National Guards Research Articles

Your Country, My Country: How Films About The Iraq War Construct Publics

American documentaries about are fascinating from many perspectives, but they matter to us all now because they are active interventions in public life, on a topic that concerns each American in some way. They fit squarely into a core expectation about documentaries: that they will be about something timely and important. They have arrived at a moment when political documentary is growing rapidly in popularity. For instance, a Pew survey after the 2004 national election (see http://www.pewinternet.org/report_display.asp?r=147) reported that 31% of American adults said they had seen a political documentary relating to the campaign or the candidates. They also fit squarely into an expectation about democracy and public life: that it is fed by the provision of information for public knowledge and action. By public, we mean here a group of people mobilized by their common knowledge of common problems, as American philosopher John Dewey used the term in his landmark 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems. Publics, informal networks of people linked by common concerns, are formed by communication with each other about these problems, and their communication is fed by media provision. They create public spheres, to use a term given stature by the work of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Publics are not, in this sense, unitary blocs under the rubric of a nation state or society, but, rather, groups constituted informally around issues or problems. Publics around the issues of the War may be national (federal taxpayers), regional (people represented by their National Guards), local (residents of a neighborhood whose resources are changed by the war), or issue-specific (families of poorly-provisioned soldiers). documentaries have rushed in-and by now there are dozens, with more than a score distributed-to fill gaps in mainstream media coverage of Iraq. They provide explanations of why we are in Iraq if there are no weapons of mass destruction and there never were. They provide a chronicle of the actual experience of combat. They provide a window into the daily lives of Iraqis. Some have been designed to enlighten and inform, others to mobilize. All of them have both exemplified and played a role in the growing public disillusionment with the war, with the regimes that have led the war, and with the quality and process of providing systems for both supplies and people to wage the war. Thus, these documentaries are not only movies about the War, they are also part of a process of constituting a public around the issues of the war. How can we understand them specifically in their role as agents of the construction of publics? Different kinds of work approach and even define the problem differently, with different implications for the nature of public engagement. Here, three approaches are addressed: essays about the legitimacy and logic of the war; films about soldiers' experiences; and films about the Iraqi experience of war. Why-We-Are-in-Iraq Docs These are essay films that analyze and extrapolate motives for the U.S. government's decision to invade Iraq. They include the film that started the current trend, Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, US, 2004); Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki, US, 2005); for Sale (Brave New Films, US, 2006); and Shocking and Awful (Deep Dish TV, US, 2005). In terms of constructing publics, all of Michael Moore's work is a fascinating exercise in tension. The charged polarity in his films is really between the victims and the powerful. Moore's projects portray a world divided between the atomized and downtrodden, and the callously rich and powerful. He acts, in all his films, as the representative of the people who do not have agency, the victims, and he uses the weapons of the weak-laughter, ridicule, shame-to point fingers at the powerful. This is a different project from invoking agency- calling on people to assume the power they have-and it is also extremely entertaining. …

State Partnership Program: Mississippi and Bolivia

The National Guard State Partnership Program seeks to link the National Guards of the United States with Ministries of Defense of emerging democratic nations in cooperative activities of mutual benefit. The Program aims to enhance those connections by bringing “Hometown America” onto the international stage through personal, sustained relationships. These associations could build a “Bridge to America,” establishing and nurturing bonds of mutual understanding at the grass roots level. The focus of the program has shifted rapidly to the “citizen” aspects of the National Guard, with instruction, orientation, and personnel exchanges in areas such as economic development, small business administration, and entrepreneurship. Mississippi's program partner is Bolivia. Mississippi State University was called upon to participate in the program by providing Subject Matter Experts. Scientists spent seven days in Bolivia working with the Bolivian military (made up of conscripted soldiers as young as 14 years of age), the Catholic University, and local villages, advising on greenhouse vegetable production and instructing program participants on cultural practices that would benefit their communities.

Maritime Piracy: Defining the Problem

��� urrent definitions of piracy are inadequate as a tool for policymakers and need to change. According to Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Mohd Najib Tun Razak, “At present the International Chamber of Commerce’s International Maritime Bureau (IMB) groups all forms of piracy under one category of piracy. Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore feel that acts of piracy should be separated according to the crime committed.” 1 To meet his challenge to provide a useful definition for maritime crimes, the U.N. International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the IMB should revise existing definitions of piracy to include four categories of maritime crimes: corruption, sea robbery, piracy, and maritime terrorism. According to the IMB, incidents of maritime piracy have more than quadrupled in the last ten years, increasing from 90 reported attacks in 1994 to 445 attacks in 2003. But these numbers are misleading due to loose definitions of the problem. Most acts cited in the annual IMB reports on maritime piracy are not the classic boarding and hijacking of a merchant vessel on the high seas. Instead, nearly two-thirds of the attacks in 2003 occurred while the ships were stationary in port and are better classified as sea robbery. Current definitions also overlook corruption among port authorities and classify maritime terrorism together with reports of dockworkers stealing cans of paint. Each category of maritime crimes requires different resources, methods of approach and agencies, and the lack of distinction in defining the problem complicates targeting resources and disperses efforts to unrelated and inconsequential issues. For example, extortion by government officials can be best resolved by tackling government corruption, while police should more properly handle sea robbery. Piracy, on the other hand, requires maritime assets that are available only to national coast guards or navies. Finally, because of its inherent political nature and potential for devastating consequences, maritime terrorism must be separately identified to allow

The Growing Role of States in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Case of the State Partnership Program

States can and do play an important role in contemporary U.S. foreign policy. This article will discuss the growing role of states through an investigation of the State Partnership Program (SSP). The SSP pairs state National Guards with the militaries of other countries through U.S. military engagement programs. The state‐level National Guard then becomes the primary site for implementing U.S. military engagement programs. Both a federalism and decision‐making perspective, however, are unable to recognize this role. The decision‐making bias of foreign policy analysis affords states a limited international role and minimal influence in shaping the policies of the government toward other countries. An implementation perspective, however, reveals a growing role of states carrying out U.S. foreign policy, including the “high politics” of national security issues. States give decisions meaning through the practice of policy implementation. A detailed case study of the Maryland–Estonia partnership illustrates how an implementation perspective can recognize a growing role of states in shaping U.S. foreign policy.

“Citizens of a Free People”: Popular Liberalism and Race in Nineteenth-Century Southwestern Colombia

“Citizens of a Free People”: Popular Liberalism and Race in Nineteenth-Century Southwestern Colombia

Making Trust or Breaking Trust: Cooperation and Conflict Between Organizations—The Case of the Active Services and National Guard

Cooperation between organizations creates a dilemma—should an organization cooperate risking exploitation or should an organization refuse to cooperate and perhaps keep itself from successfully performing a task? The answer to this dilemma is trust. If an organization can trust another then it need not fear cooperating with it. How does trust develop? This question is answered using a comparison of the air force and army with their respective National Guards. It is shown that air force procedures facilitated the development of trust while army procedures hindered it. Air force policies also incrementally increased the number of interactions between it and the guard allowing trust to develop. Army policies did not.

Memory and the Cult of Revolution in the 1871 Paris Commune

Memory and the Cult of Revolution in the 1871 Paris Commune Martin P. Johnson At the beginning of the civil war between the Paris Commune and the National Assembly in early April 1871, a crowd of women gathered on the Place de la Concorde for a march on the government at Versailles. "There were between seven and eight hundred women," one of the participants , Beatrix Excoffon, later recalled. "Some talked about explaining to Versailles what Paris wanted; others talked about how things were a hundred years ago, when the women of Paris had once before gone to Versailles to carry off the baker and the baker's wife and the baker's little boy, as they said then."1 This demonstration, the largest by women during the Commune, was founded upon a collective memory of the October Days of 1789, when revolutionary women and National Guards forced the royal family to return to Paris. It was only one of many instances in which the collective memory of the revolutionary tradition was expressed during the Commune; indeed, 1870-1871 witnessed a near obsession with the Great Revolution. Yet while men and women elaborated and acted upon the memory of the revolutionary past, the congruences and divergences in the ways they interpreted that tradition have not been sufficiently explored. This neglect mirrors a larger omission, for gender remains virtually invisible in the substantial body of scholarship created by ethnologists , historians, and sociologists in the last 10 years concerning collective memory, traditions, and commemorations.2 Where women do appear in such studies they are generally symbolic figures, such as the republican icon of "Marianne" in nineteenth-century France.3 Representations and images of women reveal much about the cultures that formed them, but the question of precisely how collective memory shapes historical action by both women and men requires greater attention. French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs initiated the modern study of collective memory with his insight that "social frameworks" shape memory and in turn memory shapes social behavior.4 There has been, however, profound disagreement about whether gender should be included in this analysis. Sylvie Vandecastle-Schweitzer and Daniele Voldman have argued that memory is not related to one's sex but to the "events of the individual's life," and warn against constructing a "feminine historical object" after having demolished a "masculinized historical object."5 While James Fentress and Chris Wickham do not deny the possibility of a "women's memory," they argue that the main barrier to identifying it is © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. ι (Spring) 40 Journal of Women's History Spring "hegemony." In other words, the language, commemorative occasions, and narrative process are so deeply dominated by male voices and actors as to render the discovery of an independent women's historical consciousness nearly impossible.6 Catherine R. Stimpson has evoked the same concept of hegemony, finding that "the powerful erase other groups" in their quest to forge the collective memory in their own likeness .7 Yet folklorists and ethnologists, who have generally preceded historians in exploring these issues, have often found clear differences in the ways men and women recount the past, implying that gender is a significant category of difference in regard to collective memory and traditions.8 Historians must do more to take up the point Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolf Starn make. "Whenever memory is invoked we should be asking ourselves: by whom, where, in which context, against what?"9 The Commune is an ideal vehicle for exploring the intersection of collective memory and gender difference because its origins and key features were shaped by the memory of the French revolutionary tradition and women were remarkably active in the movement.10 The very term "Commune" was derived from the Great Revolution; Communards read newspapers named after and imitating the popular press of the Revolution, and a Committee of Public Safety was instituted following the model of 1793. Against this background, women in 1871 fought on barricades, spoke in clubs, and worked to reshape society through producer cooperatives and other institutions in ways unprecedented even in 1793 and 1848.11 For these reasons the content and meaning of the historical memory has long...

The Public Nature of Women's Work: Definitions and Debates during the Revolution of 1848

On 21 May 1848 the revolutionary government held a festival in Paris to celebrate the Republic and to gather French citizens in a display of harmony and unity. Known as the Fete de la Concorde, the event took place on the Champs de Mars, which had been prepared by men employed in the National Workshops and was decorated with the results of competitions held among the nation's artists by the Bureau des Beaux Arts. Statues five meters in height representing Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity populated one end of the field, while allegories of France, Italy, and Germany, with arms extended in friendship, occupied the other. A reviewing stand held the National Assembly and other dignitaries who presided over a parade with thousands of participants: delegations of officials from the departements, the national guards of Paris and the provinces, and artisan corporations, as well as floats and choirs. A major feature of the parade was a band of five hundred young girls, dressed in white and crowned with oak leaves, who sang the Hymn of the Girondins. The presence of these working-class girls received considerable attention in press accounts and memoirs of the event, especially given both the circumscribed role they played in the overall festivities and the participation of other groups of women. Some accounts were favorable in their discussion of the girls; most were not. Commentators used gendered terms; their praise or criticism reflected their awareness of

Paris and the Rural Hordes: an Exploration of Myth and Reality in the French Civil War of 1871

On 2 April 1871, soon after the echoes of cannon fire had died away over Neuilly and Courbevoie in the first engagement of the civil war, the executive commission of the revolutionary Paris commune drafted an angry proclamation:The royalist conspirators have attacked! Despite the moderation of our attitude they have attacked! No longer able to count on the French army, they have attacked with the pontifical zouaves and imperial police…This morning, Charette's Chouans, Cathelineau's Vendéens, Trochu's Bretons, flanked by Valentin's gendarmes…embarked on civil war against our National Guards.