The insurgency of the Vendée

The insurrection in the Vendée combined open warfare with the methods of petite guerre, ambushing French republican soldiers and cutting their supply lines to Paris. These tactics, when combined with the hatreds generated by a civil war, go far to explain to the cruelty of the conflict in the west and the depth of the hatreds it engendered. In republican eyes the use of guerrilla tactics was unjust and illegitimate, and they denounced their adversaries as common criminals and brigands, portraying them as backward, superstitious, even as subhuman, and in the process justified the savage repression they unleashed against them.     

Defence Transformation in South Africa: Sharing the experience with the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo

“There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order”—Machiavelli

This essay was written after a team of the Institute for Security Studies visited the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to share their experiences of the challenges of defence transformation with Congolese officials and members of civil society.

It discusses the South African defence transformation process and experience in detail and highlights the imperative for visionary leadership, commitment and communication as prerequisites for successful transformation. The DRC faces a unique opportunity to design and create an optimal national defence force for itself, which will reflect its new and evolving national policy on defence, and therefore the needs of the nation. This poses an exciting challenge and true opportunity to move beyond survival into a new age. The essay aims to make a contribution to this process.     

广义Liénard方程Poincaré分岔极限环的唯一性和不存在性

讨论了一类广义Linard方程x¨+f1(x)x.2+εf2(x)x.+g(x)=0的Poincar分岔极限环的唯一性和不存在性。将不对Abel积分进行分项,而是利用一阶Mel′nikov函数直接从整体上进行分析讨论,得出了若干判别准则和充分条件。     

Insurgency and Genocide: La Vendée

The struggle between the peasant population of the Vendee and the revolutionary government in Paris during the 1790s was perhaps the first, and certainly one of the earliest, of the modern ideological insurgencies. The conflict demonstrates the fatal weaknesses of a purely popular guerrilla movement deprived of sustained outside assistance. It also brings to the surface some less‐familiar aspects of the French Revolutionary regime. Most notably, that regime, determined to eradicate rather than conciliate the Vendean peasantry, employed methods that foreshadowed the techniques of National Socialism.     

Putin – the masked nemesis of the strategy of ambiguity

Recent events demonstrate the complex and adaptive approach employed by Russia to reassert influence in Europe. The changing face of Russia’s strategy commenced in 2007 when it launched a crippling cyber-attack against Estonia. This was followed by a large Russian conventional attack against Georgia in 2008, occupying two large areas of the nation. 2014 witnessed the Russian annexation of Crimea where in just a week, Russia seized control of Crimea “without firing a shot.” The annexation of Crimea was rapidly followed by a Russian inspired and led subversive war in eastern Ukraine. The common thread among these diverse Russian operations is its use of ambiguity to confound and confuse decision makers in the West.     

The right place at the right time,or the right person in the right place?

South Africa's military has, since the First World War, been an oft-used and effective tool in the conduct of South African foreign policy, but this role has not always translated into power for Defence Department principals in its formulation. South African Defence Ministers for most of the country's history have played a minor role in the making of foreign policy; despite a change in this dynamic between approximately 1975–1990, the post-apartheid era has once again seen a diminishment of Defence's power in this arena. This article examines why Defence Ministers have generally been such weak players, with an eye toward disaggregating whether this was a product of interpersonal relationships with Cabinet and – most importantly – the Head of State, or whether this influence (or lack thereof) was more a function of South Africa's international standing. While determining who has influence on this process is difficult given the primacy of the national leader in making foreign policy and a lack of insider accounts by participants in the process, this article relies upon several interviews with participants and knowledgeable observers that help illuminate the process and Defence's role in it.     

Identifying the spoilers in the security sector reform – disarmament demobilisation and reintegration process in the Congo

The Congolese security sector reform – disarmament demobilisation and reintegration (SSR-DDR) process has suffered from setbacks in its military sector during the last 10 years, such as insufficient funding, lack of coordination and domestic reluctance to major changes, with as a result, a very fragile and disjointed Army. These problems have deepened as officers have defected from the Army and caused new instability in the East of the Congo. This article aims to analyse the recent mutinies and the reaction by the Congolese government by applying a capabilities-based approach in combination with a typology of spoilers. The objective is to identify and classify the spoilers and answer the questions of why they emerge now and how they are dealt with on a national level. From the analysis, the author suggests that there are several spoilers involved in the current situation – the most powerful being the Congolese and the Rwandan governments, prompting the question of whether an international involvement is necessary to solve the problem.     

一类微分方程Poincaré分岔极限环的不存在性

利用一阶Mel'nikov函数讨论了一类广义Liénard方程Poincaré分岔极限环的不存在性,得出了若干充分条件.     

New Evidence on the Original Setup of the ‘Tilbury Group’, Formerly in the Tower of London

Abstract

An argument is presented that Valentine Green’s mezzotint engraving ‘Queen Elizabeth at the Head of her Army at Tilbury-Fort, A.D. 1588’ (1792) was inspired by the late 18th-century life-sized group of three figures representing the same subject that was formerly on show at the Tower of London. The mezzotint presented in Acta Historica Reginarum Angliae is the only known image of the original pre-1828 setup of the display, showing the figure of the queen in a skirt-like piece of armour that has since been re-identified as King Henry VIII’s tonlet armour.     

Communication: Wrap‐up on the cost of the gulf war

This paper discusses how crises and war may “disrupt” company activities, and how companies adapt to these disruptions. Croatia is used as a case study. The original hypothesis was that war led to breaks in physical flows: in other words, that companies experienced difficulties in importing and obtaining supplies of goods. Instead, it appears that loss of customers and severely worsened conditions of payment were the principal problems for Croatian companies. Although it does not fall within the scope of this investigation, it is interesting to note that the Croatian government has not imposed any direct rationing on the industrial sector, but rather via the banking system.     

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.”     

Army reconstruction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo 2003–2009

Since the peace agreements of 2002–2003 which ended the second war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reconstruction of the army has been an inherently political process, in common with other attempts to carry out security sector reform (SSR). This article briefly sketches out the Congolese army's history, then attempts to fill a gap in the literature on Congolese SSR by detailing what can be found of the actual structure and shape of the present army. The efforts that have been made to reform the army are then examined, followed by a conclusion which examines the major issues and possible ways forward.     

一类二阶微分方程Poincaré分岔极限环的不存在性

讨论一类二阶微分方程x¨+εf(x,x.)x.+g(x)=0的Poincar分岔极限环的不存在性,利用一阶Mel’nikov函数直接从整体上进行分析讨论,得出了若干充分条件和判别准则。     

一类广义Liénard方程极限环的不存在性

利用Cauchy问题解的唯一性,研究了一类二阶非线性微分方程极限环的不存在性,得到了在奇点唯一的条件下极限环的不存在的充分条件,所得结果运用和发展了以往的方法。     

De Gaulle,the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, and the Algerian war

Rejecting the orthodoxy of French diplomatic historiography that de Gaulle was the founder of a new French independence and effected a revolution in French diplomacy after freeing himself from the Algerian yoke in 1962, this essay argues that de Gaulle sought from 1958 to make Algeria a central plank of his diplomatic strategy. That strategy sought to transform the relationship with Algeria in order forit to become the key to a neo-colonial French community, the basis for French leadership in Europe and the foundation of a new relationship of equality with Britain and the United States. However, largely as a result of de Gaulle's own making this policy failed to materialise.     

基于Rényi信息增量的机动目标协同跟踪算法

针对基于多传感器组网进行机动目标跟踪的传感器管理问题,提出了一种基于Rényi信息增量的机动目标协同跟踪算法。首先结合"当前"统计模型和交互式多模型不敏卡尔曼滤波算法设计了一种变结构多模型算法,来进行机动目标的状态估计;然后以Rényi信息增量为评价准则,选择使Rényi信息增量最大的单个传感器进行目标跟踪;最后利用得到的最优加速度估计进行网格划分,更新变结构多模型中的模型集合。在一般机动及强机动场景下进行了算法性能分析,仿真结果表明,该算法能够合理地选择传感器,提高了对机动目标的跟踪精度。