In the Midst of Wars PDF Download

Author: Edward Geary Lansdale
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 9780823213146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Author: Lisa Hultman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019884557X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Civil wars have caused tremendous human suffering in the last century, and the United Nations is often asked to send peacekeepers to stop ongoing violence. Yet despite being the most visible tool of international intervention, policymakers and scholars have little systematic knowledge about how well peacekeeping works. Peacekeeping in the Midst of War offers the most comprehensive analyses of peacekeeping on civil war violence to date. With unique data on different types of violence in civil wars around the world, Peacekeeping in the Midst of War offers a rigorous understanding of UN intervention by analysing both wars with and without UN peacekeeping efforts. It also directly measures the strength of UN missions in personnel capacity and constitution. Using large-n quantitative analyses, the book finds that UN peacekeeping missions with appropriately constituted force capacities mitigate violence in civil wars. The authors conclude by analyzing the broader context of UN intervention effectiveness, and conclude that peacekeeping is a more generally effective way to reduce the human suffering associated with civil war.

Author: David Kilcullen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199754098
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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A Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus, Kilcullen's vision of war dramatically influenced America's decision to rethink its military strategy in Iraq. Now, Kilcullen provides a remarkably fresh perspective on the War on Terror.

Author: Jonathan Nashel
Publisher: Culture and Politics in the Company
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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The man widely believed to have been the model for Alden Pyle in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Edward G. Lansdale (1908-1987) was a Cold War celebrity. A former advertising executive turned undercover CIA agent, he was credited during the 1950s with almost single-handedly preventing a communist takeover of the Philippines and with helping to install Ngo Dinh Diem as president of the American-backed government of South Vietnam. Adding to his notoriety, during the Kennedy administration Lansdale was put in charge of Operation Mongoose, the covert plot to overthrow the government of Cuba's Fidel Castro by assassination or other means. In this book, Jonathan Nashel reexamines Lansdale's role as an agent of American Cold War foreign policy and takes into account both his actual activities and the myths that grew to surround him. In contrast to previous portraits, which tend to depict Lansdale either as the incarnation of U.S. imperialist ambitions or as a farsighted patriot dedicated to the spread of democracy abroad, Nashel offers a more complex and nuanced interpretation. At times we see Lansdale as the arrogant "ugly American," full of confidence that he has every right to make the world in his own image and utterly blind to his own cultural condescension. This is the Lansdale who would use any conceivable gimmick to serve U.S. aims, from rigging elections to sugaring communist gas tanks. Elsewhere, however, he seems genuinely respectful of the cultures he encounters, open to differences and new possibilities, and willing to tailor American interests to Third World needs. Rather than attempting to reconcile these apparently contradictory images of Lansdale, Nashel explores the ways in which they reflected a broader tension within the culture of Cold War America. The result is less a conventional biography than an analysis of the world in which Lansdale operated and the particular historical forces that shaped him--from the imperatives of anticommunist ideology and the assumptions of modernization theory to the techniques of advertising and the insights of anthropology.

Author: Carolyn Nordstrom
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520239777
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Annotation This book captures the human face of the frontlines, revealing both the visible and the hidden realities of contemporary war, power, and international profiteering in the 21st century.

Author: Molly Guptill Manning
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544535170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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This New York Times bestselling account of books parachuted to soldiers during WWII is a “cultural history that does much to explain modern America” (USA Today). When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned 100 million books. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops, gathering 20 million hardcover donations. Two years later, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million specially printed paperbacks designed for troops to carry in their pockets and rucksacks in every theater of war. These small, lightweight Armed Services Editions were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy, in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific, in field hospitals, and on long bombing flights. This pioneering project not only listed soldiers’ spirits, but also helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity and made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon. “A thoroughly engaging, enlightening, and often uplifting account . . . I was enthralled and moved.” — Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried “Whether or not you’re a book lover, you’ll be moved.” — Entertainment Weekly

Author: Edward Geary Lansdale
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823213146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Edward Geary Lansdale (1908-1987) truly became a legend in his own time. His mission to the Philippines in the early 1950s as an Air Force officer and CIA agent resulted in the defeat of the communist-led Hukbalahap movement and the subsequent election of Ramon Magsaysay, arguably the most popular president that the people of the Philippines have known. In 1954 Lansdale was sent to Vietnam, where he hoped to repeat the program of counterinsurgency that was so successful in the Philippines. His ideas of land redistribution, grass roots village democracy, and elimination of corruption in the South Vietnamese government and army gradually were superseded by massive air and ground operations. When Lansdale returned to the United States for duty in Washington, he never ceased to promote the advancement of democratic ideology as the key tool to "win the hearts and minds of the people of Asia." He became romanticized in "The Quiet American" by Graham Greene, "The Ugly American" by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, and "Le Mal Jaune" by Jean Larteguy. "In the Midst of Wars" is history as Edward Lansdale saw it.

Author: Emile Simpson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199327882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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This is a philosophical treatise on war written by an Oxford grad who served in Afghanistan.

Author: Jeffrey Veidlinger
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1250116260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE “The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.

Author: Anthony Loyd
Publisher: September Publishing
ISBN: 1910463175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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'Undoubtedly the most powerful and immediate book to emerge from the Balkan horror of ethnic civil war' Antony Beevor, Daily Telegraph In 1993, Anthony Loyd hitchhiked to the Balkans hoping to become a journalist. Leaving behind him the legends of a distinguished military family, he wanted to see 'a real war' for himself. In Bosnia he found one. The cruelty and chaos of the conflict both appalled and embraced him; the adrenalin lure of the action perhaps the loudest siren call of all. In the midst of the daily life-and-death struggle among Bosnia's Serbs, Croats and Muslims, Loyd was inspired by the extraordinary human fortitude he discovered. But returning home he found the void of peacetime too painful to bear, and so began a longstanding personal battle with drug abuse. This harrowing account shows humanity at its worst and best. It is a breathtaking feat of reportage; an uncompromising look at the terrifyingly seductive power of war. 'As good as reporting gets. I have nowhere read a more vivid account of frontline fear and survival. Forget the strategic overview. All war is local' Martin Bell, The Times