Krig

This volume explores the scale and meaning of humanitarianism during the era of the Great War (1914-24). Bringing together a diverse range of scholars, it offers a fresh perspective on how and why humanitarian engagement shaped the arc of violence unleashed during these years, and analyses the extent to which the events influenced the development of humanitarian concepts and practices. Building on a decade of scholarship that has predominantly focused on the work of non-governmental humanitarian actors, the collection foregrounds the role of governmental agencies in humanitarian affairs and examines both the motivations and transnational networks of donor publics and the views of the beneficiaries of humanitarian aid. It explores how the connection between humanitarian engagement and international politics gave rise to a range of diverse humanitarian agendas, which were tied to and driven by larger questions of war and peace and conceptions of social and political order. The chapters address the debate over the emergence of 'modern' humanitarianism. Instead of seeing it as either the beginning of 'modern' humanitarianism or the end of its nineteenth century variant, the volume depicts the era as an important conjuncture in the history of humanitarianism. This was a transitional period, in which humanitarianism took on a myriad of different forms and resulted in a picture that was more complex and less triumphalist than many contemporary protagonists, and historians, have tended to admit.

[Not final] Proxy wars systematically dismantle the foundations of the states they target, leaving a legacy of violence, fractured governance, and eroded sovereignty. This book introduces the concept of "state-wrecking" to explain how external interventions--through support for insurgent actors--undermine political legitimacy, intensify violence, disrupt territorial control, and entrench cycles of instability. Using Afghanistan as a case study, the book offers a detailed exploration of how proxy wars devastate fragile states and obstruct state-building and statehood in the target county.The book moves beyond traditional studies of proxy wars that focus on global and regional power competition. Instead, it focuses on the procedural dynamics of proxy wars and highlights the internal consequences of these conflicts for the target state. Through a combination of innovative theoretical insights and comprehensive empirical research, it examines Pakistan's role in supporting the Taliban in the war in Afghanistan, the limitations of U.S.-led counterinsurgency efforts, and the broader implications for Afghanistan's sovereignty and political cohesion. Drawing on interviews, archival evidence, and conflict analysis, the book reveals how proxy wars dismantle state institutions and deepen social and political divisions.By reframing proxy wars as tools of state fragmentation rather than mere instruments of geopolitical strategy, the book sheds light on their long-term impact. It highlights the role of external actors in entrenching violence and governance failures, complicating peacebuilding efforts.Rigorously argued and deeply insightful, this book makes a significant contribution to understanding the intersections of modern warfare, state fragility, and international security. It offers an essential framework for scholars, policymakers, and readers seeking to address the enduring challenges of fragile states and conflict-ridden regions.

[Not final] A Grand Strategy for Peace is the first extended account of Britain's role in the creation of the United Nations Organization during the Second World War. As a work of traditional diplomatic history that brings in elements of intellectual history, the book describes how British officials, diplomats, politicians, and writers - previously seen to be secondary actors to the United States in this period - thought about, planned for, and helped to establish a future international order. While in the present day, many scholars and analysts have returned to the origins of the post-1945 international system, this book offers a detailed account of how the statesmen and more importantly, the officials working below the statesmen, actually conceived of and worked to establish a post-war world order.

The twentieth century witnessed the end of traditional empire.The impact of nationalism brought down many empires to disintegration. Yet, there were variations. Some empires retained their domains longer by changing their cloaks. This book compares how Russia and China survived. They both maneuvered nationalism through communist revolutions. In form, the Bolsheviks transformed the Tsarist domain into a union of multiple nation-states, while the Chinese revolutionaries re-integrated the Qing territories into one nation-state with autonomous units for ethnic minorities. To understand such divergence underneath convergence, this book compares the leading elites of the two revolutions. In comparison with the USSR-founding Bolsheviks, the Chinese communists were ethnically more homogeneous but less international. Their outlook was to establish an enclosed polity rather than a union institutionally open to incorporate new member-states. Through a protracted war the Chinese communists developed skills of reconciling the traditional "China" with revolutionary values. This rendered the Bolshevik way of entirely dissolving "Russia" in "Soviet" unnecessary. Moreover, the Chinese communists were weaker at borderlands vis-a-vis their rivalries. They were thus more cautious, rejecting the Bolshevik strategy of weaponizing "national self-determination". This book highlights the crucial features of the Chinese communist revolution and shows how they affected China's transition to nation-state: geographical isolation buffering external interference, bottom-up mass mobilization in a protracted course, and the longtime position of being the weak side of confrontation. The book will be useful to scholar interested in revolution, empire, nationalism, comparative historical sociology, and the biographies of communist leaders in Russia and China.

This innovative exploration of various Jewish experiences in France and the Francophone world through nuanced questions and representations offers an intertwining of perspectives that challenge geographical, chronological, and theoretical boundaries.

The author of The Ruin of All Witches returns with a gripping, vividly told journey of rediscovery, uncovering his uncle's past as a soldier, prisoner, fugitive and partisan in World War Two Italy Malcolm Gaskill knew two things about his great-uncle Ralph's wartime adventures: he'd been a prisoner in Italy, and he'd cut his way out of a train with a knife and fork. Apart from that, he'd faded into family folklore, lost to view. Until, one hot afternoon in an English country garden, a chance conversation set him off on his uncle's trail...What Ralph really did in the war was, he discovers, even more extraordinary than the exaggerations of family myth. From last-ditch fighting in the Libyan desert and incarceration in a Puglian prisoner-of-war camp, to desperate, dramatic escapes and the assuming of an entirely new identity among the peasants and partisans of the Italian alps, Gaskill traces a life transformed by conflict, while lifting the curtain on a long-forgotten episode of the Second World War.Yet The Glass Mountain is about more than war: it's a haunting exploration of what it means to encounter the past, and how we remember, forget and recover it. As he follows his uncle's path through dusty archives and the landscapes, towns and villages of present-day Italy, Gaskill finds himself confronted by questions that go to the heart of how we think about the people who came before us: Why do stories matter? How much of the past can ever be true?

The Vienna Gestapo headquarters was the largest of its kind in the German Reich and the most important instrument of Nazi terror in Austria, responsible for the persecution of Jews, suppression of resistance and policing of forced labourers. Of the more than fifty thousand people arrested by the Vienna Gestapo, many were subjected to torturous interrogation before being either sent to concentration camps or handed over to the Nazi judiciary for prosecution. This comprehensive survey by three expert historians focuses on these victims of repression and persecution well as the structure of the Vienna Gestapo and the perpetrators of its crimes.

Although it lasted only thirty years, German colonial rule dramatically transformed South West Africa. The colonial government not only committed the first genocide of the twentieth century against the Herero and Nama, but in their efforts to establish a "e;model colony"e; and "e;racial state,"e; they brought about even more destructive and long-lasting consequences. In this now-classic study-available here for the first time in English-the author provides an indispensable account of Germany's colonial utopia in what is present-day Namibia, showing how the highly rationalized planning of Wilhelmine authorities ultimately failed even as it added to the profound immiseration of the African population.

The ending of the slave trade and abolition of slavery by European powers during the 19th century is generally told as the work of enlightened liberals fighting against entrenched slaving interests in the Caribbean and European capitals. Sudhir Hazareesingh here turns this narrative on its head, showing how the enslaved resisted their oppressors from the earliest years of the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century until the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, and how this was the driving force for change.Daring To Be Free portrays the struggle for liberation from the perspective of the enslaved, wherever possible in their own words. It shines a light on the lives of revolutionaries like Toussaint Louverture, Nat Turner, and the pregnant mutineer Solitude; freed writers of narrative accounts like Frederick Douglass and Ottobah Cuguano; and the countless rebels, insurgents and conspirators whose acts of defiance destabilised the slave order in the colonies and galvanized the movement for abolition in France and Britain. Hazareesingh gives particular emphasis to the role of powerful women as campaigners, warriors and disruptors.Drawing on both written archives and oral history, the book traces the networks of cooperation that connected runaway settlements, covert rebellions and organized uprisings from Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil and Cuba to Mauritius and the United States. It shows us how the struggle for freedom was shaped not by western Enlightenment ideals but by the spiritual, martial, and religious influences from the lives of the enslaved in Africa before the Middle Passage - and by the inspiring example of Haiti, the first successful black revolution and the first independent black republic, which echoed down the 19th century.Daring To Be Free reshapes our understanding of Atlantic slavery by portraying how enslaved lives were defined not by their dehumanisation at the hands of colonialists and slavers but by their own resilience, rebellion, and commitment to emancipation. It also examines the afterlife of the slave trade in contemporary discussions about the legacy of slavery and possibilities for redress, reparations, and memorial in our own time.

This book provides a historically informed perspective of First Lady of China Soong Mayling's legacy within the context of World War II history, international cultural and military affairs, and transnational geopolitics inflected through gender.

Fifty years after the 1974 Ethiopian revolution, Etana H. Dinka brings together a who's-who of modern Ethiopian studies in order to offer this long-overdue analysis of the revolution and its legacies. With contributions both from seasoned academics-many of whom wrote about the revolution as it developed-and from representatives of a younger generation, this five-part collection offers new insights not only into the revolution itself, but also into issues such as the Red Terror, the EPRDF revolution of 1991, and Abiy Ahmed's repositioning of Ethiopia after 2018. Such wide-ranging analyses cumulatively cast Ethiopia's three successive post-revolution regimes not as separate entities, but rather as successive attempts to fulfil the promise of the revolution surrounding issues such as ethnicity, the nationalities question, economic development, and the land tenure question. In developing this model, the collection captures the defining developments and issues in Ethiopia, the Horn, and the Red Sea region over the past fifty years, and it speaks directly to a global body of knowledge about revolutions; state-making projects and empires; and militarism and military interventions in politics. A unique collection ultimately expands the historical revolutionary analyses of Ethiopian politics and society to the present in order to suggest new ways of ensuring social, economic, and environmental justice for all, this book is a must-read for researchers and upper-level students interested in Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa, African Studies, and revolutionary politics and economics in general.

This volume presents the way the discourse of memory and identity in the post-Soviet territory of Kaliningrad Oblast has altered over time, examining the ways in which German myths about East Prussia were reused and adapted after 1991 and the role of the region has played in wider memory politics of the Russian state.

This book explores the challenges small states face in navigating the complexities of modern warfare, particularly within the ambiguous Grey Zones where the boundaries between peace and conflict blur.

This book explores the challenges small states face in navigating the complexities of modern warfare, particularly within the ambiguous Grey Zones where the boundaries between peace and conflict blur.

The Link in the Chain chronicles the survival of a young Dutch Jewish family through the Nazi occupation of Holland from 1940 to 1945. But it is also a love story. Just days before the Germans invaded, 19-year-old Judic de Vries married Bram Wynberg, the love of her life. Together they spent the next four years in hiding, making countless life-and-death decisions, separated from their families and even their own children. In spite of devastating losses, Judic and Bram rebuilt a life in Holland and then started over again in Canada. This memoir reveals their courage and hopes, and Judic's determination to connect us to all that was taken.

The never-told-before history of WWI's home front, when a party truce opened up 29 by-elections to a hotchpotch of failing politicians, idealists, single-issue fanatics, and chancers. Foreword by John Curtice.