Land War Research Articles

Constitutive relationship of soil in contact with mortar under continuous loading

Mortars will remain critical in future land wars due to their flexibility and versatility. When mortars are fired continuously, the contact soil is gradually compacted by the mortar base plate, and dynamic research into this process is the basis for innovative mortar design. However, the discontinuity and nonlinearity of soil contact absolutely necessitate the constitutive relationship of soil contact, which is difficult to study. Therefore, this study conducted experimental research and theoretical derivation to establish an accurate dynamic model of the mortar system. First, based on the nonlinear elastic–plastic theory and the stress–strain relationship of soil under cyclic loading, a theoretical analysis method for the constitutive relationship of contact soil under continuous loading was proposed. Second, an experimental and testing system was designed to simulate launch loads, and the stress–strain response of soil under continuous impact loads was obtained experimentally. Subsequently, based on theoretical analysis and experimental data, the stress–strain relationship during the gradual compaction of soil was established using the least squares method. Finally, a constitutive relationship model of the contact soil in the mortar system was established in ABAQUS using the VUMAT subroutine interface, and the calculated results were compared and analyzed with traditional calculation results. The results indicated that studying the constitutive relationship of mortar in contact with soil during continuous firing using this method can improve the accuracy of dynamically modeling mortar systems. Moreover, this study has practical value in the engineering design of mortar systems.

Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War

Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War

A Free Market of Morals: Boycotting, Liberalism, and Property

The development of the practice of boycotting during the Irish Land War (1879–82), and its subsequent spread beyond Ireland to the United States, sparked outrage and concern. This was prompted by the specific intellectual challenges the practice posed for liberals on both sides of the Atlantic. In relying on a liberal defense of free speech and freedom of association, early boycotters in the 1880s were able to demonstrate the dependence of property rights on social sanction while also remaining initially impervious to legal censure. As a result, the definition and extent of property rights came under scrutiny because of the ease and simplicity by which they could be curtailed through social force. It is observed here that consequent legislation to insulate commercial wealth from boycotting’s parallel moral economy required the reinforcement and development of political justifications of the state’s right to manage economic interactions in the name of social stability and public welfare. The paper argues that boycotting was so threatening to classical visions of liberal individualism precisely because it was so firmly grounded in individualistic premises. It observes not only that boycotters used the language of “free trade” to defend the practice but also that the practice itself contained latent political assumptions about social organization. The argument also suggests that, contrary to much current academic opinion, rights-based popular resistance can be directed toward egalitarian ends.

Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War, by Niall Whelehan

<i>Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War</i>, by Niall Whelehan

Looking Backward, Looking Forward

This issue marks the last of our six years as the editorial team of Perspectives on Politics. It has been both a richly rewarding and exhausting journey, as well as a labor of love. As with all journeys, some of what we encountered along the way was foreseeable, but much of it was not. For example, we knew that Donald Trump’s presidency would be consequential and in many ways unprecedented when we assumed the helm in June 2017, but not that he would become the first president to be impeached twice, or the first to attempt to overturn presidential election results and violently prevent the peaceful transfer of power, thereby threatening the republic’s very foundations. We had no idea what COVID-19 was, or that it would go on to kill more than one million people in the United States alone. Nor could we foresee that the murder of George Floyd would spark the greatest wave of protest in the United States since the 1960s. Nor yet again did we know that more than seventy-five years after the end of World War II, there would be a major European land war between two former Soviet Republics. Yet we felt compelled to respond to each of these world historical moments as they unfolded in real time, while also attempting to modernize and innovate with respect to the journal’s publication procedures and to stay true to its substantive mission.

AI, Land Wars in Asia, and the Classic Blunders of Foresight

AI, Land Wars in Asia, and the Classic Blunders of Foresight

Formation and development of prerequisites for international legal protection of vulnerable population groups: historical and legal discourse

The article is devoted to highlighting the process of formation and development of the prerequisites for the creation of a modern set of norms of international law, aimed at protecting vulnerable groups of the population - parts of society with different numbers, with an increased risk compared to other groups or the rest of society of being affected by the effects of a discriminatory nature, becoming victims of violence (especially during armed conflicts), natural, man-made disasters or economic shocks. Usually, the term “vulnerable groups” is used for the elderly, children, certain categories of women, refugees, people with disabilities, migrant workers, indigenous peoples and national minorities, religious minorities. The chronological boundaries of the study cover the period from ancient times to 1919.Today, despite the apparent legal protection, these population groups in their everyday life still continue to face manifestations of discrimination and social stigmatization, despite the fact that international law emphasizes the principle of respect for human rights and declares the equality of people in their rights (political, economic, environmental, etc.), regardless of certain specific factors, including the nature or degree of their vulnerability.This problem became particularly acute with the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Such exceptional actualization is due to the fact that in wartime, unfavorable external and internal factors (primarily humanitarian, economic, ecological) that affect the risks of various most vulnerable categories of people falling into difficult life circumstances, compared to peacetime, are extremely intensified.The article emphasizes that in relation to the era of pre-classical international law, there is no reason to speak of any systematic protection of vulnerable categories of the population. At that time, we see only individual manifestations of a compassionate attitude towards women, children, the disabled, and the elderly. There were no special international legal acts in this area.It was noted that the actual formation of the foundations of international legal protection of vulnerable population groups took place only in the era of classical international law, especially in the second half of the 19th - at the beginning of the 20th century. An important place in the protection of vulnerable categories of the population at the end of the 19th century. signed agreements that specifically laid the international legal foundations for the protection of women, primarily the fight against trafficking in women. During this period, a number of international treaties aimed at protecting the poorest sections of the population were concluded. Among them are agreements on mutual support of poor sailors, sick people, abandoned children, etc. At the same time, important steps were taken to ensure the protection of the rights of religious minorities. An important milestone on the way to the creation of an international legal basis for the protection of vulnerable sections of the population during wartime was the adoption of the Geneva Convention on the Amelioration of the Fate of Wounded and Sick Soldiers in Land War on August 22, 1864, the Brussels Declaration on the Laws and Customs of War of 1874, the Hague the Convention on the Laws and Customs of the Land War of 1907, which, although not directly aimed at protecting the rights of vulnerable groups of the population, were nevertheless tentatively aimed at the implementation of this task.

The Russian Occupation of Melitopol, Ukraine

Since February 24, 2022, Ukraine has defended not only its sovereign territory, national identity, and democratic values but international law and the security of Europe. Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine disregards moral and legal norms of warfare. The army of any state reflects the moral, legal, technological, and intellectual caliber of its society. By now, most of the world has seen that the so-called “second best army of the world” is composed largely of poorly trained draftees, mercenaries, criminals, looters, rapists, and thieves who have violated all of the tenants of the international laws of war,1 in particular, the Geneva and Hague Conventions on the Laws of Land War.

Changing land: diaspora activism and the Irish Land War. By Niall Whelehan. Pp 216. New York: NYU Press. 2021. US$30.

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Howard Lune. Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish.

In this slim volume, Howard Lune tells historians of Irish America—and Irish American nationalists—a story that they know much of already, but he does it in an engaging and conceptually intriguing manner that prioritizes the history of organizations over that of individuals or ideologies. Lune, a sociologist, brings to bear his knowledge of organizational theory to study the deep continuity of conviction on the part of Irish and Irish American people who “saw themselves as a nation with or without a state of their own” (3). Lune emphasizes the creation and maintenance of an “organizational field” (4) of Irish nationalism that extended beyond Ireland itself to a larger diaspora of Irish emigrants and their descendants. Over seven chapters, Lune gives us a brisk and readable narrative of nationalist organizing in the United States and Ireland, stretching from the efforts of the United Irishmen in the late-eighteenth century through to the formation of the Irish Free State. After an introductory chapter, chapter 2 focuses on the social imaginary of the United Irishmen and their success in creating a framework for future nationalist efforts despite the failure of their immediate goals. Chapter 3 investigates the role of United Irish émigrés in remaking Irish American associational life and carries the story through the repeal movement of the 1840s. Chapter 4 focuses on nativist pressures and the impact that they had on Irish American organizational life. The fifth chapter focuses on the Fenian movement and the ambiguous relationship between Irish- and US-based physical-force nationalists in the 1860s, after which Lune turns to the period between the Land War of the early 1880s and the Easter Rising of 1916. A final chapter offers him a chance to step back from the narrative and think more generally about the “continuous social movement for Irish independence”—and specifically the ongoing conviction that there was an Irish nation—sustained by various organizations with different immediate goals—from which specific efforts to realize that independence emerged.

The Right to Life, the Right to Nature, and the Impact of Irish Land on Political Thought in the 1880s

AbstractThe Irish Land War was a pivotal conflict in the history of liberal political thought. With significant impacts on both sides of the Atlantic, events in Ireland were about more than Irish self-determination. Heavily reliant on a discourse of natural right, and asserting a relationship between land ownership and democratic-republican citizenship, the Land War provided a vehicle for popular radical opposition to an increasingly positivist liberalism. This article examines the rationales and political assumptions underlying the demand for land, and how such arguments catalysed an intellectual response among liberal political thinkers. Particular moral and metaphysical ideas about the distinctiveness of land allowed agrarian and labour radicals to reassert individualized but non-possessive rights to natural resources. Rooted in a materialist politics of the human body, this purposive conception of land posed a significant threat to claims for private property, social order, and the ameliorative authority of the state, pressing both liberal and conservative thinkers away from unstable notions of individual rights. The crisis over Irish land helped to shift the terrain of political argument away from questions of participation and popular power, and toward amelioration and public welfare.

Brian DeMare. Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution.

Brian DeMare’s Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution is a beautifully written account of land reform in China, one of the most brutal and transformative historical processes in modern Chinese history. DeMare weaves literary descriptions of life in villages during the late 1940s together with archival sources to uncover the tortuous process by which land was redistributed. In doing so, he highlights how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used land reform to inculcate a revolutionary consciousness into peasants, who were its main objects, intellectuals heading up the work teams that managed it, and urban citizens who were subject to propaganda about how land reform would allow the Chinese to fanshen—to throw off the shackles of the past and construct a new socialist future (133). The book begins with a short account of the stages of land reform in China throughout the mid-twentieth century. This sets the scene for those readers not already familiar with the policy, which is useful, because the rest of the book does not take a chronological approach. There is a nod to Sun Yatsen’s idea of Land to the Tiller, an indication of how land reform was not entirely of the CCP’s own making, and here DeMare could perhaps have highlighted how land reform was a global movement, not one confined to Communist countries. In China, there was no land reform without Mao Zedong, who created the ideological justification for the policy and made decisions about its implementation. It was Mao, who in 1927 advocated violent land reform as the basis of rural revolution, and it was Mao, who divided rural society into rich landlords pitted against poor peasants, even if the reality was much more complicated.

INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS MOVEMENT: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The article describes the process of formation of the International Movement of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and defines the limits of authority of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the Red Cross Society of Ukraine. On the basis of the study of international and Ukrainian normative legal acts, the main forms of cooperation of our state with the specified international movement in the conditions of the military conflict in the east of Ukraine are determined. Particular attention is paid to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which provides financial, material, psychological and educational assistance to both the population and the bodies of state executive power and local self-government bodies of Ukraine.The importance of the need to provide assistance to the wounded was realized already at the early stages of the development of human civilization. The article examines the history of the emergence and development of international humanitarian law («laws and customs of war»). However, the author notes that decisive steps were taken here precisely in the 19th century, as the rapid progress in the development of weapons and military art led to a sharp increase in the number of victims of hostilities. In this connection, considerable attention is paid to the figure of Swiss businessman and public figure Henri Dunant. The article notes that it was the activity of the latter that became the basis for the adoption of the famous Geneva Convention (1864) «On the Improvement of the Fate of Wounded and Sick Soldiers in Land War».Based on the conceptual achievements of modern historiography and using a wide range of diverse sources, the author has analyzed historical background of the Ukrainian Red Cross movement, its ideological principles of operation and main directions of development.

Mental health symptoms and coping strategies among Ukrainians during the Russia-Ukraine war in March 2022.

The Russian attack on Ukraine has been ongoing since February 24, 2022. Nevertheless, no research has documented the mental health of Ukrainians during the biggest land war in Europe after the Second World War, or how Ukrainians cope with the impact of the war. To provide the prevalence rates of symptoms of psychological distress, anxiety, depression, and insomnia; and to link them with Ukrainians' productive coping strategies during the war. Online survey conducted in Ukraine during the initial period of the Russian invasion (March 19-31, 2022), using a quota sampling method, of 1,400 Ukrainians aged 18 years or older, with a total of 801 valid responses for a response rate of 57.2%. Psychological distress assessed by the Kessler Psychological Distress scale (K6); anxiety assessed by Generalized Anxiety Disorder-2 (GAD-2) scale; depression assessed by Patient Health Questionnaire-2 (PHQ-2); insomnia assessed by Insomnia Severity Index-4 (ISI-4); modes of coping assessed by Brief COPE. Of 801 Ukrainian adults, 52.7% had symptoms of psychological distress (mean = 13.3 [SD = 4.9]); 54.1% of them reported symptoms of anxiety (mean = 2.9 [SD = 1.7]); 46.8% reported symptoms of depression (mean = 2.6 [SD = 1.6]). Symptom criteria for insomnia were met by 97 respondents (12.1%) (mean = 10.4 [SD = 4.2]). Demographic variables (including gender, living in an urban area, having children or elderly persons in the household, living in an area occupied by Russian forces) were associated with symptoms of distress, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. The productive coping strategies of using instrumental support, behavioral disengagement, self-distraction, and planning were significantly associated with mental health symptoms. Prevalence rates of symptoms of psychological distress, anxiety, depression, and insomnia were high. These findings underscore the need for healthcare and productive coping strategies for Ukrainians during the war.

Mnemonic land war: Memory constellations through Lebanon and South Africa

Although Lebanon and South Africa are often treated as exceptional cases, the use of geographic analogies like ‘bantustans’ and ‘Lebanonization’ signals their relevance to many other places. These analogies point to the recognition of a spatial mode of mnemonic war in which struggles over the past are also struggles over land. Such analogies signal recognition but also require forgetting: as narrative chronotopes, they are limiting. To look beyond these limits, we name this shared condition ‘mnemonic land war’ and trace its workings through territorialization, property regimes and planning in South Africa and Lebanon. Understanding these processes as memory-work allows us to see what the places analogized to Lebanon and South Africa share in their mnemonic land wars, and link them into a transnational memory constellation. Understanding this constellation can guide a comparative understanding of mnemonic war ‘on the ground’.

Innovation, ICT & food security

Food security is still a major issue permeating the global economy. Further, the salience of food security as an issue has increased dramatically following a global pandemic, a land war in Europe, fuel and fertilizer shortages, supply-chain shocks, and widespread inflation in food prices. Millennium Development Goals – MDGs brought back the issue of food security to the forefront of global innovation, technology, and environmental discussions. The agriculture industry today is becoming smarter, digitized, and more innovation and technological driven and integrated. This paper assesses the role of technology in ameliorating the risk of food security. We use a sample of 106 countries over the period from 2012 to 2018 to test this notion. Our results indicate that technology has a positive impact on global food security. For OECD countries, the impact is mostly on food availability, while for non-OECD countries the impact is mostly on food affordability. Moreover, OECD countries have been seeing increasing importance of technology to their food security in recent years.

Re-staging the 1916 Rising: Eugene McCabe’s Pull Down a Horseman (1966)

ABSTRACT The essay addresses one of Eugene McCabe’s lesser-known works, the drama, Pull Down a Horseman, which was first performed in 1966 as part of the cultural wing of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. The play is based on a secret three-day meeting held by Patrick Pearse and James Connolly in the lead-up to the April rebellion, and it captures some of the intractable divisions that obtained between the political visions of the two revolutionary leaders. The essay focuses on the distinctive dramaturgical strategies employed by McCabe in his highly effective evocation of such apparently irreconcilable ideological divergences. Equally, McCabe’s play is an implicit critique of the extant political and social conditions of his contemporary Ireland, half a century after the 1916 Rising. While McCabe is more widely feted as a chronicler of the tolls of human suffering in relation to the Great Irish Famine, the Irish Land War and the Northern Irish “Troubles,” Pull Down a Horseman is diagnostic of the disparities between the skein of ideals that energised the Irish revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth-century and the grim realities of the nation-state at this mid-century juncture.

Singing in Dark Times: Report from Berlin

Singing in Dark Times: Report from Berlin

ÇANAKKALE KOMİSYONU NİHAİ RAPORU’NUN GENEL SONUCU ÜZERİNE ASKERÎ BİR DEĞERLENDİRME

After the Gallipoli War, Great Britain established a commission by the parliament on 12 August 1916 to investigate the cause, planning and why it was defeated in the war, based on the combined authority of the law, the king and the parliament. The Dardanelles Commission, consisting of ten people, published three reports. The first of these reports was named as Dardanelles Commission First Report and included the origin and beginning of the Dardanelles War and the Dardanelles Naval Wars. The second report was prepared as the First Report to Supplement, which is complementary to the first report. The third report, called The Final Report of the Dardanelles Commission, covered the Gallipoli landing, land wars, evacuation of Gallipoli, supply issues and the general results consisting of sixteen items during the execution of the operations. The first report and the supplementary report were published in 1917, and the final report in 1919. In the final report, a summary of sixteen items was presented under the general conclusions heading, including the other two reports. The study examines sixteen items in the general conclusions section of the final report. The aim of the study is to evaluate the issues related to the sixteen-point general conclusions published in the final report of the commission established to investigate the reasons for the defeat of the Allied Powers in the Gallipoli Campaign, by making use of domestic and foreign sources in the literature.

Afrofuturism 2.0, Africana Esotericism, and the Geopolitics of Black Panther

The Black Panther phenomenon emerged at the nexus of Black speculative culture, Afrofuturism studies, Africana Esoteric Studies, and the Black spatial imagination. This phenomenon is emerging at a unique moment in world history when the world order has been slowly shifting from a unipolar to multipolar framework since the late twentieth century but accelerated since the 2008 economic collapse and accelerated since the beginning of the Eurasian land war between Russia and Ukraine. The accelerating pace of change and the accompanying existential impact of the social change is interacting with the changing geopolitical landscape to produce an ever-growing array of art and aesthetics reflecting the emerging world order.