This edited collection explores aspects of contemporary war that affect average people –physically, emotionally, and ethically through activities ranging from combat to television viewing. The aim of this work is to supplement the usual emphasis on strategic and national issues of war in the interest of theorizing aspects of war from the point of view of individual experience, be the individual a combatant, a casualty, a supporter, opponent, recorder, veteran, distant viewer, an international lawyer, an ethicist or other intellectual. This volume presents essays that push the boundaries of war studies and war thinking, without promoting one kind of theory or methodology for studying war as experiential politics, but with an eye to exploring the possibilities and encouraging others to take up the new agenda. It includes new and challenging thinking on humanitarianism and war, new wars in the Third World, gender and war thinking, and the sense of the body within war that inspires recent UN resolutions. It also gives examples that can change our understanding of who is located where doing what with respect to war –women warriors in Sierra Leone, war survivors living with their memories, and even an artist drawing something seemingly intangible about war –the arms trade. The unique aspect of this book is its purposive pulling together of foci and theoretical and methodological perspectives from a number of disciplines on a variety of contemporary wars. Arguably, war is an activity that engages the attention, the politics, and the lives of many people. To theorize it with those lives and perspectives in mind, recognizing the political contexts of war, is long overdue. This inter-disciplinary book will be of much interest to students of war studies, critical security studies, gender studies, sociology and IR in general.

Linderman traces each soldier's path from the exhilaration of enlistment to the disillusionment of battle to postwar alienation. He provides a rare glimpse of the personal battle that raged within soldiers then and now.

One of the most momentous and destructive wars in European history, the Thirty Years War has long been studied for its diplomatic, political, and military consequences. Yet the actual participants in this religiously motivated, seemingly endless conflict have largely been ignored. Hans Medick and Benjamin Marschke reveal the Thirty Years War from the perspective of those who lived it. Their introduction provides important insights into the roiling religious and political landscape from which the war emerged, as well as a thoughtful examination of the war's stages and enduring significance. An unprecedented collection of personal accounts, many of them translated for the first time into English, combine with visual sources to convey directly to students the experience of early modern warfare. Incisive document headnotes, maps and illustrations, a chronology, questions to consider, and a bibliography enrich students' understanding of this fateful war.

This edited collection explores aspects of contemporary war that affect average people –physically, emotionally, and ethically through activities ranging from combat to television viewing. The aim of this work is to supplement the usual emphasis on strategic and national issues of war in the interest of theorizing aspects of war from the point of view of individual experience, be the individual a combatant, a casualty, a supporter, opponent, recorder, veteran, distant viewer, an international lawyer, an ethicist or other intellectual. This volume presents essays that push the boundaries of war studies and war thinking, without promoting one kind of theory or methodology for studying war as experiential politics, but with an eye to exploring the possibilities and encouraging others to take up the new agenda. It includes new and challenging thinking on humanitarianism and war, new wars in the Third World, gender and war thinking, and the sense of the body within war that inspires recent UN resolutions. It also gives examples that can change our understanding of who is located where doing what with respect to war –women warriors in Sierra Leone, war survivors living with their memories, and even an artist drawing something seemingly intangible about war –the arms trade. The unique aspect of this book is its purposive pulling together of foci and theoretical and methodological perspectives from a number of disciplines on a variety of contemporary wars. Arguably, war is an activity that engages the attention, the politics, and the lives of many people. To theorize it with those lives and perspectives in mind, recognizing the political contexts of war, is long overdue. This inter-disciplinary book will be of much interest to students of war studies, critical security studies, gender studies, sociology and IR in general.

This book is the only comprehensive history of the total experience of the Russian Civil War. Focusing on the key Volga city of Saratov and the surrounding region, Donald Raleigh is the first historian to fully show how the experience of civil war embedded itself into both the people's and the state's outlook and behavior. He demonstrates how and why the programs and ideals that had propelled the Bolsheviks into power were so quickly lost and the repressive Soviet party-state was born. Experiencing Russia's Civil War is based on exhaustive use of previously classified local and central archives. It is also bold and ambitious in its breadth of thematic coverage, dealing with all aspects of the war experience from institutional evolution and demographics to survival strategies. Complicating our understanding of this formative period, Raleigh provides compelling evidence that many features of the Soviet system that we associate with the Stalin era were already adumbrated and practiced by the early 1920s, as Bolshevism became closed to real alternatives. Raleigh interprets this as the consequence of a complex dynamic shaped by Russia's political tradition and culture, Bolshevik ideology, and dire political, economic, and military crises starting with World War I and strongly reinforced by the indelible, mythologized experience of survival in the Civil War. Fluidly written, replete with new information, and always engaged with important questions, this is history finely wrought.

Facing Armageddon is the first scholarly work on the 1914-18 War to explore, on a world-wide basis, the real nature of the participants experience. Sixty-four scholars from all over the globe deliver the fruits of recent research in what civilians and servicemen passed through, in the air, on the sea and on land.