War Machinery Research Articles

Targeting Russian Oil Refineries

Abstract In March 2024, Ukraine significantly intensified its assaults on Russian energy infrastructures, deploying a multitude of long-range drones to hit Russia’s largest refineries. This led to a temporary halt in production at several of these facilities. The primary objective of these assaults was to diminish Russia’s military capacity. On the other hand, these actions inflicted damage on the Russian economy. Targeting refineries and oil depots has emerged as a contentious issue. The classification of refineries and oil depots as military objectives is legally not precise. These facilities are seen as essential infrastructure for the nation’s economy and machinery of war. Targeting oil depots or works and installations containing dangerous forces during an international armed conflict could result in significant environmental damage, raising questions about the principles of military necessity, distinction and proportionality. An attack must not cause excessive incidental civilian damage relative to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. This essay will explore the legal issues regarding targeting refineries and oil depots and a comprehensive analysis of the situation within the framework of International Humanitarian Law.

Imagining the Post-American World War: Geopolitics, Technology, and the Representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans in Singer and Cole's <em>Ghost Fleet</em>

Field Trip 13 Imagining the Post-­ American World War: Geopolitics, Technology, and the Representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans in Singer and Cole’s Ghost Fleet Yuan Shu If Chinese invasion fiction as a literary genre has been grounded in what Edlie Wong calls “counterfactual histories” and has served as a part of the Yellow Peril discourse,1 which historically informed and reshaped U.S. immigration laws and policies concerning ethnic Chinese exclusively, then Peter Singer and August Cole’s (2015) speculative fiction on the Third World War between the United States and China, Ghost Fleet, defines a new moment in the genre evolvement. Not only has the novel been noted for the two authors’ background and connection to the military, the intelligence , and Hollywood, particularly their “thorough research in defense technology with ongoing geopolitical developments” (Bearden 2015) but it has also been praised for its inclusion of nonconventional combatants for military leadership, such as women and LGBTQ individuals.2 However, while celebrating the vision of the authors on future wars and military technology, which encompasses utilization of rail guns and incorporation of cyberspace and outer space into war as new battlegrounds, even the most favorable book reviews cannot help raising questions on “why the war started” in the first place (Freeman 2015). And its detractors simply dismiss the novel as “another fearmongering piece written by another advocate for a bigger defense budget” (Frizzell 2016, 160) because the archipelago of U.S. military bases in the Asia Pacific is not even mentioned in the text: “If it is a plea for the administration to sit up and take notice of China as a threat, it does not do a good enough job of explaining why all the elements of U.S. national power supposedly are completely defunct” (160). Indeed, why would the Chinese military emulate the Imperial Japanese Army of the 1930s and launch a similar sneak attack upon Pearl Harbor after its discovery of a gas field in the Mariana Trench? Why does the novel render into oblivion the so-­ called hub-­ and-­ spoke system of bilateral military alliances between the United States and its allies, which has been implemented and sustained for more than seventy years (Twining 2007, 79), and the forward-­ deployed capabilities of the U.S. military installations in a region reconfigured as the “Indo-­ Pacific”?3 In this contribution, I read Ghost Fleet against what media critic Fareed Zakaria calls the “post-­ American world,” by which he means the “rise of the rest” vis-­à-­vis the West, and explore how the authors appropriate the 14 Field Trip historical interregnum in terms of a military threat posed by the rest—­in this case, embodied and exemplified by China in its technological advancement and military investment. Specifically, I argue that the two authors, by imagining the “aggressive act” of China as the logical consequence of its forty-­ year phenomenal economic development and as the effect of its possibly modeling on nineteenth-­ century American expansionism epitomized by Alfred Mahan’s notion of sea power, conflate the Chinese military with the Japanese war machinery of the 1930s, the first rise of a non-­Western power in human history, which failed because of its military aggressiveness,4 to highlight a possible similar fate awaiting the Chinese in their challenge to the U.S.-­ centered global order. What enables a defensive United States to triumph over an offensive China in the fiction is more than American cutting-­ edge technology and strategic alliances in the Indo-­ Pacific but the fundamental American values of individualism, innovativeness, and democracy compounded by the notions of diversity and multiculturalism. If the novel concludes with maintenance of status quo antebellum to nobody’s satisfaction, it affirms what I call a paradigm shift in the representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans from “cheap labor” to “high-­ tech” spies. 6 The Post-­American World: The Rest and the West In his 2008 book ThePost-­AmericanWorld, Fareed Zakaria announces from the outset that his work is “not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else” (Zakaria 2008, 1) and then articulates the present moment in terms of “the third great power shift of the modern...

Steel making cities of labor prowess: historical memory and new opportunities

In the beginning of 2020 in Russia an honorary title “Сity of labor prowess” was established, which was awarded to the cities, citizens of which made a significant contribution to reaching the Victory of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War of 1941– 1945. The cities to receive the new title ensured an uninterrupted production of war and civil products at plants during the war time and the citizens showed mass labor heroism and selflessness, confirmed by awarding of plants and workers by state rewards as well as presentation of challenge Red Flags of State Defense Committee. On July 2, 2020 the new title was awarded to 20 cities, among which were many centers of steel industry, in particular, Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Tagil, Novosibirsk, Izhevsk, Novokuznetsk. Steel industry in war years provided the needs of the country and the Red Army by all kinds of metals. Steel plants within a short time managed to arrange a wide-scale production of armor plates, gun, shell, armor-piercer steels and other new for them high quality alloyed steels , necessary for production of armament and war machinery. Besides, at the steel plants a production of ammunition and utilities for weapon and war machinery was mastered. The title “City of labor prowess” is a “civil” analogue of the title “City of military velour”. Despite this status does not envisages any material stimulation of citizens and additional financing of a city, receiving of it will enable not only to preserve the historical memory and to show respect to heroic forefathers, but also give a new pulse to development of regions, as well as will attract attention of mass media, business and federal authorities and will increase the tourist attractiveness.

Into the future: Donkergat Military Training Area and the Langebaan Ramsar site

Militaries need natural areas for offensive and defensive combat-readiness programmes. Here soldiers, war machinery and munitions are employed to prepare forces to execute warfighting tactics. Integration of environmental considerations into military activities is a growing global challenge. This study is based on a qualitative approach underpinned by an extensive literature review. The potential for the contribution of the military to a sensitive and diminishing wetland on the West Coast of South Africa (SA) is addressed. Donkergat Military Training Area (DMTA) in the Western Cape province, SA, provides diverse, seaborne training and warfighting facilities for the South African Special Forces (SASF), a specialist branch of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). This facility borders the Atlantic Ocean and Langebaan Lagoon, a Ramsar site (no. 398). One of only 15 island ecosystems on the southern African coastline, lies within the boundaries of the area. Saldanha Bay was identified as an economic development node by the national government. The 4 Special Forces Regiment (4 SFR) is thus obliged to contribute to the conservation of these environmental assets. Industrial development includes Operation Phakisa by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) that envisages expanded aquaculture practices in Saldanha Bay. Developers of fish and bivalve farms are allowed up-scaling aquaculture operations. These result in the loss of ecological attributes of the Langebaan Lagoon Wetland system. In the study, we recommend that parts of DMTA should be incorporated in the Ramsar definition for the Langebaan Lagoon Wetland system. Ecosystem indicators monitoring bird life, water and sediment quality, fish and rocky intertidal macrofauna in the DMTA waters should be intensified. The DMTA as a benchmark ecosystem in the Saldanha Bay area will facilitate environmentally sound planning amidst recent developments. Integrating sections of the Langebaan Lagoon that is part of the DMTA into the existing internationally recognised wetland area, the military can contribute significantly to wetland conservation. Management of these areas should be formulated in a Military Integrated Environmental Management (MIEM) plan by incorporating international guidelines.

Food Sovereignty, the Irish Homestead, and the First World War

At the outbreak of the First World War, George Russell (Æ) published a series of editorials in the Irish Homestead calling for Ireland to secure food reserves against the demands he predicted Britain would make upon Irish agricultural sectors to fuel the war effort. Irish agriculture, Russell writes, is part of a peculiar market shaped by empire: ‘Ireland is a food producing nation’; and yet ‘a machinery of export […] automatically deducts’ Irish cattle, pork, butter, milk, poultry, and eggs, ‘week by week’, while ‘week by week’ bacon, meat, flour, and other goods are imported. The machinery of war, it is implied, could easily disrupt these trade channels and trigger a scarcity crisis. Such an event would not be caused by an actual food shortage but by the unpredictable pressures of wartime markets, in which what Russell calls ‘famine prices’ would deplete food reserves. By analyzing Russell's strategic deployment of the language of colonial economics, this article argues that Russell recirculates the cultural memory of Ireland's Great Famine within Revivalist discourse in order to protest the conscription of Ireland's food reserves, rallying support for co-operatives as a matter of national defense. Co-operation dispels perceptions of Ireland as a quaint backwater of sleepy farms and reveals a competing vision of rural modernity that contrasts sharply with the terrifying military technologies and sense of a traumatic break with the past that typically anchor understandings of modernity in the era. For Russell, securing food sovereignty through self-sufficient, decentralized cooperatives could secure political sovereignty for the modern Irish nation, providing a blueprint for a new social order as geopolitical categories were re-constellated by global conflict.

Masculinities: Tracing the Trajectories of Gender Performance in Afghanistan War Poetry

This paper critically examines the war songs and poems of men who fought in the post 9/11 Afghanistan war. The study locates the analysis within the socio-cultural influences that left an impact on the ‘manly’ soldiers, allowing a 'micro mapping' of masculinity to be revealed in these men’s writings. Using thematic analysis techniques, fifty war songs and poemsfrom the years 2007 and 2008 are analyzed through the lens of masculinity and its performance. The critical investigation of the war songs and poems found that the performative dimension of masculinities in war spread around the themes of youth warriors; weapons; arms and war machinery; state of politics and need for an Islamic government; the motif of red color; and glorification of death. The religion Islam, their homeland Afghanistan and its traditional culture constantly act as a fuel to evoke overpowering emotions for the soldiers and their passion for fighting. It is furthermore found that the locally constructed masculinities informed the context ofthe Afghanistan War. This has implications for the way we understand masculinities especially in war poetry. As the paper demonstrates, the multiple ways in which the notion of masculinity is manifested in war poems point to the need to break free from the stereotypical understandings of warriors from conservative religious backgrounds.

Wachstumswahnsinn – Vor- und Nachdenker der Philosophie des Rückgangs

The progress of technology is considered by the majority as a reasonable endeavor. Nevertheless, the author tries to show that technological progress, in spite of its benefits, causes a variety of absurd dangers because of its uncontrolled growth. The author introduces the leading thinkers of a movement known as “Decroissance” which argues for a “philosophy of degrowth”. Degrowth means the undoing of technological growth and demands an end of its philosophy of “faster, wider, higher and more”. A destructive power can be seen in this, causing overexploitation in nature as well as the annihilation of humankind, not just by the machinery of war. Indeed, in view of the ecological and economical crises of our time, such as species extinction, the contaminations of the soil, the air and the sea, climate change and its impact on many societies, military conflicts due to scarce resources, then a return to more simplicity, frugality and reserve seems quite reasonable and absolutely essential in order to put an end to the madness. Hence the idea of “Decroissance” is quite relevant today and this article gives an instructive overview.

Camanchaca by Megan McDowell

Daoud never loses his poet’s eye and his noble heart. This early-twentieth-century Werther meets three key people: Russian adventurer and cartographer Berensky, who gives him his first balloon ride and his New York address; circus trapeze artist Nora, whose love lures him to Palermo; and Elena, an Italian immigrant to the United States. Woven among these pleasant awakening moments are the nadirs of repeated discrimination against him on grounds of his Arab identity, the arrest of his close friends, his father’s hostility toward him and financial ruin, and his baptism by fire as a US soldier at the Battle of Château-Thierry in July 1918. The novel’s primary plot covers barely a few weeks. This unified time/space is narrated in one-page dramatic vignettes. Like a rhizome, the plot sprouts longer secondary stories focusing on the four women in Daoud’s life: his mother, the proud Zoulikha, from whom he inherited his independent streak; his nanny, the faithful Mouldia, sold as a child on the slave market, who mothered him and taught him loyalty; his first love, the Arab-Italian trapeze artist Nora, with whom he shared self-respect; and his wife, Sicilian-born widow Elena, whose dignity and independence he instantly recognized. Altogether, the fifty-five untitled units/chapters that alternate between rhizome and secondary stories create an arresting phenomenology of dying. Daoud discovers the “civilized” world with the innocence of Robinson Crusoe discovering the “natural” world. His primary mode of exploration is a series of endless walks through cities and landscapes . We discover the diversity, colorfulness , and cosmopolitanism of Mediterranean cultures from the Maghreb to the Levant. This world teeming with explorers and adventurers, invasions and riots, contrasts with the uniform, gray, and busy northern industrial world. Trains, boats, airplanes, and the machinery of war are grim reminders that the birth of modernity was also the death of an epoch. Like many novels recently penned by North African writers, Tunisian Yankee revisits the awakening of national pride and its brutal repression. With great finesse, OumhanirelatestheTunisianscenebetween 1906 and 1911 to similar events taking place from Syria to Morocco at the hands of the French, Italian, and Ottoman authorities. Furthermore, she reveals the peoples’ shared experiences, blood ties, and political solidarity . Against this rich tapestry, she notes dates and events as passing references that help anchor the story in time and space without obscuring the characters. Her flexible language and visual sensibility create unforgettable paintings in words. Alice-Catherine Carls University of Tennessee at Martin Diego Zúñiga. Camanchaca. Trans. Megan McDowell. Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2017. 110 pages. Camanchaca is a thick fog often seen along certain parts of the Chilean coast. Pushed along by the winds coming off the Pacific Ocean, it often appears at night, covering the road in a thick, hazy layer. The camanchaca keeps you from seeing clearly, it is dangerous, it makes the landscape blurred, and it demands attention and caution, much like the novel by Diego Zúñiga that borrows its name. The story is narrated in brief fragments in which synthesis, brevity, and poetics characterize the remarkable debut novel of this young Chilean narrator. Camanchaca is a road novel along the lines of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but it is narrated with an intimacy and minimalism more reminiscent of the best work of Alejandro Zambra. A father and son set off on a journey from Santiago, Chile, to Tacna, Peru, to visit a cheap dentist who can help fix the boy’s teeth. The protagonist, a child Gisela Heffes Sophie La Belle and the Miniature Cities Literal A wealth of dizzying ideas emerges from this tiny book (presented by the author in both Spanish and English) as Heffes plays storyteller, philosopher, and provocateur in her quest to entertain and edify her audience. Walking a thin and blurry line between apocalypse and fairy tale, Sophie La Belle and the Miniature Cities is a book that both defies classification and demands multiple reads to appreciate its many facets. Jérôme Ferrari The Principle Trans. Howard Curtis Europa Editions Parisian writer Jérôme Ferrari plunges us into the world of Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize winner...

Re-imagining the Empire of Japan through Japanese Schoolboy Uniforms

Japanese kimono and the Japanese schoolboy uniform continue to interact with, and interrogate, global fashions as contemporary designers continue to call on the tropes of ‘military chic’ (Tonchi) and Japanese-inspired clothing (Kawamura).

Long Night of the Tankers: Hitler's War Against Caribbean Oil, by David Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig

Long Night of the Tankers: Hitler's War Against Caribbean Oil, by David Bercuson and Holger El. Herwig. Calgary, University of Calgary Press, 2014. xix, 344 pp. $39.95 US (paper). David Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig, both historians at the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, have written a highly readable and at times suspenseful history of the so-called operation Neuland (newland), the German submarine campaign against Allied shipping in the Caribbean in 1942, which so far has not received major attention in the historiography on the Battle of the Atlantic. Reading the book with a particular interest in the history of oil, one may be slightly disappointed as the authors approach their topic the angle of military history and especially submarine warfare. Even the book's catchy title is somewhat misleading, considering the authors' basic and convincing contention that Admiral Karl Donitz was not particularly focusing the campaign on tankers and Allied oil supply but rather following a simpler tonnage strategy according to which any sunken Allied ship was undermining the enemy's war effort (p. 123L, 155). This misconception may have reduced the effectiveness of Operation Neuland, which the book presents in an exciting, largely chronological narrative with a passion for technical and military detail which will delight readers interested in military history. As it caught the allies largely by surprise and there were, at the beginning, no effective counterstrategies, Operation Neuland was initially highly effective. In the first twelve days after their arrival in the Caribbean in February 1942, German submarines sank seventeen allied tankers and ships with a combined carrying capacity of 115,856 tons (p. 72). Until the end of that year they destroyed so many tankers that oil shipments the Caribbean to the US sank from the 1941 average of 1.42 million barrels per day to just 391,000 barrels in 1942 (p. 199). In one chapter, the authors claim that, due to oil's central position in every modern war machinery, these shortfalls had a significant effect on the Allied war effort and the supply situation on the US east coast, but they do not explore this effect within the larger war economy of oil in great detail. However, they show that the problems to transport Caribbean oil to the American East coast were crucial for the decision to build the pipelines Big Inch and Little Big Inch in order to transport oil the Texas oil fields to Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York in June 1942. …

Military Logistics Efforts during the Vietnam War Supply Chain Management on Both Sides

This paper analyses the role of military logistics operations during the Vietnam War. It looks at the technical and strategic role of logistics, and the physical obstacles that had to be overcome in Vietnam. The US had highly sophisticated war machinery that was deployed in a country that lacked not only the transportation infrastructure (roads, ports, airports) but also had extreme terrain and climate conditions. On the other hand the Vietnamese had a well-oiled supply chain which often was carried on bicycles and literally on the backs of humans not only along the Ho Chi Minh Trail but throughout the north and south of Vietnam. On the US side helicopters played an important transportation role substituting land transport with air transport. The war effort escalated so rapidly that there was literally no time for logistics advancement operations and prepositioning of assets which resulted in a parallel run of war fighting and logistics operations. Naval operations had to provide their own landing crafts due to the lack of deep seaports with adequate lifting equipment. At the same time airlifts required runways and aircontrol facilities which needed to be provided by the US. Even the US Department of Defense (DOD) food supply chain was supported from abroad while local war fighters could live off the land. The Vietnam War logistics effort reached over to neighboring countries, and Thailand played an important role with its naval and airbases close to Sattahip, U-Tapao and northern parts of Thailand. There are valuable lessons to be learned for both military logistics as well as private sector supply chain management.

Camels in the front line

This paper is a short comment on the historical perception of camels in Europe with special regard to Ottoman Turkish occupation in the Carpathian Basin. Regardless of their varied functions ranging from tokens of royal selfrepresentation to mundane beasts of burden or war machinery, these animals always stood out as exotica without ever having been integrated into the local domestic fauna. The documentary and iconographic data cited complement known osteological evidence of camels in the study area.

Healthcare and warfare. Medical space, mission and apartheid in twentieth century northern Namibia.

In the year 1966, the first government hospital, Oshakati hospital, was inaugurated in northern South-West Africa. It was constructed by the apartheid regime of South Africa which was occupying the territory. Prior to this inauguration, Finnish missionaries had, for 65 years, provided healthcare to the indigenous people in a number of healthcare facilities of which Onandjokwe hospital was the most important. This article discusses these two agents’ ideological standpoints. The same year, the war between the South-West African guerrillas and the South African state started, and continued up to 1988. The two hospitals became involved in the war; Oshakati hospital as a part of the South African war machinery, and Onandjokwe hospital as a ‘terrorist hospital’ in the eyes of the South Africans. The missionary Onandjokwe hospital was linked to the Lutheran church in South-West Africa, which became one of the main critics of the apartheid system early in the liberation war. Warfare and healthcare became intertwined with apartheid policies and aggression, materialised by healthcare provision based on strategic rationales rather than the people’s healthcare needs. When the Namibian state took over a ruined healthcare system in 1990, the two hospitals were hubs in a healthcare landscape shaped by missionary ambitions, war and apartheid logic.

Salvage and Destruction: The Recycling of Books and Manuscripts in Great Britain during the Second World War

AbstractAn analysis of Great Britain's campaigns to recycle books and paper reveals the paradoxes of wartime waste policies: destroying history and culture for the sake of reusing materials, and the impact of recycling on the war machinery's own wastefulness. Conscious of systematic recycling in Nazi Germany and its own dependence on imports, the British government established a salvage department only weeks after the outbreak of war. Beginning in 1940, this department required all large towns to collect recyclable materials. Salvage, beyond lessening shortages, served ideological and psychological aims, because reused materials were turned into weapons. This led to a critical redefinition of recycling as the war progressed. People who previously characterised the Third Reich's recycling programmes as typical fascist control now considered compulsory recycling in Great Britain wholly positive. However, protesters claimed the government was causing irreparable harm by salvaging items whose value far exceeded their worth as scrap. The harvesting of books, periodicals and manuscripts as ‘waste’ paper proved particularly contentious, with some arguing that their own government was adding to the destruction that bombs were causing to Great Britain's cultural inheritance.

Science, a weapon of peace

Can science be a route to peace? The way scientists across the world’s many religious, racial and cultural divides collaborate, you might imagine that it can. Science favours no God, colour or creed. Facts are sacred, commentary is free. But many of the advances in science are propelled by the machinery of war, the technologies of self-defence, and the treatments of the battlefield. When a medical student or doctor is revealed as a bomber, murderer or torturer, the higher ethics of science and medicine are wounded by their treachery. Advancements in science are no protection against violence or cruelty in any society. A more intuitive hypothesis is that neglect of science damages society – facts become irrelevant and bigotry seems sacred. The starkest example, from my experience, is the scientific decline of Arab and Muslim nations. Once the world considered Arab and Muslim science, including medical science, to be the pinnacle of knowledge and discovery; but few of today’s scientists would seek answers to the mysteries of the universe in the once-mighty seats of learning of Baghdad, Lahore and Timbuktu. The reasons for this decline are complex although a systematic erosion of education, science and intellectual debate played an important role. Hence, a second reasonable hypothesis is that restoring the status of these disciplines encourages peace. There are no quick wins – the Arab Spring has demonstrated that clearly enough. But there is a move among Arab and Muslim nations, in particular in the Middle East, Iran and Turkey, to reinvigorate science in their societies. Centres of science and technology are beginning to appear. Research papers are more frequently submitted to international medical journals and increasingly published; science may not yet be mainstream but it has become a work stream, not least because the health needs of the region have grown great. These initiatives are to be encouraged. In this context, Ismail and colleagues assess the state of health research in the Eastern Mediterranean Region of WHO, which covers the Middle East – a difficult task, since defining which countries are included in the region is problematic enough. In a separate paper, Haworth and others explain why the Hajj pilgrimage offers a unique opportunity to test the effectiveness of influenza prevention strategies that require a large sample size. These issues may seem distant but focusing on advances in science and improvements in health can be a unifying force. As such, encouraging a culture of research and science in Arab and Muslim nations may prove to be the greatest contribution to world peace that any medical journal can make.

(Re)Constructing Masculinity and Femininity in African War Narratives : The Youth in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Gorretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War.

Introduction: The Youth factor in Africa's War: Issues and ChallengesEarly writings on Africa's wars, for the most part, have privileged the adult viewpoint and experience.1 Although the human and economic costs of war in Africa remains understudied, less acknowledged are the roles and experiences of Africa's children and youth. Neither the psychological toll on the young, nor the gender implications of youth experiences in war has been sufficiently examined. The youth factor, therefore, constitutes part of the muted index in African literature. The deficiency of research to fully address or represent these dimensions of Africa's history of wars has led to the call for ...a more comprehensive study and understanding of the nature of the crises bedeviling the African (Nwankwo 2). This paucity is, however, slowly being redressed by the outflow of narratives that centralize youth perspectives on war. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, several works based on this most neglected aspect of Africa's history have been published.2 The experiences and contributions of the young to the war machinery are being represented in a variety of genres, and questions regarding the impact of war on their socialized gender identities have also emerged. Research on war emphasize the importance of gender discourse in the human experience of war. A gender focus clarifies issues that affect males and females, differently, and also enhances understanding of its links to youth identity reconstruction in the context of war.3In contemporary times, most nations on the African continent have gone through war or conflict in one form or the other. A sample list includes Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and most recently, Mali4 These examples are constant reminders of the collateral damages wreaked by this pervasive force on the continent. Without a doubt, war has been a permanent feature of Africa's post- colonial terrain; children and youth have also become the new machinery of war. One writer invokes the tragedy of children's socialization into the violent ethics of war:In my travels in East Africa, I have encountered terrifying perils that engulf children's lives in horrific ways. On our planet, during our watch, children have become the new face of war. The aiming of children has become one of the woist evils of the modem worlds; the existence of soldieis represents an absolute defeat foi humanity. I feai that in future when only memories of oui time remain, otheis will wondei of us: How could we have tolerated the brutal, forced conscriptions of children to kill? The future will likely question oui veiy humanity. (Dunson 6)Africa's children have been turned into victims of war as well as victimizers. Their increasing presence in warfare has drawn the attention of many human rights organizations and concerned individuals to the exploitation of the young. This situation leads scholars and critics alike to question the future of the continent. Incidentally, despite efforts of international and humanitarian organizations to curb the forced engagement of children and youth in war and to protect their rights, the enigma of child still hangs over the continent, even in the 21st century. However, public awareness and non-governmental groups have taken on the challenge. For instance, in March 2005, Invisible Children Inc., a charity organization based in the United States released a controversial documentary film calling for the immediate capture of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) junta, Joseph Kony. The film titled, Kony 2012, has been controversial. It's purpose and strategies for raising awareness on this issue have come under serious public scrutiny. In Children at War f2006), RW. Singer asserts that the use of soldiers is probably the world's most unrecognized form of abuse(9). Using interviews from both adult and soldiers, as well as humanitarian workers, he exposes the vulnerability of children to exploitation during wars. …

Japanese Warrior Prints 1646-1905 (review)

Reviewed by: Japanese Warrior Prints 1646-1905 Nam-Lin Hur (bio) James King and Yuriko Iwakiri, editors. Japanese Warrior Prints 1646-1905. Brill. 2007. 408. US$154.00 In understanding the warrior prints (musha-e) that flourished in Japan, we need two sets of materials: the warrior prints themselves and the historical tales of war (gunki monogatari) from which these prints were drawn. The warrior prints emerged in the mid-seventeenth century and came to an end in 1905 - the year the Russo-Japanese War was concluded. [End Page 448] Japanese Warrior Prints 1645-1905 contains a finely selected group of representative warrior prints that visualize heroic samurai figures who coloured the critical moments of Japanese history. This collection of illustrations, which is presented chronologically and accompanied by well-documented renditions, offers a rich repertoire of visual representations of heroism. It is worth noting that these prints not only entertained readers but also helped to support the woodblock-print industry in early modern and Meiji times. The editors of this volume, James King and Yuriko Iwakiri, have done a wonderful job in locating, collecting, classifying, and cataloguing a wide range of warrior prints. This publication will surely serve as a comprehensive introduction to Western readers who might ask why and how the Japanese people became so infatuated with heroic warriors and their tales, which stretch from the Shōmonki (Chronicle of Masakado, 940) to the Taiheiki (Chronicle of the Great Peace, c. 1340-67) in early modern times. Interestingly, the background of warrior prints is found in ancient and medieval times, but the prints themselves were a product of early modern times. One might wonder about this. The editors do not directly tackle this question but, rather, focus on the details of the comings and goings of the artists who produced the prints as well as the artistic styles and literary and theatrical ramifications of these pieces over time. In the historical trajectory of warrior prints, the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), which was followed ten year later by the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), proved to be a turning point in that the previous heroic samurai and their much-cherished sword fights were replaced with modern military officers and the unprecedented machinery of war. This produced a new genre, often referred to as sensō-e (war pictures). As King and Iwakiri point out, 'Whilst musha-e as a genre was often infused with nostalgia, sensō-e are propaganda pieces, advertisements of the military triumphs which glorify the courage and determination of the "modern" Japanese army and navy.' Still, this new genre of sensō-e reflected, to some extent, the traditional sentiments of heroic tales, all of which featured acts of bravery conducted against insurmountable odds. To be sure, in early modern times the warrior prints could not escape government censorship. But the most critical challenge, and the one that eventually ended the tradition of warrior prints, was, understandably, 'the new lithographic and photographic technologies which allowed war reportage to be circulated more immediately and, in the opinion of many, more realistically.' Modern technology delivered the death knell of the warrior prints, which had been embedded in a superhuman heroism that refused the limits of time and space. But the termination of warrior prints did not mean the demise of warrior culture, which has been carved deep into the collective psyche [End Page 449] of the Japanese. In early modern times, for example, Empress Jingū (and, by extension, her son Emperor Ōjin), who had, according to legend, conquered the ancient Korean kingdoms, brought the Japanese to the height of national pride. She was certainly a military hero. Similarly, the high points of the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War at the turn of the nineteenth century, which were thoroughly exploited for representation in warrior prints, decisively elevated Japan to the status of a great power. It is ironic that the flowering of warrior prints in these years presaged their demise. Still, the heroic images of warrior prints continued to survive until 1945, albeit through a different medium. Japanese Warrior Prints 1645-1905 offers a valuable graphic introduction to the enduring power of warrior culture in Japanese history. Nam...

War Toys: Breaking and Remaking in Great War Narratives

Children's picturebooks about war explore the encounter with death through the animation, destruction, and mending of symbolic toys. To empower the child caught in the machinery of war and loss, these stories oscillate between breaking and remaking, as they articulate cycles of adventure and return, explosive victories and traumatic suffering. By layering verbal and visual narratives, as well as inversions in the relationships of power, some stories invite complexly ironic readings. Animals mediate between human and inhuman, and codes of size evoke latent vulnerabilities. Toys perform cultural work that includes the reinscription of disrupted gender roles and the naturalization of a social order that depends upon disorderly violence.

Rainbows, Fogs, and Other Smokescreens: Billy Budd and the Question of Ethics

Rainbows, Fogs, and Other Smokescreens:Billy Budd and the Question of Ethics Thomas Claviez (bio) while . . . common novels laboriously spin veils of mystery, only to complacently clear them up at last; and . . . common dramas do but repeat the same; yet the profounder emanations of the human mind . . . never unravel their own intricacies, and have no proper endings; but in imperfect, unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate. Herman Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities 1. The Smokescreen of Expediency There hardly exists any novel in the literary history of the United States that has stirred a comparably heated debate and that has given rise to such controversial, if not outright opposed interpretations, as has Herman Melville's Billy Budd. If one short glance into the archives of Melville exegesis wouldn't suffice to support this assessment, the highly contradictory conclusions of one of the most famous commentators on Melville's work, Hannah Arendt, might be enough to verify such a claim. In one of her essays that refer to Billy Budd, she argues for a tragic view in regard to the "virtue" of Captain Vere: Virtue—which perhaps is less than goodness but still alone capable "of embodiment in lasting institutions"—must prevail at the expense of the good man as well; absolute, natural innocence, [End Page 31] because it only can act violently, is "at war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind," so that virtue finally interferes not to prevent the crime of evil but to punish the violence of absolute innocence. . . . The tragedy is that the law is made for men, and neither for angels nor for devils. Laws and all "lasting institutions" break down not only under the onslaught of elemental evil but under the impact of absolute innocence as well . . . the virtuous man, Captain Vere, recognizes that only the violence of this goodness is adequate to the depraved power of evil. The absolute—and to Melville an absolute was incorporated in the Rights of Man—spells doom to everyone when it is introduced into the political realm. (Revolution 79) In this view, both Billy and Vere are tragic figures, in that Vere just fulfils his duty, while Billy's violence, though absolutely and archaically "innocent," poses a threat to a world of "lasting institutions." Rather surprisingly, however, in Arendt's essay "Reflection on Violence," Billy turns into the embodiment of the common man. Confronted with "outrageous events or conditions" that demand "swiftness" of action, Arendt here legitimizes Billy's use of violence, in that it at times represents "the only possibility of setting the scales of justice right again." Thus, it cannot and should not be deemed "irrational" (28). If such outright contradictory interpretations seem to support the common assumption that works of art are able to accommodate and negotiate conflicting stances that a theory could not afford to comprise, it is striking that in "Reflections on Violence" Arendt uses the argument of expediency to redeem Billy's attack on Claggart. This argument has usually been used to defend Captain's Vere's "swiftness" in hanging Billy, although such a view has been highly disputed in the meantime. However, some questions surrounding Melville's enigmatic and posthumously published novel still haven't been satisfactorily answered: Whether Melville indeed redeems Captain Vere's behavior and his decision to have Billy executed on the basis of the expediency of the situation; whether he considers the ship's commander as simply mad; or whether he unveils Vere as a self-interested, willing collaborator and servant of a machinery of war which, according to the narrator in the novel, is the "abrogation of everything but brute Force" (Billy Budd [End Page 32] 122). Such brute force, however, is also what Billy resorts to; the final question, then, is whether, if Vere's behavior is to be considered morally questionable, we are to conclude that Billy is consequently rehabilitated, as Arendt suggests in "Reflections on Violence." The novel's genealogy of reception and criticism can indeed serve as a small cultural history of ethics. The critics who share the first point of view—that...

Curriculum Development Under Military Occupation: Palestinian Environmental Health Education in the Second Intifada

War-like conditions arise when war machinery is used to suppress a population, and is distinct from when two states are at war (see Halileh and Giacaman, 2002). Under these conditions, in development theory, the "relief-development" continuum calls for short-term interventions until "post-conflict". Not usually considered a short-term intervention, education is often left out, except for peace education. But what about long-term development, and what about curriculum other than peace education? This paper is about balancing a long term curriculum initiative with emergency initiatives, such as documenting injuries and deaths, and surveying mental health effects. The case study is a Palestinian environmental health education initiative, surrounded by the realities of Israeli military occupation: travel restrictions, military checkpoints, curfews, closures, demolitions, arrests, shootings and bombings. Participant observation and retrospective analysis document a period ranging from January 2000 to January 2005, and concludes that education is far more than the much-promoted conflict mediation—it is an important part of coping under war-like conditions.