War

The use of sonar by military vessels during military exercises may produce acoustic pollution of the marine environment. States have an obligation under international law to reduce and control this form of pollution. Regulation of the use of sonar is rendered more complex by the specific regime applicable to warships, i.e. sovereign immunity. Immunity however does not prevent in all cases action by States other than the flag State, notwithstanding the limitations imposed by Art. 236 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. More importantly, immunity does not prevent the flag State from taking measures to reduce pollution caused by its own warships. Under some environmental treaties, flag States not only may, but have the obligation to adopt measures.

Cyber-attacks have become increasingly common in recent years. Capable of shutting down nuclear centrifuges, air defense systems, and electrical grids, cyber-attacks pose a serious threat to national security. As a result, some have suggested that cyber-attacks should be treated as acts of war. Yet the attacks look little like the armed attacks that the law of war has traditionally regulated. This Article examines how existing law may be applied—and adapted and amended—to meet the distinctive challenge posed by cyber-attacks. It begins by clarifying what cyber-attacks are and how they already are regulated by existing bodies of law, including the law of war, international treaties, and domestic criminal law. This review makes clear that existing law effectively addresses only a small fraction of potential cyber-attacks. The law of war, for example, provides a useful framework for only the very small number of cyber-attacks that amount to an armed attack or that take place in the con...

Although trauma is usually examined as an individual experience, it is a collective dynamic. Whole communities are traumatized and dynamics of trauma involve all of us and affect the course of history. An orientation to understanding trauma is needed that is at once personal, communal and political. This paper discusses why understanding the dynamics of trauma is essential for facilitators of conflict resolution in zones of conflict and for post-war reconciliation and community building. It also considers that, in addition to international tribunals and truth commissions, there is a need for community forums throughout society to work with issues of accountability and collective trauma concerning past and current conflicts. Trauma is also relevant to such issues as understanding dynamics of revenge, the silence accompanying atrocity, and historical revisionism. Copyright © 2004 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

The outbreak of World War II in Poland and the subsequent formation of the underground state saw women’s massive involvement in the war effort. Women engaged in the resistance movement not only as civilians providing help to soldiers, but many also entered the Home Army and performed the tasks of nurses, couriers, intelligence agents and even saboteurs and minelayers. Eventually, women’s service was legally acknowledged as military service equal to that of men. Despite women’s vast participation in the Warsaw Uprising, works on the event written after the war did not integrate them into the historical record. Women insurgents are entirely absent from history textbooks and rarely mentioned in renowned monographs of the uprising. If they appear in these works, they are usually cast as background characters and very often lack necessary biographical information. Several efforts to write women back into the history of the uprising were undertaken by female combatants themselves, who sought to document women’s participation and commemorate various “women worthies.”Recently, a growing interest in female insurgents can be observed, albeit mostly in the field of public history and not in academia.
While the aforementioned efforts certainly made female insurgents visible, they were not informed by a gender perspective and sought to merely add women to the official narrative of the past. By introducing gender as a category of analysis, this book seeks to transform the narrative itself. The main aim of this book is to analyze the gender politics of the Warsaw Uprising: the way specific notions of femininity and masculinity were used by the military to mobilize men and women for the war effort and at the same time sustain the masculine character of the army. Drawing on both biographical materials (interviews and written testimonies of former insurgents) and archival research (military document sand daily press issued during the uprising), the book exposes the various militarized roles women were encouraged to play in the uprising: as patriotic mothers, embodiments of national identity, auxiliaries and soldiers. By analyzing military gender-specific policies as well as representations of female and male service in public discourse, it also sheds light on women’s limited inclusion into the ranks and their subordinate position in relation to male soldiers. It argues that while the army made extensive use of women’s work, their participation failed to challenge the gender order, since their tasks were described as feminine and endowed with lower prestige than male combat roles. While looking at the dominant discourse on the Warsaw Uprising through feminist lens, this book also seeks to suggest ways in which the memory of the insurgency could be reframed in order to include women and their experiences.

This study examines the role of political factors in attitudes toward World War II in contemporary Ukraine. The question under examination is which factors determine public views of the principal warring sides and their leaders in Ukraine. This paper uses a representative national survey specifically designed for this research project and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in 2012. It analyzes the roles of regionalism, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, age, and sex in attitudes toward the Red Army, Soviet partisans, the German Army (Wehrmacht), and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the war, as well as toward the wartime leaders of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the UPA. The analysis of the survey data shows that regional values, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, and age have significant effects on views of the Soviet Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the war and attitudes toward the wartime activities of Joseph Stalin and Roman Shukhevych. Public perceptions of the German Army and Adolf Hitler in Ukraine do not vary much across regions, political parties, and ethnic, language, age, and sex groups.

To describe the contribution of forensic anthropology to the recovery, analysis, and identification of victims from the 1991-1995 war in Croatia recovered in wells. From 1996 to the present, human remains of a total of 61 individuals have been recovered from 13 wells. Six wells contained the remains of a single individual, one well contained the remains of 2 individuals, and 6 wells contained the remains 3 or more individuals. The majority of wells, containing 90.2% (55/61) of recovered individuals, were located within a 4 km radius of the Croatian-Serbian border. Forensic anthropologists re-individualized 26/61 (42.6%) individuals out of skeletonized and commingled remains, provided basic biological data on sex, age-at-death, and stature in all identifications (n=37), as well as established positive identification by recognizing unique skeletal features (antemortem fractures and skeletal evidence of antemortem surgical interventions) in 3/37 (8.1%) cases. Trauma analyses carried ou...

Feminist philosophy can make an important contribution to the field of genocide studies, and issues relating to gender and war are gaining new attention. In this article I trace legal and philosophical analyses of sexual violence against women in war. I analyze the strengths and limitations of the concept of social death—introduced into this field by Claudia Card—for understanding the genocidal features of war rape, and draw on the work of Hannah Arendt to understand the central harm of genocide as an assault on natality. The threat to natality posed by the harms of rape, forced pregnancy and forced maternity lie in the potential expulsion from the public world of certain groups—including women who are victims, members of the 'enemy' group, and children born of forced birth.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is reported to be caused by traumatic events that are outside the range of usual human experiences including (but not limited to) military combat, violent personal assault, being kidnapped or taken hostage and terrorist attacks. Initial data suggests that 1 out of 6 returning Iraq War military personnel are exhibiting symptoms of depression, anxiety and PTSD. Virtual Reality (VR) exposure therapy has been used in previous treatments of PTSD patients with reports of positive outcomes. The aim of the current paper is to specify the rationale, design and development of an Iraq War PTSD VR application that is being created from the virtual assets that were initially developed for theX-Box game entitled Full Spectrum Warrior which was inspired by a combat tactical training simulation, Full Spectrum Command.

To estimate the frequency, type, and severity of psychological trauma among Bosnian refugee adolescents during the process of repatriation after the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A sample of 239 pupils (120 girls and 119 boys), with a mean age (+/-standard deviation) of 15.2+/-2.1 years were assessed for war traumatic events, acculturation and repatriation maladjustments, school behavioral problems, and presence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The sample consisted of adolescents who were in the process of repatriation after exile in a foreign country (n=120) and internally displaced adolescents (n=119). Adolescents who had been exposed to severe psychological war trauma still had high level of trauma more than three years after the end of war. The level of recalling traumas they experienced (mean+/-standard deviation=3.9+/-1.2 on a scale from 0 to 5) and frequency of PTSD symptoms (1.5+/-1.0 on a scale from 0-5) were significantly lower among repatriated than in...

Because the war was relatively brief, casualties relatively light, and the Nation sanctioned the war socially, veterans of Desert Shield/Storm and their families were not anticipated to suffer symptoms of trauma or re-entry stress beyond that expected in routine peacetime military deployments. However, the authors argue that the stress imposed on families by Desert Shield/Storm was not analogous to that of routine deployments. The call to duty was unexpected, disruptive, and “hazardous” (i.e., highly dangerous) which places it in the category of a “catastrophic” stressor as defined by McCubbin and Figley (1983). The deployment was a call to war, which creates unique stress beyond those experienced during peacetime deployments. The deployment also carried with it prolonged “anticipation of trauma.” For these reasons, the authors argue, the deployment to Desert Shield/Storm created a situation of “family trauma” for veterans and their families. Suggestions are offered for education, prevention and treatment for families undergoing unexpected wartime military deployments.

A small group of Gulf War veterans possess retained fragments of depleted uranium (DU) shrapnel, the long-term health consequences of which are undetermined. We evaluated the clinical health effects of DU exposure in Gulf War veterans compared with nonexposed Gulf War veterans. History and follow-up medical examination were performed on 29 exposed veterans and 38 nonexposed veterans. Outcome measures employed were urinary uranium determinations, clinical laboratory values, and psychiatric and neurocognitive assessment. DU-exposed Gulf War veterans with retained metal shrapnel fragments are excreting elevated levels of urinary uranium 7 years after first exposure (range 0.01-30.7 microg/g creatinine vs 0.01- 0.05 microg/g creatinine in the nonexposed). The persistence of the elevated urine uranium suggests on-going mobilization from a storage depot which results in a chronic systemic exposure. Adverse effects in the kidney, a presumed target organ, are not present at this time, though other effects are observed. Neurocognitive examinations demonstrated a statistical relationship between urine uranium levels and lowered performance on computerized tests assessing performance efficiency. Elevated urinary uranium was statistically related to a high prolactin level (>1.6 ng/ml; P=0.04). More than 7 years after first exposure, DU-exposed Gulf War veterans with retained metal fragments continue to excrete elevated concentrations of urinary uranium. Effects related to this are subtle perturbations in the reproductive and central nervous systems.

Multitud ha de ser un libro no solo ampliamente recomendado para
especialistas en temas de riesgo y terrorismo, sino en cuestiones de bio-política en general. La posición inicial de los autores intenta ser una lectura holística de  comprensión respecto al problema de la modernidad capitalista. Esta nueva fase implica un cambio, el cual puede ser interpretado como amenazante o simplemente una oportunidad para saltar a un estado más democrático en donde los actores y sus subjetividades se combinen. Una de las particularidades que distingue a estos dos pensadores del resto, es la visión del rol de la bio-política como mecanismo de adoctrinamiento orientado a crear comunidad. En ese contexto, la multitud debe ser considerada como un producto residual del capitalismo y de la excesiva movilidad de las fuerzas
productivas. Pero a la vez, la multitud es una fiel expresión que desafía la
propiedad privada. La modernidad, después de todo, crea estados paradojales en constante movimiento.

Third parties are thought to face a tradeoff in that those actions most likely to bring peace in the short run appear least likely to ensure its long run stability. Yet the tradeoff between conflict management and conflict resolution may be overstated. Analyzing an iterated three player bargaining model with both information and commitment problems, we first demonstrate two conditions under which third parties may produce lasting peace through conditional subsidies, even without addressing underlying informational or commitment problems. Second, we illustrate this possibility by analyzing the impact of US foreign aid on patterns of conflict and peace between Israel and her neighbors. Our analysis indicates that the termination of the rivalry between Israel and Egypt was most likely not brought about by the Camp David accords or peacekeeping operations, but by sustained foreign aid provision. We discuss the implications for both this conflict and conflict management more broadly.