Colombia, a country at civil war for over 50 years, has one of the highest rates of landmine injury in the world. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted at the Amputation and Rehabilitation Unit of Bogota’s Central Military Hospital. Through an ethnographic description of surgical amputation and rehabilitation, I examine medical understandings of vitality and masculinity in respect to the senses – primarily that of pain in the act of amputation.

Abstract [Remarks at the 10th-anniversary conference for the Journal of Military Ethics, Oslo, Norway, 9 September 2011, arranged by the journal in collaboration with the Norwegian Defence University College, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, and Bj?rknes College.].

PART I PROLEGOMENA ACTING ON ORDERS "First, words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do ...

Professional Military Ethics Education (PMEE) must transmit and promote military professionalism, so it must continuously.

. MAINTAINING DISCIPLINE IN DETAINEE OPERATIONS: A STUDY IN SMALL UNIT LEADERSHIP AND ETHICAL BEHAVIOR. Journal of Military Ethics: Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 363-364. doi: 10.1080/15027570.2012.758409.

. MAINTAINING DISCIPLINE IN DETAINEE OPERATIONS: AVOIDING THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO ABUSE. Journal of Military Ethics: Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 360-362. doi: 10.1080/15027570.2012.758407.

This article elaborates on Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics, exploring the plausibility of his claim that each praxis has its own appropriate set of virtues. The exploration will be applied to what I term military praxis. Firstly, the article analyses what is meant by the concept of a praxis and how a military praxis can be defined, as well as the wider purpose of military praxis. From there it proceeds to the “internal goods”, the desires, to be realized (...) in joining the military. Which are these desires that are satisfied by participating in military praxis? Next, by combining the preceding steps, the article suggests which virtues are appropriate to the military praxis, focusing on seven virtues of military character: responsibility, competence, comradeship, respect, courage, resilience and discipline. This framework is completed by practical wisdom, the military virtue of intellect. I will conclude my article by elaborating on the role of narrative in integrating the virtues and by giving some concrete directions about ways in which education in the military virtues could take place. (shrink)

There are broadly five interconnected meanings of the noun ‘discipline’. Disciplinawere instructions to disciples, and hence a branch of instruction or department of knowledge. This religious context provided the modern educational notion of a ‘body of knowledge’, or a discipline such as sociology or economics. We can define discipline as a body of knowledge and knowledge for the body, because the training of the mind has inevitably involved a training of the body. Second, it signified a method (...) of training or instruction in a body of knowledge. Discipline had an important military connection involving drill, practice in the use of weapons. Third, there is an ecclesiastical meaning referring to a system of rules by which order is maintained in a church. It included the use of penal methods to achieve obedience. To discipline is to chastise. Fourth, to discipline is to bring about obedience through various forms of punishment; it is a means of correction. Finally there is a rare use of the term to describe a medical regimen in which ‘doctor's orders’ brings about a discipline of the patient. In contemporary society, there is, following the work of Michel Foucault, the notion of increasing personal regulation resulting in a ‘disciplinary society’ or a society based upon carceral institutions. (shrink)

In this study, I examined what channels of socialization influence the moral behavior of cadets. We conducted a regression analysis of the effects of parents' attitudes to moral education, the standard and potential curriculum of schools, peer groups, and communication media on individual ethics and discipline using 399 sample participants. The participants were recruited through a questionnaire survey on cadets from academy of military, naval, and air force, and four-year based students from R.O.C. National Defense University. The analysis (...) results showed that the cultivation of morality among cadets was directly influenced by the school's potential curriculum (i.e., intern cadres and officers in company) and their parents' attitudes to moral education during early childhood. The results also indicated that the influence of teaching by example was more significant than that of teaching by precept. (shrink)

Crucial to the establishment of a scientific discipline is a body of knowledge organized around a set of instruments, interpretive techniques, and regimes of training in their application. In this paper, we trace the involvement of scientists and engineers at Varian Associates in the development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers from the first demonstrations of the NMR phenomenon in 1946 to the definitive takeoff of NMR as a chemical discipline by the mid-1960s. We examine the role of Varian (...) scientists in constructing several models of NMR instruments for research scientists in the 1950s and the Varian efforts to influence the adoption of NMR as a standard tool for chemical analysis through Varian-supported publications, participation in scientific meetings, collaborations with academic chemists, workshops, and postdoctoral fellowships. Special attention is devoted to the development of the Varian A-60, the first commercial NMR instrument intended for the broadly trained chemist rather than a custom-built tool for the research specialist. Drawing on an examination of the use-rate of NMR instruments in chemical literature, the assessment of NMR in the chemical review literature by practitioners, and indicators of the establishment of a suitable funding environment for the growth of physics-based scientific instrumentation in the post-Sputnik era, we argue that the establishment of NMR as a discipline coincided with the adoption of the A-60 in the mid-1960s. During the period of our study, Varian Associates was a primary military contractor. This paper is intended to contribute to recent interest in the relation of military fundingto scientific enterprise during the Cold War and to the larger question of university-industry interactions in the growth of knowledge. (shrink)

Resilience may be referred to as the capacity for positive adaptation and to quickly recover from difficulties and significant adversity. After examining operational definitions of related concepts, the article discusses resilience building exercises for functional fitness at the individual soldier level, to include among others, self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-reinforcement, emotional regulation exercises, mindfulness training, relaxation and grounding exercises and importance of maintaining discipline and routine in the military. Using an acronym CARRIES, the article examines efforts to enhance resilience building (...) through empirically validated cognitive, behavioural and intrapersonal skills originating from best practices learned in the military. (shrink)

Le lien étroit entre guerre, forces armées et masculinité est un des questionnements majeurs des travaux sur les masculinités depuis les années 1990. Historiquement, le service militaire constitue un aspect important de la citoyenneté et représente aussi une « école » de la masculinité, un moyen de discipliner les jeunes hommes et de les socialiser dans un cadre exclusivement masculin, contribuant à reproduire la domination des hommes sur les femmes. Le concept de masculinité militaire, dével...

Contemporary art is brimming with images of a future shaped by environmental destruction, technological innovation, and new forms of sociality. This article looks beyond the content of such images in order to examine the infrastructures that underpin them. Paying attention to two key infrastructures in particular—the Cold War faith in prediction and the extraordinary explosion of scenario planning in the years that followed—the article explores the ways in which speculation was transformed into a tightly defined field of expertise straddling (...) class='Hi'>military, policy, and corporate worlds. No longer the preserve of prophets or mystics, the speculative infrastructures incubated within organizations such as the RAND corporation were underwritten by cybernetics, game theory, and systems analysis, all of which helped give prediction a veneer of scientific credibility. And yet, as the planning tools of the postwar era lost their predictive edge, new techniques came to exert influence in a world dominated by the uncertainties of looming environmental catastrophe. The future was no longer thought to emerge from the present in a linear fashion but unfold along a series of branch points that allowed decision makers to navigate through a landscape of uncertainty. Tracing the genealogy of forms of prediction and scenario planning from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, this article places futurological tools in the context of an expanded field of speculative practices that include works of art. Projects by the likes of Stephen Willats, Experiments in Art and Technology, the Harrisons, and others not only generate alternative images of the future but also rework the infrastructures by which such images are conceptualized and produced. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn clinical circles, the concept of “moral injury” has rapidly gained traction. Yet, from a moral philosophical point of view the concept is less clear than is suggested. That is, in current conceptualizations of moral injury, trauma’s moral dimension seems to be understood in a rather mechanistic and individualized manner. This article makes a start in developing an adequately founded conceptualization of the role of morality in deployment-related distress. It does so by reviewing and synthesizing insights from different disciplines into (...) morality and trauma. This discussion will lead to three positions: values and norms are by definition characterized by conflict, moral conflict may entail important social dimensions, and moral conflict may lead to altered beliefs about previously held values. These insights provide important steps in further developing conceptions of the role of morality in deployment-related suffering. (shrink)

?On or about XX1100XXX2009? I arrived at Compound XX, TIF Defender, Camp Bucca Iraq and discovered that SFC XXXX and CPL XXXX had, in contravention of standard operating procedure and the requirements of Combined Joint Task Force 134 General Orders, entered Compound XX without first securing all detainees in the Salat, and walked to the rear fenceline through the occupied Compound, many times within deadspace [outside the] guard force's line of sight, and back through the sally port.1 SFC XXXX and (...) CPL XXXX were unmolested during this entry. No prior coordination was performed with the other members of the guard force, other than PFC XXXX who was ordered by SFC XXXX to open the sally port to allow entry. SFC XXXX and CPL XXXX were in a Compound occupied at the time by approximately 1038 Iraqi Security Detainees, and could have been harmed or taken hostage with little warning, leaving the guard force few options other than to attempt to defend SFC XXXX and CPL XXXX by lethal means, as these were the only weapons available that had the range and accuracy required? (shrink)

The article argues that the prohibition of abortion in Chile, other than when the mother's life is in danger, is a form of human rights violation targeting women specifically. The Pro-Birth Policy was established in Pinochet's Chile as a response to the previous government's attempts, under Allende, to encourage family planning and to educate and inform women about their choices. This had been done to put an end to the increase in back-street abortions with the inevitable toll on women's lives. (...) Pinochet's regime reversed these women-oriented family planning policies, and criminalized abortion, on the basis of costs to the state and, more importantly, the need to increase the birth rate for reasons of national security. Women's bodies were used by the Pinochet regime, both by sexual violence and torture, and by the denial of women's reproductive and sexual rights, as a means to impose discipline and order on society. The fact that this is still not acknowledged in the construction of a collective memory indicates that the issue has not yet been resolved in democratic Chile. (shrink)

Instructional technology, and the cognitivist and systems paradigms that underpin it, grew out of the military-industrial complex during the Cold War. Much as the Pentagon and this military complex defined the architecture of the Internet, they also essentially created, ex nihilo, the fields of instructional technology and instructional design. The results of the ongoing dominance or influence of the Pentagon in these specific disciplines have been traced in research that appeared during the final phases of the Cold War. (...) But this research has not been updated to reflect circumstances now most definitive of the post–Cold War world: the rapid development of Internet infrastructures and applications, and the aggressive expansion of US military spending and activity. Tracing the imprint left by the US military on instructional technology and design, this paper considers how this influence may now extend, like the Internet itself, into schools and the university. It will conclude by stressing that the end of the Cold War, along with more recent developments concerning the US military, presents a juncture offering both opportunity and challenge to the evolving field of educational technology or “e-learning.”. (shrink)

ABSTRCTIn recent times, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) hasbeen developed and widely spread around world. ICT is used in various sectorsand considered a basis in the emergence of some important technologies such asvirtual reality technology. Virtual Reality (VR) is a special technology as anadvanced technology connected to several fields, e.g. training, learning, science,engineering, medicine, military, etc. VR has great potentials which enabled toperform several phenomena and experiments. Hence, several scenarios havebecome available. The purpose of this study is to shed (...) light on virtual realitytechnology and list a glimpse of common publications and studies involved. (shrink)

During the second half of the 20th century, attempts were made to operationally redefine various social activities, including those related to science, the military, administration and industry. These attempts were aided by scientific and technical innovations developed in the Second World War, and subsequently by the increase in use of automation in various domains. This Ph.D. thesis addresses these attempts from a sociohistorical perspective, focusing on the specific case of archaeology. During this period, the domain of archaeology underwent a (...) process of disciplinarisation and professionalisation. The same occurred in applied mathematics and then computer science: this thesis focuses on the relationships between these three domains. In France, during the 1950's and 1960's, there were significant methodological and conceptual innovations. Their subsequent scientific recognition, was, however, relatively minor. In archaeology, innovations related to applied mathematics and automatics did not lead to the emergence of an archaeological speciality based on computation. This situation was in striking contrast to what happened in other scientific domains and in archaeology in other countries, where new theoretical and methodological Anglophone definitions in ‘New Archaeology’ were spreading worldwide. This thesis explores three collective attempts to redefine the conceptual and methodological basis of archaeology, led by Georges Laplace, Jean-Claude Gardin and Jean Lesage, across France, Spain and Italy. These cases are completed by other people who had significant careers in both engineering and archaeology. In general, this thesis studies a scientific activity by investigating the cognitive and social aspects of peoples’ methodological contributions. Three models of the relationships between experts in a scientific domain and experts in an applied science (here mathematics and computing) are empirically identified and described. The effects of introducing mathematical and automation procedures on the division of labour and the distribution of recognition are analysed. The success or failure of the methodological propositions are discussed with reference to several factors and models of scientific innovation. This thesis generates new information on the development of rescue and preventive archaeology and on the use of digital technologies in human sciences. The analysis draws on 82 interviews, 23 archives and several bibliometric datasets (extracted from pre-existing databases or constructed for the purpose of this research). Mirroring the archaeological propositions under study, this research also intends to illustrate the possible use of computing and formalised procedures in social sciences. The documentation and demonstrative principles underlying this work, implemented by using Wiki, the methods of literate programming and reproducible research, are themselves analysed. (shrink)

Sexual violence during war varies in extent and takes distinct forms. In some conflicts, sexual violence is widespread, yet in other conflicts—including some cases of ethnic conflict—it is quite limited. In some conflicts, sexual violence takes the form of sexual slavery; in others, torture in detention. I document this variation, particularly its absence in some conflicts and on the part of some groups. In the conclusion, I explore the relationship between strategic choices on the part of armed group leadership, the (...) norms of combatants, dynamics within small units, and the effectiveness of military discipline. (shrink)

Scholarly discussions of the live burials of Gauls and Greeks in the Forum Boarium in the mid- and late Republic replay the debate on Roman imperialism; those supporting the theory of “defensive” imperialism connect religious fears with military ones, while other scholars separate this ritual and the “enemy nations” involved in it from the actual enemies of current warfare in order to corroborate a more aggressive sense of Roman imperialism. After reviewing earlier interpretations and the problems of ancient evidence (...) for these Roman instances of “human sacrifice,” I propose a new reading based on a ritual parallel, a slightly earlier Greek oracle related to purification from avenging spirits. As burials of symbolic former enemies haunting Rome, the ritual suggests an insight into the experience of constant warfare and close-contact killing by citizen-soldiers in an aggressively imperialistic state. Especially with the disappearance of captive killings in the symbolic context of aristocratic burials and the emergence of Hellenistic epic to address elite glory, the live burials could have been critical in providing psychological closure to the once-soldiers back in Rome. Remarkably, the ritual offered an outlet in the religious realm for sentiments unwelcome in the Roman army: in the larger dynamic of the military and religious spheres, the strict world of military discipline was complemented by a religious realm that was much more open to external influence and innovation. (shrink)

The 1968 My Lai Massacre in South Vietnam and shocking events at Abu Graibh prison in Iraq in 2003 show that the behaviour of some in the American military has descended into barbarism. How strong is the military's commitment to avoiding misconduct and atrocity? This timely and compelling book asks critical questions and raises sobering issues the Australian Army can't ignore. Leading military personnel, aid workers, commentators and scholars discuss the Australian Army's commitment to behaving ethically and (...) the challenges associated with contemporary warfare. With chapters on social media and inciting violence, cyberweapons, and special operations and humanitarian deployments, 'Ethics Under Fire' offers a rare insight into the key issues facing the modern army, from technology and tactics to terrorism"--Back cover. (shrink)

For Machiavelli, religion is valued not by the importance of its founder, the content of its teachings, the truth of its dogmas or the significance of its rites. It is not the essence of what really matters but its function and importance for collective life. Religion teaches to recognize and respect political rules through the religious commandments. This collective norm could assume the outer coercive aspect of the military discipline as well as the inner persuasive character of civic (...) and moral education for the production of collective consensus. -/- Para Maquiavel, o que confere valor a uma religião não é a importância de seu fundador, o conteúdo dos ensinamentos, a verdade dos dogmas ou a significação dos mistérios e ritos. Importa não a essência da religião e sim sua função e importância para a vida coletiva. A religião ensina a reconhecer e a respeitar as regras políticas a partir do mandamento religioso. Essa norma coletiva pode assumir tanto o aspecto coercivo exterior da disciplina militar ou da autoridade política quanto o caráter persuasivo interior da educação moral e cívica para a produção do consenso coletivo. (shrink)

Through a detailed analysis of Xenophon's defence against a charge for hybris among the Ten Thousand, this paper discusses violence, reputation and hierarchy in Greek military and social contexts. Contrary to other recent treatments of the episode, the study highlights the centrality of honour/shame dynamics and of desert in establishing and upholding social order, showing that these notions are found consistently in numerous examples as early as Homer. Addressing the apparent lack of strict discipline in Greek armies, the (...) paper concludes that shame and peer pressure had a strong normative power in acknowledging and reconciling personal claims and common interests within a group. (shrink)

The creation of a citizen militia is a characteristic pretension of the Renaissance republicanism. The republic cannot lack defense nor defend themselves with mercenary armies. For Machiavelli, Guicciardini or Giannotti the citizen has a set of virtues, like austerity, discipline, patriotism or bravery, that make him the best soldier. Therefore, the Republican regime needs the citizens to be soldiers, because the military discipline itself is a means necessary to forge such civic virtues without which no republic can (...) survive. (shrink)

The coronavirus pandemic has brought to public attention a variety of questions long debated in medical ethics, but now given both added urgency and wider publicity. Among these is triage, with its origins in deciding which individual lives are to be saved on a battlefield, but now also concerned with the allocation of scarce resources more generally. On the historical battlefield, decisions about whom to treat first – neither those who would survive without treatment, nor those who would not survive (...) even with treatment, but those who needed treatment to survive – was facilitated by military discipline and the limited effectiveness of treatments available. In the allocation of scarce resources today, by contrast, such decisions are subject to intense public and political scrutiny, and the range of effective treatments available has immeasurably diminished the proportion of ‘those who would not survive even with treatment’. If triage decisions are to be made, they now need to be justified in the arena of public opinion by moral arguments which are also politically persuasive. A number of different aspects of what is required for this endeavour are examined in the first five contributions to this issue of the Journal. In ‘Should age matter in COVID-19 triage? A deliberative study ’1, Kuylen and colleagues report on a deliberative study of public views in the UK, in which participants ‘generally accepted the need for triage but strongly rejected ’fair innings’ and ’life projects’ principles as justifications for age-based allocation,…preferring to maximise the number of lives rather than life years saved’; and concerned that in any resolution ‘utilitarian considerations of efficiency should be tempered with a concern for equality and vulnerability’. A similar concern to temper utilitarian considerations, in this case with an Aristotelian view of the common good as ‘the good life for …. (shrink)

This article is dedicated to the topic of pre-conscription training in the Soviet Union in the interwar period, including such aspects of it as basic laws to attract young people to the Red Army, their implementation into practice by local authorities, analysis of practices in dopryzovnykiv eliminate illiteracy, ideological work of recruits. The focus was on the same prize in 1940, as a kind of logical end of all policies of the Communist Party to prepare young men for service in (...) the armed forces during the interwar period. Pre-conscription training or military training of boys before their involvement in the Armed Forces was established in the USSR in August 1923 and carried on training meeting for 2 months to two years. With the outbreak of World War II pre-conscription training was compulsory discipline for pupils and students of colleges, trade schools. Call-up boy thoroughly studied local recruitment office on social origin, political - ideological attitudes, health and education. The determining factor in this case were just the ideological sentiment recruit Young men that recruited into the Red Army prepared for this first "right" informing contemporary political situation, the international situation and the heroic feats of martial page Red Army. During the interwar period the army was for many Soviet citizens not only school of the martial arts, but also school of the illiteracy and certain minimal knowledge, true ideological bright colors. The typical portrait of the call-up boy: it was a man with an education in grades 1-4 forms, or completely illiterate, which then conscription to the army learned to write and read, ideologically informed "rightly" about the current situation in the country and the world, physically healthy and prepared for military service in a variety of sports clubs and courses of military training. (shrink)

The measurement of light and colour has always been a peripheral science. Light became a 'disciplined' quantity over the period of a century, but the specialist communities that measured it did not. The quantification of visible light (photometry), colour (colorimetry), and radiant intensity (radiometry) involved distinct communities of physicists, psychologists, technicians and engineers. -/- This chapter of _Science in the Shadows_ examines how the measurement of non-visible light became the domain of post Second World War military engineers and classified (...) development programmes. (shrink)

This book focuses on resource allocation in military and humanitarian medicine during times of scarcity and austerity. It is in these times that health systems bend, break, and even collapse and where resource allocation becomes a paramount concern and directly impacts clinical decision-making. Such times are challenging and this book covers this very important, yet, scarcely researched topic within the field of bioethics. This work brings together experts and practitioners in the fields of military health care, philosophy, ethics, (...) and other disciplines to provide analysis on a variety of related topics ranging from case studies and first-hand experiences to policy and philosophical analysis. It is of great interest to to academics, practitioners, policy makers and students who are looking for analyses and guidance regarding the fair provision of medical care and the use of medical rules of eligibility under adverse conditions. (shrink)

In a military-sponsored research project begun during the Second World War, inmates of the Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois were infected with malaria and treated with experimental drugs that sometimes had vicious side effects. They were made into reservoirs for the disease and they provided a food supply for the mosquito cultures. They acted as secretaries and technicians, recording data on one another, administering malarious mosquito bites and experimental drugs to one another, and helping decide who was admitted to the (...) project and who became eligible for early parole as a result of his participation. Thus, the prisoners were not simply research subjects; they were deeply constitutive of the research project. Because a prisoner’s time on the project was counted as part of his sentence, and because serving on the project could shorten one’s sentence, the project must be seen as simultaneously serving the functions of research and punishment. Michel Foucault wrote about such ‘mixed mechanisms’ in his Discipline and punish. His shining example of such a ‘transparent’ and subtle style of punishment was the panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s architectural invention of prison cellblocks arrayed around a central guard tower. Stateville prison was designed on Bentham’s model; Foucault featured it in his own discussion. This paper, then, explores the power relations in this highly idiosyncratic experimental system, in which the various roles of model organism, reagent, and technician are all occupied by sentient beings who move among them fluidly. This, I argue, created an environment in the Stateville hospital wing more panoptic than that in the cellblocks. Research and punishment were completely interpenetrating, and mutually reinforcing. (shrink)

Summary Meteorology, a scientific discipline almost exclusively associated with weather forecasting in the first half of the twentieth century in the USA, was viewed with disdain by more mathematically based scientific communities. A descriptive science lacking in physical and mathematical rigor, meteorology was typically without an academic home in US colleges and universities. This stood in sharp contrast to the meteorological communities across the Atlantic which were supported by dedicated geophysical institutes. Four factors kept US meteorologists, unlike their European (...) colleagues, on the fringes of the scientific mainstream: a lack of ?rigor?, a lack of academic presence, a lack of patronage (governmental or private), and a pervasive public view that meteorological information was ?free? and yet should be tailored to a variety of users. The symbiotic relationship of these factors created an almost insurmountable hurdle to disciplinary advancement. That hurdle was effectively overcome in mid-century when the military demands of the Second World War presented meteorology with the opportunity to leave behind its legacy as a ?guessing science? and assume its place as a mathematically and physically based theoretical scientific discipline. (shrink)

In a military-sponsored research project begun during the Second World War, inmates of the Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois were infected with malaria and treated with experimental drugs that sometimes had vicious side effects. They were made into reservoirs for the disease and they provided a food supply for the mosquito cultures. They acted as secretaries and technicians, recording data on one another, administering malarious mosquito bites and experimental drugs to one another, and helping decide who was admitted to the (...) project and who became eligible for early parole as a result of his participation. Thus, the prisoners were not simply research subjects; they were deeply constitutive of the research project. Because a prisoners time on the project was counted as part of his sentence, and because serving on the project could shorten ones sentence, the project must be seen as simultaneously serving the functions of research and punishment. Michel Foucault wrote about such mixed mechanisms in his Discipline and punish. His shining example of such a transparent and subtle style of punishment was the panopticon, Jeremy Benthams architectural invention of prison cellblocks arrayed around a central guard tower. Stateville prison was designed on Benthams model; Foucault featured it in his own discussion. This paper, then, explores the power relations in this highly idiosyncratic experimental system, in which the various roles of model organism, reagent, and technician are all occupied by sentient beings who move among them fluidly. This, I argue, created an environment in the Stateville hospital wing more panoptic than that in the cellblocks. Research and punishment were completely interpenetrating, and mutually reinforcing. (shrink)

We describe a strategy that is being used for the horizontal integration of warfighter intelligence data within the framework of the US Army’s Distributed Common Ground System Standard Cloud (DSC) initiative. The strategy rests on the development of a set of ontologies that are being incrementally applied to bring about what we call the ‘semantic enhancement’ of data models used within each intelligence discipline. We show how the strategy can help to overcome familiar tendencies to stovepiping of intelligence data, (...) and describe how it can be applied in an agile fashion to new data resources in ways that address immediate needs of intelligence analysts. (shrink)

The movement for ‘military preparedness’ in America and Britain gained tremendous momentum at the turn of the century. It assimilated the cult of manliness — the key public virtue, which allowed a person to claim possession of himself and a nation to reclaim possession of itself. An army was the means of marshalling a mass of people for regeneration. The symbol of a nation's preparedness to take control of its own soul was the readiness to bear arms. Although this (...) movement originated in the middle-class, Protestant cultures of the USA and England, its core ideas were adopted by many political movements. Affected by these ideas, as well as the formation of the Protestant Ulster Volunteers in 1913, a movement to reclaim Irish independence through the mass bearing of arms began in South and West Ireland in autumn 1914. Women were excluded from these Volunteer companies, but set up their own organization, Cumann na mBan, as an auxiliary to the men's. The Easter Rising in 1916 owed as much to older ideas of the coup d'état as new ideas of mass mobilization, but subsequent history recreated that Rising as the ‘founding’ moment of the Irish republic. It was not until mass conscription was threatened two years later that the mass of people were absorbed into the idea of an armed campaign against British rule. From 1919 to 1923, the reality of guerrilla-style war pressed people into a frame demanding discipline, secrecy, loyalty and a readiness to act as the prime nationalist virtues. The ideal form of relationship in war is the brotherhood, both as actuality and potent myth. The mythology of brotherhood creates its own myths of women (as not being there, and men not needing them) as well as creating the fear and the myth that rape is the inevitable expression of brotherhoods in action. Despite explicit anxiety at the time about the rape of Irish women by British soldiers, no evidence was found of mass rape, and that fear has disappeared into oblivion, throwing up important questions as to when rape is a weapon of war. The decade of war worsened the relationship of women to the political realm. Despite active involvement as ‘auxiliaries’ women's political status was permanently damaged by their exclusion as warriors and brothers, so much so that they disappear into the status of wives and mothers in the 1937 Irish Constitution. (shrink)

Over the last four decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died two years ago, he was considered to be a thinker on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan--a public intellectual as influential to his generation as Sartre was to his. Science of Science and Reflexivity will be welcomed as a companion volume to Bourdieu's now seminal An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology . (...) In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research--that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit. Science thus endangered can become detrimental to mankind. The line between pure and applied science, therefore, must be subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's goals in Science of Science and Reflexivity are to identify the social conditions in which science develops in order to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from relativism and the forces that might exploit it. In the grand tradition of scientific reflections on science, Bourdieu provides a sociological analysis of the discipline as something capable of producing transhistorical truths he presents an incisive critique of the main currents in the study of science throughout the past half century and he offers a spirited defense of science against encroaching political and economic forces. A masterful summation of the principles underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and a memoir of his own scientific journey, Science of Science and Reflexivity is a capstone to one of the most important and prodigious careers in the field of sociology. (shrink)

The prisoner 's dilemma game has acquired large literatures in several disciplines. It is surprising, therefore, that a good definition of the game is hard to find. Typically an author relates a story about captured criminals or military rivals, provides a particular payoff matrix and asserts that the PD is characterized, or illustrated, by that matrix. In the few cases in which characterizing conditions are given, the conditions, and the motivations for them, do not always agree with each other (...) or with the paradigm examples elsewhere. In this paper we describe several varieties of PD's. In particular, we suggest there are two distinctions among PD's with philosophical significance, the pure/impure and the utilitarian/nonutilitarian distinctions. In the first section, we explain and characterize the two distinctions. In the second, we discuss an issue of moral philosophy that illustrates the significance of the former. (shrink)

THE CONGRESS The infrastructure of the colonial territories obeyed the logic of economic exploitation, territorial domain and commercial dynamics among others that left deep marks in the constructed landscape. The rationales applied to the decisions behind the construction of infrastructures varied according to the historical period, the political model of colonial administration and the international conjuncture. This congress seeks to bring to the knowledge of the scientific community the dynamics of occupation and transformation of colonial territory, especially related to and (...) resulting from the war effort, which involved not only the agency of architecture and urbanism but also of military apparatus, and its repercussions in the same territories as independent countries. Colonial infrastructures will be addressed to question, for instance, how housing production during armed conflict has conditioned future spatial models of the independent countries or what options taken by colonial administrations were abandoned or otherwise strengthened after independence. The congress is part of the ongoing research project entitled “ARCHWAR - Dominance and massviolence through Housing and Architecture during colonial wars. The Portuguese case (GuineaBissau, Angola, Mozambique): colonial documentation and post independence critical assessment” funded by ‘Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia’ (FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology), ref. PTDC/ART-DAQ/0592/2020, in which Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (FCG) is a partner. The general goal of the congress is to debate on the repercussions of the decisions taken by the colonial states in the area of territorial infrastructures – in particular through the disciplines of architecture and urbanism – in post-independence spatial and urban models and the formation of independent countries with a colonial past. (shrink)

Maya Zehfuss critiques constructivist theories of international relations (currently considered to be at the cutting edge of the discipline) and finds them wanting and even politically dangerous. Zehfuss uses Germany's first shift toward using its military abroad after the end of the Cold War to illustrate why constructivism does not work and how it leads to particular analytical outcomes and forecloses others. She argues that scholars are limiting their abilities to act responsibly in international relations by looking towards (...) constructivism as the future. (shrink)

" Ce général expérimenté nous parle avec une grande sagesse des qualités humaines et de la conscience nécessaires pour combattre l'ennemi et diriger les hommes. Ses pages m'ont surpris par leur limpidité et leur profondeur. Nous sommes bien loin de l'armée archaïque que j'ai connue dans ma jeunesse ", père Guy Gilbert. Ce livre s'adresse au jeune étudiant qui réfléchit à devenir officier. Aucun ouvrage, récent en tout cas, n 'avait encore pris ces jeunes et leurs parents pour cible, afin (...) de tenter de leur parler, avec des mots du début du 21e siècle, de la guerre et du terrorisme, mais aussi de morale et d'amitié, de courage et de volonté. Et d 'amour et de vertus, et de principes. Et de discipline et de sacrifice et de générosité, qu'il a en quantité à condition qu'on lui explique comment il va en faire le meilleur usage. Ses propos intéresseront aussi tous ceux qui, même en dehors des corps armés, s 'interrogent sur l'énigme de l'homme face à la violence. (shrink)

This book is about politics, political theory, and political philosophy. Although these disciplines are often conflated because they interact, they actually are distinct. Political theory is part of political science, whereas political philosophy is a hybrid of political theory and philosophy. The former discipline is descriptive and explanatory, whereas the latter is prescriptive--to the point that it is often called "normative theory." It is in fact the evaluative study of political societies. Whereas political theorists describe and explain politics, political (...) philosophers examine it critically and venture to suggest improvements and, on occasion, radically different social futures. Political philosophers propose scenarios and dreams where political scientists offer snapshots of existing polities. While these disciplines are distinct, Mario Bunge asserts that they must inform each other. Political philosophy is not yet a well-defined field: it hovers between political theory and utopian fantasizing. Few, if any earlier thinkers could have anticipated any of the most pressing political issues of our time, such as the need to stop global warming, reduce nuclear armaments, stop the rise of inequality between individuals and nations, and fight authoritarianism, particularly when it comes disguised as democracy or as socialism. Not even more recent social thinkers had much to say about such topical issues as environmental degradation, gender and race discriminations, participative democracy, nationalism, imperialism, the North-South divide, resource wars, the industrial-military complex, or the connections between poverty and environmental degradation, and between inequality and bad health. Beyond ideological divergences, most political philosophers have been nearly unanimous in their indifference to the plight of the Third World. Bunge does not share that indifference. He also believes that political philosophers should pay more attention to numbers, such as the standard index of income inequality and the more comprehensive United Nations human development index for the various nations. It is pointless to write about redistributive policies unless we have some of idea of current wealth distribution. This is, in short a modern treatise of inherited concerns. (shrink)

Sound Pressure reveals how speaker systems mounted in public, employment, military and entertainment environments have played a pivotal role in the way that humans have been physiologically and psychologically organised and disciplined throughout the past century.

This paper examines the type of devotion of the early modern soldiers which was referred to as “the fearing of God”. The phenomenon started in the 1560s and continued for two centuries in the Polish and Lithuanian Duchy armies. It was based on the belief in the direct intervention of God during military action, which depended on the conduct of the soldiers. The commanders-in-chief promoted the vision of reality in which crimes were equated with sins and affected the outcome (...) of wars and battles, and even determined the safety of the soldiers themselves. The acts that were displeasing to God were to result in severe punishment during battles, while piety and good behavior guaranteed success. The analysis of this issue was conducted on the basis of normative acts issued by the commanders-in-chief, called military articles, which were supplemented by the analysis of military treaties. The paper emphasizes that this concept was promoted by all commanders regardless of denomination, including Polish Brethren, Lutherans, Reformed Evangelicals and Catholics. It was placed, as a rule, at the beginning of the military articles as an arenga, providing the basis for the validity of the criminal laws. The combination of the “fear of God” and the military law was shown to have rational justification: it guaranteed a higher discipline and morale, which could be reflected in the effectiveness of the warfare conducted. The application of this idea led to the breakdown of soldier solidarity and to the belief that the misconduct of individuals affected the fate of troops and entire armies. The most important creators of this concept include Florian Zebrzydowski, Jan Chodkiewicz and Stanisław Cikowski, and at the turn of the centuries it was developed by Jan Zamoyski and Krzysztof Radziwiłł, nicknamed Piorun. The most elaborate formula in the military articles was presented in the 17th century by Krzysztof Radziwiłł II, and a century later by Michał Kazimierz Radziwiłł. A hypothesis was also formulated that an old concept, which survived as one of the elements of Old Polish culture, was adopted to evaluate the Battle of Warsaw of 1920, which has been referred to as the Miracle on the Vistula, what was supposed to symbolize the causal role of God during the war. (shrink)

Honor, fearlessness, calm, decisive action, strategic thinking, and martial prowess have been the hallmarks of the Japanese samurai culture through the ages. Their ethos is known as bushido, or the way of the warrior-knight. Here is an insider’s view of the samurai—their moral and psychological development, the ethical standards they strive to uphold, their training in both martial arts and strategy, and the enormous role that the traditions of Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism had in influencing their ideals. Thomas Cleary (...) has collected writings on bushido by warriors, scholars, political advisors, and educators from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries that provide a comprehensive, historically rich view of samurai life and education. The selections deal with a broad range of subjects—from military strategy and political science to personal discipline and character development. Cleary includes an introduction to each piece, putting it into historical context and presenting biographical information about the authors. This is an essential read for martial artists and anyone interested in samurai history, but it will also appeal to readers in the fields of government, military, religion, and education. (shrink)

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 320pp. pbk. $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-0816666119. In Games of Empire , Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect of an emerging postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism” (xxix) to argue that videogames are “exemplary media of Empire” (xxix). Their notion of “Empire” is based on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), which (...) characterizes the contemporary world order as a decentralized system of global economic, political, and economic power that transcends national boundaries. In the view of the authors, Hardt and Negri’s account sets itself apart from other analyses of international politics by offering a “comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital” (xx). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thus divide Games of Empire into three sections to reflect each of these aspects of Empire ’s argument, seeing their work as the first account to explore “virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (xxix). Books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Electronic Mediations series “explore the humanistic and social implications” of new technologies that spark “significant changes in society and culture, politics and economics, thinking and being.” That’s an abstract goal, and one that Games of Empire surely meets. Yet at times it can be difficult to understand exactly which specific intervention this book seeks to make. It is unclear whether the authors of Games of Empire see their work as an indictment of game scholars’ lack of attention to political economy, or whether it’s a work of political theory hoping to show that other disciplines should be paying more attention to the production and play of videogames. Because Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter don’t directly criticize previous political critiques of gaming—such as Edward Castronova’s exploration of the “porous membrane” allowing two-way traffic between virtual economies and those of the real world, or Alexander Galloway’s unraveling of control protocols in algorithmic design, or Ian Bogost’s idea of political procedural rhetoric—they sometimes leave the reader wondering how to situate the book in the broader discourse on games and politics, either separately or together. Thus, Games of Empire might best be seen as an introduction to the writings of Hardt and Negri for game players and designers, rather than as a text for communicating the basic concepts of game studies and design. It is neither a truly new theory of games or digital media, nor is it a new theory of Empire—and that’s not a criticism. It is instead an introduction to Empire through popular culture, as Zizek does for Lacan in Looking Awry . If one were teaching an introductory course on contemporary political theory, this book would offer obvious inroads into Negri and Hardt’s thinking for a number of reasons. Despite its radical ideological bent, the book isn’t off-putting to readers who don’t necessarily share the authors’ politics. It synthesizes complex ideas from difficult thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Guattari while integrating modifications and critiques of Empire theory itself. And although the book is dense, sometimes feeling longer than it actually is (just over 200 pages), Games of Empire maintains a breezy readability by tightly coupling core concepts of Empire theory to well-known games and widely-publicized conflicts within the videogame industry. The first section of the book focuses on immaterial labor, the accumulation of “cognitive capital,” and the global process of manufacturing videogame consoles. It is significant for the authors that videogames began as hacker experiments within research institutes of the military industrial complex, programmed on stolen time, before becoming a commodity (7). This is the first in a string of examples showing how creative dissidence and conflict fuel the continuing evolution of Empire’s control. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter explain that the videogame industry now constitutes an international production apparatus dominating both creative work in developed nations and manual labor in developing ones. Because game industries in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are predominately non-unionized, they serve as an exemplary system for analyzing how global capital exploits contemporary intellectual work—including an excellent analysis of the “EA Spouse” scandal of 2004. On the side of the consumer, the authors argue that rabid “console races” that drive the industry forward from a technological perspective serve to structure gamer identity and combat piracy; later in the book, these machines offer a window into the worlds of Congolese coltan mining and electronic waste (222-224). In the second section, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter move on to deep case studies of individual games to show how the most popular game genres embed imperial assumptions about conflict, exchange, and urban life. First they argue that military training games such as Full Spectrum Warrior —co-developed by university researchers, industry developers, and military contractors—contribute to the “banalization” of war, a subjective state wherein perpetual preparedness for war is accepted as a part of everyday life (100). Chapter five covers Michel Foucalt’s notion of “biopower,” the extension of capital accumulation to life itself. The authors argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft , which take market capitalism as a given and force players into essentialist roles and racial antagonisms, are organized to maximize control and profit (often on the backs of virtual currency “farmers” in China and southeast Asia). Finally, they criticize the naïve assumption that humor and cynicism in the popular sandbox game franchise Grand Theft Auto offer any remedy to its racialized, violent content. Instead, such games indulge and normalize the fantasy of getting rich at any cost by keeping the realities of contemporary urban life and corporate greed at a safe distance (181). Part three of Games of Empire focuses on “games of multitude,” a preliminary attempt to escape from Empire’s order through alternate modes of videogame development and play. Multitude is defined dialectically, as “the engine and the enemy” of Empire (187). This is the most important, yet also most contradictory section of the text. It lays bare the process by which Empire and its media feed our creative and intellectual development to overabundance. At a certain point, the force of the multitude reaches such a level that it threatens the stability of Empire; however, instead of following Hardt and Negri’s utopian assumptions about the radical potential of the multitude, the authors here follow Paolo Virno’s warning that Empire is “very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources” (188). At every turn, advances in player configurative power provide new sources of revenue and advertising angles for the game industry. A disappointing shortcoming of these latter pages is the lack of truly new examples for radical resistance within game development. Instead, it turns out that the radical left seems satisfied with the same mild successes that the left-of-center also has celebrated: artist’s mods, virtual world activism, and critical counterplay within strategy- and wargames. Having been frequently cited by many authors before Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this idea of subversion or resistance through play feels tired and unpersuasive. It is unclear if the authors believe it is possible to embrace game design itself as a way of pursuing what they call “exodus” from Empire, or if an all-too-fashionable subversion is the only workable strategy. While the book does explore how the earliest independent game studios were eventually subverted and incorporated into the game industry proper, it doesn’t affirm or critique more recent non-commercial, DIY game development projects such as Klik-of-the-Month Club and Ludum Dare. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s analysis of so-called “tactical games,” including the editorial works of La Molleindustria, leads to an even more ambivalent take on the contemporary design ecology. At the conclusion of his essay on “Countergaming,” Galloway asserts that avant-garde videogame artists “should create new grammars of action […] should create alternative algorithms” (Galloway 125). Yet Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize works such as McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy as didactic, suggesting that the role of radical political games might be “limited to that of agitprop” (199). They are concerned that games like those of Molleindustria rigidly structure the activities of their players in order to prove a point. Yet, despite their repeated assertion that the equation of greater interactivity with democratic digital liberation is flawed, the authors see potential in policy simulators that “allow players to edit or tweak” (202) their parameters in response to what Bogost has called simulation fever , the simultaneous drive toward and fear of simulation (Bogost 108). The possibility of practicing radical design is bucked, and early attempts at critical game development like those of Molleindustria’s seem to be relegated to the status of exceptions that prove the rule for player-centered exodus. Overall, there is one glaring question Games of Empire leaves unanswered: how exactly are videogames the “exemplary media” of Empire, and what are the implications of videogames being exemplary in this way? Presumably Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter want to avoid essentialist claims, so they’re not keen on following Wark’s desire to mark “the game’s difference from [legacy media] as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations” (Wark 225). It is also unclear how the production apparatuses, labor standards, and subjectivizing processes involved in the creation and use of other any other kind of digital media would fail to justify their equally exemplary status. Even the book’s concluding paragraph holds that virtual games “are one molecular component of this undecidable collective mutation” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 229) of intellect, labor, and daily life. In the end, the authors seem to back away from their focus on games as exemplary to bring their work in line with broader theories of the gradual digitization of the everyday, in line with Galloway and Manovich. Despite these flaws, there is an undeniable elegance to Games of Empire ’s contrasting of gaming’s overwhelmingly imperial content with its multitudinous form . And its ambivalence about the potential of independent or political game development might be seen by scholars of Empire as a strength rather than a weakness, an acceptance that every new expression of multitude offers another opportunity for the expansion of Empire. The book also functions as a strong, all-encompassing call to greater responsibility on the part of mainstream game developers to be more conscious of the ideologies they embed in their work, of the way their intellectual property is used and manipulated by those who employ them, and of the material impact their industry has on the world at large. For players it offers a toolbox of concepts for radical examinations of their own play activities, asking them to be more cognizant of the consequences of their consumption of digital media and the ways in which their virtual lives interface with the real. REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Castranova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Dyer-Witheford, Nick and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. (shrink)