Author: Michael Howard
Publisher: C. HURST & CO. PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9781850658917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140
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Book Description
Sir Michael Howard traces the pattern in the attitudes of liberal-minded men and women in the face of war, from Erasmus to the Americans after Vietnam, and concludes that peacemaking is a task which has to be tackled afresh every day of our lives.
Author: John Malloy Owen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801486906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Liberal democracies very rarely fight wars against each other, even though they go to war just as often as other types of states do. John M. Owen IV attributes this peculiar restraint to a synergy between liberal ideology and the institutions that exist within these states. Liberal elites identify their interests with those of their counterparts in foreign states, Owen contends. Free discussion and regular competitive elections allow the agitations of the elites in liberal democracies to shape foreign policy, especially during crises, by influencing governmental decision makers. Several previous analysts have offered theories to explain liberal peace, but they have not examined the state. This book explores the chain of events linking peace with democracies. Owen emphasizes that peace is constructed by democratic ideas, and should be understood as a strong tendency built upon historically contingent perceptions and institutions. He tests his theory against ten cases drawn from over a century of U.S. diplomatic history, beginning with the Jay Treaty in 1794 and ending with the Spanish-American War in 1898. A world full of liberal democracies would not necessarily be peaceful. Were illiberal states to disappear, Owen asserts, liberal states would have difficulty identifying one another, and would have less reason to remain at peace.
Author: Alan Cromartie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317556585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
This book addresses the relationship between the 'liberal' values of Anglo-Saxon cultures and the way that they conduct themselves when they are fighting - or preparing to fight - wars. The United States and the United Kingdom are characterised by a consensus that their social and political arrangements are, in a very broad sense, ‘liberal’. Liberalism is not pacifism; nor are liberals necessarily respectful of traditional prohibitions that have set out to moderate excessive violence. But liberals do seek to understand their violent actions as part of a wider project of defending or expanding liberal freedoms. The perceived alternative is to undermine the will to keep on fighting. Sustaining a liberal picture of what is going on is an indispensable part of a liberal strategy. Contributors with disciplinary backgrounds in history, international relations, and strategic studies discuss what ‘liberalism’ means in this particular context and how it might relate to ‘strategy’, both in the recent past and in the future. The chapters consider how liberal states understand the wars they fight, the constraints liberal values place on these states, the role of public opinion and the appropriate strategies for modern liberal states. Topics addressed include civilian bombing, the nature of US military culture, the British ‘Iraq inquiries’, the effects of the erosion of Westphalian sovereignty and the rise of new ideas about ‘globalization’, and the decline in popular involvement. This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, political philosophy, foreign policy, security studies and IR in general.
Author: Andrew Knapp
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441168710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Liberal democracies have always accepted the need to go to war, despite the fact that war can undermine liberal values. Wars may be won or lost, not only on the battlefield, but in the perceptions of the publics who pay for them. Presentation is therefore increasingly important. Starting with the First World War, the first major war fought by liberal democracies after the emergence on mass media, Liberal Democracies at War explores the relationship between representations of liberal violence and the ways in which the liberal state understands 'rights' in war. Experts in the field explore crucial questions such as: · How have the violences of war perpetrated in their names been communicated to publics of liberal democracies? · How have representations of conflict changed over time? · How far have the victims of liberal wars been able to insert their stories into the record?
Author: Alice Hills
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780714656021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
This book is the first full-length study of a key security issue confronting the West in the 21st century: urban military operations, as undertaken by US and UK forces in Iraq. It relates operations in cities to the wider study of conflict and
Author: Sérgio Veludo Coelho
Publisher: Musket to Maxim
ISBN: 9781914059261
Category : Portugal
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
The Portuguese Civil War of 1828-1834, commonly known in Anglo-Saxon sources as the War of the Two Brothers, was until recently a forgotten conflict, even in Portuguese Military History. This book shows their uniforms, weapons, equipment, and tells the story of the armies involved.
Author: Victoria Basham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135016828
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
This book critically examines the significance of gender, race and sexuality to wars waged by liberal states. Drawing on original field-research with British soldiers, it offers insights into how their everyday experiences are shaped by, and shape, a politics of gender, race and sexuality that not only underpins power relations in the military, but the geopolitics of wars waged by liberal states. Linking the politics of daily life to the international is an intervention into international relations (IR) and security studies because instead of overlooking the politics of the everyday, this book insists that it is vital to explore how geopolitical events and practices are co-constituted, reinforced and contested by it. By utilising insights from Michel Foucault, the book explores how shared and collectively mediated knowledge on gender, race and sexuality facilitates certain claims about the nature of governing in liberal states and about why and how such states wage war against ‘illiberal’ ones in pursuit of global peace and security. The book also develops post-structural work in international relations by urging scholars interested in the linguistic construction of geopolitics to consider the ways in which bodies, objects and architectures also reinforce particular ideas about war, identity and statehood.
Author: Andrew Williams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136008063
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
Military power is now the main vehicle for regime change. The US army has been used on more than 30 different occasions in the post-Cold War world compared with just 10 during the whole of the Cold War era. Leading scholar Andrew Williams tackles contemporary thinking on war with a detailed study on liberal thinking over the last century about how wars should be ended, using a vast range of historical archival material from diplomatic, other official and personal papers, which this study situates within the debates that have emerged in political theory. He examines the main strategies used at the end, and in the aftermath, of wars by liberal states to consolidate their liberal gains and to prevent the re-occurrence of wars with those states they have fought. This new study also explores how various strategies: revenge; restitution; reparation; restraint; retribution; reconciliation; and reconstruction, have been used by liberal states not only to defeat their enemies but also transform them. This is a major new contribution to contemporary thinking and action. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of politics, international relations and security studies.
Author: Patrick Porter
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509542132
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
In an age of demagogues, hostile great powers and trade wars, foreign policy traditionalists dream of restoring liberal international order. This order, they claim, ushered in seventy years of peace and prosperity and saw post-war America domesticate the world to its values. The False Promise of Liberal Order exposes the flaws in this nostalgic vision. The world shaped by America came about as a result of coercion and, sometimes brutal, compromise. Liberal projects – to spread capitalist democracy – led inadvertently to illiberal results. To make peace, America made bargains with authoritarian forces. Even in the Pax Americana, the gentlest order yet, ordering was rough work. As its power grew, Washington came to believe that its order was exceptional and even permanent – a mentality that has led to spiralling deficits, permanent war and Trump. Romanticizing the liberal order makes it harder to adjust to today’s global disorder. Only by confronting the false promise of liberal order and adapting to current realities can the United States survive as a constitutional republic in a plural world.
Author: Benjamin Ginsberg
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1616149515
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Although war is terrible and brutal, history shows that it has been a great driver of human progress. So argues political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg in this incisive, well-researched study of the benefits to civilization derived from armed conflict. Ginsberg makes a convincing case that war selects for and promotes certain features of societies that are generally held to represent progress. These include rationality, technological and economic development, and liberal forms of government. Contrary to common perceptions that war is the height of irrationality, Ginsberg persuasively demonstrates that in fact it is the ultimate test of rationality. He points out that those societies best able to assess threats from enemies rationally and objectively are usually the survivors of warfare. History also clearly reveals the technological benefits that result from war—ranging from the sundial to nuclear power. And in regard to economics, preparation for war often spurs on economic development; by the same token, nations with economic clout in peacetime usually have a huge advantage in times of war. Finally, war and the threat of war have encouraged governments to become more congenial to the needs and wants of their citizens because of the increasing reliance of governments on their citizens’ full cooperation in times of war. However deplorable the realities of war are, the many fascinating examples and astute analysis in this thought-provoking book will make readers reconsider the unmistakable connection between war and progress.
