by Mike Hill 2022. London: University of Minnesota Press. 237pp. ISBN: 978-0-8166-6090-2. In the past two decades, talks about ‘everywhere’ and ‘endless’ wars have become familiar refrains among scholars of critical security studies. Whether as a strategic consequence of the use of new weapons and media or as part of a political discourse aimed at… Read more »
Tag: War
Book review: Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America
by C. Birchall, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2021, 244 pp. ISBN 978-1-5179-1043-3 Why is it that debates about trade-offs between supposed binary opposites of secrecy and transparency, and between secrecy and security, so often feel unsatisfying? As Clare Birchall acutely points out in her new book, Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied… Read more »
Book review: Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army
by Maria Rashid, Stanford University Press, 2020. 288pp. ISBN: 9781503610415 Plenty of social scientists and humanities scholars are preoccupied with the technics of warfare, such as lawfare, drones, “low intensity warfare” and the shifting spaces of war. Yet, attention to a traditional means of war, that is, the institution of the military and its constituting… Read more »
Rethinking and Revising the Theory of Network-centric Warfare
If we take a step back and cast a reflective eye over the evolutionary trajectory of western military thought, we will find that in around the 1990s—as Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) began to proliferate—discussions regarding the latest Revolution in Military Affairs also started to gather pace. It was in this context that some military… Read more »
Book review: Ethics of Drone Strikes. Restraining Remote-Control Killing
by Christian Enemark (ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. IX + 204 p The increasing use of armed drones has raised a series of ethical and legal questions. The fast-evolving development and sophistication of technologies that drones combine (aerospace, robotics, satellites, artificial intelligence) have stimulated intensive debates about the need of international regulation, tackling the… Read more »
Book club review: Savage Ecology – War and Geopolitics at the End of the World
Pardon me, I was dreaming; I forgot you are herewaiting for me to accept you again, tell you that you’re not dangerous. Alice Notley, Above the Leaders With the global security system implicated in just about every scenario of civilisational and species collapse, should it be said that scholars have given too much time… Read more »
Book club review*: Savage Ecology – War and geopolitics at the end of the world
*An in-depth review from @SecDialogue by Jairus V. Grove. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 368pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0484-4 Welcome, reader, to a new experience for the Security Dialogue blog. While we will continue to feature standard book reviews, in our book club reviews we present a novel kind of in-depth engagement with interesting books. First… Read more »
Book Review: The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare
by Craig Jones. Oxford University Press, p.400. Hardback: 9780198842927 The law of armed conflict is often imagined as a moderating force, limiting the violence that can be inflicted on the battlefield by banning certain practices, prohibiting certain targets and outlawing certain weapons. Although the law allows civilians to be killed in certain circumstances, it states… Read more »
Armed Mothers in Militant Visuals
In Hamas’ 2004 poster of suicide bomber Reem al-Riyashi, she poses for the camera holding a rifle her in left hand and her son in the other. al-Riyashi killed four Israelis and herself in a joint Hamas and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades bombing on the Gaza-Israel border. Over twenty years earlier, and nearly 5,000 miles away,… Read more »
Book review: In Plain Sight: Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict.
Gaby Zipfel, Kirsten Campbell and Regina Muhlhauser (eds), New Delhi: Zubaan Books. In Plain Sight: Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, a collection of essays edited by Gaby Zipfel, Regina Muhlhauser, and Kirsten Campbell, offers a synthesis of the work by members of the International Research Group Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC), an inter-discilplinary and multi-institutional… Read more »