Operational aspects of a future war between Egypt and Israel

The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has survived since 1979. Even so, following the events in Egypt, there is a growing tension between the two states, particularly surrounding the Sinai, which could cause a crisis and even a war. In such a case, the main battlefield would be in Sinai, and there would be several dominant aspects. Some of them would appear for the first time, compared with previous wars, such as a collision between Israeli and Egyptian units of around corps size. Other aspects would be more familiar, such as the ratio between the size of the forces to that of the battlefield, the “fog of war,” night fighting, “friendly fire” and deception.     

The war after next is here – what does the elephant look like?

A comprehensive paradigm of future wars can be defined, and is called in this article “Extended conflicts.” These can be characterized by strategic attrition, to which all national resources and all possible international legitimacy are mobilized, in order to achieve a resolution by transformation of the opponent. The use of military force in this kind of conflict is limited. The understanding that we are facing an era of extended conflicts will improve the way it is utilized.     

In pursuit of accountability during and after war

ABSTRACT

This article aims to identify and elaborate the causes and ramifications of applying transitional justice, in particular accountability measures, to situations of war. It focuses on the correlations between peace and justice – and hence an important perspective on the question ‘how do wars end’. The article seeks to understand some of the main challenges associated with pursuing accountability for crimes committed in contemporary forms of conflict, including civil wars and abuses committed by major powers in armed conflict.     

The Clausewitzian fallacy of absolute war

Clausewitz was much preoccupied with the apparent contradiction between real and absolute war. Why did war in history so rarely exhibit the extremes of violence and energy implied in the pure concept of war? Clausewitz’s commentators have usually followed him in thinking that this was a genuine problem in need of a solution, but I want to question that view. I will argue that Clausewitz did not have a coherent philosophy of absolute war, and therefore the contradiction he posited between real and absolute war was equally meaningless – as, too, was his effort to resolve it by claiming that some real wars approached or even attained the absolute form of war. The real problem was not the opposition of real and absolute war, but the self-contradictory theory of absolute war.     

Modern liberal wars,illiberal allies,and peace as the failure of policy

ABSTRACT

The post-Cold War period nearly up to the present has been characterised as the age of liberal wars, yet key facets of the liberal guidance of war remain under appreciated. This article seeks to address this wider gap with regard to the particular concern of war termination and the fulfilment or failure of policy. First, it develops characterisations of liberal wars based on the existing literature, identifying three broad types through consideration of context—defensive versus offensive—and of political and strategic agency, particularly regarding the motives for and intents of action. Three types of liberal wars result: defensive liberal wars, offensive liberal wars with humanitarian motive and geopolitical intent, and offensive liberal wars with geopolitical motive and humanitarian intent. The article then presents one exemplary case for each liberal war with an emphasis on how liberal strategy required an illiberal ally and that ally's effect on the subsequent peace.     

What Goes Up Must Come Down: Military Expenditure and Civil Wars

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of civil war on military expenditure. We employ two measures of military expenditure: the share of military expenditure in general government expenditure and the logarithm of military expenditures. We would reasonably expect a priori that military expenditure as a share of general government expenditure increases during a civil war and that such increases would taper off over the duration of a civil war. We also explore whether the termination of a civil war induces a decline in the share of military expenditure as a share of the general government expenditure in the short-run. We find evidence the of share of military expenditure increases during a civil war and falls in the year succeeding the end of a civil war, and, in particular, if a war ends in a peace treaty. The level of military expenditures, however, rises during civil wars and does not appear to decline in the short-term after the end of a civil war.     

Doing Away with “Legitimate Authority”

ABSTRACT

I argue in this article that traditional just war theory did allow private, indeed even individual war, and that arguments in support of a legitimate authority criterion, let alone in support of the “priority” of this criterion, fail. I further argue that what motivates the insistence on “legitimate authority” is the assumption that doing away with this criterion will lead to chaos and anarchy. I demonstrate that the reasoning, if any, underlying this assumption is philosophically confused. The fact of the matter is that wars need not necessarily be authorized by some higher authority (such as a king, president, or parliament) in order to be justified, and this moral fact does not need to lead to chaos and anarchy. Accordingly, the criterion of legitimate authority cannot be relied on to delegitimate individual war, private war, guerrilla war, or even terrorism. Finally, I consider some other defenses of authorization and demonstrate that the “authorization” these accounts defend is either not needed for justification or already provided by other just war criteria or, indeed, entirely fictitious.     

Understanding contemporary conflicts in Africa: a state of affairs and current knowledge

Understanding contemporary conflicts in Africa remains directly dependent on the approaches employed to decipher or interpret them. This article first examines the bias of conventional approaches (inherited from the Cold War) and then those of a series of supposedly “newer” approaches. Relying primarily on West African examples, it offers a brief overview of current knowledge, issues, and avenues for research, based on three apparent characteristics of a “new generation” of conflicts: the regionalization of wars, the privatization of violence and security, and the recourse to extreme forms of brutality. These three major trends bear witness to a rapid transformation of war and armed violence over the past 20 years, but they are not sufficient to establish a radical historical break between “old” and “new” conflicts in Africa. By concealing elements of continuity a priori, the most influential “new” approaches actually make it impossible to ponder their own limits. To that end, fashionability and struggles for influence within the Africanist field play a major role in perpetuating dominant, sensationalistic, or simplistic (and invariably incorrect) portrayals of African conflicts.     

The Political Economy and Complex Interdependency of the War System in Syria

Duration of civil wars has been an elusive area of study particularly because of the tedious task of disentangling the interplay of actors’ agencies, incentives' structures and constraints. This article tackles Syria’s civil war that has completed its fifth year with little hope for an end any time soon. I examine a plausible cause leading to its protraction. Namely the formation of a war system, which made the costs of war less than the expected risks of peace giving the local, regional and international actors that are shouldering the costs. The war system approach combines class analysis with system-structural analysis capturing nuances and dynamics of conflict. This article is based in part based on primary sources collected by author in the Summers of 2014 and 2015 in Lebanon.     

‘Fighting for peace’

In Africa, most of the present conflicts are civil, intra-state wars where belligerent groups use guerrilla tactics to achieve various political, economic or ideological objectives. The atrocities and the effect of these on-going wars on innocent civilians, human suffering, poverty and development are beyond comprehension. Not surprisingly, the majority of current peace operations are in Africa, with more than 70 countries contributing forces to these conflict zones. On the continent, South Africa has come to assume a leading role in peace operations and is now a major troop-contributing country to UN and AU missions. In the past 11 years, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) has taken part in no fewer than 14 peace missions. This article provides a brief background of the conflicts in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sudan, the different United Nations (UN) and African Union (AU) mandates under which peacekeepers had to operate as well as their objectives, and the extent of South Africa's involvement in the various missions. In the last section, the major challenges, that these operations have posed are highlighted.     

Dissolution of an Empire: Insights from the İstanbul Bourse and the Ottoman War Bond

During the transformation period of the Ottoman Empire leading to the Republic of Turkey, many conflicts took place between 1918 and 1923. These conflicts interrupted the servicing of the Ottoman war bond. The reimbursement likelihood of this bond was related to the outcomes of First World War and the hostilities. This paper analyses the impacts of First World War and hostilities on the risk assessments regarding the Ottoman war debt, using manually collected data on the price of the Ottoman war bond traded at the ?stanbul bourse between 1918 and 1925. The empirical results imply that the defeat of the Bulgarian army and the peace offer of Austria-Hungary were associated with the increasing premium demanded by investors of the bond. The victories of the Turkish National Movement and the peace offer of the Allies to end the hostilities by 1922 positively affected the likelihood of the servicing of the debt.     

Is Britain a force for good? Investigating British citizens’ narrative understanding of war

It is commonly assumed in the foreign policy literature that narratives are uniquely persuasive and thus integral to obtaining public support for war. Yet, empirical research on “strategic narrative” is often vague on both the concept of narrative and how it persuades. Moreover, the stories publics use to interpret war are rarely examined. This paper offers a novel approach to studying “from the ground up” the war stories of individual British citizens. It examines public interpretations of war through emplotment: the way people select and link events to create a coherent story. Examining the wars people include and those they silence, it illustrates how a diverse range of citizens morally evaluates Britain’s military role, be it as a Force for Good, a Force for Ill or a country Learning from its Mistakes. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative methodological approach to studying how individual citizens understand war.     

Pursuing sustainable peace through post-conflict peacebuilding: The case of Sierra Leone

Many of the world's poorest states have experienced violent conflict in the past decades and it is today widely accepted that armed conflicts require sustained efforts that address not only the military, but also the political, humanitarian, economic and social dimensions of conflicts. For some years there has been a growing international concern with and emphasis on peacebuilding programming in the area of conflict resolution and peacekeeping. In Sierra Leone, a country that was engulfed in a brutal civil war for more than ten years, peace was hard won—a peace that would not have been possible without the presence and active post-conflict assistance of the United Nations (UN). However, Sierra Leone remains in a precarious state, being one of the poorest countries in the world, and needs the commitment of the international community in ongoing post-conflict peacebuilding to sustain its delicate peace. This article examines the challenges, extent and achievements of peacebuilding programming in Sierra Leone, and assesses the prospects for sustainable peace in this once war-torn West African state.     

Lost through non-translation: bringing Clausewitz's writings on ‘new wars’ back in

While Carl von Clausewitz has generally been respected as one of the most profound philosophers of war, his expertise has been regarded as somewhat limited if not even irrelevant to the so-called ‘new wars’ of the post-Cold War world. Many scholars in international relations have claimed that ‘new wars’ are essentially ‘post-Clausewitzian’ and ‘post-trinitarian’ in nature, meaning that they are no longer fathomable through a Clausewitzian framework. However Clausewitz's earlier writings were nearly exclusively dedicated to guerrilla warfare, or what he called ‘small wars’. These writings have been largely overlooked by many analysts of contemporary conflicts. By drawing on his rare and untranslated writings, the article uncovers a critical part of Clausewitz's expertise in asymmetric warfare and shows that, far from being irrelevant in an age where interstate warfare is increasingly being replaced by conflicts between states and semi-/non-state actors, Clausewitz's philosophical writings actually shed new light into the particular interactive dynamics generated during wars waged under conditions of asymmetry.     

孙子“慎战”思想对武警部队履行职能的启示

“慎战”是孙子军事思想中层次最高的战争决策思想,其理论主要包括不战思想、重战思想、善战思想和善后思想。在以和平与发展为主题的时代,孙子的“慎战”思想启示我们：要牢固树立“兵者,国之大事”的观念,加强部队现代化建设步伐,制定正确决策,“先为不可胜”;要以“非危不战”为原则,遏制犯罪,维护稳定,努力创造和平稳定的社会环境;要依据“胜于无形”,认真处理国内民族及其他矛盾,保持和谐稳定的社会环境。     

Turkey’s imperial legacy and the conflict potential in the Balkans

Turkey is the only Eurasian state surrounded in almost a full circle by acute hot or “frozen conflicts,” ranging from low-intensity violence, terrorism to fully fledged wars. The prevailing pattern of intercommunal and interethnic conflicts in the continental Balkans and on Cyprus has long been different from those in the rest of Europe and in the Near East. This difference is closely related to the fact that these lands had experienced in the past centuries-long rule by the Ottoman Empire, whose legal successor is the Republic of Turkey. The intercommunal conflict potential in the rest of Europe used to differ substantially, but the difference has been greatly reduced as Western Europe has, in one respect, become “balkanized.”     

Tangled up in rose? Theories of alliance entrapment and the 2008 Russo-Georgian War

Recent tensions between Russia and the United States have sparked debate over the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). One controversy surrounds the extent to which NATO raises the risk of war through entrapment—a concept that scholars invoke to describe how states might drag their allies into undesirable military conflicts. Yet scholars have advanced different, even conflicting arguments about how entrapment risks arise. I offer a typology that distinguishes between the mechanisms through which entrapment risks allegedly emerge on the basis of their institutional, systemic, reputational, and transnational ideological sources. I use the 2008 Russo-Georgian War to illustrate how the purported mechanisms of entrapment fare in elucidating that conflict. In analyzing why entrapment risks emerge, and thinking counterfactually about The 2008 War, I argue that scholars need to disentangle the various mechanisms that drive both alliance formation and war to make sure that entrapment risks do indeed exist.     

Soldiering the terrain of war: Zimbabwean soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1998–2002)

The paper reveals how Zimbabwean soldiers who fought in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1998–2002) were challenged by the terrain of war. While soldiers are trained to live and fight in dreadful wars, I argue that immersing oneself in the war terrain is neither mathematical nor calculative; rather, war tactics to be employed are defined by the context in which soldiers operate in. When soldiers reflect on and about the war, they unconsciously produce accounts that are often not completely heroic, but a life lived in fear as well an issue that they had never anticipated when they set out to war. A main finding of this study is that while these soldiers were deployed to fight against the rebels, they find difficulties in locating physical features from map reading to the ground, distinguishing the enemy from civilian people and deployed for days without eating a proper meal as well as seeing their fellow soldiers dying in the context of war. The paper provides a vantage point in which we can also understand that trained soldiers do not exert total power over war terrains, they are sometimes challenged by the war situation itself.     

大力开展基于智能技术的数字化战例库建设

战例研究是进行军事问题研究的重要基础,也是汲取战争经验、深化军事斗争准备的现实需要。开展战例研究的前提是建立起知识体系完备、检索运用便捷的战例库。随着智能技术的发展,战例数据的标准化描述、规范化存储、智能化分析成为可能,极大地支撑了便捷、高效的数字化战例库系统开发工作。本文首先从战例研究的重要性入手,分析了当前战例运用和研究的基本现状,梳理了存在的典型问题;其次,从数字化技术对战例描述和战例库建设的影响角度剖析了数字化战例库构建的基本需求;最后,通过对智能技术的把握,分析了智能技术对数字化战例库构建的支撑作用,并对如何开展基于智能技术的数字化战例库建设提出了初步设想。     

The ‘War on Terrorism’: What Does it Mean to Win?

Abstract

The war on al-Qaeda and its affiliates appears to be endless but every war must end. Winding down the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq has been difficult, but both were embedded in what was then called the ‘war on terrorism.’ What does ‘success’ in that war mean? With the death of bin Laden and the increase in drone operations, how far is the US from achieving it? Can this war end? The article analyzes the ongoing US response to the 9/11 attacks in historical context, revealing four patterns common to all prolonged wars: means become ends, tactics become strategy, boundaries are blurred, and the search for a perfect peace replaces reality. It concludes by laying out an effective strategy for ending the war.