The study of war in American sociology: An analysis of selected journals, 1936 to 1984

In an analysis of articles in theAmerican Journal of Sociology theAmerican Sociological Review, andSocial Forces at six-year intervals between 1936 and 1984 it was found that the topic of war was not often examined, especially in more recent decades. The most unexpected finding was that there were proportionately no more articles on war in selected European journals than in the top three American journals. It was concluded that war is not perceived as an important research topic in American sociology, as reflected in major sociology journals. His dissertation will deal with conditions for cooperation between adversaries during war.     

“Don’t Mess with Ukrainian Farmers”: An examination of Ukraine and Kyiv’s official Twitter accounts as crisis communication,public diplomacy,and nation building during Russian invasion

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 resulted in an armed conflict that led to the death of thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians. While the countries waged war on the ground in places like Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mariupol, another battle took shape in the Twittersphere. Ukraine and Kyiv’s official Twitter accounts leveraged their online platforms to win the war of public opinion by broadcasting the atrocities of war in real time, engaging with other countries as a form of digital public diplomacy, and rallying internal publics through nation building message strategies. The current study explores the use of government social media accounts during a unique period of armed conflict to identify various messaging strategies utilized to (1) communicate during a crisis event, (2) project itself favorably among an international audience, and (3) build a sense of national identity and unity among its citizenry. Results from this study suggest that public relations scholars should consider further analyzing the ways in which social media, nation building, and public diplomacy intersect during crisis events. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Social representations of history,wars and politics in Latin America,Europe and Africa

Abstract

This study analyzes how people perceive world history on three continents: Latin America, Europe and Africa. A total of 1179 university students form Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde were asked to evaluate world events and leaders in terms of their valence and importance. The results demonstrated that social representations of history show a Euro/North American-centric, long-term positive evaluation, recency, and socio-centric bias. Euro/North American-centric events and leaders were found to be rated as more important and were more positively perceived in general. Distant political events, like French or American Revolution, were considered to be more positive than XX century similar events, which supports the long-term positive evaluation bias hypothesis. The hypothesis on recency bias was partially substantiated. Confirming the existence of such bias, World War II was rated as more important than the previous XX century wars and revolutions. Socio-centric bias also received partial support. African participants rated Mandela as a more important leader than other participants did. Latin Americans rated Che Guevara less positively, which suggests that some leaders are generally idealized icons, not based on group belongingness. However, results did not bring support to the centrality of war hypothesis. Wars were indeed negatively evaluated and World War II was rated as an important and negative event. Nevertheless, war- and politics-related events were not perceived as more important than the Industrial Revolution, suggesting that people appraise the importance of long-term socioeconomic factors of history when responding to close-ended quantitative measures (vs. open-ended salience measures). Results are discussed in the framework of social representations of history.     

WHEN A WAR IS NOT A WAR:

In this article I juxtapose American media coverage of the Gulf war and the war on abortion in 1991 to trace the meanings and possibilities for identity and activism mobilized by both. While the two wars seem unrelated, I examine the techniques through which the news coverage of both marginalized social protest and women's place within the national imaginary. In the news, protesters and women were positioned outside the sphere of normal politics and reasonable opinion. In this way, the news created a mythic community of "people like us" in opposition to women and activists. Through this marginalization of protest, broadcast news contained the threat of activism to the national imaginary of the United States in both conflicts.     

倒萨战争——确立美国新秩序的战争

冷战后,美国利用高新技术,扬长避短,连赢了几场战争,对外动武的信心十足。阿富汗战争和伊战的胜利助长了美的气焰,美成了当前世界主要的战争策源地。冷战后,遭受过美打击和欲打对象几乎都是发展中国家,反恐已成为美的金字招牌,镇压、剪除发展中国家中不服它的“刺头”的道义理由。伊不会是美欲打名单上的最后一个,反恐战争有可能指向“南方”国家。伊战是场全球化、信息化时代的“新的十字军东征”,是美在世界确立其新秩序的战争。     

The operation and subversion of gendered war discourses: soldierhood,motherhood and military dissent in the public production of Kimberly Rivera

This article undertakes a discourse analysis of texts concerning a recent high profile case of opposition to war by Kimberly Rivera, a US soldier and a mother of five. Developing on previous research concerning how female soldiers, anti-war women and anti-war soldiers have been made intelligible within understandings of war and gender, the analysis traces the discursive repertoires constituting Rivera as a political subject. The article considers how, when and with what implications for broader discourses of gender and war, and their transformation, the categories of soldierhood and motherhood were invoked to construct and obstruct Rivera as an intelligible dissenting subject. The most common presentation of Rivera centered on her motherhood, understood to be in crisis due to her military role. With motherhood and soldierhood seen to be antithetical this crisis could be “solved” through opposition to war. This limited the extent to which Rivera was intelligible as a “thinking citizen” and reproduced motherhood and soldierhood as stable categories leaving their immanent discourses concerning war and gender untroubled. The article then considers ways in which alternative avenues for transformative interventions could open up if dissenters like Rivera were “written” as other than fundamentally contradictory figures.     

Children's comprehension of war

The purpose of this paper is to show how pre-school children, both from Zagreb and refugees, experienced and comprehended the war during 1992. The study included 98 children from Zagreb kindergartens (pre-school nurseries). The children were asked five questions about the war in Croatia. Each was interviewed individually. A content analysis of the answers revealed that the children, in defining the warring parties and the causes of the war, besides using much information obtained through the media, based their concepts of the war on personal experience. The worst war-related experience for Zagreb children was the air-raid alarms, while the displaced or refugee children felt worst when there were bombardments, destruction and shooting—mostly personally experienced events. Generally, the children's answers suggest more mature comprehension of war than usually expected and found at the pre-school age.     

Foster parents exposed to political violence: The role of social support in addressing emotional and functional difficulties

BackgroundBeing a foster parent is stressful. It becomes even more stressful when foster parents face major threats to their own families and to the foster children in their care, such as during war situations. This study focuses on foster parents' reactions to the war with Gaza in southern Israel that took place in 2014. The first goal of this study was to describe posttraumatic symptoms (PTS) and problems in functioning among foster parents following their exposure to the war. The second goal was to identify background and social support predictors of PTS and functioning problems among these parents. The third goal was to examine the role of formal and informal support received by the parents as a moderator of the association between exposure to war events and PTS and problems in functioning.MethodsParticipants were 354 Israeli foster parents who were exposed to the war. Participants completed structured instruments of exposure to war events, PTS, functioning, and social support.ResultsExposure to war events was associated with PTS and related functioning problems. Education and religiosity were correlated with PTS and problems in functioning. Contrary to our hypothesis, more formal social support was associated with more PTS. Social support did not moderate the association between exposure to war events and PTS.DiscussionThe unexpected positive correlation between support and PTS was interpreted as either reflecting the fact that foster care agencies targeted foster parents who were most in need, or as a reflection of the inadequacy of the support they received. The findings indicate that foster parents need support during times of major stressful events such as natural disasters and wars, so that they will be able to help the children in their care. Specialized professional training for foster care workers needs to be implemented. Future longitudinal and mix-methods studies are suggested to help address the limitations of the present study.     

Codes and conflict

Conclusion If theory caused a more critical study of war, it would have achieved its purpose. (Clausewitz)In this article I have shown that in times of war, beneath the apparently rational surface of modern societies and states there lurks a powerful religious dimension that is of crucial importance in structuring political and military activity, in informing public, political, and intellectual discourse, and in shaping opinion, beliefs, attitudes, sentiments, and social action. The religious dimension is neither a mere jumble of diffuse sentiments, beliefs, and ideas, nor a simple ideological reflection of social interests — it is an autonomous, internally coherent, analogically organized code that specifies sacred and profane elements and embodies an endogenous apophantic logic. This analytically autonomous code provides for the specification of war as ritual in concrete historical sequences. If the reader comes away from this article feeling that she better understands the role and organization of culture in war, and that consequently war cannot be explained, understood, and interpreted only in terms of economic, geopolitical, and psychological variables, then I will have achieved my chief objective here. However, I hope that this article also has a larger contribution to make. Sociology has inherited a rich tradition of ideas from its founding fathers. This tradition, enshrined in the classic works of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, has informed and shaped the discipline. It seems a shame that contemporary trends in social thought and research draw increasingly upon selected strands of thought in the legacy of only two of those gentlemen. The result of this movement, I believe, is not just a trend toward impoverished uni-dimensional studies of social reality, but also the loss of the auto-critical possibilities engendered by a discourse that draws upon diverse theoretical resources. As I have tried to demonstrate here, Durkheim's legacy, with its unique emphasis on ritual and symbolism, still provides a useful resource for the critique of social theory and the analysis of social life — even in those areas where one would least expect any fruitful insights to arise. More importantly, as Clausewitz recognized, theory contains the possibility not merely for the formal study, but also for the critical study of war. With its stress on voluntarism, a Durkheimian theory of war provides a vital and distinct contrast to those theories of war that attribute causation to factors outside of human control, be they psychological, geopolitical, or economic. The awareness of ethical responsibility arising from such an under-standing provides, one would like to think, the possibility for change.     

Women,conflict, and culture in former Yugoslavia

The civil war in the former Yugoslavia has taken a toll on the women's movement which has disintegrated across male-defined nationalist borders. The women's movement in this area got its start during the Second World War but was disbanded under communism until women's groups began to form in the 1970s. Today the women's movement has lost the power to oppose the war and has been unable to prevent widespread violence perpetuated against women. Some feminists who have refused to embrace nationalism and patriotism have been vilified and have had to seek refuge abroad. Recently, however, hundreds of nongovernmental organizations have been formed to provide support to women and children victimized by the war. Women have been raped and impregnated as a strategy of male warfare, and raped women who refused an abortion were ostracized. War-related rape has yet to be fully recognized as an international human rights violation, and the issue is being used as political propaganda in the former Yugoslavia while it is ignored elsewhere. Sensationalist reporting of these rapes has further victimized women and made them unable to give voice to their trauma. War also increases women's suffering by destroying economic and social welfare systems. Oxfam is helping women record their testimonies of war and reconstruct the fabric of their societies through programs which provide income-generation and training in micro-enterprises. In addition, Oxfam is strengthening electronic communication and networking among women's groups throughout the region.     

Social Conservatism, New Republicans, and the 1980 Election

Using data from the 1980 National Election Study, we examinethe claims (1) that those voters who shifted to Ronald Reaganin 1980 ("New Republicans") were drawn disproportionately fromthe lower to middle strata of the population: (2) that theywere social conservatives motivated by issues like abortionand ERA: and (3) that they were more religious and alienatedfrom the federal government than average. Our results stronglysuggest that all of these assertions are false and thus questionthe emergence of a "neopopulist" or "Middle American Radical"political constituency on the right wing of American politics.Our findings also have implications for prominent theories aboutconservative political movements and about the changing natureof party politics in a postindustrial society.     

Necropolitics, narcopolitics, and femicide: gendered violence on the Mexico-U.S. border

In 1993, a group of women shocked Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, with the news that dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the city during the year. As the numbers of murders grew over the years, and as the police forces proved unwilling and unable to find the perpetrators, the protestors became activists. They called the violence and its surrounding impunity "femicide," and they demanded that the Mexican government, at the local, state, and federal levels, stop the violence and capture the perpetrators. Nearly two decades later, the city's infamy as a place of femicide is giving way to another terrible reputation as a place of unprecedented drug violence. Since 2006, more than six thousand people have died in the city, as have more than twenty-eight thousand across the country, in relation to the violence associated with the restructuring of the cartels that control the production and distribution of illegal drugs. In response to the public outcry against the violence, the Mexican government has deployed thousands of troops to Ciudad Juárez as part of a military strategy to secure the state against the cartels. In this essay, I argue that the politics over the meaning of the drug-related murders and femicide must be understood in relation to gendered violence and its use as a tool for securing the state. To that end, I examine the wars over the interpretation of death in northern Mexico through a feminist application of the concept of necropolitics as elaborated by the postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe. I examine how the wars over the political meaning of death in relation both to femicide and to the events called "drug violence" unfold through a gendering of space, of violence, and of subjectivity. My objective is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the antifemicide movement illustrates the stakes for a democratic Mexican state and its citizens in a context where governing elites argue that the violence devastating Ciudad Juárez is a positive outcome of the government's war against organized crime; and second, to show how a politics of gender is central to this kind of necropolitics.     

Remapping the German Homeland: Germania and Catholic Efforts to Mobilise Continued Support during the First World War

Abstract

Despite a minority status that often left them viewed as outsiders, German Catholics – like their compatriots more generally – rallied behind the war effort in 1914. Indeed, intense involvement in the war effort came to be seen as a way to finally squash any remaining suspicions about whether Catholics could truly ever be at home in a country with a Protestant majority. Yet, as the war continued and conditions in Germany worsened, the divisions both within the Catholic Centre Party and among all political parties in the Reich began to resurface and cast a shadow on the common war effort. In an attempt to maintain unity and continued mobilisation for the war, Catholic rhetoric in outlets like the newspaper Germania – a leading organ of the Centre Party – crafted a narrative that redrew the mental map of the German homeland. To do so, the rhetoric relied upon formative geographic tropes established right after unification in 1871 that stressed regionalism and diversity as the hallmark of unity and Germanness. At first sticking closely to efforts at emphasising the centrality of Catholic regions on the periphery, the rhetoric in late 1915 and early 1916 turned towards stretching the map of the German homeland east, especially to the Baltics.     

The effect of war on marriage,divorce and birth rates

The impact of war on marriage, divorce, and birth rates in the United States from 1933 to 1986 is explored. The author concludes that "the involvement of the nation in military activities was accompanied by a decrease in marriage and birth rates but not by any change in divorce rates. Mobilization of the armed forces and demobilization had no discernible impact on divorce, marriage or birth rates."     

Self-Interest and Civilians' Attitudes Toward the Vietnam War

The possible consequences of self-interest on American publicopinion were examined in the context of the United States militaryinvolvement in Vietnam Civilians' personal connections to thewar, in terms of their friends' and relatives' military service,did make them pay more attention to the war, but such connectionsseemed to have only weak effects on the salience of the waras a political issue. Similarly, there was no evidence thatthe self-interested had distinctively self-serving policy attitudestoward the war. Rather, the more important determinants of attitudestoward the war were attitudes toward various political symbolsassociated with the war. Finally, self-interest made very littledifference in enhancing the consistency of partisan attitudesinvolved in the 1968 presidential decision.     

Childhood exposure to the Second World War and financial risk taking in adult life

Adverse childhood experiences might have long-lasting effects on decisions under uncertainty in adult life. Merging the European Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement with data on conflict events during the Second World War, and relying on region-by-cohort variation in war exposure, we show that warfare exposure during childhood is associated with lower financial risk taking in later life. Individuals who experienced war episodes as children hold less – and are less likely to hold – stocks, but are more likely to hold life insurance, compared to non-exposed individuals. Effects are robust to the inclusion of potential mediating factors, and are tested for nonlinearity and heterogeneity. Moreover, we provide evidence of hedonic adaptation to war, as high and low intensity of war exposure have comparable long-term effects. We also document that war exposure in childhood increases sensitivity to financial uncertainty since exposed-to-war individuals are less likely to hold stocks after periods of high volatility. Finally, we shed light on the most likely mechanism in the relationship between war exposure and financial risk taking – i.e., enhanced sensitivity to uncertainty – and we show that preferences, and not beliefs, channel this relationship.     

Hadedas in the hood: Hadeda Ibis activity in suburban neighbourhoods of Pietermaritzburg,KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

Urban environments are a combination of green and grey spaces and although many species are unable to live in these transformed areas there are some that can use urban features to benefit their persistence here. The Hadeda Ibis (Bostrychia hagedash) is one such species and this study investigated the urban activities of these birds. Five suburbs of Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa were surveyed for Hadeda Ibis engaged in flying, foraging, perching and calling behaviours. Each suburb differed in the degree of urbanisation and we expected that their morning activity would differ accordingly. A difference in Hadeda Ibis calling, foraging and flying activity between summer and winter was also expected because of seasonal rainfall patterns. Although Hadeda Ibis were more common in suburbia than the city centre in Pietermaritzburg, they occurred throughout. More were observed calling in summer than in winter probably because of changes in distribution during the breeding season with more family groups of two or three individuals. There was no significant difference in Hadeda Ibis flock size when comparing foraging during summer with winter despite greater summer rainfall. Also there was no significant difference in flock size with flying activity for both seasons nor suburb although it was expected that Hadeda Ibis would need to travel further during winter and from suburbs with more grey space to access ideal foraging areas. Hadeda Ibis need moist soil to forage effectively and in an urban environment short grassed, well watered lawns provided an ideal foraging habitat regardless of season. Hadeda Ibis used urban structures like house roofs, poles, pylons, and fences for perching but continued to roost in trees so while they are able to use urban features, they still rely on a certain degree of green space for urban persistence.     

All Things Thrown and Wonderful,All Memories Great and Small

And the Lord God made them all. I went to Sunday school and like lots of other kids (though far from all) came to an age at which I simply stopped going. Nothing conscious about it, I don't think, it's just those sets of spaces stopped becoming; stopped like nothing physical can stop, like a car crashing into a wall and instead of rebounding being merely consumed in whole. I (re)member, in my naive teens (when is this? I do not know. Perhaps the time of the Iraq war, but maybe this was a different car journey) I once came out with the statement (which was not particularly naive especially) “I think God exists, how did we all get here otherwise”. Me, my sister that is two years older than me, my mum and dad, were on the road from Auchmuir Bridge towards Stirling around Loch Leven, the loch in Fife, Scotland, on which Mary Queen of Scots was held on an island. I have an image of a memory of going there as well. It is thus, however, that I (re)member the initiation into a different vision of the universe and everything. Yet it is a state clearly pleated bewilderingly. As an event it exists in what Deleuze and Guattari term a “rhizome, a burrow”, with “flights of escape” which have no beginnings or ends, mere initialities and finalities. 3 3 They talk of this in many places. See Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix , Anti‐Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , ( London and New York : Continuum, 2004 ); Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix , Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature , Dana Polan trans., ( Minneapolis and London : University of Minnesota Press, 1986 ). For Deleuze alone also see Deleuze, Gilles , The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque , Tom Conley trans. ( London : The Athlone Press, 1993 ).
This is strange. It is not a polemic, nor does it have an explicit argument, except perhaps to ask the question that always dances on a pinhead – as Bohumil Hrabal once put it, “Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp” 4 4 Hrabal, Bohumil , Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp .
– is there any escape? I think I sang “All Things Bright and Beautiful” at my Gran's funeral, but it might have been something else. We stopped in the house of the priest and watched England lose the Cricket World Cup in 1999; they played in blue. That's how I (re)member the year of my Gran's funeral. The church I used to go to burned down. Arson, I think.     

The impact of the Gulf war on migration and remittances in Asia and the Middle East

The author discusses the impact of the 1990 Gulf war on the migrant worker populations in the region, with a focus on migration and remittances in Asia and the Middle East. Both immediate and long-term effects are considered. "From the perspective of foreign migrant communities living in the Gulf...the war...was much more of a disaster for Arabs than for Asians....Arab migrant populations...were dramatically affected by the Gulf crisis. In contrast, the Asian migrant community was largely concentrated in Saudi Arabia and the [United Arab Emirates] and remained relatively less affected by the crisis. Subsequent polarization in the Arab world gives Asian labor-exporting countries an unexpected opportunity to increase their share of Gulf labor markets still further in the coming years." (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)     

Stalinism,famine, and Chinese peasants

Conclusions What do the two cases have in common and what sets them apart? Both have in common a high degree of administrative incompetence and mismanagement. The preceding analysis shows this clearly in the Chinese case. In the Soviet case, the issue of incompetence can be formulated as follows: Given the decision to extract rural resources for the sake of industrialization, how could the damage to agriculture and peasant morale be minimized? Stalinist planners could have learned lessons from some of their predecessors, who had similar problems, such as the Bolsheviks of 1918–1920 or Count Witte of the Russia of the 1890s, who also harshly squeezed the peasantry on behalf of industrialization. Stalinist officials, however, plunged into the tasks of collectivization and grain procurement without giving much thought to procedures that might secure minimal peasant subsistence and hence keep alienation within bounds. The result was to set in motion a cycle of repression and concessions that culminated in the 1932–33 famine.Administrative incompetence in the Soviet Union was linked to the fundamental stance of the state toward the peasants, which was one of war. The state viewed its relations with the peasants as a zero-sum conflict - it's them or us, as one Central Committee member reportedly put it. The state adopted a scarcely disguised view of peasants as enemies. This conflictual posture was the basis for Stalin's determination to force the peasants unconditionally to subordinate their interests to those of the state. Even if top leaders did not make an explicit decision to inflict famine upon peasants, they were prepared to pay this price. The catastrophe of 1932–33 was thus an extreme manifestation of the conflictual state-peasant relationship that characterized the entire Stalin era: For a good quarter of a century, extracting grain from the peasants amounted to a permanent state of warfare against them and was understood as such by both sides. In the Chinese case there is simply no evidence that the state regarded peasants in this light, Mao's acknowledgment of interest conflicts notwithstanding. There is no evidence that GLF procurements were viewed as a weapon of war or of punishment, designed to force peasants into submission to state goals. What then was the state's stance toward the peasants during the GLF? It was to harness the peasantry to unprecedentedly ambitious developmental goals, goals shaped by Mao's new ideological conceptions. In the process of implementing them, the state's domination of the peasantry reached new heights, thereby bringing China closer to Stalinist reality. As in Stalin's case, GLF policy called for increased extraction of resources from the peasants, not just for national but also for local purposes. But this was based on the assumption that a breakthrough had occurred in agricultural production, a belief, in other words, that increased extraction was compatible with peasant welfare. This assumption turned out to be erroneous; it was part and parcel of the extraordinary mismanagement of the GLF. Famine was an unanticipated outcome of this mismanagement, an outcome for which Mao Zedong and his associates are responsible.When Chinese leaders finally realized what was going on in late 1960 they retreated from the policies of the Great Leap Forward. In the years that followed, procurement continued to be an important issue of conflict between the state and the peasants, but both the extent of extraction and the conflict fell significantly short of the Stalinist case. To the extent that in relation to the peasants Stalinism amounted to the intentionally extreme exploitation of the peasants, to that extent the Stalinist label is not fully appropriate even for the Great Leap Forward, nor for the rest of the Maoist era.

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