In a new era of global conflict involving non-state actors, At War with Words offers a provocative perspective on the role of language in the genesis, conduct and consequence of mass violence. Sociolinguistics meets political science and communication studies in order to examine interdependence between armed conflict and language. As phenomena attributed only to humans, both armed conflict and language are visible on two axes: language as war discourse, and language as a social policy subject to change by the victorious.

In this unique volume, internationally known...

How do alliances, in the aggregate, "behave"? What explains the actions and performance of alliances? Within alliances, how do members' actions and performance vary, and what explains that variance? This book addresses these questions with respect to one of the world's principal alliances of the late twentieth century, the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), also known as the Warsaw Pact. The author argues that though we understand a great deal about the military hardware of the Warsaw Pact, little is known about its reliability, cohesiveness, and the distribution of military burden within...

Among communist states, Romania is, in several respects, a unique case. Romania has been the only Warsaw Pact member to deviate consistently from Soviet foreign policy norms and, alone within Eastern Europe, to avoid oil imports from the USSR. The leadership of Nicolae Ceausescu since 1965 has, meanwhile, governed through a studious commitment to socio-economic centralization and control often reminiscent of' Stalinist orthodoxy. Intellectual freedom, artistic liberty and workers' rights have changed little relative to Poland, Hungary or the transient Prague Spring. Such international and...