America's debate over whether and how to invade Iraq clustered into civilian versus military camps. Top military officials appeared reluctant to use force, the most hawkish voices in government were civilians who had not served in uniform, and everyone was worried that the American public would not tolerate casualties in war. This book shows that this civilian-military argument--which has characterized earlier debates over Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo--is typical, not exceptional. Indeed, t...

When the "don't ask, don't tell" policy emerged as a political compromise under Bill Clinton in 1993, it only ended up worsening the destructive gay ban that had been on the books since World War II. Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Nathaniel Frank exposes the military's policy toward gays and lesbians as damaging and demonstrates that "don't ask, don't tell" must be replaced with an outright reversal of the gay ban.Frank is one of the nation's l...

Where are the women? In traditional historical and scholarly accounts of the making and fighting of wars, women are often nowhere to be seen. With few exceptions, war stories are told as if men were the only ones who plan, fight, are injured by, and negotiate ends to wars. As the pages of this book tell, though, those accounts are far from complete. Women can be found at every turn in the (gendered) phenomena of war. Women have participated in the making, fighting, and concluding of wars t...

This volume explores the implementation of key gender policies in international peace and security, following the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 1325 in October 2000, the first thematic resolution on Women, Peace and Security.How should we understand women’s participation in peace processes and in peace operations? And what forms of gendered security dynamics are present in armed conflict and international interventions? These questions represent central themes of prote...

Conflict economics contributes to an understanding of violent conflict in two important ways. First, it applies economic analysis to diverse conflict activities such as war, arms races, and terrorism, showing how they can be understood as purposeful choices responsive to underlying incentives. Second, it treats appropriation as a fundamental economic activity, joining production and exchange as a means of wealth acquisition. Drawing on a half-century of scholarship, this book presents a pr...

This book examines forty-six UN peacekeeping operations, initiated from 1956 through 2006 to manage cases of intrastate and interstate conflicts, to identify the most significant factors that could help to explain the success or lack of success of such operations. Factor analysis is used to exploit the correlations between independent variables in order to regroup them into a smaller set of factors explaining the success or failure of these operations. The results show that the success of ...

The Casualty Gap shows how the most important cost of American military campaigns--the loss of human life--has been paid disproportionately by poorer and less-educated communities since the 1950s. Drawing on a rich array of evidence, including National Archives data on the hometowns of more than 400,000 American soldiers killed in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, this book is the most ambitious inquiry to date into the distribution of American wartime casualties across the ...

The unintended deaths of civilians in war are too often dismissed as unavoidable, inevitable, and accidental. And despite the best efforts of the U.S. to avoid them, civilian casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan have been a regular feature of the United States' wars after 9/11. In Accountability for Killing, Neta C. Crawford focuses on the causes of these many episodes of foreseeable collateral damage and the moral responsibility for them. The dominant paradigm of legal a...

Trades of money for political influence persist at every level of government. Not surprisingly, governments themselves trade money for political support on the international stage. Strange, however, is the tale of this book. For, in this study, legitimacy stands as the central political commodity at stake. The book investigates the ways governments trade money for favors at the United Nations Security Council - the body endowed with the international legal authority to legitimize the use o...

This book focuses on the use of small arms in violence and attempts by the state to govern the use and acquisition of these weapons.It is likely that hundreds of thousands of people are killed every year as a result of armed violence – in contexts ranging from war zones to domestic violence. This edited volume examines why these deaths occur, the role of guns and other weapons, and how governance can be used to reduce and prevent those deaths. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, r...

At peak utilization, private security contractors (PSCs) constituted a larger occupying force in Iraq and Afghanistan than did U.S. troops. Yet, no book has so far assessed the impact of private security companies on military effectiveness. Filling that gap, Molly Dunigan reveals how the increasing tendency to outsource missions to PSCs has significant ramifications for both tactical and long-term strategic military effectiveness—and for the likelihood that the democracies that deploy PSCs...

Why adopt a poststructural lens for the reading of the military strategy of national missile defence (NMD)? No doubt, when contemplating an attack on US territory by intercontinental ballistic missiles, consulting Michel Foucault and critical international relations theory scholars may not seem the obvious route to take.The answer to this lies in another question: why has there been so much interest and continuous investment in NMD deployment when there is such ambiguity surrounding...