Postmodern War poses an urgent challenge to the ways we conceptualize and actually wage war in our high technology age. Computerization and artificial intelligence have brought about a revolution in warfare spawning both increasingly powerful weapons and a rhetoric which disguises their apocalyptic potential in catch phrases like smart weapons and bloodless combat. Postmodern War examines: * contemporary practices of war, defining and critiquing trendy military doctrines hidden behind phrases like Infowar and Cyberwar * the roles of those who manipulate high technology, those who are manipulated by it, and those who are increasingly merging with it * the role of peace activists and socially responsible scientists in countering dangerous assumptions made by a postmodern military. Far from opposing technological change, however, Gray finds new hopes for peace in the twenty-first century. Provocative and far-reaching in its scope, the book argues that postmodern war has left us poised between the most dreadful and most utopian of alternatives: we may eradicate either the human race or war itself.

Postmodern War poses an urgent challenge to the ways we conceptualize and actually wage war in our high technology age. Computerization and artificial intelligence have brought about a revolution in warfare spawning both increasingly powerful weapons and a rhetoric which disguises their apocalyptic potential in catch phrases like smart weapons and bloodless combat. Postmodern War examines: * contemporary practices of war, defining and critiquing trendy military doctrines hidden behind phrases like Infowar and Cyberwar * the roles of those who manipulate high technology, those who are manipulated by it, and those who are increasingly merging with it * the role of peace activists and socially responsible scientists in countering dangerous assumptions made by a postmodern military. Far from opposing technological change, however, Gray finds new hopes for peace in the twenty-first century. Provocative and far-reaching in its scope, the book argues that postmodern war has left us poised between the most dreadful and most utopian of alternatives: we may eradicate either the human race or war itself.

Discussing theorists including Baudrillard and Virilio and covering conflicts including the two Gulf Wars, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, Kosove, Afhanistan, and the War on Terror, this book investigates the new character of modern warfare, and why media presentation of conflict is so central to both Western military operations and terrorists.

Sun Tzu and other classical Chinese strategic thinkers wrote in an era of social, economic and military revolution, and hoped to identify enduring principles of war and statecraft. The twenty-first century is a time of similarly revolutionary change, and this makes their ideas of particular relevance for today’s strategic environment. Placing these theories in historical context, Dr Kane explores ancient Chinese reactions to such issues as advances in military technology and insurgency and terrorism, providing interesting comparisons between modern and ancient. The book explains the way prominent Chinese thinkers - such as Sun Tzu, Han Fei Tzu and Lao Tzu - treated critical strategic questions. It also compares their ideas to those of thinkers from other times and civilizations (e.g. Clausewitz) to illuminate particularly important points. In concluding, the book addresses the question of how ancient Chinese ideas might inform contemporary strategic debates. Ancient China on Postmodern War will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, Chinese philosophy and military history.

Frederic Jameson once characterized the Vietnam War as "the first terrible postmodernist war, " suggesting that it embodied or reflected the sensibility of an emerging historical epoch. But does it make sense to place a military conflict within a category of cultural and aesthetic periodization? Is it possible to see the Vietnam War as an expression and reflection of postmodernity -- what Jameson calls "the cultural logic of late capitalism"?

Within the past ten years, the field of contemporary American literary studies has changed significantly. Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of “postmodernism,” new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar—and After aims to be a field-defining book—a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain—that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after. The first section of essays returns to the category of the “post-modern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recent past. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern. Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.

The first sustained study of the relationship between Anglo-American postmodernist fiction and the Second World War, Crosthwaite demonstrates that postmodernism has not abandoned history but has rather reformulated it in terms of trauma that is traceable, time and again, to the catastrophes of the 1940s.