July 2010

28th of July 2010 Jørgen Johansen First published February 7th, 2005 In the literature the most used term for such conflicts is «war». War has been defined in various ways but most of the definitions have in common the description of war as an armed conflict with a certain number of deaths. Disagreements are more around the number and how to count the deaths than the much more interesting and important part of the definitions, namely the almost universal view that war is a form of conflict. I will argue below that war is NOT a conflict and that this misinterpretation has had serious consequences for the field. Most research on large-scale conflicts is focused on armed ones. Wars have been studied from a large number of perspectives since the first works in this field were published. This tradition, from pioneers such as Richardson and Wright, has dominated the majority...

By Jonathan PowerJuly 28, 2010 We live in exciting times. I am not talking about the advances of medicine, science and engineering. Nor the growth of the internet, the mobile phone and the fact that Africa is the world’s fastest growing market for the latter. Nor…..I could go on. I’m talking about the dramatic drop in child mortality, the birth rate and the death rate in the poorest countries – a drop that appears to be accelerating. It is expected that more up-to-date figures to be published in a few years, will show an even more dramatic fall. Give thanks to all the energy and sweat that has been poured into the problem by local governments, the Bush administration’s program to fight AIDS and malaria, such organisations as the Bill and Linda Gates foundation, the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and countless smaller but effective NGOs. Today we...

By Jonathan PowerJuly 22, 2010 Not long ago Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security advisor, told me that the Ukraine “smells more like Europe” than does Russia and that the West should concentrate on bringing Ukraine into Western institutions- NATO and even the European Union. If I had had more time with Brzezinski I would have said that if it hadn’t been for Russian resolve, the Mongol and Tartar hordes would have conquered Moscow and quickly afterwards the rest of Russia. They would have turned Russia into an Islamic society that would have undermined the Christian civilization of both Russia and Europe. Likewise, the Christian-influenced West owes much of the preservation of its religious beliefs to the Constantinople-based Eastern Orthodox Church. Constantine, who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity, moved the centre of the Church to Constantinople and it became the Byzantine Empire. When the Ottomans ravaged Constantinople in...

If the Jews of Israel want to go back to their memories of their war against the Arab nations after they had been attacked following the handover of the British in 1948; if they want to go back to the Holocaust; if they want to go back to the anti-Jewish violence, the first so-called “pogrom” in 1819 when the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt was ransacked; or to twelfth century England when began the libel that the Jews ritually murdered Christian children to mix their blood in the unleavened bread baked at Passover, then they should recall some equally important other events. What about the welcoming of the large numbers of Jews by the Moslem Turks when they were expelled from Spain in 1492? What about the long period up to the 12th century when Jews lived unpersecuted for the most part in Europe? What about the centuries up to the...

the Lateran Council condemned torture as cruel. From the fifteenth century onwards the common law of England (which is also the original common law of America) adamantly set its face against torture and the admission of evidence procured by torture. The judges who presided over these decisions pointed to the inherent unreliability of the evidence in confessions procured by torture since a person subjected to unbearable pain will say anything to get it stopped. Voltaire, who lived in London for three years, wrote of how he admired the English attitude. Nevertheless, the special Court of the Star Chamber could issue torture orders, but one of the very first acts of the Long Parliament in 1640 was to abolish this court and since then no torture warrant has been issued in England. In Prussia torture was abolished in 1740, in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1847. In 1791 the...