Responsibility For War Research Articles

Israel’s Human Shields Defense

Israel’s Human Shields Defense

Between Caesar’s state and God’s kingdom: Theological reflection on two citizenships in terms of the issue of ianfu

Japan’s war responsibility for rounding up and forcing hundreds of thousands of Asian and Dutch women to become “comfort women” has still not been clarified by the Japanese government even today. This paper is a historical and theological reflection on the Japanese military’s sexual slavery crimes, its civil-legal-moral responsibilities, and the indispensable need for it to atone in a just manner and to seek reconciliation for these criminal actions. With the exception of Korea and the Philippines, the church in Asia is not a social majority that can directly influence politics and society in the face of the state. Despite this circumstance, however, it is clearly wrong to conclude that the Asian Church cannot question its current relationship to the state. Justice for the “comfort women” may seem a “penultimate matter” in comparison to the “ultimate concerns” of the Kingdom of God, yet it is clear that the church must bear witness to the “ultimate” through the “penultimate.”

L'image de la Guerre civile espagnole dans la bande dessinée entre 1936 et 1975-I

This paper is the first of two that present a quick overview of the representation of Spanish Civil War in comics from the beginning of the conflict in 1936 up to Franco's death in 1975. This first part investigates Spanish comics during wartime and a second one will deal with other countries' comics in the same period, as well as Spanish and foreign comics during the following years of the Francoist dictatorship. During the conflict, both opponents extensively used comics with fairly different purposes and tones. The Franco's camp used them for propaganda and mudslinging the enemy, in a rather restrained tone in the case of the extreme-right Phalange, more radical and full of hatred in the case of the Catholic Church. The governmental camp used comics in trench magazines to entertain and educate soldiers, in political newspapers to reject war's responsibility on foreign countries and in comic magazines to reduce anguishes of the juvenile public in front of war events.

전쟁책임과 점령기 일본문학 - 사타 이네코 ｢허위｣와 문학자의 전쟁책임 논의를 중심으로 -

전쟁책임과 점령기 일본문학 - 사타 이네코 ｢허위｣와 문학자의 전쟁책임 논의를 중심으로 -

전쟁책임과 점령기 일본문학 : 사타 이네코 ｢포말의 기록(泡沫の記録)｣과 ‘전향’을 중심으로

전쟁책임과 점령기 일본문학 : 사타 이네코 ｢포말의 기록(泡沫の記録)｣과 ‘전향’을 중심으로

The Non-Aligned Movement: A Struggle for Global Relevance

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) forms a powerful bloc in the United Nations and associated technical agencies. The movement was created during the height of the Cold War in response to tension between the Eastern and Western blocs with the goal of buffering NATO and the Warsaw Pact. However, the end of the Cold War did not bring about the end of the NAM – indeed, by some measures, the movement is stronger now than it was during the Cold War. Few researchers have endeavored to explain why this is the case. This thesis examines the puzzling persistence of the NAM, first telling a narrative history of the movement from its inception to the present, then presenting data as evidentiary proof of the NAM’s maintenance of cohesion, and finally analyzing this data and this narrative using international relations theory to explain the maintenance of NAM power. This thesis argues that the Non-Aligned Movement has persisted due to a rise in counterhegemonic ideology among NAM states, combined with pressure from radical NAM hawks and increased institutionalization.

Czy wojna nowego typu może być sprawiedliwa?

The thesis of this article is that the just war theory must be reformulated in such a way that it can be applied to new types of wars. Today, there has been a theoretical shift when discussing the nature of war, encompassing both a change in language and a practical shift. The theoretical shift has brought about a crisis regarding the idea of sovereignty as the notion that orders both internal and international relations. Consequently, other concepts related to the theme of sovereignty have lost their relevance. On the other hand, due to the practical shift, war has been redefined as “a new type of war”. War has become a not entirely overt confrontation of forces supported by various, not always explicit sides in the conflict. The legal aspects of war, responsibility for war and future visions of peace cannot be considered without a sovereign power, a political community and a hierarchy. To date, the just war theory has been the basis of international law concerning war. Contemporary international relations and armed conflicts cannot be governed by the laws of war and ordered by the just war theory. An alternative is therefore emerging: the basis of martial law can be discarded or the just war theory can be reformulated. However, it must be reformulated in such a way that it takes into account the changes that have occurred with respect to sovereignty and forms of political community.

Setting-up a multi-center human research: Systematic observation during a Swiss clinical trial

Clinical trials aim at assessing the effectiveness and safety of drugs, medical devices, medical interventions (incl. surgery) and laboratory tests intended for human use. They are necessary to avoid scientifically unsubstantiated medical approaches and are therefore an essential tool to build up evidence-based medicine. Moreover, they represent the best way to evaluate options for unmet clinical needs. Ethical guidelines for medical research involving human subjects have mainly been established since the end of Second World War in response to the scandalous clinical experiments conducted at that time [1]. The necessity of studies approval by independent ethics committees (ECs) is nowadays undisputed to protect the rights, safety and well-being of study participants. Furthermore, ECs contribute to ensure the adequacy of the investigators, as well as of the study procedures, documents and facilities.

Ontological Security and Japan’s Ideological Debate over Compensating Wartime ‘Comfort Women’

This paper analyzes the absence of a constructive dialogue about the issue of comfort women in Japan between conservatives and liberals in spite of their respective clear concerns about the issue as part of Japan’s war responsibility. With the case of the Asian Women’s Fund’s atonement project for former comfort women, this paper suggests that both sides’ ontological insecurity controlled their interpretations of the issue and that both sides failed to understand a new notion of Japan, as proposed by the Asian Women’s Fund, in which both the Japanese government and Japanese people constitute a new public entity and act jointly to render atonement to the victims. Hardline conservatives, giving special attention to Japan’s honor, took umbrage at any atonement for former comfort women, arguing that many worked voluntarily, while anti-Fund liberals, as survivors’ representatives, guarded against any revisionist and patriarchal interpretation of the comfort women issue and persisted in pushing for truly official compensation only by the Japanese government. Hardline conservatives’ rhetoric significantly decreased the credibility of Japan’s attitude toward the issue in the eyes of the victims’ countries, while the anti-Fund liberals, by focusing their criticism against the Fund, failed to face their real rivals, hardline conservatives.

Cultural Framing of Risk and Religion within Science Fiction Narratives

This article explores some case studies of science fiction narratives concerning human-made worldwide catastrophes (i.e. The Day the Earth Stood Still, I Am Legend, Dawn of the Dead) that have been made and re-made since World War II. It analyses how the notion of risk has changed over this period of time, the degree of human responsibility for these post-World War II catastrophes and how religion, which has not been their root cause, is now being offered as a subtle ‘way out’. The article discovers key differences between narratives on risk in popular culture from the modern and late modern periods.

Reactionary Nationalism and Museum Controversies

Using Peace Osaka (an exhibit facility known for its portrayal of the Japanese military’s aggressions during the Asia-Pacific War) as a case study, this essay examines the shift in ways that the war has been portrayed in Japanese museums. Echoing the neo-revisionist turn, a trend that is increasingly apparent in various venues including cultural production and policy making, the exhibit at Peace Osaka will soon be changed in its entirety to erase any traces of aggressive behavior by the Japanese military. The essay argues that the recent shift to neo-revisionism is an example of “reactionary nationalism”: a response to earlier acknowledgements of war responsibility that was not based on a historical understanding of the past.

Corporeal Disasters of War : Legibilities of “Spain” and the Jewish Body in Helen Tamiris’s Adelante!

Corporeal Disasters of WarLegibilities of “Spain” and the Jewish Body in Helen Tamiris’s Adelante! Lisa Jackson-Schebetta (bio) With Goya a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art…While the image, like every image, is an invitation to look, the caption, more often than not, insists on the difficulty of doing just that. SUSAN SONTAG, REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS The civil war now raging in Spain has brought Goya’s Disasters of War to [an] intense second life. Through them we see deeper into the present suffering in Spain than we could in newspaper photographs. A. HYATT MAYOR, “GOYA’S ‘DISASTERS OF WAR’” Between 1810 and 1820, Francisco de Goya created Disasters of War in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Each of the eighty-five etchings explicitly depict wartime atrocities (rape, dismemberment, castration, torture, massacre). Goya captioned each print with cryptic phrases: “This is bad.” “With reason—or without.” “Poor mother.” When first published in 1863 by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, the series appalled British and U.S. critics as psychotic filth and served for others as yet further evidence of the Black Legend, of just how cruel and degenerate the Spanish could be. The etchings found a receptive English-speaking audience, however, after World War I, an audience that grew larger during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. In 1936, the Spanish military revolted against the Spanish Republic, democratically elected in 1931. The western democracies adhered to a policy of nonintervention throughout the conflict, leaving the Republican side dependent on Communist Russia and, to a [End Page 35] lesser extent, Mexico. The Nationalists, in contrast, benefited from the support of Italy and Germany, borne out in arms, airplanes, money, and bodies. Despite official U.S. policy, as deaths mounted in Spain and fascism’s hold on Europe grew, Republican sympathy in the United States gained momentum. Spanish Republicans conjured popular resistance to Napoleon as a precedent to their current plight, an ideological move that featured Goya’s images, the well-known Third of May 1808 and Second of May 1808 as well as the Disasters. In the United States, Goya’s series was republished in 1938 as a newly potent invective against the atrocities of global fascism in which Spain figured as the key battleground. The publication of the Disasters in 1938 could be read as but one more contribution to the representations of wounded, displaced, dead, and dying bodies that circulated through the international imaginary of the Spanish Civil War. It is not difficult to rattle off such images: Jay Allen’s account from Badajoz, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier, and the violence of air raids, mass graves, and executions documented in newspapers and photography and imagined on screen and stage. What is unique about the Disasters is that they found their way onto a national stage in the United States: Helen Tamiris staged Goya’s work in the dance piece Adelante! (meaning “onward” or “forward”), presented by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in April 1939. The presence of Goya in the work has yet to be examined by scholars. In this essay, I argue that Goya’s etchings influenced the aesthetics of the dance, its dramaturgy, and the historio-graphical bent of its politics. In Adelante!, Tamiris ostensibly presented a story of Spain as told through the memory of the dying body of Republican soldier José, but Tamiris was not only documenting the corporeal disasters of war that were littering Spain. Tamiris’s disasters of war, built upon both Goya’s and Spain’s, staged a revision of Iberian Jewish history in order to issue a call to arms, not for the Spanish but for the American Republic. Continued U.S. inaction against the anti-Semitism of fascism, Adelante! declared, compromised America’s legitimacy as a democracy in a global world. Tamiris’s activism in American modern dance, her passion for organizing, and her instrumentality in the Federal Dance Project and the Federal Theatre Project have been addressed by Elizabeth Cooper (1997, 2004), Mark Franko (2002), Susan Manning (2004), and Ellen Graff (2007). Tamiris’s work on Adelante!, in particular, has been amply...

Iris Young, Radical Responsibility, and War

In this paper I argue that a merit of Iris Young’s social connection model of responsibility for structural injustices is that it directs the American people’s responsibility for unjust wars, such as the recent war against Iraq, toward their responsibility to abolish the “war machine,” including the “empire of bases,” that is a contributing factor of unjust U.S. wars. I also raise two objections to her model. First, her model leads us to downplay the culpability of the American people as a political collective in voting to continue the Iraq war with the re-election of George W. Bush. Second, Young misinterprets her model of responsibility as a new type of responsibility that is conceptually completely distinct from liability responsibility rather than as offering a new ground for holding people responsible.

Writing New Japan in Sugamo, 1948-1952

This article examines the Sugamo Shimbun (the Sugamo Weekly News), written by Sugamo prisoners between 1948 and 1952 during the Allied occupation of Japan, in broader domestic and international political contexts. The prisoners questioned the legitimacy of both Allied and Japanese authorities as the United States initiated its Cold War strategies with Japanese government support. The newspaper demonstrates that the concept of “democracy” as promoted by the Allies during their occupation of Japan came into question around the time of the Korean War in 1950. Nonetheless, the prisoners’ sense of responsibility in World War II was not impartial. By examining the prisoners’ voices in the Sugamo Shimbun and the power dynamics inside the prison, this article focuses on where the prisoners’ sense of guilt originated—as a result of the prison’s correctional programs—and how the voices of the prisoners more or less reflected national and international politics of that time.

Writing war: soldiers record the Japanese Empire

Historians have made widespread use of diaries to tell the story of the Second World War in Europe but have paid little attention to personal accounts from the Asia-Pacific Theater. Writing War seeks to remedy this imbalance by examining over two hundred diaries, and many more letters, postcards, and memoirs, written by Chinese, Japanese, and American servicemen from 1937 to 1945, the period of total war in Asia and the Pacific. As he describes conflicts that have often been overlooked in the history of World War II, Aaron William Moore reflects on diaries as tools in the construction of modern identity, which is important to our understanding of history. Any discussion of war responsibility, Moore contends, requires us first to establish individuals as reasonably responsible for their actions. Diaries, in which men develop and assert their identities, prove immensely useful for this task. Tracing the evolution of diarists' personal identities in conjunction with their battlefield experience, Moore explores how the language of the state, mass media, and military affected attitudes toward war, without determining them entirely. He looks at how propaganda worked to mobilize soldiers, and where it failed. And his comparison of the diaries of Japanese and American servicemen allows him to challenge the assumption that East Asian societies of this era were especially prone to totalitarianism. Moore follows the experience of soldiering into the postwar period as well, and considers how the continuing use of wartime language among veterans made their reintegration into society more difficult.

A Game Theory Analysis of the Threshold Requirement

In recent years the interpretation of the ad bellum rules has been readjusted so as to permit forcible responses against terrorism under more lenient conditions. Yet the threshold level of provocation that legitimizes a full-scale war in response remains relatively high. This observation is especially puzzling insofar as customary international law reflects the practice of (strong) states, because these states, as we show, can benefit from credibly lowering their tolerance towards terror attacks. We argue, however, that a low threshold requirement cannot be sustained; it is a futile measure to fight terrorism since normally it is not renegotiation proof (albeit credible). Namely, were a strong state to wage a full-scale war following some mild provocation by a weak one, both parties are better off renegotiating their way back to the status quo ante. On the other hand, renegotiation may fail if transaction costs are high enough. In which case, intolerant threshold strategy by the strong side does become renegotiation proof. Consequently, a strong state is expected to violate the ad bellum threshold rule in these circumstances, and decrease, thereby, the terror level from which it suffers.

Japan's War Responsibility Issue and Neo-Nationalism

Japan's War Responsibility Issue and Neo-Nationalism

“Bread or Freedom”: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and the Arabic Literary Journal Ḥiwār (1962-67)

Abstract In 1950, the United States Central Intelligence Agency created the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with its main offices in Paris. The CCF was designed as a cultural front in the Cold War in response to the Soviet Cominform, and founded and funded a worldwide network of literary journals (as well as conferences, concerts, art exhibits and other cultural events). From 1962 until its scandalous collapse over the course of 1966 and the early months of 1967, Tawfīq Ṣāyigh edited the CCF’s Arabic outpost Ḥiwār from Beirut, joining a growing web of CCF journals, including London’s Encounter, Kampala’s Transition, Bombay’s Quest, and the Latin American, Paris-based Mundo Nuevo. Ḥiwār, a journal funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and thus covertly by the CIA, sought to co-opt the Arab avant-garde, offering authors both material compensation for their writing, as well as the much lauded cultural freedom. By 1966, Ḥiwār’s promise to writers of both bread and freedom collapsed in the pages of the Arabic press under the weight of paradox and a worldwide scandal on the eve of the 1967 Arab defeat.

Collective Responsibility for Unjust Wars

This article argues against Anna Stilz's recent attempt to solve the problem of citizens' collective responsibility in democratic states. I show that her solution could only apply to state actions that are (in legal terminology) unjustified but excusable. Stilz's marquee case – the 2003 invasion of Iraq – does not, I will argue, fit this bill; nor, in all likelihood, does any other case in recorded history. Thus, this article concludes, we may allow that Stilz's argument offers a theoretically cogent case for citizens' task-responsibility in democratic states (given the right conditions); it just so happens that few if any cases satisfy these conditions.

Memory and myth: the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima in German and Japanese TV drama

Japan is often blamed for not coming to terms with its own wartime past and for focusing solely on its role as a victim of the war. Germany, however, is often seen as the model that Japan has to emulate, having penitently accepted responsibility. Thus, in order to work out how these popular myths are being perpetuated, the media prove to be a good source of information, since they help to uphold memory and myth at the same time. In this paper, it will be examined how the “memory” of the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima is being upheld in Japan and Germany 蜢 and what kinds of “myths” are being created in the process. In focusing on two TV dramas, it shall be worked out to what extent Japan and Germany are represented as “victims” and to what extent, if at all, the issue of war responsibility features in these dramas.