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Postmodern War poses an urgent challenge to the ways we conceptualize and actually wage war in our high technology age. Computerization and artificial intelligence have brought about a revolution in warfare spawning both increasingly powerful weapons and a rhetoric which disguises their apocalyptic potential in catch phrases like smart weapons and bloodless combat. Postmodern War examines: * contemporary practices of war, defining and critiquing trendy military doctrines hidden behind phrases like Infowar and Cyberwar * the roles of those who manipulate high technology, those who are manipulated by it, and those who are increasingly merging with it * the role of peace activists and socially responsible scientists in countering dangerous assumptions made by a postmodern military. Far from opposing technological change, however, Gray finds new hopes for peace in the twenty-first century. Provocative and far-reaching in its scope, the book argues that postmodern war has left us poised between the most dreadful and most utopian of alternatives: we may eradicate either the human race or war itself.
Discussing theorists including Baudrillard and Virilio and covering conflicts including the two Gulf Wars, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, Kosove, Afhanistan, and the War on Terror, this book investigates the new character of modern warfare, and why media presentation of conflict is so central to both Western military operations and terrorists.
Assesses contemporary civil-military trends by looking at specific areas in the US military. This book provides the student and defense professional with a foundation on which to base organizational and personal policies. It also tells readers about what life is really like in military, and how it is both the same and different around the world.
This book is designed to give contemporary strategists and current military leaders a solid, common understanding of an ever complex and ever evolving reality driven and influenced by perceptions in any domain rather than a logic, linear, factual, and well defined conceptual framework. As stressed in his preface to this book by Lieutenant General John T. Thomson, US Army, by “leveraging timeless classics by military theorists as well as historical examples and recent operations, it provides the foundation on “how to think” about today’s geo-political security environment”. It is primarily meant to educate the mind of future leaders and commanders or, more accurately, to guide them in their self-education; and it is also addressed to Governments, Universities, Organizations and all those who keep the responsibility to educate future generations, our future leaders, to be prepared to participate intelligently in the strategy-making process of their Nations or systems. In the post-modern environment, future leaders will battle for “perception dominance” in order to drive the course of future conflicts and confrontations where people, not systems or machinery, will define success.
Frederic Jameson once characterized the Vietnam War as "the first terrible postmodernist war, " suggesting that it embodied or reflected the sensibility of an emerging historical epoch. But does it make sense to place a military conflict within a category of cultural and aesthetic periodization? Is it possible to see the Vietnam War as an expression and reflection of postmodernity -- what Jameson calls "the cultural logic of late capitalism"?
Media, War and Postmodernity investigates how conflict and international intervention have changed since the end of the Cold War, asking why Western military operations are now conducted as high-tech media spectacles, apparently more important for their propaganda value than for any strategic aims. Discussing the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s and the War on Terror, the book analyzes the rise of a postmodern sensibility in domestic and international politics, and explores how the projection of power abroad is undermined by a lack of cohesion and purpose at home. Drawing together debates from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, Philip Hammond argues that contemporary warfare may be understood as 'postmodern' in that it is driven by the collapse of grand narratives in Western societies and constitutes an attempt to recapture a sense of purpose and meaning.
This handbook provides a comprehensive, problem-driven and dynamic overview of the future of warfare. The volatilities and uncertainties of the global security environment raise timely and important questions about the future of humanity’s oldest occupation: war. This volume addresses these questions through a collection of cutting-edge contributions by leading scholars in the field. Its overall focus is prognostic rather than futuristic, highlighting discernible trends, key developments and themes without downplaying the lessons from the past. By making the past meet the present in order to envision the future, the handbook offers a diversified outlook on the future of warfare, which will be indispensable for researchers, students and military practitioners alike. The volume is divided into six thematic sections. Section I draws out general trends in the phenomenon of war and sketches the most significant developments, from the past to the present and into the future. Section II looks at the areas and domains which actively shape the future of warfare. Section III engages with the main theories and conceptions of warfare, capturing those attributes of contemporary conflicts which will most likely persist and determine the dynamics and directions of their transformations. The fourth section addresses differentiation and complexity in the domain of warfare, pointing to those factors which will exert a strong impact on the structure and properties of that domain. Section V focuses on technology as the principal trigger of changes and alterations in the essence of warfare. The final section draws on the general trends identified in Section I and sheds light on how those trends have manifested in specific local contexts. This section zooms in on particular geographies which are seen and anticipated as hotbeds where future warfare will most likely assume its shape and reveal its true colours. This book will be of great interest to students of strategic studies, defence studies, war and technology, and International Relations.
Preface Acknowledgements Glossary Foreword Alice Ackermann, OSCE Conflict Prevention Centre 1. Violent Postmodern Conflict: A Need to Go Beyond Symptoms 2. A Framework for Analyzing Violent Postmodern Conflict 3. A Model for Responding to Violent Postmodern Conflict 4. Eliciting the Wisdom of CSCE/OSCE Negotiators: Research Design 5. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators' Perceptions of Select Peace and Security Issues 6. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators' Perceptions of Causes of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s 7. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators' Perceptions of Lessons Learned from the Balkan Wars of the 1990s 8. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators’ Visions of Ideal Peace and Security in Postmodern Europe 9. After 9/11: Peace and Security Issues Revisited 10. Implications for Research, Theory, and Policy Appendix A Appendix B Bibliography Index
This collection takes its inspiration from Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, a landmark critique of American culture at the end of the 1950s. Goodman called for a revival of social investment in urban planning, public welfare, workplace democracy, free speech, racial harmony, sexual freedom, popular culture, and education to produce a society that could inspire young people, and an adult society worth joining. In postmodernity, Goodman's enlightenment-era vision of social progress has been judged obsolete. For many postmodern critics, subjectivity is formed and expressed not through social investment, but through consumption; the freedom to consume has replaced political empowerment. But the power to consume is distributed very unevenly, and even for the affluent it never fulfills the desire produced by the advertising industry. The contributors to this volume focus on adverse social conditions that confront young people in postmodernity, such as the relentless pressure to consume, social dis-investment in education, harsh responses to youth crime, and the continuing climate of intolerance that falls heavily on the young. In essays on education, youth crime, counseling, protest movements, fiction, identity-formation and popular culture, the contributors look for moments of resistance to the subsumption of youth culture under the logic of global capitalism.