War Debate Research Articles

Gender and Its Discontents

Gender produces multiple discontents (unease, discomfort, embarrassment, irritation, annoyance) in society. With this straightforward thesis the author addresses the problem of gender—Butlerian “gender trouble”—as a form of cultural discontent or unease. During the ground-breaking and path-paving women’s, feminist, gay and lesbian movements, gender, then female gender, caused cultural irritation for the patriarchy of the then societies and continues to do so to this very day. However, with the recent transgender movement, this cultural unease about gender has taken on entirely new dimensions, including turning gender into an alarming issue, a threatening global specter and annoyingly omnipresent conflict not only in wider society but also in academia. These uneasy issues are here tackled in two ways, through the theory and practice of gender. The way subversive gender theory can trigger collective unease, even if it is falsely imposed, artificially induced, and manipulatively orchestrated, is shown using the example of the abuse of Judith Butler’s gender theory by polemicists in culture war debates surrounding gender and proponents and supporters of the anti-gender movement, clearly betraying their intention of harming communities of gender non-conforming people and those communities’ efforts towards social, political, and legal emancipation. The way transgressive gender practice can trigger relational discomfort in everyday interactions is illustrated through the author’s own “gender story” in the form of a short autoethnography of gender unease, to illustrate the problem of deep sex/gender binarism, essentialism, primordialism, perennialism, and naturalism permeating, completely spontaneously and unreflexively, all our thoughts, words, actions, relationships, institutions, and collectives.

Civilizational Politics at the Commonwealth Games: Identity, Coloniality and LGBTIQ+ Inclusion

Abstract In 2022, the United Kingdom hosted the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, with this games featuring a pride programme that promoted LGBTIQ+ inclusion around the Commonwealth. With British colonial norms and laws often providing the origins of homophobic and transphobic policies in Commonwealth member states, this paper sees LGBTIQ+ inclusivity narratives at the games as a significant object of study. Focusing on the theme of “welcoming,” the paper interrogates the various welcomes that were extended to different communities at the games; welcoming athletes from around the Commonwealth to Birmingham, welcoming queer people into the world of sport, and welcoming Commonwealth citizens into the LGBTIQ+ framework. Encapsulating these welcomes, it argues, was a liberal progress narrative that ignores ongoing British colonial violence, for example through the United Kingdom’s carceral border policy, or through culture war debates that demonize trans women. Contesting depictions of British democracy as the zenith of human development, this paper highlights the inconsistency of this with the UK Government’s politics of exclusion and the ways in which civilizationist agendas detract attention from the ongoing operation of coloniality. It also reflects on opportunities for resisting colonial violence in complex socio-political contexts.

‘Of a Human Satellite’: Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali in Cold War Finnish Television Culture, 1960–1965

This article discusses the reception of Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali in Finnish media from 1960 to 1965, during the emergence of satellite broadcasting networks. The focus is especially on his two matches against Sonny Liston in 1964 and 1965, which had particular cultural and political resonance in Finland. Alongside other European sports fans, Finns were able to follow the bouts via satellite broadcasts, demonstrating not only the transnational possibilities of television but also the supposed technological supremacy of the West. The article is based on materials of the Finnish Broadcasting Company’s Radio and Television Archive and press coverage of Clay/Ali. The article argues that the Clay/Ali-Liston fights in Finland are best understood within the context of the Cold War, with the country itself being rapidly modernized after World War II. Within this geopolitical setting, the Clay/Ali-Liston boxing matches served as cultural vehicles in the broader Cold War debates, as the satellite broadcasts and other media activities helped to build Ali’s transnational fame and, in so doing, his globalization.

The Weimar Republic and the War of Memory

World War I dismantled Imperial Germany and, long after the fighting had ceased, continued to shape the newly-born Weimar Republic. This paper argues that a war over the memory of the Great War in Germany led to Weimar’s downfall. The Weimar Republic’s lack of a collective memory of the first total war became the center of the political debate on the republic’s viability and Germany’s future. This war debate was potently wielded in the arenas of literature and art to heighten political conflict and ensure that the war’s memory seeped into every aspect of society. Ultimately, Weimar’s inability to promote any consensus on the war’s meaning in the face of opposition from the conservative and extremist right weakened the republic significantly and led to its downfall.

“Gays Have Taken the Paulista!”: Queer Protest and Placemaking in São Paulo

Focusing on queer protest cultures in downtown Sao Paulo, this article investigates how urban spaces function as a “national stage” for the public dramas of political crises that took place between 2010 and 2018. In the culture war debates over sexual minority and gender identity rights that pervaded national politics in this period, protest served as a key venue to articulate not only queer visibility but queer political affect. The key to these protests is their site-specificity. The street is not just the site where protest takes place—ratherit is an important ideological construct within Brazilian society and political imagination. Drawing on performance studies with an emphasis on the choreography and design of protest, this article examines how protest as a genre of street occupation frames queer lifeworlds as it presents them to the national public. LGBT people’s struggle over and attachments to distinct locations in Sao Paulo, such as Paulista Avenue, become operationalized as part of the message of protest. Because of Sao Paulo’s concentration of news media, the streets of Sao Paulo’s downtown district play a distinct role in transmitting nationalized sentiment.

Ethics of War and Ritual: The Bhagavad-Gita and Mahabharata as Test Cases

ABSTRACT This article uses paradigms developed in the ethics of war debate, primarily jus in bello (just actions in war), and academic theories developed for the study of religion: the dialectic of the sacred and profane, and ritual studies – primarily sacrifice, festivals, and rites of passage – to analyze the Bhagavad-Gita and the sections of the Mahabharata that tell the story of the Kurukshetra War. 1 The article focuses attention on the fact that along with Krishna preaching Hindu dharma (religious socio-ethical duties) in the Bhagavad-Gita, a militarist ethic is forcefully put forth within Kshatriya dharma. The objective is to bring out salient points on human behavior expressed by combatants in war through their religious ethics and religious rituals. While some commentary is offered on the meaning of the teachings presented in these texts, the main goal is examining human behavior not textual meaning. The article builds on studies that show religious ritual as a powerful force in inculcating ethics and behavior in the pursuit of war. The article comments on religion and war in general in order to advance the understanding of human religious expression and behavior in regard to war.

Corporate Leadership and Mass Atrocity

With the last Holocaust survivors quietly passing away, one might also expect to see accountability debates slowing to a trickle. Surprisingly, however, recent years show an upswing in corporate World War II-related atonement debates. Interest in corporate participation in mass atrocity has expanded worldwide; yet what constitutes ethical corporate behavior during and after war remains understudied. This article considers these questions through a study of the French National Railways’ (SNCF) roles during the German occupation and its more recent struggle to make amends. This study demonstrates that ethical business leadership requires taking responsibility for past as well as current decisions. Most executives grappling with complex corporate histories work in isolation, in part because the scholarship on business ethics fails to provide guidance. Without such guidance, corporations often respond to accusations about their pasts with carefully crafted statements and legal strategies rather than deep expressions of moral leadership. To assist in remedying this tendency, this paper simultaneously encourages companies to engage in deeper reflection on corporate history, while urging scholars to help guide corporations through critical ethical conversations.

“Rigoberta's Listener”: The Significance of Sound inTestimonio

“[LOS INDIOS SON] LOS VENCIDOS POR LA CONQUISTA ESPAÑOLA, LOS QUE SE EXPRESAN HOY EN LA VOZ DE RIGOBERTA-MENCHÚ” (“THE voice of Rigoberta Menchú allows the defeated to speak”; Burgos-Debray, Prólogo 8; Introduction xi). This statement introduces thetestimoniorecorded on cassette tapes and then edited into print by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray:Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y asi me nació la conciencia(My Name is Rigoberta Menchú and This Is How My Consciousness Was Born), published in English asI, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala.In order to hear that voice from January 1982, and to consider the important role of aurality in the text's production and later uptakes, one now has to visit the Hoover Institution, on the campus of Stanford University. Given that Menchú'stestimonio, a genre defined by the work of personal witnessing on behalf of a collective struggling against injustice, tells the story of her community's socialist fight against exploitative labor practices and government-sponsored genocide, it might seem odd that her voice has been preserved in the archives of a right-wing think tank in the United States, some of whose fellows provided support for the government Menchú spoke against. However, the Hoover Institution has long dedicated itself to an archival counterrevolutionary practice, collecting the voices, newspapers, personal correspondence, and other documents associated with the ideological enemies of the institution's current and former fellows. Moreover, the location of Menchú's tapes makes some historical sense. Many today will recall that Stanford University, the Hoover Institution, and Menchú were at the center of what has since been called the Rigoberta Menchú controversy (Arias), in which the text galvanized culture war debates when progressive faculty members includedI, Rigoberta Menchúon syllabi to diversify the curriculum. Right-wing pundits railed against the inclusion as an example of “affirmative action for books” (Dinesh D'Souza qtd. in Strauss) and denounced Menchú'stestimonioafter the Stanford PhD and anthropologist David Stoll revealed that it included several inaccurate statements.

Guns for the Government: Ordnance, the Military “Peacetime Establishment,” and Executive Governance in the Early Republic

During the 1810s and 1820, officials in the War Department engaged in military state building, which transcended partisanship and contributed to the development of executive autonomy. The process revealed the ability of the executive to shape national security, while also foreshadowing Progressive Era trends toward expertise-based bureaucratic autonomy. The activities of the Ordnance Department suggest that the connection between war and early American state building was forged in the efforts to bolster the armaments industry. Ordnance officers established autonomy partly through arms expertise, and they were not necessarily coalition builders like the late nineteenth-century Post Office and Department of Agriculture bureaucrats, especially because they generated more hostility. Thus, there were different routes by which autonomy was and is established, but in the first decades of the nineteenth century, this autonomy depended on national security and war preparations. This article uses War Department papers, armory records, and congressional debates to show how certain bureaucrats developed the ability to work against congressional limits to their functionality. Ordnance ultimately succeeded because its leaders executed a nonpartisan military agenda and demonstrated an ability to effectively manage the nation's security apparatus, especially in times of peace.

Religion and the New Wars Debate

Abstract In this article, we analyse the converging of research on religion with the debate over the so-called ‘New Wars.’ Our aim is to present a state of the art of the broad literature which relates religion as an explanatory and causal factor of contemporary organised violence with the criticisms that have emerged in response to the objectivist methodology of mainstream scholarship. The work is divided into three sections, the first being a presentation of the mainstream literature, where religion is perceived as a category with causal powers. The next two sections are divided between two types of critique. The first challenges the identitarian perspective of organised violence, adding other explanatory dimensions to the analysis of contemporary conflicts. The second questions the notion of religion as an autonomous, universal and transhistorical concept, exploring genealogically the varied meanings religion may acquire and the different powers the demarcation of non-religious spheres authorises. In the concluding sections, we seek to relate those three types of methodology on religion and violence to the types of questions each one makes regarding its research object.

Tale of Loss & Personal Ruin in Response to Time of Crisis in Selected Plays by Christopher Shinn & Jon Robin Baitz

Dying City by Christopher Shinn, an American playwright, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London 2006. Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz, also an American playwright, premiered at Off-Broadway in January 2011. Both plays deal with Iraqi war in apolitical way. However, Dying City puts into focus conflicting identities as a result of social and political context that threatens individuals’ agency and concepts about themselves. Meanwhile, Other Desert Cities investigates domineering paternal relationships that produce passive/docile subjects. This study demonstrates that individuals’ agency and identity could be affected by domination relationship, limiting individuals’ choices and eliciting rebellion. This is undertaken by investigating characters’ ability to resist hegemonic relationships and endure controversial war debate. Characters’ subordination and resistance are also discussed. However, Shinn and Baitz’s aims are not to deal with the war but to underline its influence on personal relationships.

Wars, presidents, and punctuated equilibriums in US defense spending

Under what conditions does the USA adjust its defense spending dramatically? Scholars have identified many factors that affect military budgets, from international threats to domestic politics. Yet, most existing studies use regression analysis to estimate average marginal effects, thereby neglecting large-scale outlier “punctuations” that, though rare, supply theoretical insights, set institutional trajectories, and shape aspirations for future policy. Blending scholarship from public policy, international relations, and defense analysis, this article uses punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) and a mixed-method research design to argue that either a change in war policy or a presidential transition is necessary for a US defense spending punctuation. War debates and presidential transitions facilitate punctuations by triggering shifts in policymaker attention and policy subsystem structure, two mechanisms central to PET theorizing. In its quantitative section, the article uses a mathematical threshold to identify four punctuations since 1950: Truman’s Korean War buildup, Eisenhower’s post-Korean War drawdown, Kennedy’s peacetime civil defense buildup, and Bush I’s post-Gulf War, post-Cold War drawdown. War policy or a presidential transition figured prominently in each case. In its qualitative section, the article analyzes the Kennedy period in greater detail because, lacking a hot war, the case was least likely to witness a punctuation and therefore represents the hardest test for PET. In line with the theory’s expectations, Kennedy’s muscular agenda setting and subsystem shaping interacted with rising Cold War tensions to cause a dramatic-but-brief increase in civil defense funding to guard against a Soviet nuclear attack.

Just War Theory: Feminist Critique as a Practical Alternative to Revisionism

For more than a decade now, a debate has taken place between revisionists and traditionalists about some of the constitutive aspects and the nature of the just war theory. This article argues that revisionism has not been able to provide a practical alternative to the traditional just war theory and that we can satisfy some of the main practical aims of revisionism even within the traditional just war theory framework. The article then briefly introduces the feminist critique of the just war tradition recently presented by Rosemary Kellison and argues that Kellison’s approach promises a more appropriate practical reform programme for the just war debate. Moreover, the practical perspective of Kellison’s account is able to contain some of the aims of revisionism without containing its shortcomings such as its counterintuitive conclusions or deflecting too far from the traditional just war theory.

Continuing the Vietnam War Debate

Some day, hopefully, there will be bookshelves groaning under the weight of tomes written to justify—or criticize—the war decisions of America’s leaders after September 11, or to argue the war on terror was or was not lost, and why. We already have that for the Vietnam war—both the French war and the American one. And where some probably hoped that history would come to its judgment and settle, that has not been the case. Instead the Vietnam War debate continues and Gregory Daddis’s Withdrawal opens the next phase of the argument. In an interesting point of departure, Daddis opens with his time in Iraq as an Army lieutenant colonel and historian, and what he observed on colleagues’ reading tables. One of those books, the product of another former officer, was Lewis Sorley’s A Better War (Disclosure: I have been a friend of Sorley’s, and have had him speak to a class of mine; I have also had Daddis speak at a conference I helped organize). He became concerned that the “better war” thesis “manufactured a narrative that misinterpreted the complicated nature of American strategy” (xii). Gregory Daddis sets out to explore that terrain. It soon led to historical minefields.

The perils of realist advocacy and the promise of securitization theory: Revisiting the tragedy of the Iraq War debate

Why does realist political advocacy for a more limited national security agenda fail? For nearly two decades, realists in general and Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in particular have publicly lamented an endemic problem of threat inflation in America, culminating in the unnecessary 2003 Iraq War. This article argues that understanding the failure of realist advocacy requires appreciating its roots in the model of the marketplace of ideas, an ironically liberal model of discourse that downplays questions of power. As a corrective, I argue that securitization theory and its framing of security debates as discursive, competitive and ultimately power-laden processes offers substantive insights into understanding realism’s anaemic interventions. Focusing specifically on the advocacy of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in their opposition to the 2003 Iraq War, I examine how powerful processes involving social identity and collective emotion came to be turned against realists by their neoconservative interlocutors. In the final section, I suggest that a common research agenda among realism and securitization scholarship is needed to explore their joint interest in the statecraft of threat construction in order to produce practical, politically relevant knowledge.

NOTIONS OF ADDICTION IN THE TIME OF THE FIRST OPIUM WAR

AbstractThis article explores whether the British decision-makers and public were conscious of the habit-forming nature of opium at the time of the Chinese war of 1839–42, the First Opium War. While most political historians have assumed that the British authorities understood the nature of the drug, social historians argue that notions of addiction only arose, in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century. Examining the abundant press, pamphlet, and parliamentary literature generated by the war debate, this article examines in what terms opium use was characterized. It considers the groups that intervened on both sides of the debate and draws lessons from the arguments they deployed for and against the war. Situating the source literature within the context of early Victorian values and mores, finally, it argues that the British leaders and political nation were aware of the drug's habit-forming properties. Not only was it widely recognized that it was something dangerous that was being introduced, at the point of a gun, into China, but there can be said to have existed, in Britain, a layman's notion of drug addiction.

A political theory of territory. By Margaret Moore

Contemporary liberal political theory has paid a great deal of attention to individual rights, social justice and the authority of the state. But in spite of the attention given to the importance of sovereignty in this context, somehow the deeply political dimension of the state's location in and claim over territory has been subjected to much less theoretical reflection until relatively recently. This is true in spite of what would seem to be the evident normative problems arising from territorial claims and the importance of issues such as secession and state-breaking, ethnic conflict and territorial disputes, and just war debates about national defence against armed violations of territorial integrity. In fact, as Margaret Moore argues in her enormously valuable contribution to the growing debate on the political theory of territory, philosophers have generally acted as if raising questions specifically about territorial rights is obviated by theories of sovereignty: ‘state sovereignty necessarily involves control over territory’, they commonly assume, and ‘whatever justifies the state also justifies the territory of the state’ (p. 4). However, the belief that justifying sovereignty is sufficient to account for the territorial claims that states also make fails when confronted with problems at the margins of sovereignty such as how disputes over uninhabited islands can be evaluated and settled. But even had it accounted for such things satisfactorily, the very success of a body of theory that focused exclusively on individual rights, social justice and state sovereignty would run the risk of obscuring what Moore persuasively argues is a distinct and independently important normative dimension of political life: the particularities of people's relationships with political space and the ethical dimensions of occupying land and claiming it as political territory.

Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars

Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars

Project and prototype: industrialized and prefabricated construction in Italy (1945-1980)

Based on archival survey, the study sheds the lights on a neglected story. The research track a line between the post war debate, the traditionalist turn of the INA Casa plan, to the main actions of the public planning for housing and schools. However them were false starts. The process, reduced to anachronistic use of foreign building techniques, will last only few years, dilated over time by constant discussion about the results. Once were given up expectations of an overall reconversion of the building sector, prototypes, remain, presently, witnesses of the foresight that Italian experience demonstrated on the small scale industrial production.

James V. Neel and Yuri E. Dubrova: Cold War debates and the genetic effects of low-dose radiation.

This article traces disagreements about the genetic effects of low-dose radiation exposure as waged by James Neel (1915-2000), a central figure in radiation studies of Japanese populations after World War II, and Yuri Dubrova (1955-), who analyzed the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. In a 1996 article in Nature, Dubrova reported a statistically significant increase in the minisatellite (junk) DNA mutation rate in the children of parents who received a high dose of radiation from the Chernobyl accident, contradicting studies that found no significant inherited genetic effects among offspring of Japanese A-bomb survivors. Neel's subsequent defense of his large-scale longitudinal studies of the genetic effects of ionizing radiation consolidated current scientific understandings of low-dose ionizing radiation. The article seeks to explain how the Hiroshima/Nagasaki data remain hegemonic in radiation studies, contextualizing the debate with attention to the perceived inferiority of Soviet genetic science during the Cold War.