Author: David Scott
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386186
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history—when many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption, and authoritarianism—David Scott argues the need to reconceptualize the past in order to reimagine a more usable future. He describes how, prior to independence, anticolonialists narrated the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism as romance—as a story of overcoming and vindication, of salvation and redemption. Scott contends that postcolonial scholarship assumes the same trajectory, and that this imposes conceptual limitations. He suggests that tragedy may be a more useful narrative frame than romance. In tragedy, the future does not appear as an uninterrupted movement forward, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of ups and downs. Scott explores the political and epistemological implications of how the past is conceived in relation to the present and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James’s masterpiece of anticolonial history, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938. In that book, James told the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the making of the Haitian Revolution as one of romantic vindication. In the second edition, published in the United States in 1963, James inserted new material suggesting that that story might usefully be told as tragedy. Scott uses James’s recasting of The Black Jacobins to compare the relative yields of romance and tragedy. In an epilogue, he juxtaposes James’s thinking about tragedy, history, and revolution with Hannah Arendt’s in On Revolution. He contrasts their uses of tragedy as a means of situating the past in relation to the present in order to derive a politics for a possible future.
Author: Elizabeth Shesko
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Military service in Bolivia has long been compulsory for young men. This service plays an important role in defining identity, citizenship, masculinity, state formation, and civil-military relations in twentieth-century Bolivia. The project of obligatory military service originated as part of an attempt to restrict the power of indigenous communities after the 1899 civil war. During the following century, administrations (from oligarchic to revolutionary) expressed faith in the power of the barracks to assimilate, shape, and educate the population. Drawing on a body of internal military records never before used by scholars, Elizabeth Shesko argues that conscription evolved into a pact between the state and society. It not only was imposed from above but was also embraced from below because it provided a space for Bolivians across divides of education, ethnicity, and social class to negotiate their relationships with each other and with the state. Shesko contends that state formation built around military service has been characterized in Bolivia by multiple layers of negotiation and accommodation. The resulting nation-state was and is still hierarchical and divided by profound differences, but it never was simply an assimilatory project. It instead reflected a dialectical process to define the state and its relationships.
Author: Simon Duindam
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642500056
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
In this book, entitled "Military Conscription: an economic analysis of the labour component in the armed forces", military conscription is regarded as an eco nomic policy to minimize the cost of labour in the armed forces. The economic cost of conscription becomes clear when we analyse the opportunity costs of conscription. If conscripts were free to choose whether to join the armed forces, many would not under the present day conditions, since for them the costs of conscription far outweighs the benefits. The principle of opportunity costs is always central in the economics of warfare. In this book the analysis begins with an investigation of these oppor tunity costs and then uses the results to analyse the formation of an all-volunteer force, which will in fact be achieved, if everything proceeds according to schedule, by 1998. Chapter one concentrates on the structure of the thesis. One of the cor nerstones is welfare economics. Welfare economics uses a mechanical view of the state. Translated to military conscription this means that the welfare of the conscript is a central point in the analysis of the economic aspects of military conscription. Also important is the fact that the concept of welfare concentrates on scarcity. Due to conscription the aspects of scarcity of labour in the armed forces are very weak, if not absent.
Author: Myron J. Echenberg
Publisher: James Currey
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
This text offers a socio-political history of post-war Francophone West Africa, focusing on colonial conscripts from Senegal.
Author: Alan I. Forrest
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195059379
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Between the outbreak of war with Austria in 1792 and Napoleon's final debacle in 1814, France remained almost continously at war, recruiting in the process some two to three million frenchmen--a level of recruitment unknown to previous generations and widely resented as an attack on the liberties of rural communities. Forrest challenges the notion of a nation heroically rushing to arms by examining the massive rates of desertion and avoidance of service as well as their consequences on French society--on military campaigns and the morale of armies, on political opinion at home, on the social fabric of local villages, and on the Napoleonic dream of bringing about a coherent and centralized state.
Author: Daniel Conway
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526129590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
Masculinities, militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign explores the gendered dynamics of apartheid-era South Africa’s militarisation and analyses the defiance of compulsory military service by individual white men, and the anti-apartheid activism of the white men and women in the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), the most significant white anti-apartheid movement to happen in South Africa. Military conscription and objection to it are conceptualised as gendered acts of citizenship and premised on and constitutive of masculinities. Conway draws upon a range of materials and disciplines to produce this socio-political study. Sources include interviews with white men who objected to military service in the South African Defence Force (SADF); archival material, including military intelligence surveillance of the ECC; ECC campaigning material, press reports and other pro-state propaganda. The analysis is informed by perspectives in sociology, international relations, history and from work on contemporary militarised societies such as those in Israel and Turkey. This book also explores the interconnections between militarisation, sexuality, race, homophobia and political authoritarianism.
Author: John M. Sacher
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807176540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award Finalist for the 2022 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize In April 1862, the Confederacy faced a dire military situation. Its forces were badly outnumbered, the Union army was threatening on all sides, and the twelve-month enlistment period for original volunteers would soon expire. In response to these circumstances, the Confederate Congress passed the first national conscription law in United States history. This initiative touched off a struggle for healthy white male bodies—both for the army and on the home front, where they oversaw enslaved laborers and helped produce food and supplies for the front lines—that lasted till the end of the war. John M. Sacher’s history of Confederate conscription serves as the first comprehensive examination of the topic in nearly one hundred years, providing fresh insights into and drawing new conclusions about the southern draft program. Often summarily dismissed as a detested policy that violated states’ rights and forced nonslaveholders to fight for planters, the conscription law elicited strong responses from southerners wanting to devise the best way to guarantee what they perceived as shared sacrifice. Most who bristled at the compulsory draft did so believing it did not align with their vision of the Confederacy. As Sacher reveals, white southerners’ desire to protect their families, support their communities, and ensure the continuation of slavery shaped their reaction to conscription. For three years, Confederates tried to achieve victory on the battlefield while simultaneously promoting their vision of individual liberty for whites and states’ rights. While they failed in that quest, Sacher demonstrates that southerners’ response to the 1862 conscription law did not determine their commitment to the Confederate cause. Instead, the implementation of the draft spurred a debate about sacrifice—both physical and ideological—as the Confederacy’s insatiable demand for soldiers only grew in the face of a grueling war.
Author: Christopher Harrison
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666925683
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205
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Book Description
Genocidal Conscription examines how some states have employed mandatory military service as a tool to capture and kill the victims of genocide by recruiting the perpetrators from other minorities, and shifting blame away from the state. The book highlights several unique intersections that connect military history, Holocaust studies, and genocide. The study details an original framework that encompasses intentions and outcomes of wartime casualties, Clausewitzian wastage, and genocidal massacres. Christopher Harrison traces and compares how two genocidal regimes at war – the Ottoman Empire during World War One and Axis-era Hungary in World War Two – implemented certain policies of military service to capture and destroy their targets amidst the carnage of modern warfare. Following this historical comparative study, the author then summarizes relevant implications and ongoing concerns. The conclusion includes insights into conscription by contemporary authoritarian regimes. By examining these histories and crises, the book suggests that several states are at risk of carrying out genocidal conscription today. While difficult and unlikely, due to political disincentives, the implication of this analysis considers reforms which may prevent states from repeating similar policies and actions again.
Author: Pertti Joenniemi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351893114
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Conscription is seen as forming a site and an issue-area around which different identities are struggled over and core political relations established in a security-related context. The unravelling of conscription thus unavoidably pertains to a set of essential ideational issues and has significance far beyond the military sphere. The contributors to this book explore the more profound issues such as the meaning of conscription in the context of the increasingly feeble relationship between the state and the nation. The analysis relates the question of changes or lack of change in recruitment to broader social, political and cultural issues, thereby breaking new ground. Attention not only focuses on what the military manpower systems do, but also on what they represent. As such, conscription has meaning far beyond the sphere of military affairs.
Author: Donald Stoker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134270097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
This edited volume explores conscription in the Napoleonic era, tracing the roots of European conscription and exploring the many methods that states used to obtain the manpower they needed to prosecute their wars. The levée-en-masse of the French Revolution has often been cited as a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’, but was it truly a ‘revolutionary’ break with past European practices of raising armies, or an intensification of the scope and scale of practices already inherent in the European military system? This international collection of scholars demonstrate that European conscription has far deeper roots than has been previously acknowledged, and that its intensification during the Napoleonic era was more an ‘evolutionary’ than ‘revolutionary’ change. This book will be of much interest to students of Military History, Strategic Studies, Strategic History and European History.
