Landscape Of War Research Articles

Shadows of identity: the experience of Jewish soldiers in the Ukrainian military

ABSTRACT This article delves into the study of Jewish identity within the Ukrainian army, providing a detailed exploration of the experiences of soldiers with Jewish backgrounds fighting at the front lines of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Considering the historical complexities and contemporary challenges faced by the Jewish community in Ukraine, the study investigates how military service transforms the national and ethnic self-identification of Jewish soldiers. Through interviews and comprehensive contextual analysis, we illuminate their personal narratives, ways of expressing identity, common features, inclusivity, and the adaptation of diverse cultural backgrounds within the Ukrainian army.‏ Our study contends that within the military landscape of the ongoing war, the perception of Jewish identity in Ukraine undergoes a significant shift, becoming more prominent and tangible. This transformation imbues the lives of Jewish soldiers with a profound sense of pride and uniqueness.

Loss and Found: Barthes, Hidden Biography and Ethical Deficit in Alexander Gardner’s ‘Portrait of Lewis Payne’

The reconsideration of the symbolic landscape of the Civil War and Confederate iconography since events in Charleston, Charlottesville, and Minneapolis points toward a necessary reappraisal of Alexander Gardner’s 1865 portrait of Lincoln conspirator Lewis Payne (real name Lewis Powell), and its use by Roland Barthes as an illustration for his seminal 1980 book Camera Lucida. Barthes uses the photograph to illustrate a conceptual shift from the punctum, as an individual affect for the viewer, to the noeme, or ‘that-has-been’ appreciable in all photographs. As a result of an emblematic approach using a combination of motto, subscriptio, and illustration, key details of the photograph are misrepresented, and key features of Powell’s Confederate identity are erased. This study therefore explores the circumstances of the photograph’s production, its precarious existence as an unprinted cast-off, and its eventual appreciation as a distinctive example of portraiture’s power. Whereas in Civil War historiography Powell and this photograph are little more than footnotes, the debate around Confederate statues and symbols now begs the question of how the photograph should be contextualised in photography, media and cultural studies, where it has its greatest visibility by far.

Language likely promoted peace before 100,000 ya.

Based on evidence of selection against alpha-male behavior in the earliest Homo sapiens, I suggest that by 300,000 ya (years ago) language would have been sufficiently sophisticated to contribute to peacemaking between groups. Language also influenced the social landscape of peace and war, and groups' ability to form coalitions.

Reintegrating Cold War landscapes? The former Trieste Barracks in Casarsa della Delizia

This paper engages with a specific feature of former military landscapes, the Cold War barracks, located in a specific territory, the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region in north-eastern Italy, at the former border between the Western and Eastern blocs. Based on several academic activities, such as an international workshop and didactical experiences, this work focuses on the Trieste Barracks in Casarsa della Delizia (in the province of Pordenone) as a laboratory for new landscape solutions to reintegrate a derelict military site into civil society. The main outputs of the research are: 1) updating the international scientific literature and the relative research gaps in the discourse of Cold War post-military landscapes; and 2) an innovative landscape-oriented approach to a former military landscape founded on locally based long-term solutions in terms of resilience and sustainable development. Our research aims to demonstrate that Cold War landscapes have primarily been neglected in the academic field, but academic work in collaboration with local actors can result in feasible solutions to export to other cases.

A Comparison ofUniformed Services University andHealth Professions Scholarship Program Graduates' First Deployment Readiness.

Military physicians must be prepared to lead health care teams across complex landscapes of war during future small- and large-scale combat operations. This preparation optimally begins in medical school so that early career physicians are fully ready for their first deployment. Past qualitative research has suggested that military physicians who attended civilian medical school are not as well prepared for the operational environment as physicians who attended the Uniformed Services University (USU), our nation's military medical school. However, there is a lack of larger-scale quantitative research comparing the readiness differences between the two medical school pathways. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to quantify any differences in first deployment preparation between students attending USU and civilian medical schools through the Health Professions Scholarship Program (HPSP). We compared USU and HPSP graduates' first deployment experiences by distributing a 14-item Likert survey to active duty military physicians in the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Air Force who graduated within the past 10 years from medical school (USU or civilian). The USU graduates rated themselves significantly higher than the HPSP graduates on their readiness for deployment (3.83 vs. 3.24; P < .001); ability to navigate the operational environment (3.59 vs. 2.99; P < .001); confidence in communicating with their commanding officer (3.59 vs. 2.99; P = .002); navigating the combined role as physician and officer (3.33 vs. 2.84; P = .004); leading a health care team (3.94 vs. 3.43; P = .001); preparation by a medical school (3.78 vs. 2.52; P < .001); and overall readiness compared to peers (4.20 vs. 3.49; P < .001). There was no significant difference between the two pathways regarding their stress level at the beginning of deployment (2.74 vs. 2.68; P = .683); clinical preparation (3.94 vs. 3.76; P = .202); and success of first deployment (3.87 vs. 3.91; P = .792). The largest effect size of the difference between the two pathways was noted on the question "How well did medical school prepare you for your first deployment" (Cohen's d = 1.02). While both groups believed that they were prepared for their first deployment, USU graduates consistently reported being more prepared by medical school for their first deployment than HPSP graduates. To close this readiness gap, supplemental military unique curricula may help to optimize HPSP students' readiness.

African Americans and federal land policy: Exploring the Homestead Acts of 1862 and 1866

AbstractWe examine the history of US land policy, with a focus on the Homestead Acts, underscoring the precarious position of African Americans during the homesteading period. We discuss the historical context and the shifting political landscape of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, providing the context for research on federal land policies and problems of race. Past research is almost entirely outside of the agricultural and applied economics profession. We believe that the applied economics discipline is especially suited for empirically examining the influence of federal land policies on past and present disparities and racial makeup of American agriculture.

Conflict Landscapes of the Great War: The Spatial and Ecological Dimension of Military History

The spatial and environmental dimension of WWI has recently taken the central place in academic debates on the military history of the “short twentieth century”. At present, the large-scale conflict of humanity and nature under totalized warfare is recognized as no less significant to the existential experience of combatants and civilians than actual battles. Functioning as a demiurge, the Great War created and re-molded landscapes, accelerated development trends shaped during the industrial era, triggered the construction and demolition of infrastructure, and determined the resource policy, economic practices, and language constructs of national communities during subsequent historical periods. Textual and visual narratives of the war feature the following three dimensions of the environment: a subject and adversary (sometimes even more dangerous than the real enemy); an object of destruction, invasion, and ordering; and an anthropological construct defining behavioral strategies and the memorial culture relating to the conflict. Modern researchers share a unanimous opinion that the pivotal role of the clash between humanity and the environment during WWI for subsequent historical development is paradoxically at odds with the degree to which the clash has been studied. This may be linked with the fact that the multidimensionality of militarized landscapes would require a research methodology incorporating elements of military history, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, geology (landscape studies), and cultural geography. Such a creative symbiosis has become possible only recently, owing to the adoption of the interdisciplinary approach by military historians. The gradual uptake of innovative study techniques has resulted in the uneven development of the spatial and environmental history of the First World War as a research field: at present, the best-studied locations are confined to the western front and, partly, the colonial periphery. This publication presents a review of the recent conceptual publications by authors developing this research avenue and seeks to identify the heuristic potential of the concepts “Anthropocene”, “belligerent landscapes”, “landscape biographies”, and “layered landscapes”, including their applicability to the history of the Eastern Front of the First World War.

War as an Environment: Domesticity, Bitterness, and Multispecies Attachments to Life

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook and Film ReviewsWar as an Environment: Domesticity, Bitterness, and Multispecies Attachments to Life A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon. By Munira Khayyat. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022.Diana Pardo PedrazaDiana Pardo PedrazaDepartment of Anthropology and International Affairs, George Washington University, Hortense Amsterdam House, 2110 G Street NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA ([email protected]). 1 III 23 Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 64, Number 3June 2023 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725036 HistoryAccepted March 01, 2023 © 2023 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Ethnography, cacophony, and Lebanon as a zone of prestige in the anthropology of the Middle East

Ethnography, cacophony, and Lebanon as a zone of prestige in the anthropology of the Middle East

The Military Medical Officer's Current-Day Professional Identity: An Enhanced Model.

As the landscapes of war have evolved, so too has the role of the military medical officer (MMO). Colonel (Retired) Barry Wolcott developed a "vector" model in the 1990s, illustrating the dual professional role of the MMO. Since then, propelled by the War on Terror, MMOs have adapted to treating patients in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous operational environments. This study, therefore, aimed to explore modern-day aspects of the MMO's role in order to enhance Wolcott's depiction of the MMO's professional identity in contemporary operational environments. We used the qualitative phenomenological tradition to design our study. We interviewed military physicians from a variety of specialties in order to explore their experiences and professional identity as MMOs. Our research team then coded each of these interview transcripts. We organized these codes into categories, which served as the themes of our study. The following themes emerged from our data regarding the role of the MMO in the operational environment: Primary roles (officer, physician, educator, and diplomat) and aptitudes (innovation, advocacy, cultural competency, and leadership). The MMO's roles as officer and physician often intersect, with dual foci on the mission and the patient. The MMO also serves as an educator to medics and line officers. In addition, they act as diplomats both outside and within the military. Within each of these primary roles, the MMO innovatively prepares for future landscapes of war and advocates for both the individual warfighter and the unit/command. Finally, the MMO navigates both foreign and internal cultural differences and demonstrates leadership in enabling the military's mission. The role of the MMO is complex and multifaceted. The recognition of the contemporary MMO's unique skill set is essential for the effective education and training of future military health care leaders. The value of capitalizing on this unique skill set has been demonstrated in recent civ-mil responses. Because their intricate skill set is specialized for the operational environment, long-term retention of MMOs is key to force readiness.

David Shneer. Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph.

The postmemorial landscape of World War II has been shaped by well-known photographs. Endlessly reproduced, they crystallize the narratives of violence, conquest, and loss into a single image. Yet these iconic visual objects also have life stories of their own. In Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph, David Shneer brings to life one such biography. The photograph at the center of his book shows the aftermath of mass executions, in early December 1941, of the inhabitants of Kerch, a port city in Crimea. Shortly after the city fell to the Germans on November 16, 1941, about seven thousand of the city’s Jews were rounded up and shot in an antitank trench in nearby Bagerevo. The focal point of the Kerch photograph is a female figure with arms outstretched, leaning toward a corpse of a man. When the photograph was first published in March 1942, in a photo essay in the Soviet publication Ogonek (Огонёк), the woman was identified as “P. I. Ivanova, discovering the body of her husband.” Around her is a frozen landscape strewn with corpses—the last victims of the Aktion were shot in the open field along the edge of the ditch. A woman’s body contorted in a posture of grief, her countenance hollowed by sorrow, is a familiar trope that conveys the ravages of war, the eternally feminine face of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. The titular grief in the photograph is amplified by the image’s ambiance created by portentous dark clouds in the background, which we now know were spliced into the original picture.

Friend or Foe? Re-visioning Friendships Beyond Borders

Destruction is transnational: homes, places of worship, healing and community are annihilated and the landscapes of counties are altered. Meanwhile, civilians are left to grapple with their new realities. However, the attention afforded to these disasters varies depending on factors of race, ethnicity, creed, and nationality—the ties that are held dear are the very bonds that determine friends from foes. In most cases, however, news of violence is met by indifference. Individuals are unable to empathize with strangers whose lives are being shattered. This paper analyzes Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (1999/tr.2002) in order to argue that the vehicle transporting one away from apathy is a re-visioning of friendship. Questions of focus include, how is empathy formed for those who are long-gone, or for those whose faces one cannot see? And how can friendship help bridge this gap? An ethical turn to analyzing friendships that can forge connections around the world requires a “re-visioning” of what it means to be a witness to another’s distress as outlined by Oliver Kelly in Witnessing: Beyond Recognition and Michel Foucault’s “Friendship as a way of Life.”&#x0D; In Earth and Ashes transit and re-visioning operate on two levels: physically across an unforgiving landscape to the coal mines, and emotionally through death and destruction to the eventual acceptance of infinite loss. This paper argues that progress down the road and past the checkpoint is enabled by fleeting relations working as vehicles: Dastaguir befriends a shopkeeper, a fellow bus passenger, and a servant who help facilitate his passage through the hazardous landscapes of war and trauma. As witnesses to Dastaguir’s transit, these friends help catalyse, and cauterise, exile from family, community, safety—from life itself until an ethical re-visioning of friendships beyond borders can occur.

Digging the Digital: Beat Modalities and the Representation of the Beats in Video Games

Ever since setting their foot on the social and cultural landscapes of the post-World War II realities, the Beats have been both the subject of and subject to pop-cultural representations and appropriations. While figurations of Beat sensibility in film, television, press and popular music have been well recognized and analyzed, an area which remains uninvestigated for Beat influences, perhaps due to its relatively short pop-cultural presence, is the one of video games. Recent years, which have marked the release of titles such as Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015) and Life Is Strange (Square Enix, 2015), attest to a certain amount of interest invested in Beat mythos by both indie game developers and the biggest game studios in the world, thereby opening a new chapter in representing the Beats in visual media. By, on the one hand, mapping out the categories of Beat references in video game narratives and, on the other, setting them against the backdrop of existing models of (mis)appropriating the Beats in visual culture, I will seek to explore the ways in which video game designers venture into the Beat ethos and I wish to address the implications this bears for the lineage of Beat pop-cultural presence. The final part of the essay takes a closer look at Fallout 4, making references to such theoretical concepts as Derridean hauntology, Zygmunt Bauman’s retrotopia and Simon Reynolds’ retromania, to further demonstrate how complex and ambiguous Beat video-game figurations can be.

Unchaining Disability Law: Global Considerations, Limitations and Possibilities in the Global South and East

Pons, Lord, and Stein's article entitled “Disability, Human Rights Violations, and Crimes Against Humanity,” offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the necessity to legally frame and approach crimes against persons with disabilities across the globe as crimes against humanity (CAH). National public inquiries examining the systematic violations against persons with disabilities repeatedly demonstrate how, despite efforts to report such heinous crimes, these violations remain largely ignored and nearly always unprosecuted. In the Global South and East, violations may be accentuated as complex historical, economic, (geo)political, cultural, ideological, spiritual, and even religious beliefs come into play alongside shifting landscapes of civil unrest, war, and state militarization. Within such contexts, legal measures for the protection of persons with disabilities, particularly for minority communities, meet extraordinary barriers. In this essay, we identify a number of core issues that constrain the possibilities of investigation and prosecution of CAH committed against persons with disabilities living in the Global South and East. Even though such laws are largely grounded in practices and institutions of the Global North, this essay emphasizes the need to ensure that accountability efforts for CAH perpetrated against persons with disability are rigorous in their design, robust in their application, and recognize the heterogeneity of persons with disability on a global scale.

Geotechnical approach to the filling of trench warfare landscape of the World War I

La Grande Guerre a fortement marqué les paysages, notamment sur le front ouest, des Flandres à l’Alsace. Les cratères de mines, les trous d’obus, les abris, les tranchées et boyaux de communications dégagent des « polémopaysages » caractéristiques de la zone de front. Ces « polémoformes » subsistent sous couvert forestier et sont mises en évidence à l’aide du LiDAR aéroporté alors qu’elles sont intégralement nivelées en zone cultivée. En Champagne, l’extension de la ville de Reims occasionne des prescriptions archéologiques et permet de mieux connaître l’organisation spatiale et la nature du remplissage de ces formes, par une approche archéométrique (pénétromètrie dynamique, coupes mécaniques orientées, photographies par drone). L’analyse réalisée sur un secteur expérimental de 2 ha, en première ligne de défense, permet de caractériser les structures archéologiques de la Grande Guerre dans un contexte typique de rendosols sur poches de cryoturbation étirées dans la craie de Champagne. Les résultats montrent que les formes de la Grande Guerre sont nivelées par un remplissage polyphasé avec une sédimentation fine synchrone au conflit, suivie d’un remblaiement hétérométrique peu consolidé. Ce dernier provenant des géomatériaux du parados et du parapet démantelés, est riche en fragments métalliques des réseaux de défense accessoire, surmonté d’un apport de terre végétale. La bombturbation détermine également une contamination métallique par « effet pépite » circonscrite aux entonnoirs d’obus, comblés par des apports de terre. Ces pédoturbations anthropiques déterminent d’importantes disparités spatiales des réserves hydriques du sol et sont associées à des risques géotechniques et pyrotechniques.

Northwards: How Norway became a destination for German car tourism, 1920s–1960s

ABSTRACT The article traces the beginnings of the powerful liaison between automobile technology, tourism, and the ‘Land of the Fjords’. Focusing on the German automobile club ADAC in the period 1920s to 1960s, the article examines how German motorists discovered and embraced Norwegian roads, and what idea of the ‘Norway experience’ was constructed along the way. Tourists, it is argued, were primed for car travel through the narratives of contrasting vistas and sublime nature stemming from the time Norway was experienced by cruise and cariole. During the German occupation of Norway 1940–1945, narratives and pictures of Norwegian landscapes were spread among Germans as never before; now combined with narratives of heroism, conquest, and technology. In the 1950s, when West Germany was experiencing the onset of mass tourism and mass motorization, the concept of the extraordinary car trip on Norway’s roads was ready to be widely communicated and put into praxis. Postwar ‘Grand Tours on wheels’ to Scandinavia were both continuing narratives on Northern remoteness and otherness, and ‘silencing’ historical landscapes of war. By the mid-1960s, Norway had been established as a superb car travellers’ destination, a sanctuary of nature just accessible by a car.

Inhabiting war craters examining geostatistical modeling within landscape heritage recovery in Aleppo

PurposeAleppo city in Syria has witnessed severe bombardment since the 2011 war affecting its landscape heritage, causing explicit geomorphological changes with anthropogenic qualities. The research aims to log observations on the patterns of bombardment craters. It investigates their key role in guiding post-war recovery plans. Currently, the interpretation of war scars is not considered in the reconstruction plans proposed by local administrations and here lies the importance of the research.Design/methodology/approachThe study investigates the geomorphological transformations along the southern citadel perimeter in old Aleppo. Currently, digital tools facilitated data prediction in conflict areas. The research employs an empirical method for inhabiting war craters based on both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The former utilizes satellite images to define the geographical changes of landscape heritage. The latter applies geostatistical data analysis, validation, interpolation and simulation for multi-temporal Google Earth maps. The study exploits Surfer 13 software to localize and measure the preserved craters.FindingsThe research employs the generated models in a landscape design proposal examining the method's applicability. Finally, it offers a methodological toolkit guiding post-war landscape recovery toward the interpretation of conflict geography.Practical implicationsThe paper enables a practical understanding of the contemporaneity of landscape heritage recovery as an action between sustainable development and conservation.Social implicationsThe paper integrates the conflict geographies to the people's commemoration of places and events.Originality/valueThe article offers an insight into the rehabilitation of war landscapes focusing on land craters, exploiting geostatistical data prediction methods.

The Dada Text and the Landscape of War

The Dada Text and the Landscape of War

Lightbringer by Claire Legrand

Reviewed by: Lightbringer by Claire Legrand Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Legrand, Claire Lightbringer. Sourcebooks, 2020 [592p] (The Empirium Trilogy) Trade ed. ISBN 9781492656685 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781492656692 $18.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 10 up At the end of Kingsbane (BCCB 6/19), Rielle had just fled her wedding directly into the arms of Corien, the seductive angel bent on destroying humanity and using Rielle's abilities to control the elements to do so. Over a thousand years later, Eliana, part of the rebel group overthrowing Corien's angelic empire, has been betrayed by her lover and handed over to the ageless Corien. The parallel storylines follow the two prophesied queens: Rielle, the Blood Queen, who descends fully into villainy, opening up the Gate that allows the cruel, merciless angels to enter the world and begin their regime over mortals; and Eliana, the Sun Queen, as she is brutally tortured by Corien, who wants her to use her powers to go back in time and to prevent Rielle from killing herself and destroying all magic. Legrand brings her trilogy to a triumphant but bittersweet ending, effortlessly weaving together complicated plot strands and giving further nuance to already complex characters as the narrative focus shifts among Rielle, Elianna, and others. Both women have truly godlike powers, and they must negotiate their agency and ambition, deciding what they want, what they need, and whom, if anybody, they should love and protect. Legrand's eloquent, vivid prose is focused on a bloody landscape of war and death as opposed to the love and lust of the prior volumes, but the romance elements remain, with Eliana's relationship with her lover and betrayer tragic but undeniably tender. The conclusion is both happy and heartbreaking, and readers who have followed the two queens this far will appreciate an ending that respects both the light and dark within in each of them. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Soldiers, Sacred Waters, and Landscapes: Zimbabwean Soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo War (1998–2002)

Zimbabwean soldiers deployed to the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, 1998–2002) feared death and misfortune, and patrolled the landscape of this war zone largely in terms of terrain they needed to dominate. Yet these soldiers’ guns and military tactics were understood to be challenged by spirits which eventually dictated the ways in which they operated. The paper reveals how the spirited landscapes of the war shaped soldiers’ beliefs. The central analytical argument of this paper is that soldiers do not always dominate and do violence on the landscapes of war, but rather that spirits and enspirited objects can exert power over soldiers and disrupt their activities and tactics. The central belief conveyed by local Congolese civilians was that soldiers had to establish harmony with the spirits in and of the landscape, thereby creating and perpetuating spiritual authority and belonging in the war context.