of History and uses Tacitus’ account to build a discourse around the tools and mechanisms for preserving stability and avoiding conflicts. The aim of this article, in the first instance, is to examine Sammarco's discursive programme and the purpose of his discourse; in the second place, how Tacitus serves the author's aim and how his account means a fundamental anchor. Furthermore, it will be useful to trace how the political language that transforms the continuous threat of war into politics is modelled by 1626 in Italy and how Sammarco contextualizes his political vocabulary within the Spanish Monarchy political dialectic at the beginning of XVII century. (shrink)

The conduct of hostilities is very bad for the environment, yet relatively little attention has been focused on environmental military ethics by just war theorists and revisionist philosophers of war. Contemporary ecological concerns pose significant challenges to jus in bello. I begin by briefly surveying existing literature on environmental justice during wartime. While these jus in bello environmental issues have been addressed only sparsely by just war theorists, environmental jus ad bellum has rarely been tackled within JWT or the morality (...) of war. In line with the theme of this special issue, I focus my discussion of war and the natural environment primarily on the jus ad bellum level. I set out with the presumption against the use of force, and its possible exceptions. The principal question raised is whether environmental harm can trigger a new justification for war. Beyond just cause, I consider what might be a proportionate response to “environmental aggression,” or negligent harm to nature. The use of force is clearly justified in response to military attacks, against the natural environment or otherwise. Where harm to nature or its inhabitants are not caused by military aggression, just war theory criteria point in favor of responding via measures short of war. Finally, I suggest that responding by means that are not themselves harmful to nature serves to fulfill the further jus ad bellum criterion of “right intention.”. (shrink)

Preface -- I. WELCOME TO THE WAR -- Introduction -- The war of the worldviews -- Who will be God? -- II. WORLDVIEWS IN PHILOSOPHY -- Introduction -- Thomas Aquinas -- The first battle front -- René Descartes -- John Locke -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Karl Marx -- Ralph Waldo Emerson -- The second battle front -- Jeremy Bentham -- Charles Darwin -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- John Dewey -- Jean-Paul Sartre -- III. WORLDVIEWS IN LITERATURE -- Introduction -- The third (...) battle front -- William Shakespeare -- Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Mark Twain -- Ernest Hemingway & John Steinbeck -- IV. WORLDVIEWS IN CULTURE -- Pandora's machine -- Glossary -- List of images. (shrink)

America is at war with terrorism. Terrorists must be brought to justice.We hear these phrases together so often that we rarely pause to reflect on the dramatic differences between the demands of war and the demands of justice, differences so deep that the pursuit of one often comes at the expense of the other. In this book, one of the country's most important legal thinkers brings much-needed clarity to the still unfolding debates about how to pursue war and justice in (...) the age of terrorism. George Fletcher also draws on his rare ability to combine insights from history, philosophy, literature, and law to place these debates in a rich cultural context. He seeks to explain why Americans--for so many years cynical about war--have recently found war so appealing. He finds the answer in a revival of Romanticism, a growing desire in the post-Vietnam era to identify with grand causes and to put nations at the center of ideas about glory and guilt.Fletcher opens with unsettling questions about the nature of terrorism, war, and justice, showing how dangerously slippery the concepts can be. He argues that those sympathetic to war are heirs to the ideals of Byron, Fichte, and other Romantics in their belief that nations--not just individuals--must uphold honor and be held accountable for crimes. Fletcher writes that ideas about collective glory and guilt are far more plausible and widespread than liberal individualists typically recognize. But as he traces the implications of the Romantic mindset for debates about war crimes, treason, military tribunals, and genocide, he also shows that losing oneself in a grand cause can all too easily lead to moral catastrophe.A work of extraordinary intellectual power and relevance, the book will change how we think not only about world events, but about the conflicting individualist and collective impulses that tear at all of us. (shrink)

Both Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996), in their critique of Lakoff and Johnson, drew narrowly from a broad range of reasonable interpretations of the metaphors they analyzed. Expanding the interpretations vitiates many of Vervaeke and Kennedy's criticisms, but it supports their call for an open interpretation of groups of metaphors and points toward a more complex elaboration of the theories put forth by Lakoff and Johnson. The results of applying this approach to "ARGUMENT IS WAR" suggest (...) that war is not necessarily the primary conceptual metaphor for contentious argument, as Lakoff and Johnson claimed. Rather, there is a complex field of contentious interactions, ranging from simple discussions through contests to all-out war: Any and all of these can be and are used as metaphors for the others. When a word or phrase like "defend," "position," "maneuver," or "strategy" is used, there is no a priori way to determine whether the intended meaning is an athletic contest or a game of chess. Similar analyses are applied to other examples from the metaphor literature, and a modification of the basic idea of conceptual mapping is proposed, in which metaphors map cognitive responses onto prototypical situations rather than mapping 1 specific experience or concept onto another. (shrink)

Statues also die -- Open letter to the enemy : Jean Genet, war, and the exact measure of man -- Mayhem : symbolic violence and the culture of the death drive -- War, word, worst : reading Samuel Beckett's worstward ho -- Translation of a system in deconstruction : Derrida and the war of language against itself.

Kasher and Yadlin make significant contributions to the literature on counter-terrorism, (1) in their fine-tuned distinctions among degrees of individual involvement in terrorist activities, and (2) in weighing (a) obligations to minimize harm to one's own noncombatants and combatants against (b) the duty to limit harm to non-citizen noncombatants. But the authors? analysis is hampered by some ambiguous definitions, some unwieldy terms, and some questionable moral assumptions and arguments.

Nature has been widely represented in literature and culture as healing, redemptive, unspoilt, and restorative. In the aftermath of the First World War, writers grappled with long cultural associations between nature and healing. Having survived a conflict in which relations between people, and the living environment had been catastrophically ruptured, writers asked: could rural and wild places offer meaningful sites of solace and recovery for traumatised soldiers? In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), (...) Nan Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse (1930) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932), trauma severs emotional, social, and cultural relationships with the natural world. These interwar literatures offer counter-narratives to simplistic depictions of nature as a healing space and highlight the difficulties of returning to rural environments and ‘reconnecting’ with known and natural places. (shrink)

In Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, the year of 2020 marked a dramatic escalation of military activities of the Islamist insurgent group locally known as Al-Shabab or mashababe. This intensification was accompanied by a more immaterial phenomenon: the rise in prominence of social media, both as battleground and as public forum. While the insurgents sacked and occupied major towns and district headquarters, the Web 2.0 networks - Facebook and WhatsApp especially - became the central arena in which the war was apprehended and (...) discussed. This essay is an exploration of the entwining of social media with the 'new war' in Cabo Delgado, focussing on the events that surround the conquest of the Makonde plateau, mythical cradle of the Mozambican liberation struggle. Building on a budding literature on digital militarism, the essay dwells especially on orality and the use of the voice note as a medium to convey information deemed to be more trustworthy and stable than images. Tracking these media and their interrelations, the essay establishes a narrative, however fragmentary, of the downfall of the Makonde plateau; highlights recurring features of violence in the Cabo Delgado conflict; and provides fresh insight into the formation of the Local Force (Força Local), a State-sponsored militia largely constituted by war veterans. (shrink)