Archive for the ‘war reviews’ Category

OK, so I’ve just completed another round of posting of old material. Honestly, it’s the last. Now all my online reviews since 1999 are searchable in this blog, using the categories ‘reviews’, ‘genocide reviews’ and ‘war reviews’. There’s some good material in them, but from now on, I promise, it will be new writing.

from http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/hafa3/kaldor.htm Martin Shaw The contemporary mode of warfare? Mary Kaldor’s theory of new wars Review essay from Review of International Political Economy, 7, 1, 2000, 171-80. Contents: The theory of new wars; The understanding of ‘old’ warfare; The absence of the larger context; Genocidal war as the problem; Bibliography Mary Kaldor and Basker Vashee, [...]

Christopher Cramer’s focus on the regenerative effects of war misses both history’s lessons and a change in the nature of modern war, argues Martin Shaw.  Go to Open Democracy for the full text.

Strategy and slaughter Martin Shaw Colin Gray’s ‘Clausewitz rules OK’ was the one contribution to the Interregnum special issue of this Review that engaged the problem of modern war in general.1 Issues of war and peace were represented only patchily in a volume aiming to reflect on the ‘post-Cold War’ decade, but put together before [...]

Martin Shaw Iain King and Whit Mason, Peace at any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. xx, 303. $27.95. It is a sign of the times that Kosovo can be seen as a partial success of international intervention and rule. Against the backdrop of Iraq, the fact that this [...]

David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-618-34965-4, 0-618-34965-0, 420 pp, $27. This book deserves its modest celebrity, not so much because it expresses the new, post-Iraq scepticism towards war – the connections are explicit but not particularly [...]