Between 1980 and World War II, South America experienced the unsettling first stages of modernization. During this half-century of economic, political, and social change, the armies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru underwent a process of professionalization as European military missions transformed their officer corps into copies of French and German officialdom. In so doing, European officers inculcated their ideals and values, thought and self-perception?their professionalism?in countries historically vulnerable to militarism. ø Based mainly on a comprehensive examination of European and South American military literature, this study describes the significant contribution of European military professionalism to South American professional militarism. Nunn not only details the workings of the French missions in Brazil and Peru and the German missions in Argentina and Chile, but gives great emphasis to the themes and topics that most concerned the European mentors and their overseas disciples. He demonstrates convincingly that much of their professional literature was based on a yearning for an idealized past, discontent with an unsatisfactory present, and apprehension about a future that might threaten the most cherished of traditional officer-corps principles and aims. ø The study ends with World War II, yet is makes an important contribution to our understanding of South American history since 1940. The military organizations of the four countries considered here confronted what they perceived to be the major problems of their modernizing nations with solutions learned from their European teachers. Since 1940, they have resorted to golpes de estado?most notably the post-1964 institutional golpes?in order to impose forcibly some of those same solutions. Thus, despite increased U.S. influence, many of the programs implemented by military regimes in the latter half of this century bear the indelible stamp of "yesterday's soldiers."

A visceral and unflinching memoir of a young Russian soldier’s experience in the Chechen wars. In 1995, Arkady Babchenko was an eighteen-year-old law student in Moscow when he was drafted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya. It was the beginning of a torturous journey from naïve conscript to hardened soldier that took Babchenko from the front lines of the first Chechen War in 1995 to the second in 1999. He fought in major cities and tiny hamlets, from the bombed-out streets of Grozny to anonymous mountain villages. Babchenko takes the raw and mundane realities of war the constant cold, hunger, exhaustion, filth, and terror and twists it into compelling, haunting, and eerily elegant prose. Acclaimed by reviewers around the world, this is a devastating first-person account of war that brilliantly captures the fear, drudgery, chaos, and brutality of modern combat. An excerpt of One Soldier’s War was hailed by Tibor Fisher in The Guardian as “right up there with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Michael Herr’s Dispatches.” Mark Bowden, bestselling author of Black Hawk Down, hailed it as “hypnotic and terrifying” and the book won Russia’s inaugural Debut Prize, which recognizes authors who write despite, not because of, their life circumstances. “If you haven’t yet learned that war is hell, this memoir by a young Russian recruit in his country’s battle with the breakaway republic of Chechnya, should easily convince you.” —Publishers Weekly

An experiment recreating the mind-set of World War II escalates into an actual battleground between native revolutionaries and space colonists bent on subverting the power of the central government. In the midst of this turmoil, a physically enhanced agent questions his upbringing and training.

The first collection to theorise race and racism through the philosophy of Gilles DeleuzeIn this volume, an international and multidisciplinary team of scholars inaugurates the Deleuzian study of race through a wide-ranging and evocative array of case studies.Deleuze and Guattari provided new concepts of how humans are differentiated, through processes of state formation, capitalism, madness and desire. While sexual difference has received much attention in Deleuze studies, racial difference is a thornier problematic. As this collection of essays shows, Deleuze and Guattari had extremely original things to say about race, and the politics of phenotype and origin is never far from any engaged consideration of how the world works.

Contains thirty-seven narratives, drawn from letters, diaries, private memoirs, and oral histories in which American veterans describe their experiences serving in conflicts from the First World War to the twenty-first-century war in Iraq.