Experiencing War

ISBN-13: 9780415566308 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 140 str.

Christine Sylvester

Opis

This book presents the most recent thinking on war as a physical and emotional experience for those who touch and are touched by it politically, through feelings, and through physical activities ranging from combat to TV viewing.

It is designed to supplement the usual emphasis on strategic and national issues of war in the interest of theorizing aspects of war from the point of view of individual experience, be the individual a combatant, a casualty, a supporter, opponent, recorder, veteran, distant viewer, or intellectual, to name just a few possibilities. 

This volume presents essays that push the boundaries of war studies and war thinking. It does so without promoting one kind of theory or methodology for studying war as experiential politics, but with an eye to exploring the possibilities and encouraging others to take up the new agenda.  It includes new and challenging thinking on humanitarianism and war, new wars in the Third World, just war thinking, and the sense of the body within war that inspires recent UN resolutions. It also gives examples that can shatter our usual understandings of who is located where doing what with respect to war  –women warriors in Sierra Leone, the western media constructing new bodies of war-to-be with respect to Iran, new approaches to memory and war, and even an artist endeavoring to draw something seemingly intangible about war –the arms trade.

The unique aspect of this book is its purposive pulling together of foci and theoretical and methodological perspectives from a number of disciplines on a variety of contemporary wars. Arguably, war is an activity that engages the attention, the politics, and the lives of many people. To theorize it from those lives and perspectives, recognizing the political contexts of war, is long overdue.

This inter-disciplinary book will be of much interest to students of war studies, critical security studies, gender studies, sociology and IR in general.

Spis treści

1. Experiencing War: An Introduction Christine Sylvester  2. The Passions of Protection: Sovereign Authority and Humanitarian War Anne Orford  3. Gendered Humanitarianism: Reconsidering the Ethics of War Kimberly Hutchings  4. Wars, Bodies, and Development Brigitte Holzner  5. Ruling Exceptions: Female Soldiers and Everyday Experiences of Civil Conflict Megan MacKenzie  6. Experiencing the Cold War Heonik Kwon  7. On The Uselessness of New Wars Theory: Lessons From African Conflicts Stephen Chan  8. Dilemmas of Drawing War Jill Gibbon  9. Pathways to Experiencing War Christine Sylvester

O autorze

Christine Sylvester is Professor of International Relations and Development at Lancaster University, UK and the recent recipient of the anuual Kerstin Hesselgren Chair in Sweden.