Rethinking Private Warfare

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-191
Author(s):  
Daphné Richemond-Barak
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Military Industry ◽  
Military Contractors ◽  
Inclusive Approach ◽  
Private Military Contractors ◽  
Modern Form ◽  
Modern Nation State

Waging war for money has been frowned upon since the Peace of Westphalia and the rise of the modern nation-state. The stigma associated with private warfare translates, in legal terms, into a prohibition on mercenary activity and denying mercenaries the protection afforded to regular combatants (in particular, prisoner of war status). Noting the apparent similarities between mercenaries and private military contractors, some have sought to extend to the latter the restrictive regime applicable to the former. But the resemblance between these two types of actors should not imply that private warfare, in its modern form, is condemnable outright. This Article argues that an inclusive approach to military outsourcing—drawing upon historical, legal and moral perspectives—is necessary to contend with the challenges raised by the growth of the private military industry. I examine the connection between history (highlighting the shared roots of private military contractors and mercenaries), morality (through which the stigma against private warfare developed), and law (the formal vehicle of such stigma), to show that private warfare deserves a more nuanced and pragmatic treatment under international law.

The Riddle of the Sands

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Brayton
Keyword(s):  
Coastal Zone ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Intertidal Zone ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Aesthetic Appeal ◽  
Secret Service ◽  
German Coast ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Modern Nation State

The aesthetic appeal of coasts is due in part to the indeterminacy of the intertidal zone. The imagination finds room to play where land and sea meet. This chapter explores the coastal zone that lies at the heart of a novel considered by many to be the first modern spy thriller, Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service. Childers develops the notion of coastal indeterminacy as a figure for the boundaries, ambitions, and limitations of the modern nation-state. The journey of Childers’s characters through a north Atlantic archipelago that extends from the German coast draws a line of association between Europe and Britain, whose form depends on coastlines, estuaries, and shallows. In following this course, Childers creates a narrative fiction that shifts between charts, borders, and languages.

Private Military Contractors, Crime, and the Terrain of Unaccountability

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 593-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn L. Rothe ◽  
Jeffrey Ian Ross
Keyword(s):  
Military Contractors ◽  
Private Military Contractors

Conflict of Laws and the Internet

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uta Kohl
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Collateral Damage ◽  
Private International Law ◽  
State Law ◽  
Conflict Of Laws ◽  
Private Ordering ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Global World

This chapter documents the extreme stresses that cyberspace applies to state law by examining how private international law, or conflict of laws, has responded to the online global world. This highlights both the penetration of globalization into the ‘private’ sphere and the strongly ‘public’ or collective political nature of much of the ‘private’ ordering through national law. The chapter shows that the nation state is asserting itself against the very phenomenon—globalization (through cyberspace)—that threatens its existence, and does not shy away from accepting the fragmentation of this global cyberspace along traditional political boundaries as collateral damage to its own survival. Yet, the frequent appeal to international human rights normativity in recent conflicts jurisprudence suggests an awareness of the unsuitability and illegitimacy of nation state law for the global online world.

Subversive Archaism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Herzfeld
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Equation Of State ◽  
Urban Slum ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Slum Dwellers ◽  
State Authority ◽  
Modern Nation State

In Subversive Archaism, Michael Herzfeld explores how individuals and communities living at the margins of the modern nation-state use nationalist discourses of tradition to challenge state authority under both democratic and authoritarian governments. Through close attention to the claims and experiences of mountain shepherds in Greece and urban slum dwellers in Thailand, Herzfeld shows how these subversive archaists draw on national histories and past polities to claim legitimacy for their defiance of bureaucratic authority. Although vilified by government authorities as remote, primitive, or dangerous—often as preemptive justification for violent repression—these groups are not revolutionaries and do not reject national identity, but they do question the equation of state and nation. Herzfeld explores the political strengths and vulnerabilities of their deployment of heritage and the weaknesses they expose in the bureaucratic and ethnonational state in an era of accelerated globalization.

The Modern Tradition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Anne-Marie Curley
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Complementary Relationship ◽  
The Real ◽  
Pastoral Letter ◽  
Private Matter ◽  
Modern Nation State ◽  
The Ideal

Abbot Kōnyo’s pastoral letter of 1871 codifies an understanding of the Pure Land as a transcendent realm, attainable only after death, and of faith as a private matter of the heart. This understanding is valuable as a way of negotiating a place for Shinshū in the regime of the modern nation-state. Early Meiji thinkers like Shimaji Mokurai rely on this understanding of religion as internal in arguing for the separation of church and state. Shinshū reformer Kiyozawa Manshi pushes this focus on interiority to its limit, destabilizing the complementary relationship between the Buddhist law and the imperial law that his predecessors sought to secure. During the Taishō, Kiyozawa’s disciple Kaneko Daiei attempts to rearticulate the connection between the ideal Pure Land and the real world, while the Honganji-ha thinker Nonomura Naotarō argues that it is time for the Pure Land tradition to set aside the myth of the Western Paradise.

The New Knight: The French Far Right’s View of the Middle Ages

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-49
Author(s):  
Stéphane François
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Political Model ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Modern Nation State ◽  
The Middle Ages

The far right has always taken an interest in the Middle Ages. For the French revolutionary far right, which shares an ideological matrix influenced by Julius Evola, fascination with the Middle Ages revolves around the image of the Holy Germanic Roman Empire as a political model for Europe opposed to the modern nation-state. The romantic image of the medieval knight also offers a watered-down way to celebrate and legitimize violence without having to allude to a taboo National Socialism. This obsession with the Middle Ages contrasts with the reality that these revolutionary far-right movements were rather pro-Arab during the Cold War decades. This shift reveals the transformation of their thinking and the new dominance of the Identitarian notion of ethnic withdrawal, with the knight as the symbol of a pure racial warrior defending his society against Muslim invasion.

The Modern Foundations of Brazilian Cinema

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Maite Conde
Keyword(s):  
Nation State ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Brazilian Cinema ◽  
Political Project ◽  
Modern Nation State ◽  
Alternative Modernity

The introductory chapter outlines a theory of early cinema in Brazil and its relationship to the country’s invention of modernity. Theories and examinations of early film’s relationship to modernity have by and large focused on the medium’s links to changes and transformations wrought by the advent of industrialization. Noting that such transformations were not present in Brazil, the introduction outlines how early film in Brazil—that is, its arrival and dissemination—were linked instead to a political project impelled by the first Republican regime, one that sought to transform the country into modern nation-state of order and progress. The chapter maps ways in which this imbrication between film and this project laid the foundations for the birth Brazilian cinema and modernity in Brazil. In doing so, it provides an alternative modernity of early cinema.

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