Personal Experience Of War Research Articles

On the Phenomenon of Populism and Extremism in the Balkans

This paper is based on my personal experience of war and peace in Bosnia. The basic notion is that it is easier to start a war than to stop it. Thus, postwar recovery or peacebuilding is not easy. But thanks to open-minded people who have been all along against a mythical populism that caused the bloody war against Bosnia and its autochthon people, the peace, although unjust, was reached after all. The focus here is on the idea of pluralism in Bosnia as an opposite to "populism" and "extremism." For a positive narrative like pluralism is a good way to encounter today’s threat of "populism" and "extremism." A positive or optimistic narrative is creative while a negative and pessimistic one is depressive and discouraging.

Mehmet Akif Ersoy’s "To the Martyrs of Dardanelles": Turkish View of the First World War in Comparison to the English War Poets

This paper is concerned with the Turkish view of the First World War as reflected through Mehmet Akif Ersoy’s ‘Çanakkale Şehitleri’ (To the Martyrs of Dardanelles) in comparison to the English war poets and argues that the Turkish attitude to the First World War is very different from that of the English war poets in terms of patriotism and sacrifice for one’s country. The most important feature of the English war poets who wrote during the First World War is that all of them, except Rupert Brooke, who died of malaria, participated in the war personally and reflected their personal war experiences and perspectives in their poems. The Ottoman Empire, which participated in the First World War as an ally of Germany, fought with the British in Çanakkale. There are many poems written by professional poets about the Dardanelles wars, in which the Turks won a decisive victory, but there is no known soldier-poet in Turkish poetry who participated in this war. Considering the poems written on the battles of Çanakkale, the first ones that come to mind are ""To the Martyrs of Dardanelles”, and Mehmet Akif Ersoy. The epic poem "To the Martyrs of Dardanelles", written by Mehmet Akif for the heroic martyrs who sacrificed themselves for the salvation of their country, is the poem that best reflects the Turks' perspective on this war. This article focuses on the difference between the Turkish side's view of the war, which is reflected in Mehmet Akif Ersoy's poem "To the Martyrs of Dardanelles”, from the British war poets in terms of patriotism and self-sacrifice ideas for the homeland. The perspective reflected by the English war poets was initially treated as a romantic ideal adorned with the propaganda of democracy, freedom and protection of Western civilization. However, after it was understood that the war had nothing to do with national security for England, it was just an environment of hell where millions of young politicians died in vain for the power struggle, it gave way to protest and disappointment. For the Turks, since this war meant the occupation of their lands in case of defeat, they defended their lands at the cost of their lives and did not allow Gallipoli passed by.

An Orthodox Priest at War: The Classification of Moral Experience

The relevance and practical significance of the study of the moral experience of a priest in the time of war is due to the actual lack of research on the critical understanding of the personal choice made by an individual in the situation of perpetrating, suffering, or witnessing violence during wars. In the modern analytical tradition, the problem of moral experience in war is more often revealed from the point of view of normative approaches associated with the just war theory. In our opinion, it is necessary to understand war, first of all, as a situation that violates the fundamental principles of modern morality. This article is aimed at the researching and classification of the models of moral choice made by Orthodox priests who took part in the wars. It is only as a result of studying the functioning of moral choice in specific situations and understanding the personal experience of war that is it possible to reconstruct the ethos and to formulate the ethics of war. This approach has a philosophical and anthropological character, since it seeks to answer the question of “how to remain human in a non-human situation?”. The sociological perspective of the study of this problem allows us to identify the institutional factors that influence the priest‘s decision-making. At the same time, it becomes possible to identify the transformations in the moral structure of the priest’s personality, which occur depending on the degree of his involvement in army life.

МІФОЛОГІЯ ВІЙНИ: МИСТЕЦЬКІ ОБРАЗИ ТА СМИСЛИ

In scientific research, the artistic images and meanings of the mythology of the Russian-Ukrainian war; their influence on the society and cultural space of Ukraine and its image in the world are outlined and broadly classified. The research focuses on the events after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia on February 24, 2022. The mythology of war has several vectors. First of all, it is the creation of new myths and an appeal to the archetypal images of Ukrainian culture, to the archaic layers of our worldview, actualized in the conditions of a fullscale war. Through art, you can convey the images of a new mythology that is being created before our eyes. Today, the Cyborgs (defenders of the Donetsk airport), the militarized image of Taras Shevchenko, have already become the core images of the mythology of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The full-scale invasion gave rise to new images and meanings: The Ghost of Kyiv, Bucha, Azovstal, Chornobaivka, Zmiiny, Zmiiebaivka Red Forest, Patron Dog, Crimean Dog, Bavovniatko. Among the characteristic features of artistic reflections of war events, the following can be distinguished: "glamorization" of war images, their humorous and satirical depiction and interpretation; dehumanization of the enemy (Orcs, Russians, Rashists); a powerful array of song creativity (the curse song "It will be like the witch will say!" became especially popular); creative depiction of acute social problems caused by the war (experience of war by women, children, less mobile groups of people, animals); creative understanding of the personal experience of war. It has been proven that russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the occupation of territories, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the abuse of peaceful people became the impetus for serious worldview changes for many Ukrainians. It can be argued that russian aggression contributed to the process of Ukrainization. This also affected art reflections, especially among singers, artists, and actors. In this research, the author only outlines certain trends and vectors of the mythology of the war, which were reflected in art practice.

OMEGA, OOR EN UIT: DIE STORIE VAN ’N OPSTANDIGE TROEP - François Verster

War narratives are in essence categorised as a distinct literary kind of its own. In his masterpiece The soldier’s tale: Bearing witness to modern war, Samuel Hynes argues that mankind is generally curious about war. Hynes contends that it is often easier to respond to one man and his ‘war’, than to try to comprehend the overwhelming statistics associated with modern wars – especially in terms of the overwhelming numbers of soldiers, battles and casualties. For Hynes, it was important to “understand what war was like, and how it feels, we must … seek the reality in the personal witness of the men who were there”. As such, the recording of the personal narratives of soldiers are extremely important. These narratives, however, can be subdivided into two broad categories depending on differing needs – the need to report and the need to remember. Accounts that fall into the reporting category generally comprise letters, diaries and journals that are kept as the war unfolds. The value of these sources is varied, but in essence, they offer immediacy and directness in recording the personal experience of war. The second category comprises memoirs. Memoirs are indeed much more reflective in nature, in that they are written years afterthe actual experience of war. Moreover, memoirs give a selective overview of “what the young self did, what happened to him, what changed him”.

Vitalist temptations: Life, earth and the nature of war

This article stages an encounter between contemporary vitalist thought and the work of the controversial zoologist turned political geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904). The remarkable degree of congruence between Ratzel's ideas and contemporary more-than-human geography, I argue, opens up crucial questions about vitalism as a political project. A discussion of Ratzel's concept and personal experience of war brings into sharp focus a number of problems in the academic language used by vitalism to blur the boundary between nature and society. The article concludes by suggesting that vitalism should pay closer attention to its own place in the history of modern biopolitical thought.

УЧАСТЬ ЖІНОК УКРАЇНИ У ВІЙСЬКОВИХ ФОРМУВАННЯХ У ПЕРШІЙ СВІТОВІЙ ВІЙНІ: СУЧАСНА ІСТОРІОГРАФІЯ

The article is focuses on the study of the issues of participation of women of Ukraine in military formations in the First World War by modern Ukrainian historiography (1991-2016). Based on the topic, the author tried to solve the following research tasks: to identify which aspects of women's military history are within the interest of historians, to analyze the scale, character and level of research of the topic. The author found that the study of women's military history is gaining momentum. Historians are actively searching women's stories in the sources of those times; they are in the process of gathering information. They call military history “personal” because research on the subject is partially based on reports of the press about women volunteers and mainly on participants' personal documents, memoirs and letters. In the letters, women wrote about the way to the front, military life, a little about participation in battles, relations with soldiers; they also left information about each other. At the same time, each of the women had personal experience of war, own motives and results. Therefore, historians concluded that "this experience is quite difficult to summarize ". Modern researchers approach the study of women's stories not only in terms of heroism but trying to understand the causes and consequences of women's actions. The authors mention such main reasons as boredom of everyday life, escape from duties and national impulse. Inspired by the new fashionable views on life, the girls tried to escape from their everyday duties; they wanted to overcome social barriers and to prove that women were capable to cope with any work. The escape to the front was an attempt to change the way of life. Women who came to the front and participated in hostilities had to adapt quickly to difficult conditions and trials; they had to fight and to protect their own lives. The authors also analyze how society perceived the phenomenon of women in the war. Military commanders heroized their actions with the reason to raise the fighting spirit. However, the views of military men varied: the village guys welcomed and supported the girls; on the contrary, the men from the intelligent circle condemned women regarding them as competitors. Civil women believed that the girls had forgotten their traditional duty, they could have been more helpful in hospitals and doing charity. The author of the article also found that the participation of women in the military unit of the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen was better studied. The researchers concluded that the Ukrainian women who lived in the Russian Empire supported the call in 1917 of the Provisional Government and Maria Bochkareva to form women's combat battalions. Women were motivated to go to the front by the same reasons as women in the ranks of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen: failures in love, the desire to escape from violence and humiliation in the family, domestic problems, the desire to avenge the dead relatives and loved ones. In big cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Poltava, the Ukrainian women willingly enrolled in the army. Anyway, the inclusion of women in the combat units of the army of the Russian Empire was found out fragmentary, there are almost no names and characteristics of the activity of the women's battalions. Only a few researchers pay attention to the messages in the then newspapers about escapes and the heroic deeds of girls in the war. These issues require the search of information and detailed study. The author came to the conclusion that most of the questions remain scientifically open requiring the search for information about women in the ranks of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and the army of the Russian Empire for the generalization of information and creation of a coherent picture of the military service of women at the front of the First World War.

War, Popular Culture, and Contents Tourism in East Asia

This introductory essay to the special edition War, Popular Culture, and Contents Tourism in East Asia presents how contents tourism, defined as ‘travel behavior motivated fully or partially by narratives, characters, locations, and other creative elements of popular culture forms, including film, television dramas, manga, anime, novels, and computer games’, is an increasingly useful concept in understanding war-related tourism in East Asia. The wars of the twentieth century continue to cast a long shadow on the politics and international relations of the region. But, the region is also known for its vibrant popular culture exports. With four essays about Japan and one about South Korea, this special edition examines how representations of war in entertainment formats are triggering contents tourism to war-related sites, and what the implications of this might be for war memories, particularly among youthful fans of popular culture with no personal experience of war.

An Interview with Kevin Powers

Kevin Powers served with the U.S. Army in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq, in 2004 and 2005. He is the author of The Yellow Birds, a poetic and lyrical novel inspired by his personal experience of war. The Yellow Birds received The Guardian First Book Award and the 2013 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. In 2014, Kevin Powers published a collection of war poems entitled Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting. His second novel, A Shout in the Ruins, was published in 2018 and continues to explore ...

From the Shell-shocked Soldier to the Nervous Child: Psychoanalysis in the Aftermath of the First World War

This article investigates the development of child analysis in Britain between the wars, as the anxious child succeeded the shell-shocked soldier as a focus of psychoanalytic enquiry. Historians of psychoanalysis tend to regard the Second World War as a key moment in the discovery of the ‘war within’ the child, but it was in the aftermath of the First War that the warring psyche of the child was observed and elaborated. The personal experience of war and its aftermath, and the attention given to regression in the treatment of war neuroses, encouraged Melanie Klein, Anna Freud and others to turn their attention to children. At the same time, however, the impact of the First World War as a traumatic event, with inter-generational consequences, remained largely unaccounted for within psychoanalysis as Klein and others focused on the child's riven internal world.

Se souvenir de l'Indochine L'écriture des femmes engagées dans l'armée française, entre mémoire de guerre et récit de voyage

Abstract From 1945 to 1954, France was at war in Vietnam. Many women who enlisted in the French armed forces after 1940 joined the French Far Eastern Expedition Corps and served well beyond Europe. In 1954, the French-Vietnam war ended in a double loss for French soldiers—a personal as well as a military defeat. With more women serving in and with the military after World War II, women's memories of military service also included the testimony of veterans of the war in Indochina. Many of these women recalled their personal war experiences, sometimes immediately afterward, sometimes many years after the conflict. These memories of women at war are a previously unexplored set of sources of historical memories of the French-Vietnam war, which up to now have been produced mainly, if not exclusively, by men. This study thus shows how feminine authors in the French military expressed their views, between memories of war and travel accounts.

Se souvenir de l’Indochine L’écriture des femmes engagées dans l’armée française, entre mémoire de guerre et récit de voyage

From 1945 to 1954, France was at war in Vietnam. Many women who enlisted in the French armed forces after 1940 joined the French Far Eastern Expedition Corps and served well beyond Europe. In 1954, the French-Vietnam war ended in a double loss for French soldiers—a personal as well as a military defeat. With more women serving in and with the military after World War II, women’s memories of military service also included the testimony of veterans of the war in Indochina. Many of these women recalled their personal war experiences, sometimes immediately afterward, sometimes many years after the conflict. These memories of women at war are a previously unexplored set of sources of historical memories of the French-Vietnam war, which up to now have been produced mainly, if not exclusively, by men. This study thus shows how feminine authors in the French military expressed their views, between memories of war and travel accounts.

P-981 - Secondary traumatic stress in wives of war veterans with PTSD

Wives of PTSD affected war veterans experience a wide range of psychosocial difficulties including secondary traumatic stress (STS). To compare level of STS symptoms, emotional functioning and perceived quality of life between wives of PTSD affected veterans, wives of veterans without PTSD and wives of non-veterans in Croatia. To investigate the effect of veterans’ PTSD, wives’ knowing of the veterans’ war trauma, and wives’ personal war experiences on STS. A total of 150 married women participated in the study. Fifty wives of PTSD affected veterans were recruited through Referral Center for Psychotrauma Rijeka, while 50 wives of veterans without PTSD and 50 wives of non-veterans were recruited using the snowball method. Sociodemographic questionnaire, Brief Symptom Inventory, Manchester short assessment of quality of life, and Modified questionnaire for secondary traumatization were administrated. Thirty-six percent of wives of PTSD affected veterans meet the criteria for secondary traumatic stress disorder. Wives of PTSD affected veterans report significantly higher level of STS symptoms compared with wives of non-PTSD veterans. Also, wives of PTSD affected veterans report higher level of psychological difficulties and have lower percieved quality of life compared with other two groups. Multifactor analysis shows main effect of wives' knowing the veteran's traumatic event on STS, and main effect of veterans' PTSD on emotional functioning of their wives. Clinicians working with war related PTSD should be aware of secondary traumatic effect on the spouses. Systemic approach in psychotherapeutic treatment of PTSD should be considered.

De Tweede Wereldoorlog en statusverwerving

World War II and occupational status attainment.In this study we include personal war experiences in Duncan’s path model of status attainment to answer the following research question: To what extent can personal war experiences explain the occupational status of Dutch people who experienced World War II? We expect that personal war experiences have a detrimental effect on the human capital formation, which in turn leads to a lower educational level and a lower occupational status. To test our hypotheses, we use unique individual-level data from the ‘Onderzoek naar Doorsnee Nederlanders in de oorlog’, which was conducted from 2005 to 2010 (N = 346). The results of our path analysis show that people who were forced to work in Germany or the Netherlands during the war obtained a lower educational level and subsequently a lower occupational status. Physical destruction of one’s house also has a negative effect on occupational status through education. In addition, we found some direct effects of personal war experiences on the occupational status.

Argument is Argument: An Essay on Conceptual Metaphor and Verbal Dispute

The metaphor “ARGUMENT IS WAR” looms large in the conceptualist and experientialist approach of Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Despite extensive discussion of this metaphor by critics and supporters of Lakoff and Johnson, it has so far escaped serious scrutiny on several key points. English-speakers can identify verbal exchanges as arguments without resort to metaphorical comparisons or transfers, and speakers' use of war metaphors to characterize verbal dispute depends on conventional understandings rather than personal experience of war or of other kinds of physical struggle. Much of the evidence for Lakoff and Johnson's claims—a culture that metaphorizes argument as dance; the historical and personal priority of force over verbal dispute; the influence of metaphor on action; even the experience supposedly shaping source domains—depends on supposition and ungrounded assertion. In making sense of how people use this metaphor, the discourse-based program elaborated by Naomi Quinn (1991, 1997) carries analysis further than a purely conceptualist approach.

Whitman and the romance of medicine

In this compelling, accessible examination of one of America's greatest cultural and literary figures, Robert Leigh, Davis details the literary and social significance of Walt Whitman's career as a nurse during the American Civil War. Davis shows how the concept of 'convalescence' in nineteenth-century medicine and philosophy - along with Whitman's personal war experiences - provide a crucial point of convergence for Whitman's work as a gay and democratic writer. In his analysis of Whitman's writings during this period - Drum-Taps, Democratic Vistas, Memoranda During the War, along with journalistic works and correspondence - Davis argues against the standard interpretation that Whitman's earliest work was his best. He finds instead that Whitman's hospital writings are his most persuasive account of the democratic experience. Deeply moved by the courage and dignity of common soldiers, Whitman came to identify the Civil War hospitals with the very essence of American democratic life, and his writing during this period includes some of his most urgent reflections on suffering, sympathy, violence, and love. Davis concludes this study with an essay on the contemporary medical writer Richard Selzer, who develops the implications of Whitman's ideas into a new theory of medical narrative.

Blackett and the Origins of Nuclear Strategy

I feel not only honoured but grateful to have been given opportunity to deliver this lecture. Patrick Blackett was a man to whom I owe a deep personal and professional debt of gratitude. Thirty years ago I was given task of creating what is now Department of War Studies at Kings's College London first of its kind in this country and indeed in world. With much trepidation I approached Blackett, then an apparently remote and awe-inspiring figure at Imperial College, and invited him to deliver a lecture in an inaugural series which was intended to define and publicize activities of new department. Not only did he agree and give a scintillating lecture which attracted much attention, but he took a deep interest in everything we were doing in Department and remained for rest of his active academic career unremittingly supportive and helpful. Four years later in 1958, when with a group of journalists, politicians and churchmen I was helping to establish what has now become International Institute for Strategic Studies, I again approached him, this time asking him to serve on our Council. Again he readily agreed and became one of our most valuable councillors, in particular finding premises in Adam Street, leased from Royal Society of Arts, in which Institute functioned for 20 years. Finally he enlisted me into British delegation to early Pugwash Conferences, where I found myself in company of such luminaries as John Cockcroft, William Penney, Solly Zuckerman, Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard and Henry Kissinger, trying to establish contact across cultural and ideological barriers with our colleagues in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union. During those 10 years, therefore, between 1954 and 1964, which was when Blackett transferred his energies to Whitehall to become a close adviser to Harold Wilson's first administration, I was able to watch at first hand his development as one of leading thinkers in this country on problem of nuclear weapons and preservation of peace. The subsequent 20 years since 1964 have seen developments in weapon technology amounting almost to a further revolution, but problems with which Blackett then wrestled have remained as contentious in 1980s as they were for 1960s. Indeed much that he wrote has now become commonplace in British strategic thinking, and insofar as a consensus can be established in this country, excluding extreme unilateralists, it would be very much along lines that Blackett laid out a quarter of a century ago. Patrick Blackett's distinctive contribution to strategic thinking came less from his brilliance as a scientist then from his personal experience of war, and healthy scepticism which that experience had given him of all theories based upon either unstated or unverifiable hypotheses. Blackett claimed with some reason to have been the only atomic scientist brought up as a professional fighting man,' and eight adolescent years which he spent in Royal Navy between 1913 and 1919 equipped him not just with a stern sense of what was practically possible and necessary in warfare but with first-hand knowledge of what war was like; with an understanding of that Clausewitzian element of 'friction' without which all theories of war are meaningless. In his writings Blackett referred repeatedly to Battle of Jutland, when vessel on which he was serving, Barham, steamed past a great oily patch littered with flotsam and bobbing heads of survivors where battle-cruiser Queen Mary had been destroyed by a single German salvo a few moments before. There's something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield, Admiral Beatty had calmly remarked about disaster. In fact there was something wrong with Royal Navy as a whole: way it designed its ships, way in which it thought about war, way in which it waged war. It worked too much on hiunches and unverified assumptions. It did not take enough trouble to find out about its enemy. It did not sufficiently base its tactics on hard reasoning from observable phenomena. When Blackett returned