Search results
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
’, p. 1. E. Kohlman, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford: Berg, 2004). M. Duffield, ‘War as a Network Enterprise: The New Security Terrain and its Implications’, Cultural Values, Vol. 6, No. 1–2 (2002), p. 153. For the former on networked war, see J. Arquilla and D. Rondfeldt, ‘Cyberwar is Coming!’, Journal of Comparative Strategy, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1993), pp. 141–165 and for the latter on nomadism, see J. Reid, ‘Deleuze’s War Machine: Nomadism Against the State’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2003), pp. 57
Croatia and Bosnia, the international community had organised a series of embargoes and economic sanctions in an attempt to force the Milosević administration to the negotiating table. As the Kosovo Commission notes, by the late 1990s ‘the Milosevic war machine has relied on the “mafiazation” of the economy to get around the sanctions. Likewise, the division of labour between the army as an institution and the paramilitary forces had facilitated both ethnic cleansing and organized crime.’28 Following the Dayton Peace Accords which ended the fighting in Bosnia, Milosević
taxes to finance their war machines. But Britain’s attempt to tax the American colonies and that of France to tax its own subjects without granting some political representation, induced rebellion. In the subsequent crises either side of the Atlantic different aspects of a new kind of political entity first took their shape. On the western side, the new state that was designed in 1787 was a self-conscious attempt to create a representative republic over a large territory on new federalist principles. On the eastern side, in 1789, came the argument, most forcefully
of 2013–14. In hindsight, the dissolution of Yugoslavia served as a dress rehearsal for later events in Ukraine, with Serbia in the role of Russia and Kosovo’s KLA the prototype of the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and fascists who seized power in February 2014.67 NATO enlargement also exposed the EU directly to the consequences of any American confrontation policy towards Moscow. Its reliance on Russian gas and the potential of extensive economic and cultural interdependence were now effectively made hostage to the interests of the US war machine. Russia’s new
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
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.
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
historical and political context, the uniformity of its supportive presentation in the news media at the time is brought even further into relief. There appears to have been no desire to give emphasis to the more ambiguous elements at work within it. At the time, this image was published to support two interconnected notions about this particular conflict: simultaneously, coalition soldiers are both humanised liberators and part of a militarily effective war machine – interpretations that resonate with the coalition discourses of humanitarianism and good soldiering. In