Review – The Routledge Handbook of War and Society
Carlton-Ford and Ender’s edited collection draws attention to the challenges facing the military in irregular warfare, albeit with its main focus on the American experience.
Review – Counterinsurgency
This expansive compilation of David Kilcullen’s major works on insurgency and counterinsurgency is vital to understanding military tactics in both pre- and post-9/11 epochs.
Rising Extremism: The Debate Over U.S. Arms Sales to Iraq
A US sale of Apache helicopters to Iraq would at best have no substantive effect on the short-term ability to combat al Qaeda. At worst, it would contribute to increased extremism in the region.
Review – Securitization and the Iraq War
Donnelly’s analysis of the Iraq War contributes 2 important ideas – that security is not a static concept & securitizing actors operate within an evolving system of rules.
Gendered Bodies for the ‘Theatre of War’
The disciplining of martial bodies through gender specific regulations tells us a great deal about the relationship between gender, sexuality, militarisation and warfare.
Implications of the Iran-Iraq War
25 years after its end, the Iran-Iraq war ushered the region into a new geopolitical situation. However, like the war itself, its contribution to shaping the contemporary Middle East is fading from memory.
Review – Anatomy of a Bad Idea: COIN Best Practices
Nearly every question about how the U.S. Army came to be entangled in wars it knew better than to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan are answered by three excellent and complementary books.
Review – Routledge Handbook of Civil-Military Relations
The Handbook fills a lacuna in the civil-military relations literature by offering up-to-date empirical analyses of civil-military relations in a variety of regime types around the world.
What the Peculiar Case of the Kurdistan Region Can Teach Us about Sovereignty
Examining how the process of ‘becoming a state’ works allows analysts to better capture the complex dynamics in Iraq and the nature of sovereignty as a discourse.
Counterinsurgency: The Graduate Level of War or Pure Hokum?
The US Army’s counterinsurgency manual calls COIN the “graduate level of war.” But, the idea that enlightened soldiers were required to win a war is hokum.
