War and pieces

There is increasing recognition among human geographers that conceptualising the spatiality of peace is a vital component of our collective disciplinary praxis. Within this emergent literature, this paper seeks to position anarchism as an ethical philosophy of nonviolence and the absolute rejection of war. Such an interpretation does not attempt to align nonviolence to any particular organised religious teaching, as has recently been advocated by some geographers. Instead, the paper argues that the current practices of religion undermine the geographies of peace by fragmenting our affinities into discrete pieces. Advancing a view of anarchism as nonviolence, the paper goes beyond religion to conceptualise peace as both the unqualified refusal of the manifold-cum-interlocking processes of domination, and a precognitive, pre-normative and presupposed category rooted in our inextricable entanglement with each other and all that exists. Yet far from proposing an essentialist view of humanity or engaging a naturalised argument that reconvenes the “noble savage”, the paper contextualises the arguments within the processual frameworks of radical democracy and agonism in seeking to redress the ageographical and ahistorical notions of politics that comprise the contemporary post-political zeitgeist.     

War and Splendour

Abstract

Collective performances cannot be understood only from the intentions of the organizers, participants and bystanders, and from their historical, political, economic and ideological contexts. Cultural performances close in on themselves and evolve with their own logic: that of ceremony and festival in which their own scenes of splendour, dance and war adjust to one another.     

War Narratives: Framing Our Understanding of the War on Terror

Unlike past American wars, the current war on terror has not been associated with a centrally proffered narrative providing some guidance and orientation for those administering government services under state-of-war conditions. War is as much a cultural endeavor as it is a military undertaking, and the absence of a clear sensemaking narrative was detected in this study of public administrators from three agencies with varying proximity to the conflict. Q-methodology was used to explore the way individuals processed the war narratives put forth by the Bush administration and reported in the media immediately following the September 11 attacks. Though no distinct state-of-war narratives were found among the public administrators in this study, there are clear indications that latent narratives reflecting local political and organizational task environments have emerged.     

The War on Cyberterrorism

This article addresses the problem of international law enforcement within the War on Cyberterrorism. Hybrid conflicts have replaced the traditional ones, and new threats have emerged in cyberspace, which has become a virtual battlefield. Cyber threats - cybercrimes, cyberterrorism, cyberwarfare - are a major concern for Western governments, especially for the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The international community has begun to consider cyberattacks as a form of terrorism, to which the same measures apply. Because the term “terrorism” is ambiguous and legaly undefined, there is no consensus on a definition of the derivative term “cyberterrorism”, which is left to the unilateral interpretations of states. Pretending to consider the cyberspace domain as traditional domains, and claiming to apply IHL for the sole purpose of lawfully using armed forces in contrast to cyberterrorism is a stretch. This paper addresses the question of whether or not current laws of war and international humanitarian law apply to cyber domain, and gives some recommendations on how to tackle this issue.     

The Hollywood War Machine

What we call the "Hollywood War Machine" analyzes the production of films within the studio system depicting the glories of US military action within theaters from around the world, spanning the Revolutionary War period to the present. A large majority of films under discussion here can be understood from the perspective of "good wars" that the film industry has strongly favored, especially during the 1990s. This essay reveals an increasing emphasis on the World War II experience as the quintessential "good war" that brings American audiences back to the undistilled benevolence of the US military through its various patriotic and heroic exploits. The undoubtedly powerful impact of the September 11, 2001 events and their aftermath upon the Hollywood War Machine is a topic worthy of further discussion.     

Mutual Optimism and War

Working with the definition of mutual optimism as war due to inconsistent beliefs , we formalize the mutual optimism argument to test the theory's logical validity. We find that in the class of strategic situations where mutual optimism is a necessary condition for war—i.e., where war is known to be inefficient, war only occurs if both sides prefer it to a negotiated settlement, and on the eve of conflict war is self-evident—then there is no Bayesian-Nash equilibrium where wars are fought because of mutual optimism. The fundamental reason that mutual optimism cannot lead to war is that if both sides are willing to fight, each side should infer that they have either underestimated the strength of the opponent or overestimated their own strength. In either case, these inferences lead to a peaceful settlement of the dispute. We also show that this result extends to situations in which there is bounded rationality and/or noncommon priors.     

The Fourth Indo-China War

Against the background of twentieth-century military conflict in Asia, the article concentrates on China’s contemporary relationships with outlying states, regions and provinces. Employing a version of Thomas Malthus’s political economy, we argue that population wars are an important, if often disguised, future of modern foreign relations. Through an examination of a various examples but specifically Tibet, Vietnam and Uyghurs in Xinjiang province, the article considers the current prospects of sinicization by demographic means. We conclude by describing ‘red capitalism’ in Asia as a combination of authoritarian states plus economicv success within the framework of a tributary Han civilization.     

A Cold War before the Cold War: Early Soviet Relations with the West

The field of international relations has seen considerable debate about the reasons for conflict between revolutionary states and status quo powers. The two works reviewed here deal with the early years of the Soviet regime. The material presented indicates that tensions were largely the result of Bolshevik attempts to “export the revolution.” This indicates that it is the nature of a revolutionary state and its desire to challenge the international status quo that leads to tension with other powers.     

War Chests as Precautionary Savings

I present a model of campaign spending and saving in repeated elections which yields empirical implications on the creation of war chests. As previous studies disagree whether war chests deter potential challengers from running against incumbents, I present an alternative model that intentionally excludes deterrence as a motivation and formalizes under what circumstances (if any) a war chest would be created for savings. The model predicts that an incumbent creates a war chest when she faces a weaker challenger, i.e. as precautionary savings for future elections. The model yields several other predictions of incumbent fund-raising, spending, and saving behavior. Using incumbents from 1982–1998 U.S. House elections, I find strong empirical support for the predictions of the model.