Past Wars Research Articles

Post-war mental health, wealth, and justice.

The paper launches a normative debate on an under-assessed health policy problem, namely post-war mental health. It explores its ethical dimensions and argues for a strong moral claim to invest in it as a form of reparation that must be added to the jus post-bellum’s truncated list of recommendations. Many countries are currently involved in armed conflict and many more still recovering from past wars. These generally belong to the low-to-middle income group that spend minimally on social and health expenditures.The problem worsens post-war for these countries are burdened with an increased prevalence of mental health disorders with far-reaching repercussions. Failure to recognize in particular war-related psychosocial sequels could weaken capacity to recover and may contribute to a nation’s socio-political unrest that could perpetuate throughout generations. The paper argues that reconstructing war-torn societies should be achieved by rebuilding first and foremost the shattered individual. Policy-makers have a stronger positive obligation to invest in post-war mental health because of a shared responsibility for the harm inflicted. This consequently means a shared responsibility in building a sustainable and viable post-war ‘minimally just state’.The paper draws on Pogge’s ‘relational conceptions of justice’ and the concept of‘shared responsibility’ used in contemporary environmental discourses. It challenges the old paradigmatic model of the just-war tradition which views the world as an archipelagos of well-delineated, self-contained and atomized actors. It also aims to set the stage for an ‘ethics of post-war mental health’ in line with what Ricoeur calls ‘an ethics of memory’.

Japan's Parliamentary Confrontation on the Post-Cold War National Security Policies

AbstractIn the fall 2007 Diet session, the largest opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) showed strong opposition against the government's proposal to continue the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) refueling operations to support maritime inspections in the Indian Ocean. In order to evaluate this parliamentary confrontation, the article compares the handling of this issue with the six past major post-Cold War national security policies. The DPJ constantly presented its own legislative proposals in order to participate in Diet deliberation. DPJ's counter proposals, however, were not always cooperative with the government. This different attitude by the DPJ could not be explained by the public and media opinions or the position of the supporting organization but by DPJ's political calculation.

China in the Japanese Radical Gaze, 1945–1955

AbstractJapanese images of China have much to tell us about the way Japan sees its own modernisation and its place in the international system. Contrary to popular belief, Japan did not turn unabashedly toward the USA after 1945. During the first decade after World War II, a number of important Japanese radical historians and thinkers decided that modernisation could be accomplished without the help of the West. Just when many in Japan were looking to America and Europe as exemplars of modernisation, others looked instead to revolutionary China and its past struggles against Japanese colonialism in the construction of a very different historical position from that ordinarily associated with the early post-war years. Certain Japanese historians, inspired by the push toward decolonisation in Asia, set about writing the history of the present in ways that aligned Japan with modern Chinese history. Even though China had just been liberated from Japanese colonial rule, Japanese Marxists saw their own position—under American imperialism—as historically and politically congruous with China's past war of resistance against Japan (1937–45). Through campaigns to develop a kind of cultural Marxism on the margins of Japanese society, they sought to bring about post-war Japanese ‘national liberation’ from American hegemony in ways that consciously simulated past Chinese resistance to Imperial Japan. Replacing Japan's own cultural Marxist traditions from the pre-war era with the more palpable and acceptable example of China, they also hoped a new form of Asian internationalism could remedy the problem of Japan's wartime past. The historical irony associated with this discursive twist deferred to future generations the problem of how the Left* would come to terms with the past.

The politics of war memory in radical Basque nationalism

This paper examines how war memory has been appropriated, interpreted and domesticated by radical Basque nationalism. The so-called patriotic left presents an interesting case study because of its need to justify ETA's use of unconventional methods and political violence. The politics of war memory places violent conflicts in a historical continuum where Basques and Spaniards stand against each other. The memory of the Carlist Wars, the Spanish Civil War and ETA's violent campaign are all used both as an ethnic boundary between Basques and Spaniards and as a powerful mobilizing agent. The conflict between the Basque insurgents and the Spanish state is celebrated as a narrative of heroic past wars and redemptive sacrifices, hence removing the need to reflect on the usefulness of the armed struggle.

An Ethic of Political Reconciliation

The core proposition of this article is that reconciliation, both as a process and an end state, is a concept of justice. Its animating virtue is mercy and its goal is peace. These concepts are expressed most deeply in religious traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The idea of justice as right relationship is also found in the contemporary restorative justice movement, an approach to criminal justice that has emerged in the past generation.For contemporary political orders addressing past war, genocide, and authoritarianism, the holistic justice of reconciliation involves not only the legal guarantee and actual practice of human rights and the laws of war but also a redress of the range of wounds that political injustices inflict. Reconciliation is achieved through a set of six political practices that seek to restore a measure of human flourishing. A secondary fruit of these practices is an increase in the legitimacy that citizens bequeath to their governing institutions or to their state's relationship with other states.The article takes a close look at two of the practices that are often thought to be at odds in addressing past injustices—punishment and forgiveness—and argues that when viewed as practices that reflect and participate in a restorative concept of justice, punishment and forgiveness become compatible in principle—with important implications for the politics of facing past evil

Beyond the War on Terror: Into the Fifth Generation of War and Conflict

Fifth generation warfare has arrived and is irreversibly changing the character and nature of human conflict. It confronts the United States with the evolving strategic dilemma of not only dealing with the War on Terror, but of simultaneously crafting strategies that look beyond military preparedness for past wars and embrace the perspective of national preparedness for the spectrum of future conflicts. This article uses four essential elements of war—the new domains of conflict, the changing nature of adversaries, the changing nature of objectives, and the changing nature of force—to build a generational typology of war and conflict that informs the characteristics of fifth generation warfare. The resultant model produces two outcomes: First, it demonstrates how recent events such as the rise of computer hackers, the 2001 anthrax and the 2003–2004 ricin attacks, the 2004 Madrid bombings, and the emergence of Al Qaeda demonstrate characteristics of fifth generation warfare. Second, it illustrates the way in which these events are unique indicators of a future in which non-state entities are increasingly able to wage war on equal footing with nation-states. The article concludes that the United States must embrace fifth generation warfare if it is to successfully confront these threats that have taken on new and heretofore unimagined forms in the postmodern era of war.

The Linkage Between Israel's Military Policies and the Military's Social Composition The Case of the al-Aqsa Intifada

With the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000 and in contrast to past wars, the Israeli state impressively regained its relative autonomous capacity in managing a prolonged military operation without significant internal opposition. Arguably, the state's autonomy increased in light of the alteration of the social composition of the army, from relying on the Ashkenazi middle class to drawing on peripheral and religious social groups. Specifically, this change was reflected in the composition of casualties that reshaped the bereavement ethos from protest to an acceptance of the sacrifice. Concurrently, the field forces exhibited much greater enthusiasm than they had for aggressive missions through which the religious and peripheral groups hoped to prove themselves worthy of status both inside and outside the army.

Peace or Pacifism? The Soviet 'Struggle for Peace in All the World', 1948-54

This article examines the Soviet 'Struggle for Peace in All the World' between 1948 and 1954. The 'Struggle for Peace' was a vital arena in the early Cold War within which a new image of the Soviet relationship with the outside world was forged. 'Peace' emerged in this context as a shorthand for the USSR's muscular and moral patronage of the oppressed peoples of the world. Soviet citizens responded to the 'Struggle for Peace' with great enthusiasm. This enthusiasm has been cited as evidence that the Soviet population were naively duped into accepting a harsh post-war settlement in return for peace. In reality, Soviet citizens were not so passive in their engagement with the late-Stalinist state. Drawing on Kotkin's description of the 'little tactics of the habitat' this article suggests that some participants in the Peace Campaigns creatively reappropriated them as a platform for the articulation of their personal grief from the past war and their pacifist sentiments. It also offers some provisional suggestions about how the 'tactics' employed by Soviet citizens in relation to the government changed after 1945. The Soviet government could mobilize its population to 'Struggle for Peace', but it could not guarantee that they shared its understanding of what 'peace' meant.

The Emergence of International Terrorism and Technological Changes: Have These Changes Made the Law of Armed Conflict Obsolete?

The Geneva Conventions of 1949, the primary basis of the present Law of Armed Conflict, are primarily a reaction to past wars, including World War II. Since 1949, armed conflict had evolved from large armies controlled by nations to fighting by nations, groups, and organization, and are fought both nationally and internationally. This article explores some of the difficulties as a result of these changes.

Rate of British Psychiatric Combat Casualties Compared to Recent American Wars

This paper examines factors leading to the low rate of combat psychiatric casualties in the British recapture of the Falklands compared to the American experience in North Africa, Italy, Europe...

The Trauma Continuum-of-Care Quality Forum Integration Committee System-Wide Video Teleconference

The lessons learned in the care of combat casualties throughout time have been vitally important to the improvement of military medicine. However, often the lessons learned were essentially personal, because the ability to transmit those lessons to other medical personnel was not systematized and organized. In past wars, the transmission of those lessons to other care providers was difficult and often long after the fact. Consultant visits were made and War Medicine conferences were held, but policy changes and actual changes in the mechanisms to provide care often lagged. Lessons learned often were not widely spread until years later. New capabilities in medical communications have permitted the development of real-time casualty care information exchange and rapid policy decision-making. This article describes one such effort.

Retracted:Making sense of war: using the interpretation comparison model to understand the Iraq conflict

AbstractThe current research addressed the issue of how people use the past to compare and interpret the present. Using the logic of the Interpretation Comparison Model (ICM) we examined two factors (distinctness of past events and ambiguity of target event) that may influence how people make sense of a real world event (the Iraq War) within the context of past events (World War II and Vietnam). Extending earlier ICM studies, we used new manipulations and measures to examine the impact of these two factors. Results show that higher levels of (manipulated as well as measured) distinctness lead to contrastive evaluations about the Iraq War (and involved politicians) as a function of past wars. Lower levels of distinctness lead to assimilative evaluations, but only when the meaning of the target stimulus was somewhat ambiguous. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Structural Vulnerabilities of Networked Insurgencies: Adapting to the New Adversary

The ongoing conflict in Iraq has sparked a renewed interest in the study of counterinsurgency, leading many to comb the wars of the twentieth century, the golden age of insurgencies, for lessons that can be applied to today. (1) Much of this recent analysis has focused on the knowledge gained from fighting Marxist revolutionaries. The insurgent of today, however, is not the Maoist of yesterday. His organization and methods are strikingly different from his twentieth century predecessors. The modern insurgent aims to defeat his opponent by psychological warfare and terrorism instead of military action. (2) He draws his support from criminal networks as opposed to popular mobilization. He fights a netwar not a People's War. These dissimilarities raise the question of just how much of twentieth century counterinsurgency thought can be applied to twenty-first century conflicts. Methods from past wars are put forth as guiding principles with only a nod towards these differences. (3) Applying these principles without examination could lead, at best, to wasted effort, at worst, to defeat. Sun Tzu said, Know your enemy. (4) The structure of a movement, meaning its organization and methods, is the key to understanding it. Modern and Maoist insurgencies are structurally different. In order to be effective, those conducting counterinsurgencies must take into consideration these differences and adapt their methods to the structure of modern adversaries. This article examines the distinction between Maoist and modern insurgencies and the implications for counterinsurgency methods. First, it contrasts the two types of insurgencies in terms of their organizations and strategies. Building on that information, it analyzes the vulnerabilities of Maoist and modern insurgencies in their organization, political cohesion, support base, and use of information technology. From this analysis, it draws conclusions about how to modify twentieth century methods to combat the modern insurgent. The purpose of this article is not to propose a comprehensive strategy for a modern counterinsurgency. Instead, it examines one component of such a plan--understanding and exploiting the insurgent's structural vulnerabilities. It does not exhaust this analysis; the conclusions drawn here are demonstrative of the possibilities inherent in this methodology. Throughout this article, the conflict in Iraq is used as an illustrative example of a modern insurgency. The Iraqi insurgency is thus far the most advanced embodiment of netwar, where small groups coordinate, communicate, and conduct their campaigns in an internetted manner, without a precise central command. (5) As such, this conflict is a powerful predictor of the future of insurgency. Structure of the Maoist and Iraqi Insurgencies The first step in learning to defeat this new netwar adversary is to understand how its structure differs from past movements. The following contrasts the organization and strategy of the Maoist and Iraqi insurgencies. Organization The last half of the twentieth century witnessed the appearance of several effective revolutionary movements based on Mao's strategy of the People's War. (6) Examples include the Hukbalahap in the Philippines, the Malaya Races Liberation Army (MRLA) in Malaya, and the Viet Cong in Vietnam. These groups were all organized in similar hierarchies. (7) For example, at the head of the Viet Cong was the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), a committee composed of the top political and military leaders. Below the COSVN were six regional committees, each of which oversaw several provincial and district offices. At the district level was an extensive support organization including medical personnel, weapon manufacturers, training teams, and fiscal auditors. At the lowest level, the cadres organized the entire population to support the movement. Armed bodies consisted of main force units, local guerrillas, and village militias. …

The Nordic Approach to the Promotion of Equality

The Nordic countries including Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – have in many ways distinctive approach to development of the welfare state, gender equality and provision for children. The distinctiveness is a result of a long and complicated joint history, including collaboration, shifting borders as well as past wars. Generally Nordic countries were agricultural, and industrialized relatively late – especially Finland. This has had an impact on ways in which issues such as distribution of resources, settlement between the state, employers and trade unions have been negotiated. The position of women has also been marked with similarities, with policies aiming at inclusion of women in the labour market. To make this participation possible, the care and welfare of children needed to be addressed.

Counseling Adolescent Students Affected by the War in Iraq: Using History as a Guide

The schemes of war of today's generation of adolescents might be heavily influenced by the War in Iraq because it is the first war this generation is likely to remember living through. Although the War in Iraq has produced a unique set of circumstances and concerns for adolescents who have experienced it, there is much to be learned from past wars about the types of counseling that would be helpful and appropriate. Considering developmental theories and information gleaned from previous wars is helpful in establishing best practice methods for counseling adolescents during times of current and future international conflict.

Counseling Adolescent Students Affected by the War in Iraq: Using History as a Guide

The schemes of war of today's generation of adolescents might be heavily influenced by the War in Iraq because it is the first war this generation is likely to remember living through. Although the War in Iraq has produced a unique set of circumstances and concerns for adolescents who have experienced it, there is much to be learned from past wars about the types of counseling that would be helpful and appropriate. Considering developmental theories and information gleaned from previous wars is helpful in establishing best practice methods for counseling adolescents during times of current and future international conflict.

The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia (review)

Book Reviews63 appears in the Appendix, was written by Michael Frenzei, an East German resister who served time in a Communist prison. Several authors described the negative impact of prisons on inmantes and insisted that an enlightened society would find creative alternatives to incarceration as they had experienced it. Besides their intrinsic readability, these essays provide a useful reference tool for researchers studying a prison system based on the assumption that increasingly punitive tactics bring desirable results. Despite frequent use of severe punishment, including solitary confinement, only one of the resisters included in this anthology abandoned his pacifism. These Strange Criminals is must reading for any young man or woman considering a moral stand that might lead to a prison sentence. It will also help make visible the absolutist pacifists from past wars, for their stories constitute an important chapter in the much neglected history of active nonviolence. For collecting these memoirs, and contributing one of his own, Peter Brock has earned the thanks of all Friends and others who are working to end the horror ofwar. Larry Gara, EmeritusWilmington College The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. By Paul Lyons. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. The story of the New Left in Philadelphia is complex, tangled, ultimately both sad and inspiring. Paul Lyons tells it clearly and sympathetically in seven well-focused chapters. He weaves together a broad overview in the first and final chapters and documents the social activism fueled by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam anti-war movement, first on the Quaker campuses—some ofwhose students had traveled South and worked in predominantly African-American communities like Chester, Pennsylvania; then in the Catholic institutions La Salle, Villanova, and St. Joseph's; and in the commuter school Temple University and the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. This leads on to his account of the emergence of two dominant organizations, the Philadelphia Resistance and People Against Racism. A large part of this story is Philadelphia itself, not only Quaker Philadelphia but also the city of small industries, homeowners, and neighborhoods spread over an extensive area. Lyons draws the sharp contrast between Quaker pacifism and patrician liberalism. . . .and Frank Rizzo, the high school dropout who becomes Police Commissioner and is twice 64Quaker History elected mayor. Rizzo is the urban populist and avenger, hero of the row house people and the ethnic communities who were convinced that they were getting nothing. Where was the war on their poverty? Readers of Quaker History will be especially interested in how Lyons assesses the impact ofQuaker activists and organizations on Philadelphia's New Left. The Philadelphia Resistance exemplifies a "prefigurative politics " of personal authenticity, living one's revolutionary values as one engages in revolutionary struggle, by establishing "the beloved community " and practicing participatory democracy. The Quaker organizations were "the backbone ofmuch ofthe movement," providing and subsidizing office space, equipment, and paid jobs. They were the ongoing, stable institutional that the New Left activists ridiculed, denigrated, exploited, but finally depended on. Readers will recognize many familiar names of organizations and individuals in the story: WILPF, SANE, AFSC, Friends Peace Committee, AQAG, FOR, CCCO, Stuart Meacham, Larry Scott, Robert Gilmore, Lillian and George Willoughby, Lynne Shivers, Charles Walker, Robert Eaton, Norval Reece, George Lakey, David Gracie, and many others who helped create a morally consistent, pragmatically grounded antiwar movement which avoided many of the ideological conflicts of SDS and other activist groups. Many factors contribute to the fall ofthe Philadelphia Left, among them an uncritical support of Maoism and Third World violent revolutionary movements, a readiness to romanticize any deviant behavior as resistance to bourgeois forms of social control, and an obliviousness, if not a contempt , for the suburbs and their mostly middle-class residents. The New Left could not connect with the row house and ethnic constituencies for whom Frank Rizzo spoke. But as Lyons tells it, this fall is also a fertile scattering of activists into new movements—feminism, gay rights, ecological concerns—and into social work, public health, law, medicine, teaching, and not least into careers in Quaker schools and the AFSC, where we...

"These Strange Criminals": An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War (review)

62Quaker History for the split in Genesee Yearly Meeting when 200 Friends walked out and formed the Congregational Quakers. Their statements sound very much like some Friends today who do not want anything to do with hierarchy, ministers, elders, or select meetings. In the context ofthe heated abolitionist /Free Soil/women's rights arguments of the 1840s, the Quaker leadership seemed to offer very little, particularly in terms of real spiritual nourishment. The question for each generation, it seems, is how to live out the radical call of discipleship in the thorny, controversial issues of the day—and do it under God's guidance, in community. Martha Paxson GrundyCleveland Heights, Ohio "These Strange Criminals ": An Anthology ofPrison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War. Ed. by Peter Brock. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, xviii + 505 pp. Notes and bibliography. Cloth, $75; paper, $45. This anthology included the prison experiences ofthirty-one war resisters from World War I to the Cold War and in seven different countries. It is edited by the dean of peace historians, Peter Brock, who was himself imprisoned in England during the first World War. Most of the material was mined fromunpublished or privately published memoirs though some, like Donald Wetzel's Pacifist, are excerpts from previously published accounts. Seven of the memoirs are by Quaker pacifists, most from England during the first World War. Others are from a variety of religious and philosophical backgrounds. There is great variety in these accounts, yet their reactions to the prison environment are remarkably similar. The impact ofbeing isolated from society in an institutional setting designed to humiliate and depersonalize inmates seems universal. Though all of these young war resisters were political prisoners, none set themselves apart from their fellow convicts. While there is much discussion ofprison rules and the attitude of prison guards—called "screws" by the British and "hacks" by the Americans—there is very little discussion of sex. Several resisters described their disgust with the foul and sexually-explicit language they confronted for the first time. Two of Brock's authors, Kathleen Lonsdale and Kathleen Wigham, were British women jailed during WWII. Both were Quakers who refused to perform assigned work under compulsion. In prison, unlike many ofthe men, they were concerned about the lack of sanitation and the poor medical care given prisoners. One ofthe most interesting memoirs, which Book Reviews63 appears in the Appendix, was written by Michael Frenzei, an East German resister who served time in a Communist prison. Several authors described the negative impact of prisons on inmantes and insisted that an enlightened society would find creative alternatives to incarceration as they had experienced it. Besides their intrinsic readability, these essays provide a useful reference tool for researchers studying a prison system based on the assumption that increasingly punitive tactics bring desirable results. Despite frequent use of severe punishment, including solitary confinement, only one of the resisters included in this anthology abandoned his pacifism. These Strange Criminals is must reading for any young man or woman considering a moral stand that might lead to a prison sentence. It will also help make visible the absolutist pacifists from past wars, for their stories constitute an important chapter in the much neglected history of active nonviolence. For collecting these memoirs, and contributing one of his own, Peter Brock has earned the thanks of all Friends and others who are working to end the horror ofwar. Larry Gara, EmeritusWilmington College The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. By Paul Lyons. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. The story of the New Left in Philadelphia is complex, tangled, ultimately both sad and inspiring. Paul Lyons tells it clearly and sympathetically in seven well-focused chapters. He weaves together a broad overview in the first and final chapters and documents the social activism fueled by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam anti-war movement, first on the Quaker campuses—some ofwhose students had traveled South and worked in predominantly African-American communities like Chester, Pennsylvania; then in the Catholic institutions La Salle, Villanova, and St...

Dealing with the Legacy of Past War Crimes and Human Rights Abuses: Experiences and Trends

Dealing with the Legacy of Past War Crimes and Human Rights Abuses: Experiences and Trends

Dealing with the Legacy of Past War Crimes and Human Rights Abuses: Experiences and Trends

1Professor of Jurisprudence, University of Zagreb Law School, Agent of the Republic of Croatia to the International Court of Justice.