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progress, the more we increase our chances for collective annihilation. Indeed, despite the potential human benefits of technological advancement, the triumph of the technical over the poetic in political affairs undermines the role of human creativity. How many critical theorists still have to affirm the importance of arts and humanities to the promotion of peace? Theory and science are not objective: we produce the technologies we desire, which are over-coded with all manner of assumptions and prejudices. So, as the technological mind continues to produce war machines
This book explores the evolving African security paradigm in light of the multitude of diverse threats facing the continent and the international community today and in the decades ahead. It challenges current thinking and traditional security constructs as woefully inadequate to meet the real security concerns and needs of African governments in a globalized world. The continent has becoming increasingly integrated into an international security architecture, whereby Africans are just as vulnerable to threats emanating from outside the continent as they are from home-grown ones. Thus, Africa and what happens there, matters more than ever. Through an in-depth examination and analysis of the continent’s most pressing traditional and non-traditional security challenges—from failing states and identity and resource conflict to terrorism, health, and the environment—it provides a solid intellectual foundation, as well as practical examples of the complexities of the modern African security environment. Not only does it assess current progress at the local, regional, and international level in meeting these challenges, it also explores new strategies and tools for more effectively engaging Africans and the global community through the human security approach.
World War II, personified political evil. The atrocities of his war machine have represented an image of naked power politics. The Nazi ideology, with its mix of biology and politics and its lack of any universal notions of ethics, has become a representation of ideas and theories that are barbaric and beyond the pale of acceptable political discourse. After World War II the study of International Relations has been affected by two fearful memories from World War II: one is the Nazi death camps; the other is the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both
which technological apparatuses such as drones are and have been put, we can say, along with Puar, that ‘the potential for gender differentiation in the first instance is already the potential – indeed the capacitation – of whiteness; the capacity to lean into gender ‘undecidability’, the province of that same whiteness.’ 41 Drone assemblages, in a mode that both resembles the politics of gender and also makes use of gender, take part in the production of a capacity to ‘fix’ certain bodies and identities so various war machines might be able to ‘tell the
years. Soldiers from the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance would shell each other unceasingly in an unprecedented exercise of mutual exhaustion. At the fronts, there would be a bloodbath which had scarcely seen its equal. It would cost nearly ten million soldiers their lives (Strachan 2011). 2 The trench warfare of the western front provided the most potent image of the war: machine guns and automatic rifles would shoot at everything that moved above ground. This made the spade a defensive tool, because it allowed the soldiers to save their lives by
political solution: Katanga simply had to continue to be part of the Republic of the Congo. With Resolution 169, the Security Council further authorised ONUC to ‘take vigorous action, including the use of requisite measure of force, if necessary, for the immediate apprehension’ of all non-UN foreign personnel. The United States demanded that ONUC be given the authority to render useless hostile war machines
resource revenue allowed both sides to continually re-arm and re-equip their forces. The long-running conflict in the eastern DRC is similarly prolonged by the ability of the combatants to continually fund their war machines with resource revenue, as well as by neighboring countries seeking to manipulate the ongoing chaos to exploit the region’s vast natural resource wealth for their own economic gain. The end result is the same. The duration and intensify of African conflicts is increased, with countries and even entire regions plunged into long-term instability that
achieve this, it was essential that the choice be realised: it was either ‘subjection to the Nazi war machine or a voluntary participation in new forms of international co-operation’. The political corollary of this combined a need to prevent Germany ever repeating its actions of 1914 and 1939 either by a partition of Germany or by creating ‘a permanent alliance between the western powers [i.e. Britain and France] and either Russia or the U.S.A.’.7 This awareness of the necessity of combined political European and global economic solutions chimed increasingly well with
of other writers. There have been some excellent studies of the relationship between war and scientific thinking about it during this century. One such study can be found in Daniel Pick, The War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993), especially Chapters 12–15. See also Coker, War in the Twentieth Century. See, for example, Karl Leibknecht, Militarism and Anti-Militarism (Cambridge, Rivers Press, 1973, first published 1907). Lowes Dickinson, The Choice Before Us, p. vi. Maurice Hankey, Diplomacy by