This book examines the long, complex experience of American involvement in irregular warfare. It begins with the American Revolution in 1776 and chronicles big and small irregular wars for the next two and a half centuries. What is readily apparent in dirty wars is that failure is painfully tangible while success is often amorphous. Successfully fighting these wars often entails striking a critical balance between military victory and politics. America's status as a democracy only serves to make fighting - and, to a greater degree, winning - these irregular wars even harder. Rather than futilely insisting that Americans should not or cannot fight this kind of irregular war, Russell Crandall argues that we would be better served by considering how we can do so as cleanly and effectively as possible.

A New York Times bestseller Now also an Oscar-nominated documentary In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater, takes us inside America's new covert wars. The foot soldiers in these battles operate globally and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies. Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former Blackwater and other private security contractors, the CIA's Special Activities Division and the Joint Special Operations Command ( JSOC), these elite soldiers operate worldwide, with thousands of secret commandos working in more than one hundred countries. Funded through "black budgets," Special Operations Forces conduct missions in denied areas, engage in targeted killings, snatch and grab individuals and direct drone, AC-130 and cruise missile strikes. While the Bush administration deployed these ghost militias, President Barack Obama has expanded their operations and given them new scope and legitimacy. Dirty Wars follows the consequences of the declaration that "the world is a battlefield," as Scahill uncovers the most important foreign policy story of our time. From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond, Scahill reports from the frontlines in this high-stakes investigation and explores the depths of America's global killing machine. He goes beneath the surface of these covert wars, conducted in the shadows, outside the range of the press, without effective congressional oversight or public debate. And, based on unprecedented access, Scahill tells the chilling story of an American citizen marked for assassination by his own government. As US leaders draw the country deeper into conflicts across the globe, setting the world stage for enormous destabilization and blowback, Americans are not only at greater risk -- we are changing as a nation. Scahill unmasks the shadow warriors who prosecute these secret wars and puts a human face on the casualties of unaccountable violence that is now official policy: victims of night raids, secret prisons, cruise missile attacks and drone strikes, and whole classes of people branded as "suspected militants." Through his brave reporting, Scahill exposes the true nature of the dirty wars the United States government struggles to keep hidden.

The histories of the Dirty Wars in Mexico and Argentina (1960s–1980s) have largely erased how women experienced and remember the gendered violence during this traumatic time. Viviana Beatriz MacManus restores women to the revolutionary struggle at the heart of the era by rejecting both state projects and the leftist accounts focused on men. Using a compelling archival blend of oral histories, interviews, human rights reports, literature, and film, MacManus illuminates complex narratives of loss, violence, and trauma. The accounts upend dominant histories by creating a feminist-centered body of knowledge that challenges the twinned legacies of oblivion for the victims and state-sanctioned immunity for the perpetrators. A new Latin American feminist theory of justice emerges—one that acknowledges women's strength, resistance, and survival during and after a horrific time in their nations' histories. Haunting and methodologically innovative, Disruptive Archives attests to the power of women's storytelling and memory in the struggle to reclaim history.

Unlike a conventional war waged against a standing army, a "dirty war" is waged against individuals, groups, or ideas considered subversive. Originally associated with Argentina's military regime from 1976-1983, the term has since been applied to neighboring dictatorships during the period. Indeed, it has become a byword for state-sponsored repression anywhere in the world. The first edition of this reference illustrated the concept by describing the regimes of Argentina, Chile (1973-1990), and Uruguay (1973-1985), which tortured, murdered, and disappeared thousands of people in the name of anticommunism while thousands more were driven into exile. The second edition expands the scope to include Bolivia (1971-1982), Brazil (1964-1985), and Paraguay (1954-1989). Includes a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on the countries; guerrilla and political movements; prominent guerrilla, human-rights, military, and political figures; local, regional, and international human-rights organizations; and artistic figures (filmmakers, novelists, and playwrights) whose works attempt to represent or resist the period of repression.--Publisher.

Argentina’s Missing Bones is the first comprehensive English-language work of historical scholarship on the 1976–83 military dictatorship and Argentina’s notorious experience with state terrorism during the so-called dirty war. It examines this history in a single but crucial place: Córdoba, Argentina’s second largest city. A site of thunderous working-class and student protest prior to the dictatorship, it later became a place where state terrorism was particularly cruel. Considering the legacy of this violent period, James P. Brennan examines the role of the state in constructing a public memory of the violence and in holding those responsible accountable through the most extensive trials for crimes against humanity to take place anywhere in Latin America.

DIVTransnational ethnography and history of the School of the Americas, analyzing the military, peasant, and activist cultures that are linked by this institution. /div

Since World War II, the American West has become the nation?s military arsenal, proving ground, and disposal site. Through a wide-ranging discussion of recent literature produced in and about the West, Dirty Wars explores how the region?s iconic landscapes, invested with myths of national virtue, have obscured the West?s crucial role in a post?World War II age of ?permanent war.? ø In readings of western?particularly southwestern?literature, John Beck provides a historically informed account of how the military-industrial economy, established to protect the United States after Pearl Harbor, has instead produced western waste lands and ?waste populations? as the enemies and collateral casualties of a permanent state of emergency. Beck offers new readings of writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Rebecca Solnit, Julie Otsuka, and Terry Tempest Williams. He also draws on a variety of sources in history, political theory, philosophy, environmental studies, and other fields. Throughout Dirty Wars,øhe identifies resonances between different experiences and representations of the West that allow us to think about internment policies, the manufacture of atomic weapons, the culture of Cold War security, border policing, and toxic pollution as part of a broader program of a sustained and invasive management of western space.