bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Interlude
Authors: Kiszely John
Published: November 2024

This chapter recounts the four years of Ismay’s life following his return from India in December 1947. It describes his appointment as chairman of the council of the Festival of Britain and the efforts to which he went to ensure its success. It also describes his membership of the advisory group that Churchill formed to assist him with his memoirs and the extent of Ismay’s influence in this role. In particular, it details his input to Churchill’s account of the events of 1940, the ill-fated 1941 campaign in Greece, and Churchill`s references to numerous individuals including Admiral Keyes, General Auchinleck and Lord Halifax. It describes Ismay’s tenure as Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations 1951-52, his involvement in the controversy surrounding Seretse Khama, and the circumstances of Ismay’s appointment as the first Secretary General of NATO.
Itinerant Judges on a Part-Time Court
Authors: Banner Stuart
Published: November 2024

In some respects, the early Supreme Court was very different from today’s Court. It sat for only a few months each year because the justices spent most of their time traveling around the country conducting trials. The Court had no courthouse and scarcely any employees apart from the justices themselves. It heard cases in a room in the Capitol. While they were in Washington, the justices lived and worked together in boarding houses. Most of the justices had previously held political office. They were nominated and confirmed by the Senate behind closed doors, often within a few days. In other respects, however, the early Court closely resembled today’s Court, particularly in the political calculations that went into the appointment of justices. Presidents tried to appoint, and senators tried to confirm, justices who belonged to their political party and who would implement their preferred views.
Federal and State Power
Authors: Banner Stuart
Published: November 2024

Many of the Court’s famous early cases called upon the Court to settle the boundary between federal and state power. In one line of cases, including Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816) and McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the Court reinforced the power of the federal government. In another line of cases, including Fletcher v. Peck (1810) and Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), the Court limited the power of state governments. After a big turnover in personnel that occurred in the 1830s, the justices were more willing to approve state regulation of the economy, in cases like Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837) and New York v. Miln (1837). But even with a firm Jacksonian majority, the Court ensured that the United States would remain a common market free from inconsistent state regulation, in cases such as Swift v. Tyson (1842) and Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852).
Slaves and Indians
Authors: Banner Stuart
Published: November 2024

Race discrimination was such an ordinary part of life in the early nineteenth century that the Court’s cases involving American Indians and African Americans concerned the details of how discrimination would be implemented, not the lawfulness of discrimination itself. In Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), the Court held that Indians did not own their land but merely had a right to occupy it until it was taken from them by the federal government, while in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the Court held that Indian tribes lacked the sovereignty possessed by settler governments. In cases involving slavery, including Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Court took a broad view of the southern states’ authority over slaves, and a narrow view of the power of the northern states and the federal government to curtail the rights of slaveowners.
The Court and the Civil War
Authors: Banner Stuart
Published: November 2024

The Supreme Court’s remarkable power was ambivalently displayed during the Civil War and its aftermath, when the justices decided several important cases challenging the legality of the Union’s conduct of the war and the federal government’s postwar program of Reconstruction. In the Prize Cases (1863), the Court affirmed the constitutionality of the Union blockade of southern ports. After the war, the Court invalidated several aspects of Reconstruction, including the use of military commissions in Ex parte Milligan (1866) and the exclusion of former Confederates from government positions in Cummings v. Missouri (1867). In the Legal Tender Cases (1871), the Court overruled one of its own decisions from just one year before and affirmed the constitutionality of the paper currency the federal government issued to finance the war.
Life at the Court, 1870–1930
Authors: Banner Stuart
Published: November 2024

As the importance of regional diversity on the Court declined with the end of circuit-riding, religious diversity took its place. Beginning with the appointment of Edward White in 1894, there would nearly always be at least one Catholic justice. After Louis Brandeis became the first Jewish justice in 1916, there would nearly always be at least one Jewish justice. Unlike in the years before the Civil War, the Court’s most highly regarded justices were not the chief justice. They included, in the late nineteenth century, John Harlan, Stephen Field, and Samuel Miller; and in the early twentieth century, Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The Birth of the Modern Court
Authors: Banner Stuart
Published: November 2024

Three important changes in the 1920s created the modern Supreme Court. First, the Court gained the power to choose which cases it would hear. Previously, the Court had to decide every case that litigants presented to it. In the 1920s, however, the Court became what it is today—an institution that primarily decides important questions of law and only incidentally resolves disputes between the litigants who happen to appear before it. Second, the Court got its own building, the one it still occupies today. The building’s design presented the justices to the public as distant oracles, while its location and its massive scale signified the Court’s equality with the other two branches of government. Third, the Court gradually began to enforce the noneconomic constitutional rights of individuals against the government. Nearly all the Court’s best-known modern cases are in this category.
A Partial Counterrevolution
Authors: Banner Stuart
Published: November 2024

Between 1969 and 1991, ten consecutive justices were appointed by Republican presidents, with the aim of overruling the Court’s major liberal decisions of the 1960s and early 1970s. But the Court did not fulfill these expectations. Rather than overruling the big liberal decisions, the justices merely chipped away at them. By the early 1990s, the Court had created a variety of exceptions to the constitutional doctrines restricting police officers, but the police were still governed by all sorts of rules that had not existed before the 1960s. Judges had less authority to remedy some kinds of discrimination, but the Court gave them more authority to remedy other kinds. The Court shaved some height off the wall separating church and state, but not much—the wall was still higher than it had been before the 1960s. And, perhaps most surprising of all, Roe v. Wade was still standing.
Ahab, Walking
Authors: Blake David Haven
Published: November 2024

Melville learned from Shakespeare how to stage Ahab’s disability and his crew’s reaction to his “barbaric white leg.” The chapter combines Melville’s portraits of limb loss in Mardi and White Jacket with extensive archival research into nineteenth-century surgical methods, views on amputation, and medical technologies. It weighs the merits of seeing Ahab as a narrative prosthesis (as Mitchell and Snyder describe him) or as a victim of trauma (as Berger suggests.) Immersed in disability studies, the chapter discusses how Melville carefully imagines Ahab’s disability onboard the ship, focusing on his use of assistive devices and the efforts of Stubb, Starbuck, Pip, and Ishmael to comprehend his impairment. Ahab was less a representative of Melville’s vision of disability than he was an example of the power of loss in democratic societies. Ahab uses his aggrievement to turn others into prosthetic extensions of himself.
Bone to Bone
Authors: Blake David Haven
Published: November 2024

The manufacture of prosthetics was a thriving industry in the antebellum United States. In “Ahab and the Carpenter,” Melville turns the decks of the Pequod into a Shakespearean stage, as the carpenter constructs an ivory leg that must encompass the natural leg of the past, the severed leg of the present, and the prosthesis the captain will wear into the future. Although filled with comedy, the scene highlights the problems of trauma, embodiment, and phantom limb pain. This chapter compares Ahab’s whalebone leg to the whalebone arm that Captain Boomer displays on the Samuel Enderby, an English ship that stands in contrast to the grim Pequod. Ahab’s prosthesis defines not just the avenger’s body, but his relation to other bodies as well. That relation is best expressed in the oval slate the carpenter attaches to Ahab’s ivory limb.
The Phantom Fedallah
Authors: Blake David Haven
Published: November 2024

Drawing on numerous historical and cultural materials, the chapter focuses on Fedallah as the most important of Ahab’s prostheses, the crewmember who props up his wounded body, elevates his vengeance, and mystically tracks the white whale. The Parsee extends Ahab’s quest into a metaphysical realm. Ishmael’s physical description of Fedallah turns him into an amalgam of racist stereotypes and the racial embodiment of Ahab’s wounds and monomaniacal will. Tracing Fedallah to Beckwith’s Vathek and De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, the chapter aligns him with the Turkish and Islamic imagery the novel uses to characterize the threat of violent power, both Ahab and Moby-Dick. Using the work of Erich Fromm, the chapter examines the degree to which Fedallah becomes a projection of the American Ahab’s violence.
We have to make a list
Authors: Behrends Andrea
Published: November 2024

This part starts in the midst of war in 2007 with the everyday projects and efforts of borderland villagers who refused to move into refugee camps to access humanitarian aid. Knowing that as “war-zone dwellers” they did not qualify for the kind of humanitarian aid offered in refugee camps, they made use of the author’s presence to generate a “boundary object” (following Star and Griesemer, 1989): a list, supposed to represent in name and numberall the borderland people who had to flee their villages (this list making is depicted on the book’s cover). The chapter builds on the borderlanders’ approach to spontaneously seize and resort to new options in times of turmoil. The chapter shows how people know about and deliberately cross category-boundaries to develop new options for action. The chapter leads into the book’s first part on how war arrived in the borderlands.
In general, they are comfortable
Authors: Behrends Andrea
Published: November 2024

This chapter introduces a perspective on war of the more privileged people who had lived in the Chadian border town of Adré before and now during the war. It shows how they experienced uncertainty from a comparatively well-off position, facing hardships of their own. A brief story of a midwife who experienced the rebel attack while working at the hospital introduces this perspective. When the gunfire started, she ran to look for her young daughter who was in school. Shaken by laughter and utterly relieved to have found her safe and sound, she later remembered how her daughter had thrown away her bookbag, but held on to her shoes, when running for safety. Stressing kin solidarity as well as ethnic labels, this chapter looks at current practices of defining oneself and one’s family and community that can be traced back to the French occupation of the area and the founding of the border town.
Epilogue
Authors: Behrends Andrea
Published: November 2024

As another brutal war began during the publication phase of the book, this short epilogue takes account of the events leading to it by drawing a direct line between the former war (which this book is about) and the current war. It reflects on why people took to arms faster now than before; and states that media coverage is almost non-existent, in contrast to the former war. It concludes with the borderland population’s utter incomprehension for this renewed outbreak of violence, just like the author remarked when she first arrived in the region twenty years ago.
The Crisis of Culture
Authors: Roy Olivier
Published: November 2024

Are we confronting a new culture—global, online, individualistic? Or is our existing concept of culture in crisis, as explicit, normative systems replace implicit, social values? This book explains today's fractures via the extension of individual political and sexual freedoms from the 1960s. The book explains that the twentieth-century youth culture disconnected traditional political protest from class, region or ethnicity, fashioning an identity premised on repudiation rather than inheritance of shared history or values. Having spread across generations under neoliberalism and the internet, youth culture is now individualized, ersatz. Without a shared culture, everything becomes an explicit code of how to speak and act, often online. Identities are now defined by socially fragmenting personal traits, creating affinity-based sub-cultures seeking safe spaces: universities for the left, gated communities and hard borders for the right. Increased left- and right-wing references to “identity” fail to confront this deeper crisis of culture and community. Our only option, the book argues, is to restore social bonds at the grassroots or citizenship level.
Introduction
Authors: Roy Olivier
Published: November 2024

This introductory chapter begins by recounting how, on January 27, 2018, United Airlines refused to allow a passenger onto an airplane with a peacock, even though the passenger had a medical certificate stating that the presence of the bird was vital to enable her to bear the mental stress of flying. After a while, American airline companies decided to establish new guidelines stating which pets were acceptable and which were not. Why were new guidelines needed? Because things that had seemed obvious, at least within the same culture, are suddenly no longer so. There were new issues here, two of which are immediately apparent: the place of animals—which questions the place of human beings by comparison—and the passenger's distress, which could not be simply disregarded without the risk of being sued. What was once regarded as the settled line between humans and animals is now being challenged. The chapter then considers the crisis of culture. It assesses why the great utopia of 1960s liberation has led to an expansion of systems of moral and legal normativity, in the absence of any call to order.
The Crisis in Question
Authors: Roy Olivier
Published: November 2024

This chapter discusses the crisis of culture. From feminism and the crisis of masculinity to racism and intersectionality, gender versus biological sex, identity versus universalism, cultural appropriation, “wokeism,” cancel culture, “dumbing down,” censorship and the purging of artworks and literary classics—not to mention immigration—today's political conflicts are focused more on values and identity than on the economy and specifically social questions. Central to all these debates is the issue of culture. At stake are the very codes and symbols that comprise social ties, and which are encapsulated rigidly in discussions about identity. All this has led to the ever-increasing moral and judicial indictment of social relations. Beyond a debate of ideas, there is an attempt not only to impose new norms, but to extend the very domain of normativity. The chapter looks at four sequences of civilizational rupture that took place during the single period between 1960 and 2000: the May 1968 revolution and the war of values; neoliberalism; the internet boom; and globalization. It argues that we are not in the midst of a cultural transition but a crisis over the very notion of culture.
Can We Choose Our Sex or Race?
Authors: Roy Olivier
Published: November 2024

This chapter explores how coding and sequencing go hand in hand with an expansion of taxonomies. We classify and create categories by selecting a few markers that define a person's identity. The next stage is to obtain recognition for that identity, on the grounds of the suffering caused by non-recognition. Sex and race are the two main domains of this new fight, since both raise the problem of nature in its biological form. Why is sexuality now caught in a system of normative coding, where the question of explicit consent becomes central? Because sexuality has become autonomous in relation to culture. The revolution of the 1960s freed sexuality from cultural constraint. Fifty years later it is obvious that this sexual liberation has not abolished relations of domination while simultaneously making them less tolerable: rape, sexual harassment, femicides, paedocriminality, and incest have become more visible as they become less and less socially acceptable. This reaction is not indicative of a desire to go back to a conservative culture centered on the family, but of sexual liberation turning on itself. The chapter then looks at the concepts of sexual contract, sexual consent and pornographic coding, code switching, and racialization.
Suffering and Reparation
Authors: Roy Olivier
Published: November 2024

This chapter studies how, from the 1960s to the 1980s, the conquest of rights for the dominated gradually became the overarching slogan for mobilization. Revolt is only “right” if it respects what is “good”, in this case human rights. The struggle for civil rights in the United States during the 1960s is archetypal in this regard. Demonstrations, petitions, political mobilization and a concrete program for change (affirmative action and bussing) sought to advance the cause without integrating it into a more all-encompassing ideological program. Feminism and the movement for gay rights adopted this model into the late twentieth century. The demand is for reparation, and the demand for reparation assumes a transactional relationship with domination: instead of overturning the system because it is bad, the aim is to require the system to recognize that it is not “good.” The chapter then considers how, rather than the acquisition of new legal or political rights, the aim is to obtain protection for one's identity. It looks at the depoliticization of struggles, as well as the return of a morality of suffering. Finally, it assesses why moralism and culture do not make a good match.
The Joy of Norms
Authors: Roy Olivier
Published: November 2024

This chapter begins by presenting the concept of “uberisation,” which is on the way to becoming the model both for work and for social relations as a whole. While individuals are allowed and indeed encouraged to choose for themselves, this is solely in domains that do not undermine their relationship to the “real” domination. Their imaginary emancipation leads them to consume the products of their alienation. The chapter then looks at the end of the private space and its commodification. The ideal of individual emancipation is entirely compatible with neoliberalism. Both sides share this “inclusive” culture of desiring individuals, self-fulfillment, autonomy, and a kind of self-harmonization of social relations. While adopting a progressive posture, neoliberalism avoids any consideration of the structural reasons for discrimination. It makes individuals responsible for their actions, turning racism, sexism, and discrimination more broadly into a moral problem caused by bad thoughts or individual drives, and which can thus be solved by the establishment of ethical rules, promulgated and imposed by ethics committees and resulting in sanctions, always against individuals. Ultimately, neoliberalism brings with it a considerable expansion of systems of normativity and the bureaucracy that goes with them. The chapter then considers the concept of authoritarian pedagogy.
Conclusion
Authors: Roy Olivier
Published: November 2024

This concluding chapter discusses how the trilogy of deculturation, coding, and normativity seems to structure all debates and strategies on every side, be they conservative, progressive, secular, religious, feminist, masculinist, populist, multiculturalist, sovereignist, or globalist. Deculturation also produces derealization, and is fuelled by it, to the point where the difference between real and virtual becomes hard to assert. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is the extraordinary capacity of Russians not to want to know what is happening in Ukraine. Faced with this derealization, the terrain seems open to domination. Protests and challenges are imprisoned in individualism, closed spaces, and a competitive victimhood that the theory of intersectionality cannot resolve. The insistence on suffering and all kinds of redemption and compensation means the issue of power is not addressed. Power itself remains invisible. The chapter then considers the demand for sociability. Things change when individuals seek to regain social connection in their real lives, in whatever remains of the social fabric.
Introduction
Authors: Trim D. J. B. , Simms Brendan
Published: November 2024

This chapter introduces the volume, defining terminology, and setting out key concepts, themes, and the contribution the volume makes to scholarship. It highlights the issue of relations between England/Britain and Europe, suggests that the distinction between Anglo-British action in its colonies and action in Europe is misplaced when it comes to warfare, and addresses the book’s contribution to the history of violence and the history of strategy. It identifies that the ruthless violence and atrocities addressed by the book as a whole are top down, being ordered by high political and/or military authorities, rather than being the autonomous action of rank-and-file military—indeed, independent, bottom-up violence was disapproved of by military authorities who tried to stamp it out, bringing into sharp focus the violence that was ordered from above.
Gujarat Under Modi
Authors: Jaffrelot Christophe
Published: November 2024

In 2012 Narendra Modi became the first Hindu nationalist politician thrice elected to lead a state of the Indian Union, his stewardship as Chief Minister of Gujarat being the longest in that state’s history. Modi and his BJP supporters explained his achievement by pointing to economic growth under his leadership, yet detractors point out that Modi has been more business-friendly than market-friendly—to the benefit of large industrial corporations, and at the cost of great social polarization.In 2002, an anti-Muslim pogrom of unparalleled ferocity occurred in Gujarat, leading to the biggest number of Muslim deaths since Partition. The state’s Hindu majority immediately rallied around Modi. No serious riot has occurred in Gujarat since, but polarization was key to Modi’s strategy there, and he has deployed that strategy again and again since he became Prime Minister of India in 2014. For Modi has cultivated a communal image. A marketing genius, his messaging combines the politics of Hindutva with economic modernization, to the clear appreciation of Gujarat’s middle class.Christophe Jaffrelot’s revealing book shows how Modi’s Gujarat served as the laboratory of Modi’s India, not only in terms of Hindu majoritarianism and national populism, but also of caste and class politics.
Gujarat before Modi
Authors: Jaffrelot Christophe
Published: November 2024

In Gujarat, Congress shared important dimensions of Hindutva in the 1940s and 50s. That was largely due to the ambivalent legacy of Mahatma Gandhi in a state whose political culture he had largely shaped. But Indira Gandhi’s Congress (I) unwittingly prepared the ground for Hindutva politics by exploiting the policy of reservations for the lower castes and the Tribals in the 1980s. In response, the upper castes joined hands and supported Hindu nationalism in order to counter reservation politics. But the Sangh Parivar rose to power in the 1990s on its own “merits” too. In the 1980 and 1990s it was reaping the harvest of fifty years of political activism at the grass roots and benefited from communal polarization resulting from a series of Hindu–Muslim riots that its activists had triggered.
The Saffronisation of the Police and the Judiciary
Authors: Jaffrelot Christophe
Published: November 2024

After 2002, Gujarat was the scene of a growing deinstitutionalization of the police forces, which were used in a dozen fake encounters between 2003 and 2007 and were invited to engage in communal attitudes—as the promotion of the guilty officers of the 2002 riots showed. By contrast, honest policemen were sidelined. A similar deinstitutionalization of the judiciary occurred in parallel, due to the infiltration of the judicial machinery and a sophisticated strategy of appointing reliable men to key posts. This policy, was intended to cope with the fallout of the events of 2002– as in the case of the police—whose victims could not get justice.
Social Polarisation
Authors: Jaffrelot Christophe
Published: November 2024

The so-called Gujarat “model” has resulted in a very inegalitarian society. Industry—the engine of growth—did not create many (good) jobs and growth did not bring significant benefits either to the rural part of the state or to the weaker sections. While the growth rate of Modi’s Gujarat was remarkable, the state recorded poor results in terms of social indicators, largely because the government was not interested in fighting inequalities by investing in pro-poor policies, such as public health and education.
The Backing of the Elite and the Growing Support of the “Neo-middle Class”
Authors: Jaffrelot Christophe
Published: November 2024

Modi not only defended the interest of the middle class—a group designated as a social elite in India—but he attracted a new emerging social group, the “neo-middle class”, by instrumentalizing religion and exploiting their aspirations. His promotion of both categories—who supported the BJP election after election—at the expense of the poor is evident from the manner in which cities were developed, especially Ahmedabad whose modernization was epitomized by the new Sabarmati River Front.
Conclusion
Authors: Jaffrelot Christophe
Published: November 2024

Modi’s Gujarat has been the laboratory of Modi’s India, as he could scale up at the national level the four pillars of his success in the state after 2014: communal polarization, institutions capture, crony capitalism and national populism.Besides, the victims of the policies and the political economy of the Modi government in New Delhi remained the poor and the minorities as well as the Dalits and the Adivasis. Authoritarianism found expression in the same kind of marginalization of parliament that had already affected the state assembly in Gujarat and in the same kind of surveillance as well as deeper state as what Gujarat had just experienced.
Temperature Rising 2010–16
Authors: Kenny Michael
Published: November 2024

The 2010 general election generated a new set of challenges for the system of territorial government that Labour built. Following the SNP’s advent to power in Scotland in 2011, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to hold a referendum on Scotland’s place in the UK and the British state was faced with the challenge of compiling and communicating the case for the Union. Initially, support for independence was a minority view in Scotland, but support grew, culminating in a 2014 referendum where 45% voted for independence – an outcome that few on the British side anticipated. Cameron's decision to allow the referendum has been much criticized, but should be understood in the context of the gradual acceptance by many Conservatives that this is a union based on consent. The campaign exposed the UK government's unpreparedness and the difficulty of engaging large parts of Whitehall in this cause. It also laid bare the lack of connection between central state and local political unionists, a challenge that was accentuated by the decay of the Labour party political machine in Scotland.
The Indochina Crisis
Authors: Benvenuti Andrea
Published: November 2024

Chapter 2 builds on the previous chapter by explaining how a spiralling crisis in Southeast Asia led to India’s increasing opposition to the Eisenhower administration’s policy of containment in Asia. The American response to France’s military defeat in Indochina in early 1954 fuelled Indian fears that the United States might take precipitate action to prevent Indochina from falling under communist control, thus triggering a major conflict in Asia. This chapter provides the necessary context to understand the course of Indian foreign policy in the following months. More specifically, it reveals how the Indochina crisis, following hot on the heels of the US-Pakistan defense pact, compelled Nehru to act as a counterbalance to American containment and promote a different vision of regional order and security, based on his concept of areas of peace and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.
Entrenching Peaceful Coexistence
Authors: Benvenuti Andrea
Published: November 2024

Chapter 5 builds on the preceding chapter by discussing Zhou Enlai’s short visit to Rangoon, which served as a litmus test for China’s peaceful intentions and the validity of Nehru’s assumptions. Although it was still uncertain in late June 1954 whether an Asian-African conference would ever occur, Zhou’s talks with Burmese leader U Nu were, in retrospect, a significant step in that direction. These talks not only made Nehru more optimistic about Chinese behavior but also led him to view China as a stakeholder in regional security rather than a threat. As Chapter 5 demonstrates, Nehru’s main concern in the late summer of 1954 was the direction of Western policy in Asia. The American decision to establish SEATO in September 1954 strengthened his conviction that the United States, rather than China, hindered his efforts to create a regional area of peace. It was at this point that he began to attach greater importance to the notion of an Asian-African summit, viewing it as an opportunity to advance his vision of a neutralized Asia in opposition to the American containment of China.
Nehru’s Visit to China
Authors: Benvenuti Andrea
Published: November 2024

Nehru’s visit to China in October 1954 was crucial in advancing his vision of a neutralized Asia. As Chapter 7 explains, his talks with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in Beijing reassured him that China was genuinely committed to peaceful coexistence. During the visit, he gained further evidence of Beijing’s commitment to the Five Principles and his concept of areas of peace. He also noticed a significant degree of convergence on various Cold War issues. As India and China appeared to share similar regional objectives, Nehru saw increased value in inviting China to a future Asian-African conference. He reasoned that a conference that included China would do much to consolidate peaceful coexistence, reassure China’s Asian neighbors, and overcome Cold War divisions. By the time he left China, he was increasingly convinced that regional stability depended significantly on Beijing’s constructive engagement in international affairs.
The Bandung Conference
Authors: Benvenuti Andrea
Published: November 2024

Chapter 9 provides a detailed account of the Bandung Conference and its proceedings. It also examines the role played by Nehru and the Indian delegation and how they tried to establish a neutralized Asia. Contrary to Nehru’s expectations, however, non-communist delegations spoke out against communism, questioned Nehru’s neutralism and expressed support for defensive alliances. During the conference’s deliberations, the Five Principles became a bone of contention due to the attendees’ differing views on crucial Cold War issues. This situation clearly underscored the challenge faced by India in leading an Afro-Asian grouping between superpower blocs. On the other hand, Nehru’s efforts to engage China and push it to commit unequivocally to peaceful coexistence appeared successful. Zhou’s calm demeanour impressed Nehru, as did his proclamations that China desired peace, sought no expansion, and had no intention of subverting its neighbors.
Epilogue
Authors: Benvenuti Andrea
Published: November 2024

Chapter 11 traces Bandung’s legacy on Nehru’s foreign policy. It does so by assessing the role of the Afro-Asian caucus in addressing key Indian Cold War concerns and by examining the evolution of Sino-Indian relations between the late 1950s and early 1960s. After Bandung, Nehru no longer set great store by Afro-Asian solidarity to advance India’s national interests, given the diverse agendas and persistent disagreements among Afro-Asian nations. Furthermore, India and China grew apart within a few years of Bandung. India continued to view Afro-Asian cooperation as a mechanism to create neutralized areas of peace and avoid Cold War conflict. In contrast, China shifted from advocating peaceful coexistence to promoting violent national liberation struggles throughout the Afro-Asian world. To compound the growing chasm in Sino-Indian approaches to regional security, serious misunderstandings emerged over Tibet and their yet-to-be demarcated border. However, while the border question undoubtedly triggered the rapid unravelling of Sino-Indian ties, the relationship between India and China was already built on shaky ground, given the different premiums they placed on peace and stability, and their clashing visions for the postcolonial Afro-Asian world.
Revisiting Putin’s 2022 Invasion of Ukraine
Authors: Echevarria Antulio
Published: November 2024

This chapter examines four of the major themes common to strategic and security studies against the backdrop of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. These four themes include: the waning of major war; strategic coercion; war among, against, and by the people; and war's changing character and dynamic nature. This conflict, as unfortunate and egregiously destructive as it is, has nonetheless provided important data which will aid scholars to expand their understanding of each of these important themes.
After Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
Authors: Gat Azar
Published: November 2024

The war in Ukraine and the China challenge brings back the question of whether the world is becoming more peaceful. Realists’ claim that “we told you so” compares oranges with cabbages. Today’s world is divided into a “zone of peace”, encompassing all the developed countries, and a “zone of war”, comprising less developed countries. Within the former, interstate wars, civil wars, and the “security dilemma” have all disappeared.
The Next War Would Be a Cyberwar, Right?
Authors: Ducheine Paul , Pijpers Peter , Arnold Kraesten
Published: November 2024

Given the integration of Information & Communication Technology (ICT) in modern societies, armed forces have developed cyber capabilities for warfare. Especially after officially declaring cyberspace a warfighting domain, the prediction that “the next war will be fought in cyberspace (too)” was not an absurd idea. Since the “next” war was the armed conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, the validity of this prediction is debatable. An important question concerns the degree to which cyber capabilities have been used in the war, and if so, what effects were sought, by whom, and against what. As expected, soft-cyberoperations have been used by both parties. Unexpected is the seemingly rather limited number of “hacks” or hard-cyberoperations so far that can be attributed to the warring armed forces. Unforeseen is the number of non-state hacktivist groups, such as the IT Army of Ukraine, that have joined the wider conflict on both sides with soft- and hard-cyberoperations. Most notably are the numerous public and commercial ICT-service and infrastructure providers that—in various ways—are actively engaged in this war. Hence, the “next” war was indeed conducted in cyberspace too, however, in other ways than predicted.
Military-Technological Innovation in the Digital Age
Authors: Cronin Audrey
Published: November 2024

The fast-changing landscape of digital technological innovation is changing the present and future of warfare. To remain competitive, Western democracies must address critical blind spots to develop a national security framework supported by an informed and resilient populace capable of weathering future conflicts. Key weaknesses include relying on outdated historical frameworks (particularly those from the Cold War); failing to address cultural and organizational challenges (such as superficial technological expertise among Western policymakers); and undervaluing the role of accessible commercial technology (in contrast to high-capital systems). Ways to address these challenges include fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among engineers, computer scientists, historians, and social scientists; enhancing the digital literacy of military and civilian leaders to enable smarter decision-making; and ensuring academics and policymakers rigorously analyze emerging technologies’ strategic implications. This multifaceted approach transcends simple resource battles, political divisions and techno-optimism debates that currently distract and predominate.
Artificial Intelligence and the Nature of War
Authors: Payne Kenneth
Published: November 2024

Artificial Intelligence is poised to change war’s nature, not just its character. This chapter explores the psychology of strategic decision-making in humans, other animals, and now AI. It argues that strategy demands social intelligence, and in particular “theory of mind”—the ability to intuit what others are thinking, the better to weigh their likely actions. Today’s large language models embed “world models,” including models of other minds. As these develop, the near future of strategy will involve human-machine teams, speaking a common language but with radically different underlying processes. Some implications are discussed, including the role of AI in co-creating our social milieu.
The Past as Guide to the Future
Authors: Heuser Beatrice
Published: November 2024

History does not unfold in a linear fashion. We cannot confidently predict a future trajectory from past developments, even if in the recent past a development was fairly linear. One can, however, identify potential trajectories and developments, some of them contradictory and mutually exclusive, where one or the other may dominate in the near future, but the other’s turn may come thereafter. In predicting individual leaders’ decisions, one person’s behavioral patterns do not predict another’s in a similar situation. Even the past actions of one person may not reflect his or her own future actions in very different circumstances. By contrast, institutional cultures and standard operational procedures can be remarkably constant across regime changes and indeed revolutionary transformation of state and society. Patterns of past institutional behavior may thus help interpret present and future patterns. Finally, “new” wars may follow older patterns familiar to those with a wider historical knowledge.
Forecasting the Future of War
Authors: Meisel Collin J.
Published: November 2024

Could Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, have been predicted—and, if so, with how much advance notice? This chapter seeks to answer these questions with a review of past attempts to forecast war initiation over long time horizons and a discussion of patterns of knowability—complexity, measurability, equilibration, stochasticity, and tractability—and a structural, systems-based analysis built around these patterns. This analysis suggests that while the invasion could not have been predicted over a long time horizon, knowable factors contributing toward an armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine were generally increasing prior to 2022 and were expected to continue to increase in the coming years. This logic applies to other potential future conflicts.
The War in Ukraine and the Apocalyptic Imaginary
Authors: Mitchell Jeni
Published: November 2024

This chapter explores the sources of twenty-first-century visions of apocalypse (i.e., contemporary “apocalyptic imaginaries”) and the ways in which they influence policymaking and strategic decision-making by state actors. It presents a brief history of apocalyptic imaginaries and a typology of today’s apocalyptic threat perceptions. It argues that the current war in Ukraine demonstrates the real-world impact of apocalyptic threat perceptions on strategy, while having a somewhat limited influence on contemporary ideations of the end of the world.
The Radical Redemption Model
Authors: de Graaf Beatrice
Published: November 2024

What do convicted terrorists really believe when they say they committed their acts in the name of a higher authority? This book deploys a cutting-edge combined approach of (oral) history and social psychology toward religiously inspired terrorism, and develops a radical redemption model. Beatrice de Graaf went into prisons to talk to terrorist convicts. She listened to their stories about their frustration with their own lives, their anger at injustices done to them, and their decision to join the terrorist fight, and she questioned them specifically about their extreme beliefs. The stories they told her reveal that the actual, lived and believed practice of radical redemption is crucial to understanding terrorists’ actions. On the basis of interviews with terrorist detainees from the Netherlands, Syria, Pakistan, and Indonesia—mostly jihadists and some right-wing extremists—life stories of surrender, struggle, sacrifice, and redemption are reconstructed. In this way, the nexus between extreme beliefs and terrorist activity is unraveled, and a grounded theory of radical redemption is developed. In addition, important questions are explored; for example, when and how do radical religious and ideological beliefs inspire and trigger people to engage in a holy war? And what happens when the longed-for redemption fails to materialize? This book combines historical research and a deep reading of past incidents of terrorist actions with insights gleaned from the interviews with current-generation terrorists, pivoting around the notion of the terrorists’ extreme beliefs. It is a history of the most recent period of terrorist violence, but it also offers a new understanding of the elusive and perennial connection between religion and violence, between radical beliefs and terrorism.
The Second Panel
Authors: de Graaf Beatrice
Published: November 2024

Chapter 5 explores the second panel of the triptych model of radical redemption: devotion and struggle. It examines how the pull factors of influential terrorist organizations (including an accessible conflict zone) combined with the push factors of young people looking for meaning and a better and purer life, and keen to earn points for the afterlife. What appealed greatly to all the interviewed (ex)detainees was the ethical opportunity that radical redemption provided to purify their own lives and give them greater meaning, not only in their own eyes but also in the eyes of their parents, the community, the worldwide ummah, and, ultimately, Allah. This chapter explores how the available options to achieve this redemption in practice changed over time, beginning with the first wave of international jihadists, who went to fight in Afghanistan, and ending with the last generation, who sought redemption in Syria and Iraq.
The Third Panel
Authors: de Graaf Beatrice
Published: November 2024

Chapter 6 examines the third panel in the radical redemption model: validation. Only through a radical praxis of atonement or revenge can redemption and deliverance be achieved. When sacrifices are made, there must be religious or ideological templates that validate the acts of redemption; otherwise, the narrative of redemption becomes a narrative of contamination and disappointment. For most of the interviewed (ex)detainees, the quest for meaning through devotion and struggle resulted primarily in disappointment and deception, sometimes because their own understanding changed, but much more often because parents, friends, or the community refused to acknowledge their acts of radical redemption and urged them to return home. When their act of redemption failed, was not acknowledged, or did not bring them the sense of fulfillment they had expected, the interviewees experienced disappointment and, sometimes, denial. In a few cases, it led to a reappraisal of other forms of engagement.
Toward a Grounded Theory of Radical Redemption
Authors: de Graaf Beatrice
Published: November 2024

Chapter 8 reviews the findings and identifies the threads running through the terrorists’ accounts that indicate the shaping role of religion and the radical redemption narrative in their radicalization processes. On the basis of their accounts of redemption, a grounded theory approach (GTA) is developed to give the accounts a systematic basis. The chapter explores how radical redemption acts as a moderator in the radicalization process, when it leads to validation and when to contamination, and how this helps us in understanding recidivism and in mapping out strategies for deradicalization, disengagement, and reintegration of former terrorist detainees. With the data collected and analyzed in the previous seven chapters, chapter 8 compares the profiles and life histories of the interviewed terrorists, charts relationships, and identifies trends. The findings are presented in a tentative model as a first step toward further research.
Phylogeny-Dependent Analysis
Authors: Gu Xun
Published: November 2024

In this chapter, the author first gives an overall review of the basic concepts and terminologies in phylogeny. In the following sections, four major classes of tree-making methods are introduced: distance methods; parsimony methods, maximum likelihood methods and Bayesian methods. The rest of this chapter introduces the concept of ancestral sequence inference, and the estimation of rate variation among sites, which are important in phylogenetic analysis.
Neutrality Testing when Some Amino Acid Sites are Strongly Constrained
Authors: Gu Xun
Published: November 2024

The common dN/dS ratio (nonsynonymous-to-synonymous rates) can be used to statistically detect adaptive evolution (or purifying selection) if dN/dS>1 (or dN/dS<1). However, due to strong structural constraints imposed on amino acid sites, the statistical power for testing dN/dS=1 may be insufficient to distinguish between different selection modes. Here, a more powerful test is introduced, called dN/dS-H, in which a new parameter H, a relative measure of rate variation among sites, is introduced. Given the condition of strong purifying selections at some sites, the dN/dS-H model predicts dN/dS=1-H for neutral evolution, dN/dS<1-H for nearly neutral selection, and dN/dS>1-H for adaptive evolution.
Functional Divergence after Gene Duplication
Authors: Gu Xun
Published: November 2024

Since gene duplication is thought to have provided the raw materials for functional innovations, it is desirable to identify amino acid sites that are responsible for functional divergence from the sequence analysis of a gene family. As most amino acid substitutions are not related to the functional divergence but only represent neutral evolution, it becomes crucial how to statistically distinguish between these two possibilities. In this chapter, the author first gives an overall review of the basic concepts and terminologies for modeling functional divergence. It provides concise descriptions of the statistical methods for two major types of functional divergence, as well as detailed examples.