Blog post archive

Monday, 13 Feb 2023
Book Review: On Posthuman War: Computation and Military Violence

by Mike Hill 2022. London: University of Minnesota Press. 237pp. ISBN: 978-0-8166-6090-2. In the past two decades, talks about ‘everywhere’ and ‘endless’ wars have become familiar refrains among scholars of critical security studies. Whether as a strategic consequence of the use of new weapons and media or as part of ...

Tuesday, 18 Jan 2022
Book review: Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America

by C. Birchall, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2021, 244 pp. ISBN 978-1-5179-1043-3 Why is it that debates about trade-offs between supposed binary opposites of secrecy and transparency, and between secrecy and security, so often feel unsatisfying? As Clare Birchall acutely points out in her new book, Radical Secrecy: The ...

Thursday, 16 Dec 2021
Book review: Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army

by Maria Rashid, Stanford University Press, 2020. 288pp. ISBN: 9781503610415 Plenty of social scientists and humanities scholars are preoccupied with the technics of warfare, such as lawfare, drones, “low intensity warfare” and the shifting spaces of war. Yet, attention to a traditional means of war, that is, the institution of ...

Thursday, 2 Dec 2021
Rethinking and Revising the Theory of Network-centric Warfare

If we take a step back and cast a reflective eye over the evolutionary trajectory of western military thought, we will find that in around the 1990s—as Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) began to proliferate—discussions regarding the latest Revolution in Military Affairs also started to gather pace. Figure 1: Trajectory ...

Tuesday, 14 Sep 2021
Book review: Ethics of Drone Strikes. Restraining Remote-Control Killing

by Christian Enemark (ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. IX + 204 p The increasing use of armed drones has raised a series of ethical and legal questions. The fast-evolving development and sophistication of technologies that drones combine (aerospace, robotics, satellites, artificial intelligence) have stimulated intensive debates about the need ...

Monday, 13 Sep 2021
Book club review: Savage Ecology - War and Geopolitics at the End of the World

Screenshot from book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFP2m8O2Ex8 Pardon me, I was dreaming; I forgot you are herewaiting for me to accept you again, tell you that you’re not dangerous.Alice Notley, Above the Leaders With the global security system implicated in just about every scenario of civilisational and species collapse, should it be ...

Friday, 10 Sep 2021
Book club review*: Savage Ecology - War and geopolitics at the end of the world

*An in-depth review from @SecDialogue by Jairus V. Grove. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 368pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0484-4 Welcome, reader, to a new experience for the Security Dialogue blog. While we will continue to feature standard book reviews, in our book club reviews we present a novel kind of in-depth ...

Tuesday, 9 Feb 2021
Book Review: The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare

by Craig Jones. Oxford University Press, p.400. Hardback: 9780198842927 The law of armed conflict is often imagined as a moderating force, limiting the violence that can be inflicted on the battlefield by banning certain practices, prohibiting certain targets and outlawing certain weapons. Although the law allows civilians to be killed ...

Friday, 1 May 2020
Armed Mothers in Militant Visuals

In Hamas’ 2004 poster of suicide bomber Reem al-Riyashi, she poses for the camera holding a rifle her in left hand and her son in the other. al-Riyashi killed four Israelis and herself in a joint Hamas and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades bombing on the Gaza-Israel border. The Savior of the ...

Monday, 30 Mar 2020
Book review: In Plain Sight: Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict.

Gaby Zipfel, Kirsten Campbell and Regina Muhlhauser (eds), New Delhi: Zubaan Books. In Plain Sight: Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict,a collection of essays edited by Gaby Zipfel, Regina Muhlhauser, and Kirsten Campbell, offers a synthesis of the work by members of the International Research Group Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict ...

Saturday, 6 Jul 2019
Liberia’s Women Veterans: War, roles and reintegration

Leena Vastapuu (2018) Liberia’s Women Veterans: War, roles and reintegration, London: Zed Books Ltd. Book review by Linn Marie Reklev Scholars and policy makers put increasing attention on the role of women in conflict and peacebuilding. However, women are often portrayed as “victims”, and their multiple roles in conflict are ...

Thursday, 28 Feb 2019
Dangerous feelings: Checkpoints and the Perception of Hostile Intent

Checkpoints were a surprisingly deadly place for civilians in both Afghanistan and Iraq. While our attention was often drawn to the more spectacular or scandalous acts of violence, the steady accumulation of dead and injured bodies at coalition checkpoints passed by largely unnoticed. At one point, the situation in Iraq ...

Thursday, 21 Jun 2018
Conspiracy and Foreign Policy

The spectre of conspiracy looms large in politics and international affairs. We hear of covert Russian interferences in the 2016 US Presidential Elections or of renewed intrigue surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy over half a century ago. Intelligence dossiers, anonymous sources, secret meetings and suspicious connections make up ...

Tuesday, 21 Mar 2017
Trump and Threats to Truth, Democracy and Peace

Stein Tønnesson delivered this year’s The Fjord Memorial Lecture  at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer. The lecture discusses Trump’s team of advisors, calls for fighting the increasing use of lies in political campaigning, sees Trump’s election as having weakened democracy worldwide, and perceives a major risk to world ...