Social War Research Articles

Information heroes

Through their brave actions, information heroes have assured access to information in times of social conflict, revolution, and war. They deserve to be recognized, and their achievements remembered.

L’octroi de la citoyenneté romaine aux Latins: un anachronisme de Cassius Dion

In the fragments about the last Latin war, Cassius Dio depends on an author who probably lived shortly after the Social war and interpreted the history of the Latin war in the light of the events of his own time. Livy too is aware of this source which, however, is used independently by Dio.

Social Cleavages and Civil War Onset

This paper addresses the false dichotomy of ‘greed–grievance’ regarding the onset of civil wars, providing a theory that specifies the interaction of economic and identity-based factors within a two-stage causal process. The sociological concept of overlapping versus cross-cutting social cleavages is applied to explain the origins of the potential for ethnic civil war, as the overlap of ethnic cleavages with material cleavages fuels an in-group/out-group ideology. Such situations can, however, exist for decades without the onset of war, thus it is necessary to delineate this question from the necessarily separate, temporal question of the timing of the outbreak of such wars as a second stage. Catalysts such as economic decline and adverse regime change provide the variables that, in the presence of a social structure of overlapping social cleavages, exacerbate existing intergroup tensions to the point of organized violence, or are mitigated by the lack of major cleavages or the presence of cross-cutting cleavages. Evidence from cases is provided, followed by a discussion of the implications of this theory for further research.

Dreams of Our Grandmothers: Discovering the Call for Social Justice Through Storytelling

This study examines the role of personal narrative for examining, articulating, and sharing stories in the context of social justice education and practice. It is written by five students and their instructor based on an experiential exercise in examining their own cultural backgrounds and sharing that with each other. The analysis combines autoethnography and reflexive analysis in a collaborative qualitative study. This analysis is informed by theory about storytelling, identity and meaning, and social justice that emphasizes the role of power in making knowledge and making peace. Connecting with our own or others' stories of strength and resilience in the face of social upheaval, war, and trauma can be an antidote to what might otherwise be the internalization of a sense of powerlessness, depression, fear, or even shame. Through an examination of both the circumstances faced by past generations as well as individuals' choices in the face of these, we have a greater understanding of the interaction of so...

‘The trophies of their wars’: affect and encounter at the Canadian War Museum

This paper explores the concept of the war trophy in relation to two exhibits at the Canadian War Museum: a black Mercedes-Benz bulletproof limousine that was once used by Hitler as a parade car and Gertrude Kearns' (1996) painting Somalia Without Conscience, an image that depicts Master Corporal Clayton Matchee posing beside tortured Somali teenager Shidane Arone. A central preoccupation of the paper is how to encounter and think with the affective realm of experience when the narrative encounter at the museum is one that represents difficult histories of social devastation, violence and war. I investigate free association as a method of cultural analysis that can attend to the affective force of the social encounter. To do so, I propose a fictive exhibit that brings the car into conversation with the painting and consider how the embodied subjects of war are constructed in the presence of memorial space. Finally, I comment on how visitor responses to the car and the painting open new questions with regard to the mandate of the museum to remember, to preserve and to educate.

Routes or Rivals? Social Citizenship, Capitalism, and War in the Twentieth Century

Routes or Rivals? Social Citizenship, Capitalism, and War in the Twentieth Century

The US military's social media civil war: technology as antagonism in discourses of information-age conflict

This article uses the controversy within the United States (US) military over the use of social media by individual military professionals as a window into larger debates about the nature of information-age conflict. Information and associated technologies are now central to the US military imaginary. But the controversy over social media is one indicator that the dominant discourse of information-age conflict is neither stable nor total. The introduction of a new technology can serve as an antagonism that turns latent, potential contradictions into substantive differences for policymaking. Thus, though the US military generally has embraced information and communication technologies (ICTs), the introduction of a particular ICT can still be a source of controversy. Military imaginaries, technologies and the relationships between them remain dynamic, contingent and sometimes contentious.

Epilogue. Anarchism & Academia, Insurrection & Illegality: Age Old Tensions Revisited

[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2012 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]The North American Anarchist Studies Network (NAASN) has positioned itself within the continental anarchist milieu as a network of idea producers, activists, theorists, historians, critics, students and teachers. Some of us are entrenched in universities, others with independent writing and research endeavors, but the thread that runs throughout remains stable - anarchist studies. Whilst some of us identify chiefly as activists and others as we are all anarchists. Borrowing from Barbara Epstein, David Graeber1 writes in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology1 that anarchism has replaced Marxism as the discipline of critical scholarship, whilst lamenting the lack of anti-Statists within the academy. If Graeber's account is correct, and Marxist scholars are moving aside for a new generation of anarcho-academics, how does this assertion compare to counterpoints proclaimed by other portions of our movement that scorn our studious eye?Since the anarchist movement is fluid, amorphous, and more of a 'network of networks' than anything else, it is sometimes hard to pinpoint where there borders start and end. What are the boundaries of our movement? Can Ted Kaczynski, Noam Chomsky, the Conspiracy of Fire Cells, and the NAASN membership ranks really exist within a singular label? Amongst this taxonomic challenge, one can easily locate numerous anarchist-linked individuals and projects that have explicitly anti-academic tendencies and thus exhibit categorical ideological cleavages. In their final communique entitled, As With Christ, Bash Back! News Is Dead, the anarcho-Queer insurrectionary network diagrams its enemies, including academics, as the anonymous author(s) write:Death to Christianity. Death to religion. Death to all state and corporate infiltrators. Death to the turncoats. Death to academics. Death to rapists. Death to liberal provocateurs. Death to the collegiate co-opters of gendervariancy.3This label of serves as a form of erasure, flattening all students, teachers, etc. into a mish mosh of homogeneity - of enemy status.In the 2012 book, Queer Ultra Violence chronicling the activities of the Bash Back! network, the editors explicitly attack those that would lend an academic lens to their movement. In the book's conclusion, the editors give examples of contemporary scholars focused on Queer theory writing:Some idiot tries basing his thesis on the riots at the G20; Judith Butler delivers a speech at a conference at the New School about anarchism; Jack Halberstam seeks to valorize the negative and trace the anti-social turn; a class at the University of California is called criminal queer (yet the instructor denounces the activity of insurrectionaries on that very campus) - one after another academics line up to jump on the negativity bandwagon. Each appropriates the activity of insurgents toward the ends of strengthening their own careers. They take anti-social activity and use it to reproduce the Academy as a central engine of society itself. This is the ultimate treason.4This attack on the Queer theorists, both named and unnamed, cites a form of opportunism, a cashing in on the product of struggle. Many are quick to link such appropriations as a recuperation of anarchism, but not all references to social war are equal. While one can quickly point to the recuperative value of AXE body spray's Anarchy Is Here advertising campaign5 or Kanye West & Jay-Z's No Church In The Wild6 music video, a conference paper analyzing an emergent social movement serves a very different function.Animal Liberation Front prisoner of war Walter Bond (aka Abdul Haqq) has expressed contempt for animal liberation scholars and anarchist-academics on numerous occasions, including during his rail against Derrick Jensen's book End Game, writing:I seem to have lost my patience with a great number of the mouthpieces in this 'movement', It's gotten to the point where everyone with a laptop and an opinion about Animal Liberation, Earth Liberation or Human Liberation thinks that everything they have to say is professionally valid. …

Belgesel film yoluyla tarihi belgeleme

This research examines relationship between documentary film and history and evaluates role of documentary film about recording history. In 1977, director Suha ARIN shot a documentary film, “Time in Safranbolu” in a historical place that is famous for its traditional houses and famous for its historical objects in Anatolia in Turkey. The director devoted his film for history of people and remind people their history, and their valuable accumulations via his film and recorded all historical heritage on his film. Many historical accumulation can be chained via documentary film against destruction of time. Thousands of documentary films have been shot about social life, traditions, wars and art works, about historical remains and documents, about buildings, monuments and ceremonies, about wild nature, animals and plants and about human since Robert Flaherty shot “The Nanook of the North” in 1922. Documentary film always documents accumulation of people who tried to constitute a civilization since the beginning and as a historical role, documentary film conveys great accumulation of humanity to next.

War 2.0: irregular warfare in the information age

War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age argues that two intimately connected grassroots trends-the rise of insurgencies and the rise of the web-are putting modern armies under huge pressure to adapt new forms of counterinsurgency to new forms of social war.

Julius Caesar: the colossus of Rome

Prologue 1. Rome and Italy in the 2nd century BCE 2. Caesar's childhood: the Social War and the Sullan Civil War 3. Caesar's early manhood: the rise of Pompeius 4. Roman politics in the sixties 5. The long year 59 BCE 6. The conquest of Gaul 7. Roman politics in the fifties 8. Caesar's place in Roman literature and culture 9. The Civil Wars against Pompeius and the Optimates 10. Caesar the Dictator Epilogue

Edward Bispham: From Asculum to Actium. The Municipalization of Italy from the Social War to Augustus.

Edward Bispham: From Asculum to Actium. The Municipalization of Italy from the Social War to Augustus. Oxford: Oxford UP 2007. XVII, 566 S. 3 Abb. (Oxford Classical Mo-nographs.) 90 £.

The ‘Italian Constitution’ in the Social War: a Reassessment (91 to 88 BCE)

The ‘Italian Constitution’ in the Social War: a Reassessment (91 to 88 BCE)

Theorising law and legitimacy in international criminal justice

This paper seeks to explore the relationship between law and morality and its relevance for establishing the legitimacy of international criminal justice (ICJ) within the context of international trials. At present, imperatives for peace and reconstruction in conflict societies are divorced both conceptually and practically from the process of punishment in international criminal trials. It argues that, in order for international trial justice to move beyond partial forms of retributivism requires a profound re-alignment of the rationales underpinning international penality and a merging of retributive and restorative justice forms. The paper suggests that the resolution of ‘truth’ must go further than this by implicating penal law and process as crucial determinants of ‘legitimate’ strategies for intervention, thereby enabling a wider choice of consequent resolutions. The paper suggests that the intrinsic value of international criminal process lies in its capacity to confront the relativism of ICJ by providing the means to engage with its plurality and so increase its legitimacy for all victims and communities affected by social conflict and war. In so doing it considers how law may be transformed into normative guides to conduct and examines the relationship between the processes of legal reasoning and sentence decision-making in international criminal trials.

Social Relations and War Remembrance: Second World War Atrocities in Rural Tuscan Villages

This article addresses the issue of how long‐term memory of extreme conditions is socially transformed. It focuses on elements of the social structure and pre‐war habitus that might help understanding of the divided memory of massacres that were perpetrated by the Nazis in three rural Tuscan villages between 1943 and 1944. Within the “mnemonic communities”, discrepancies arise since some of the villagers paradoxically blame the partisans instead of the Nazis. An attempt is made to trace current representations of historical events in the framework of traditional social institutions and political life of these small villages in time of crisis. Battles over memory are seen as a twofold process—that is, as part of “internal”, intra‐village relations as well as a form of reaction toward the “external” world of which they feel victims. The article argues that long‐term memory of past political violence is strictly bound up with local power relations.

The Greek wars: the failure of Persia

1. Introduction 2. The subjection of the Greeks of Asia 3. 'The lands beyond the sea' 4. The Ionian Revolt 5. The conquest of Greece 6. The war in the East Aegean 7. Peace with Athens, 449-412 BC 8. The recovery of the Greeks of Asia 9. From the King's Peace to the end of the Social War 10. The end of the Achaemenids

Police Militarization in Urban Areas: The Obscure War Against the Underclass

THE WAR ON CRIME in inner-city urban America has changed the breadth and scope of urban policy, urban policing, and the perception of the urban underclass. While the inner-city urban underclass has become socially and economically encapsulated by the urban war on crime and an increasingly militarized urban policing force waging that war, ironically, it has also become both enemy and victim in an obscure economic and social war that is sanctioned by federal, state, and local governments. This essay will not only examine the question of whether this is a war against crime or a war against the urban underclass, but will also examine the context of police militarization and its negative impact on the urban underclass.

J. B. McCall, The Cavalry of the Roman Republic: Cavalry Combat and Elite Reputations in the Middle and Late Republic. London/New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. viii + 200. ISBN 0-415-25713-1. £50.00.

J. B. McCall, The Cavalry of the Roman Republic: Cavalry Combat and Elite Reputations in the Middle and Late Republic. London/New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. viii + 200. ISBN 0-415-25713-1. £50.00. - Volume 94

Stabilization Tactics in Latin America: Menem, Cardoso, and the Politics of Low Inflation

In the 1990s presidents Carlos Menem of Argentina and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil both accomplished something of a macroeconomic miracle. They managed to bring their countries' chronically high inflation rates down close to zero and keep them very low for more than five years, after decades of price instability and unsuccessful attempts at stabilization. Some of the shine has since come off both achievements. A currency crisis forced Brazil to devalue in 1998, and in 2002 fear of a left-wing victor in the presidential election roiled markets again. In Argentina Menem's successor, Fernando De la Rfia, struggled in vain to generate growth and fend off a debt default, currency crisis, and run on the banks. He left office in late 2001 amid street violence and a plummeting peso. It is thus worth emphasizing just how historically unusual the reemergence of price stability in Brazil and Argentina in the 1990s was. As of 2002, Brazil's inflation had been under 10 percent for five years, and Argentina's had for eight. In each country, inflation for the first time in forty years stayed this low for more than one year. No equivalent eight-year spell of low inflation had occurred in Argentina since 1944. Brazil had not had a five-year period with such stable prices since before 1937. Argentina's commitment to stable money was so entrenched by the late 1990s that it survived a four-year recession and 18 percent unemployment. It took a major political crisis-and three presidents-to break the dollar peg. Even if this recession is taken into account, Argentine growth in the 1990s was higher than in any decade since the 1950s. How did these political leaders stabilize prices when so many before them had failed? Political economists have offered a number of explanations. Some emphasize crisis, social wars of attrition, or the electoral cycle. Others contend that Menem's left-wing Peronist credentials gave him greater credibility in demanding sacrifice from the working class. Although these factors may contribute to an answer, they do not provide a convincing account. Both achievements rested on a particularly effective political strategy that demobilized key beneficiaries of inflationary policies and created confidence in the durability of reforms.

Ο θησαυρός Γυθείου IGCH 170

The Gythion Hoard IGCH 170. IGCH 170 was found at Gythion of Laconia in 1938. It consists of 33 silver coin–issues often occuring in Peloponnesian hoards: 1 drachm of Aegina, 32 triobols of Sikyon, 1 tetradrachm of Antiochus I Soter. The drachm issue,with two dots on the reverse incuse, dates to the second half of the 4th century B.C. The triobols follow the so–called reduced Aeginetan standard, with an average weight of about 2.6 gr. each; these can be attributed to the very last years of the 4th up to the first decades of the 3rd century B.C. The tetradrachm of Antiochus I, minted in Seleucia on the Tigris c. 278–274 B.C., is important for the chronology of the find. In a total of 23 coin hoards found in the Peloponnese, buried in the period between the middle of the 4thand the 2nd century B.C., four include Seleucid tetradrachms (17 in all); see the table in p. 124, of which 8 were minted in Seleucia on the Tigris.It is probably an emergency hoard connected either with the troubled times of Cleomenes III’s war (228–222 B.C.) or the Social War (220–217 B.C.). Thus, the period around the year 220 B.C. is grosso modo suggested as the possible burial date. The Gythion find is another important hoard for the dating of the triobols of Sikyon and also provides further evidence for coin circulation in the Peloponnese during the second part of the 3rd century B.C.