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15418 results in Military history

Page 210 of 771

  • 12 - Turn Everyone into a Civilian: René Cassin and the UNESCO Project, 1919–1945

  • from Part III - Civilian Protection and International Norms and Organizations: When and How Much?
  • Edited by Andrew Barros, Université du Québec, Montréal, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    The Civilianization of War
    Published online:
    20 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 243-259

  • Summary

    Nobel Peace Laureate René Cassin played a key role in the creation of UNESCO; one that highlights its conception and central mission as an organization to pursue human disarmament, and with it to eliminate the civil-military distinction by turning everyone into a civilian. This study examines the “moral disarmament” movement which arose after the First World War, the idea that it was important not just to eliminate physical weapons but change the way people thought about war by having them embrace and understand each other and their common humanity. It pays close attention to the role that history played in this process, particularly the fierce debate over the origins of the First World War. Cassin was an important member of this movement, and his career helps trace its evolution, from the League of Nations to the World Disarmament Conference, and finally to the Second World War and the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education which lead to the creation of UNESCO in 1945.

  • 11 - The CIA’s Drone War and the Civilianization of Warfare

  • from Part II - A Moving Target: Strategic Bombing and Civilians, 1916–2014
  • Edited by Andrew Barros, Université du Québec, Montréal, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    The Civilianization of War
    Published online:
    20 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 221-240

  • Summary

    While it is common to discuss the evolution of armed drones as having transformed the way the United States fights wars, this chapter argues that the technology has triggered a more significant paradigm shift with regard to who actually does the fighting. For the first time in history, those involved in pursuing America’s enemies and directly responsible for taking the lethal action to eliminate them commute to their workplace, fight in the U.S.’s wars, and return home to their families at the end of each shift. This campaign is directly overseen by the civilian agents of the CIA, pursued against terrorists who were until recently classed as criminals not combatants, and waged from the skies over the civilian compounds of the tribal areas of America’s ally, Pakistan. It is this change, initially overlooked in the wake of the technological novelty of the drones themselves, that truly marks how armed drones transformed warfare.

  • 2 - Fighting the Fifth Column: The Terror in Republican Madrid during the Spanish Civil War

  • from Part Ia - The ‘Total War’ Era, 1914–1945
  • Edited by Andrew Barros, Université du Québec, Montréal, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    The Civilianization of War
    Published online:
    20 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 47-63

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the ruthless elimination of the so-called ‘fifth column’ in Republican Madrid during the first months of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Republican terror is often dismissed as the work of anarchist or criminal ‘uncontrollables’. Yet in reality, the mass killing in the Spanish capital (over 8,000 executions), was carried out by militants of all leftist Popular Front organisations and policemen. In a conflict where the distinction between combatants and non-combatants was at best imprecise, antifascists believed that a powerful internal enemy was poised to stab the Republican defenders of Madrid in the back. The irony is that the ‘fifth column’- a concept coined in Madrid in 1936- did not exist during the terror itself. Nevertheless, fear of internal subversion was common to both sides during the fratricidal conflict and foreign observers, particularly the Soviets, concluded that ‘fifth columns’ could play a significant role in the outcome of future wars.

  • 6 - East Pakistan/Bangladesh 1971–1972: How Many Victims, Who, and Why?

  • from Part Ib - The Cold War and Decolonization, 1945–2000
  • Edited by Andrew Barros, Université du Québec, Montréal, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    The Civilianization of War
    Published online:
    20 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 116-140

  • Summary

    The chapter disaggregates victim numbers during Bangladesh‘s war of independence in 1971 according to social groups. Based on findings from the secondary literature, medical studies, official Bangladeshi data, diplomatic and UN records, the chapter argues that overall 500,000 to one million lives were destroyed, less than often assumed. Violence was multi-polar (including killings by civilian crowds) and struck many groups in different ways, which blurred the line between armed formations and civilians, though members of the former were killed at higher rates. In absolute figures, rural dwellers (mostly dying from conflict-related famine) and Hindus were worst affected. In relative terms, certain armed formations (police and army units made up of Bengalis) were hardest hit. Killings struck urbanites at higher rates than villagers. Urban workers and pro-Bangladesh political activists bore an elevated risk of losing their life. In general, Pakistani massacres were widespread but data suggest that there was no attempt to exterminate the Bengali intelligentsia. Mass migration as a survival strategy was enormous; ten million civilians fled to India, mostly Hindus, and 16 or 17 million were internally displaced, mostly Muslims.

  • 3 - Moscow 1941: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet People’s Militia (Narodnoe Opolchenie)

  • from Part Ia - The ‘Total War’ Era, 1914–1945
  • Edited by Andrew Barros, Université du Québec, Montréal, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    The Civilianization of War
    Published online:
    20 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 64-80

  • Summary

    In the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s government relied upon extraordinary measures to avoid the complete anihilation of the Soviet State and its military. One of these measures was the creation of the People’s Militia (Narodnoe Opolchenie) in July 1941, first in Moscow, and then in other large Soviet cities. Usually seen in the Soviet and Russian historiography as an outburst of popular patriotism, the Militia, it can be argued, was also a catastrophic experiment in the mobilization, training and frontline use of civilians, thus blurring the civilian-military divide. Using declassified Communist Party materials from the experience of Moscow in 1941, this article stresses the various methods, often coercive, carried out by various local committees of the Soviet Communist Party to raise in a few weeks a paramilitary force numbering hundreds of thousands of civilians.

  • 1 - Doing the Necessary: The Declaration of London and British Strategy, 1905–1915

  • from Part Ia - The ‘Total War’ Era, 1914–1945
  • Edited by Andrew Barros, Université du Québec, Montréal, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    The Civilianization of War
    Published online:
    20 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 23-46

  • Summary

    The Declaration of London (DOL) has been struck from the study of power politics and British policy, although it illuminates international law, and the links between diplomacy and naval strategy between 1905-15. The DOL illuminates British and German war plans before 1914; the links between humanitarianism, law and realpolitik; how the relationship between ideology, bureaucratic politics, diplomacy and naval policy, shaped British strategy; and how the failure of sea law drove the radicalization of economic warfare. This study will address those questions, and thus the evolution of the distinction between the civilian and the military. It shows how, during peacetime, states sought to use international law as a tool of power politics, and why, soon after the great war began, they adopted terrible campaigns of economic warfare. During 1914-15, law gave maritime war a jagged edge. Law links morality and strategy, in paradoxical ways: its letter triggered unrestricted submarine warfare and the hunger blockade.

  • 9 - Bombing Civilians Scientifically: Operational Research in Bomber Command, 1941–1945*

  • from Part II - A Moving Target: Strategic Bombing and Civilians, 1916–2014
  • Edited by Andrew Barros, Université du Québec, Montréal, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    The Civilianization of War
    Published online:
    20 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 181-195

  • Summary

    In the course of the Second World War, objectives of the Allied Air Force's strategic bombing of Germany shifted from warfare related targets to the morale of the enemy civilians. This article shows how important this orientation became through the examination of the reports produced during the conflict by the Operational Research section of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. These seldom used sources demonstrate that the results of the bombing of German cities were systematically analyzed in order to improve its effectiveness, regardless of civilian loss of lives. The goal was clearly to maximize destruction. The chapter demonstrates this through several examples of Bomber Command’s Operational Research civilian scientists knowingly being involved in this pursuit.

  • 8 - The Problems of Opening Pandora’s Box: Strategic Bombing and the Civil–Military Divide, 1916–1939

  • from Part II - A Moving Target: Strategic Bombing and Civilians, 1916–2014
  • Edited by Andrew Barros, Université du Québec, Montréal, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    The Civilianization of War
    Published online:
    20 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 165-180

  • Summary

    This chapter is a case study of the dangers of over-estimating the power of technology to rapidly shrink the distinction between civilians and combatants. It examines the evolution of the concept and practice of strategic bombing during the inter-war period by its leading proponent, the Royal Air Force (RAF). The chapter underscores the Britain’s institutional commitment to his new form of warfare and studies how it developed. Yet as a new conflict emerged in the 1930s there was a belated realization that the technological demands required to conduct this type of large scale, long range, campaign were well beyond the current capabilities of the RAF. Even rudimentary skills like navigation were far from what was required for these types of operations. The study emphasis the complexity of bombing, and the often unintended consequences that flowed from this, as well as the importance of fear of what the type of campaign many envisaged could do to Britain’s opponent, and vice versa.

  • Introduction: The Civilianization of War and the Changing Civil–Military Divide, 1914–2014

  • Edited by Andrew Barros, Université du Québec, Montréal, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    The Civilianization of War
    Published online:
    20 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 1-20
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  • Summary

    This introduction lays out the central argument of the collection, that the distinction between civilians and combatants is a very dynamic and variable phenomenon. Its dynamism comes from three inter-related factors: the changing nature or war, the types of mobilization being pursued by the belligerents, and the role that international norms and law comes to play in the conflict. To assist in making this argument there is an analysis of the relevant literature from the fields of international history, political science, and international law. This assessment underscores the problems with other views on the question, notably that the divide is inexorably diminishing thanks to the rising power of international law and norms and the idea that technology and the changing nature of war are drastically narrowing it.

  • 7 - ‘I Wasn’t a Boy, I Was a Soldier’: Militarization and Civilianization in Narratives of Child Soldiers in Africa’s Contemporary Conflicts, c.1990–2010

  • from Part Ib - The Cold War and Decolonization, 1945–2000
  • Edited by Andrew Barros, Université du Québec, Montréal, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    The Civilianization of War
    Published online:
    20 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 141-162

  • Summary

    Child soldiers have been heavily involved in contemporary African warfare. The figure of the child soldier has often been taken as evidence of the ‘barbarism’, depoliticization and criminalization of modern warfare in Africa. This chapter interrogates the generational dynamics of civilianization debates by using published memoirs of former child combatants from Uganda, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, read within and against humanitarian discourses of war and childhood, to explore how former child soldiers represent their experiences of militarization. This chapter analyses how concepts of ‘civilian’ and ‘combatant’ can be applied to legal minors, highlighting child soldiers’ notions of their own victimhood and agency, and the contextual fluidity of their identities between military and civilian poles. It argues that child soldiers are interstitial characters caught between childhood and adulthood, and between military and civilian status, both in what they do and in what is done to them.

The Civilianization of War
  • The Changing Civil–Military Divide, 1914–2014
  • Edited by Andrew Barros, Martin Thomas
  • Published online:
    20 July 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018
  • Distinguishing between civilians and combatants is a central aspect of modern conflicts. Yet such distinctions are rarely upheld in practice. The Civilianization of War offers new ways of understanding civilians' exposure to violence in war. Each chapter explores a particular approach to the political, legal, or cultural distinctions between civilians and combatants during twentieth-century and contemporary conflicts. The volume as a whole suggests that the distinction between combatants and non-combatants is dynamic and oft-times unpredictable, rather than fixed and reciprocally understood. Contributors offer new insights into why civilian targeting has become a strategy for some, and how in practice its avoidance can be so difficult to achieve. Several discuss distinct population groups that have been particularly exposed to wartime violence, including urban populations facing aerial bombing, child soldiers, captives, and victims of sexual violence. The book thus offers multiple perspectives on the civil–military divide within modern conflicts, an issue whose powerful contemporary resonance is all too apparent.

Page 210 of 771