Exploiting the Urban System? The Frictions of Military Finance and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic, 1688–1714

This article examines how international military finance operated in the Dutch Republic between 1688–1714. The region’s unique urban geography in which the political and financial infrastructures crucial for military financing were geographically dispersed created stresses and strains. These inconveniences were overcome due to the Republic’s excellent intra-urban infrastructure – creating fast and reliable communication between the different urban centers – and their reliance on (semi-)private agents, the solliciteurs-militair. As a result, the urban system created a level of flexibility: credit for military purposes could be found both in The Hague and Amsterdam, rather than having to rely on a single city as was the case in London. This focus on the urban has broader historiographical importance because recent scholarship on early modern war and state formation is increasingly questioning whether the focus on political and financial centralization is necessarily the best way to understand these processes.

The geontological time-spaces of late modern war

Attending to connections between serious health conditions (cancers and congenital disorders) and weapons residues in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza, this article develops a geographical agenda for examining power in late modern war from the perspective of the ground and the life it sustains. A case is made for understanding the time-spaces of war as not compressed, vertical or remote but enduring, pedospheric and proximate in which violence emerges through processes (carcinogenic and teratogenic) that transcend boundaries between ‘life’ ( bios) and ‘nonlife’ ( geos). Such are the geontological time-spaces of late modern war that geographers – in both ‘physical’ and ‘human’ sub-fields – are uniquely equipped to examine.

Friends in the Profession: Rebel Leaders, International Social Networks, and External Support for Rebellion

What drives foreign state support for rebel organizations? While scholars have examined the geopolitical and organizational factors that fuel foreign support, the role of rebel leaders in this process remains understudied. In this article, we propose that rebel leaders’ personal backgrounds shape their ability to obtain foreign support during conflict. In particular, we argue that rebel leaders with significant prior international experiences—including study abroad, work abroad, military training abroad, and exile—are at an advantage in securing wartime external support for their organizations. These experiences provide opportunities for would-be rebel leaders to interact with a multitude of foreign individuals who may later enter politics or otherwise gain prominence in their respective societies, allowing them to build interpersonal social networks across borders. Such networks offer key points of contact when rebel leaders later seek foreign backing. We test this theory using data from the new Rebel Organization Leaders (ROLE) database, finding robust support for our argument as well as the broader role of rebel leader attributes in explaining external support. Our results underscore the value of incorporating individual leaders and their social networks more squarely into the study of modern war.

The Langscape of War

This chapter documents the ways in which an aggressively modern war took shape in language in World War One, yielding, in Clark’s notebooks, a real-time engagement with the fleeting diction of vernacular geography at the front, the weapons of industrial warfare, and the diverse taxonomies of mud or sound. It explores the emergence of trench warfare, and its own distinctive patterns of use (and variability), alongside the reconceptualization of fundamental terms such as battle and battlefield. Here, too, is a shifting language of attack and resistance and of ‘them’ and ‘us’, in which air warfare, or amphibious warfare, or gas warfare, or the brief efflorescence of Turpiite, offer striking lexical fertility alongside their new capacities for destruction.

CHUVASH DRAMA ABOUT THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR

This article is devoted to the analysis of Chuvash plays dedicated to the Great Patriotic War; reveals the peculiarities of their poetics and problems, shows conflict situations that reveal heroic characters. The main attention is paid to the analysis of the plays by N. Aizman, N. Terentyev, M. Yuhma, A. Vasiliev, M. Belov, N. Sidorov, and others. They are united by the themes of courage, heroism, the feat of Soviet people on the battlefield and in the rear. Whereas in the early decades dramatists focused their attention directly on combat events, modern war plays are filled with deep moral content, their plots are distinguished by the sharpness of moral choices, revealing the moral and ethical aspects of the individual.

Methodological myth of modern actional war áctors

Problem setting. The thesis that modern war is a "war of consciousness" inevitably leads science to the problems of methodology in understanding the phenomenon of consciousness. This study shows that both the authors and the followers of the concept of modern continental wars in general reproduce a thoroughly forgotten (and in the history of philosophy has been overcome for two hundred years) its interpretation as tabula rasa - a blank slate that necessarily distorts the understanding of the real state of affairs. At the same time, the methodology developed by German classical philosophy, which culminated in Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit", reveals the true essence of both modern and historical forms of national consciousness. All this makes it possible to remove some of the tension created in the social sphere by the very formulation of the thesis about the consistent nature of modern wars. Article’s main body. In the article the authors consider modern problems of methodology in understanding the phenomenon of consciousness. It is emphasized that the very nature of consciousness is determined by the fact that it itself in its knowledge it considers true. On the basis of a thorough analysis of scientific achievements in the field of phenomenology, the authors state that the position on modern war without opponents is filled with contradictory, inconsistent grounds. The same myth of political technologists is the statement about the nature of national self-consciousness as tabula rasa. Conclusions. Historically, it is possible to trace the "steps" of the development of such units of national self-consciousness, while in modern times their existence is possible either in the form of "fragments" or in the form of "repetitions" of these steps. The phenomenon of international law is intensifying everywhere, and the phenomena of bipatrism, feminism, LGBT, etc. are following it - this is the verdict of World History, which can be reborn only in the form of philosophy. And our contemporary is right, saying that "the world exists to enter the book" [22, p. 370].