War, like football- two games that are commonly known yet rarely understood. Two games, too often reduced to playing rather than winning, scoring goals rather than attaining them. Precisely because football is so well-established and the game “commonly understood”, it is crucially relevant in understanding small wars (a match between professionals and amateurs)
This paper will analyse how the concepts in Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society are influencing the War on Terror. Moreover, it will examine their practical enforcement, the way in which they pose serious threats to the international law system and how this contributes to the shaping a new domestic order in those states where they have being applied.
There is an incompatibility between the purpose and mode of Middle Eastern economic development to date and the fraught efforts towards forms of democracy across the region. Additionally, the importance of certain economic developments to specific actors has successfully outweighed the importance of democracy in the region, and will persist in doing so for the foreseeable future.
The 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees is “one of the most widely accepted international norms, and remains the sole legally binding international instrument that provides specific protection to refugees”. Yet the Convention is neither fit for purpose nor universally accepted.
The human rights discourse has become a paradigm in international relations, with the transition from the international system to an international society. A vital aspect of that paradigm is the differentiation between adult and child, which has also been primarily instituted by the West. The supremacy of this definition has served the supremacy of the West in the human rights question.
One of the last major books about war in international relations is paradoxically a book forecasting the end of the object it analyses. Retreat from Doomsday: the Obsolescence of Major War by John Mueller was released in 1989 and has become a classic reading making the author one of the most influential authors on the topic of war.
The case of continental Europe is special in several ways and contains several intriguing paradoxes. It is a continent that has produced some of the most prominent contemporary social theorists – e.g. Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann – but the insights of their social theory has not really been ‘translated’ into IR theory in any comprehensive or structured fashion.
This paper examines the conceptualization of women in contemporary counterterror conflicts. It analyzes in which ways constructed gender dichotomies as the beautiful soul and the just warrior are reinforced and manipulated by political elites focusing on the case of Afghanistan. The paper’s core is the (re)construction of women as victims by politicians, namely the Bush administration.
Ethno-nationalism has become a potent force in international and domestic politics. Gradually, norms have developed favouring a right of self determination for national groups seeking self-government.
This essay will focus on the science-fiction ‘Halo’ series of video games to show how mediation, remediation, and hypermediation has significant political, ethical and moral influences on its audience in relation to the War on Terror. Botler and Grusin’s ‘Remediation: Understanding New Media’ will be drawn upon to describe how this colourful, futuristic ‘space opera’ depicting an interstellar conflict for the fate of humanity has a constructive role in creating a post-9/11 American identity and morality.
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