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Introduction 1 On 15 December 2013, only two and a half years after the Republic of South Sudan had become an independent state, the long-simmering tensions between President Salva Kiir and his former vice-president, Riek Machar, erupted into armed clashes in the capital, Juba. War soon broke out. This article seeks to document and analyse violence affecting the provision of healthcare by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and its intended
1 War Introduction This I feel. A curse. Mother said it more than once, ‘You could be killed over there, Oliver,’ as if I were incompetent, not man enough to take care of myself; I hated her motherlove arrogance. Did I listen? Did it make sense? Mothers are cowards. Curses passed down the vaginal passageways deep to man. True as true can be. I told her that I didn’t really want to go back to Yale, I was an adventurer, just like her and went to Vietnam instead. But I wonder what she’ll say when she finds out about this. My limbs stiffening, waiting in this groin
Introduction What is the logic governing journalistic practices in armed conflict contexts? 1 There are obvious physical constraints that make it difficult for sociologists and anthropologists to directly observe reporters working in war zones or areas of armed conflict. And while it is no substitute for direct observation, I would like to share my own experience of the multiple constraints that journalists face in crisis zones and of the
Introduction The idea of the just war is in danger of becoming one of the political clichés of the new century. From an object of neglect and indifference it has been transformed into the dominant image of war in the post-cold war age. Moral distaste for war and things military, widely felt during an era of superpower rivalry and nuclear confrontation, has given way (in some circles at least) to
1 War imagined The prospect of total war – again I T WAS WISH fulfilment rather than realism that drove the phrase ‘a war to end wars’ into the public consciousness during the unprecedented slaughter of 1914–18. When that nightmare was at last over, there was a natural human desire to believe its like could never again be contemplated, that it really had been ‘a war to end war’. For a decade or more a traumatized mankind was in denial about its historic complacency towards the use of war as an instrument of policy. Pacifism became a mass movement of
The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. It also tells the stories of those less well known who shared the attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first ‘total war’. The five-year research for this study gathered evidence from all the major archives in Great Britain and abroad in order to paint a complete picture of this unique form of anti-war expression. The narrative begins with the Great War's effect on philosopher-pacifist Bertrand Russell and Cambridge University.
Cold War, which is endangering both humanitarian teams and the operations they conduct. References to ‘before’ have been heard since the mid-1990s, in the wake of the Bosnian War and the Tutsi genocide. The mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda – coming on the heels of the Somali and Liberian civil wars – created a landscape of widespread violence, ‘anarchic conflicts’ in which not even humanitarian workers or journalists were safe. People stressed the contrast with earlier
This article considers how the reburial and commemoration of the human remains of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) is affected by the social, scientific and political context in which the exhumations occur. Focusing on a particular case in the southwestern region of Extremadura, it considers how civil society groups administer reburial acts when a positive identification through DNA typing cannot be attained. In so doing, the article examines how disparate desires and memories come together in collective reburial of partially individuated human remains.
Thousands of people died in Rotterdam during the Second World War in more than 300 German and Allied bombardments. Civil defence measures had been taken before the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 and these efforts were intensified during the country’s occupation as Allied bombers attacked Rotterdam’s port, factories, dry docks and oil terminals. Residential neighbourhoods were also hit through imprecise targeting and by misfired flak grenades. Inadequate air raid shelters and people’s reluctance to enter them caused many casualties. The condition of the corpses and their post-mortem treatment was thus co-constituted by the relationship between the victims and their material circumstances. This article concludes that an understanding of the treatment of the dead after war, genocide and mass violence must pay systematic attention to the materiality of death because the condition, collection and handling of human remains is affected by the material means that impacted on the victims.
4062 building a peace economy_2652Prelims 25/11/2013 15:06 Page 69 4 Transforming a war economy: learning from the case of Kosovo AVING BUILT up a preliminary framework in the previous chapter through which war economies and transformation policies can be assessed, the case of Kosovo and transformation policies implemented by the DSI following the conflict there will be analysed, not simply to test the framework but to build and improve upon it. As a starting point, it is important to note that the conflict in Kosovo has primarily been analysed in relation to