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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a military alliance and international organization comprising North American and European countries. It is generally considered to be among the most powerful, long-enduring, and successful alliances of modern times. It has influenced both the study and practice of international security and politics for more than seventy years. Created in 1949 by twelve countries as a classic treaty-based mutual defense pact, its substantive focus, formal organization, and membership grew steadily from its earliest years. The legacy of World War II and the trials of the Cold War dominated NATO’s first four decades, when the organization’s first secretary general described its purposes for Europe as keeping “the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the post–Cold War transformation of NATO’s political and military functions. Yet the central issue in politics among the allies has often been the “burden sharing” or distribution of costs and benefits. The United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have often wielded outsized roles in such politics, though NATO decisions are taken by consensus traditionally. The endurance of NATO after the Cold War and through many crises is one of the great puzzles in the academic discipline of international relations, and the Alliance is a common object of study in all the main theoretical schools of thought. While NATO’s political structures resemble other international organizations, its standing multinational integrated military structure is unique. Its military policy and strategy evolved with thinking about deterrence in the nuclear age. NATO first embarked on “out-of-area” military operations in the Balkan civil wars of the 1990s, but its largest and longest-running mission began in 2003 with its involvement in Afghanistan, far from its original geographic area of concern. NATO has entered into political and military partnerships with dozens of countries around the world, and its enlarged membership reached thirty countries in 2020. Its global ties add to a longer-standing debate about trans-Atlanticism versus autonomy in European security. NATO and the European Union give important context to one another, though their institutional collaboration has not always been as close as their greatly overlapping membership and neighboring headquarters in Belgium might suggest. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 inaugurated a period of increased tension with NATO, though the Alliance has alternated deterrence and dialog in its relations with Russia both during and since the Cold War. Primary sources and archival material about NATO are increasingly accessible.
World War II was unprecedented both in its magnitude and its horror. The massive conflict—which lasted six years, spread across thirty countries, and involved some seventy million combatants—left more dead, both civilian and military, than any other war in history. As if the brutality of the Blitz, Bastogne, Guadalcanal, the siege of Leningrad, the bombing of Dresden, the D-Day invasion, and countless other instances of death and carnage were not enough, there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and, of course, the unfathomable evil of the Holocaust. The nature of that evil, the stark polarization of the world between the Allies and Axis powers, the storytelling potential of men and women confronting the dangers of combat or the challenges of life on the home front, and the propagandistic capacities of the film medium all help to explain the powerful pull that World War II has exerted on filmmakers. Yet another factor is the sheer diversity of the contexts in which the war unfolded. There were the multiple theaters of war in Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa; the expansion of naval and aerial warfare in addition to land combat; new and frightening technologies of destruction culminating in the apocalyptic power of the atom bomb; widespread social changes resulting from the war; the exploits of antifascist Resistance movements; and the multiple dimensions of the Holocaust. These varied and numerous facets of the war seem almost to demand some form of cinematic representation—the result being an enormous, and still growing, number of films dealing with World War II. That the war’s beginning coincided with the maturation of the global film industry—and, ironically, with what has often been called Hollywood’s greatest year, 1939—only underscores the seemingly inevitable association of this war with its renderings on screen. Recent scholarship on World War II has shifted its emphasis from those in high command to the subaltern perspectives of the rank and file; a similar pattern has gradually emerged in film. To be sure, some earlier productions also emphasized the perspectives of common soldiers—two famous examples are The Story of GI Joe and Ballad of a Soldier. But this tendency has become more prevalent in recent years, so that once popular movies about generals (e.g., Patton and Tora, Tora, Tora) have given way to films that focus on enlistees and lower-ranking officers, such as Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Dunkirk, and The Pacific, among others. Moreover, films today increasingly depict the participation of women and racial minorities in the war (as in Pearl Harbor and Fury). Black fighting units especially have received more attention in such films as Red Tails, The Tuskegee Airmen, and Miracle at St. Anna. These and other patterns of historical continuity and change in films of World War II receive attention in the scholarly studies reviewed in this essay. And, not surprisingly, the scholarship about World War II films is immense. To keep the list of citations manageable, the focus here is primarily on feature films, with categories including broad-based overviews, studies of individual directors, and discussions of such issues as genre, gender, race, the Holocaust, and the war’s depiction in different national cinemas. These categories are intended not to be comprehensive, but rather to indicate the range of scholarly work already completed, and to suggest pathways for yet further explorations of a seemingly infinite subject.
The Napoleonic Wars took place from 1802 to 1815 and fundamentally altered the political, social, cultural, and military structures of Europe and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world. This created a collective memory that influenced, and continues to influence, the modern world in a myriad of ways. The conflicts were a continuation of the French Revolutionary Wars, which bear their own collective and historical memory. They involved nearly every power in Europe, affecting them each to varying degrees. Political and legal systems changed, both as a result of Revolutionary ideals and the introduction of the Code Napoléon. Nationalism and national identity formation accelerated during the period, often benefiting from opposition to Napoleon or the destruction of existing systems wrought by the Revolutionary spirit that French armies brought to occupied territories, spurring the creation of national memory wherever they appeared. Napoleon and his power, undeniable genius, success, and ultimate failure have proven an irresistible and enduring figure of autobiographical and biographical memory in realms as diverse as fiction, wargaming, and history, both popular and academic. The methods of his armies became the paradigm for contemporary militaries, and their legacy continues to form the bedrock of collective, institutional, and popular memory. The arts contain their own cultural memory of Napoleon, many of which remain current. Collectively, the various aspects of the cultural and historical memory of the Napoleonic Wars have become a part of many important areas of history and historiography. As a result, works on Napoleon, his empire, and the Napoleonic Wars are voluminous and grow significantly every year.
This bibliography includes histories that explore the manifold meanings and purposes that popular culture has possessed in wartime. Popular culture provides entertainment and escapism for soldiers and civilians, while also allowing them to imagine and give expression to their wartime identities, and social and political worlds. Militaries embrace song or sport to entertain, but also to train and condition their troops. On the home front, it is often on the movie screen or the dance floor, or at the concert hall or the baseball game, where critical issues about class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nation are reflected, experienced, and debated. Popular culture also serves as a potent means of official and unofficial propaganda, and can offer a means of resistance against authoritarianism or occupation, or a pathway toward recovery from war. The bibliography adopts a broad definition of “popular culture,” which eliminates socially and historically constructed distinctions between “high” and “low” cultures, to consider the wide range of leisure forms and performing arts that entertained and shaped the experience of individuals and societies in wartime. The focus is primarily on popular cultural forms that possess an interactive or technologically-driven relationship between producer and consumer, or performer and audience, and so the bibliography does not deal with literature or the visual arts, which each have their own disciplinary specialists and immense scholarly literatures. The bibliography is also only concerned with popular culture produced during the war or wars in question, rather than as part of the retrospective articulation of individual or collective memory. Temporally, it is focused on the era of total war and beyond, including World War I, World War II, the Cold War and decolonization, and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Significantly, at almost precisely the same moment in the early 20th century, warfare and popular culture both evolved and modernized in critical ways. The First World War erupted just as the Jazz Age took hold; new technologies for cultural dissemination emerged, and the transnational commercial leisure industries surrounding music, film, dance, theater, sport and a range of other cultural forms expanded exponentially. Works in this bibliography are concerned with what followed, and the intertwined modernities of both war and popular culture.
In September 1939, a committee of the British War Cabinet estimated that the dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa could raise fourteen divisions of the fifty-five-division field force it hoped the British Commonwealth would assemble for the war against Germany and the other Axis powers. The British got what they were looking for, and then some. The Canadians raised three infantry divisions, two armored divisions, and two independent armored brigades. They also raised another three divisions for home defense, one of which was designated for the invasion of Japan when the war in the Far East ended in August 1945. The Australians generated four infantry divisions and one armored division for the 2nd Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF), plus another two armored cavalry divisions and eight infantry divisions (not all of which were fully manned) for the militia and home defense. Two of those militia infantry divisions fought in the New Guinea campaign. The 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force (2 NZEF) comprised one infantry division (later converted to an armored division), which fought in the Mediterranean, and a two-brigade infantry division that deployed to the Pacific theater, where it worked under American command until its disbandment in October 1944. The South Africans raised two expeditionary infantry divisions, one of which fought in East Africa and the Western Desert until converted to an armored division and deployed to Italy in 1943. The other division fought in the Western Desert from mid-1941 until its capture at Tobruk in June 1942. The first serious studies of the dominion armies in World War II were the official histories, commissioned by the respective governments to record what their soldiers had done and accomplished. The works remain solid records of what happened, and, cost and profit being less of a concern for government publication projects than they are for independent presses, the official histories are almost invariably better illustrated with clear maps and well-chosen photographs than the histories that followed. A generation of dominion historians since the 1970s has continued to explore their nations’ wartime histories, challenge long-held assumptions, and fill in historical gaps left by the official histories, most along purely national lines. Combined with the official histories, these new national histories have formed a solid foundation for a growing number of transnational examinations of the British Commonwealth armies since the mid-2000s.
Vietnam was the focal point of a larger set of conflicts that broke out in Indo-China in 1945 and resulted by 1975 with Cambodia and Laos as well as Vietnam falling under the rule of various Communist parties. The first Vietnam War (1945–1954) pitted French colonists and their local allies against Vietnamese Communist rebels. It ended with the French withdrawal from Indo-China and the partition of Vietnam into two states, Communist North Vietnam and pro-Western South Vietnam. In the second Vietnam War (1955–1975), North Vietnam and Communist rebels in the south fought against the US-backed South Vietnamese regime. No conflict in American history since the Civil War was as divisive as Vietnam, yet the war was widely supported until US ground forces entered the fray (1965). Mounting casualties and the threat of conscription fueled a growing antiwar movement that forced Washington to find a way out of the war. After the United States withdrew in 1973, Communist forces overran South Vietnam and reunited the country under their rule in 1975. Films about the Vietnam War were produced in both North and South Vietnam, the Soviet Union (which armed the North) and South Korea and Australia (both dispatched troops to support the South). With few exceptions, many were seldom seen outside their lands of origin. With Hollywood’s dominance of movie markets in much of the world, American stories about the war dominated the imagination of moviegoers in the United States and most other countries. Hollywood took only slight interest in Vietnam during the war’s early years. The first major motion picture about American combat in Vietnam, John’s Wayne’s pro-war The Green Berets (1968), was a box-office hit but universally derided by critics. With the war’s increasing unpopularity and unsuccessful conclusion, the subject was deemed “box-office poison” by the studios for several years. By the late 1970s a rising generation of filmmakers embraced Vietnam as material for displaying American heroism, explaining the US defeat or exploring the ethical basis for war. The commercial breakthrough for Vietnam War movies was achieved by director Sidney Furie’s The Boys in Company C (1978), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Each reflected in different ways America’s disillusionment and the physical and psychological toll charged to the men who served in the conflict. The theme continued with Platoon (1986), directed by a Vietnam combat veteran, Oliver Stone. A counter-trend appeared with Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series (1982–2019), which amplified the resurgent nationalism that began under the Reagan administration. Providing a third perspective, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) presented the war unemotionally as a fact of history. In the 21st century, movies on the Vietnam War continue to be made, if in diminished number. Characteristic of recent films, We Were Soldiers (2002) validates the experience of US servicemen while honoring the heroism of the enemy.
Peacekeeping is unlike other forms of military intervention because of its founding three-part doctrine, comprising consent of the parties, impartiality, and the non-use of force except in self-defense (and, more recently, defense of the mandate). Peacekeeping is important to understand because it is the most frequent form of intervention today. As of March 2020, there were thirteen UN peacekeeping missions, mainly in Africa, and nearly 100,000 peacekeepers, including civilians and uniformed personnel (see Resources: Data Sources, Key Reports, and Policy Documents). This means there are more UN peacekeepers in conflict zones than any other type of multilateral troop (from, for example, the African Union, the European Union, ASEAN, or NATO). Moreover, despite media attention and arguments in the qualitative literature, peacekeeping is a highly effective type of multilateral action. This review focuses on the explosion of top-rate publications on peacekeeping beginning in 2015. It begins with (1) the general overviews and the classics. It then turns to discussions and debates in the current peacekeeping literature about the following: (2) the remarkably affirmative findings in the positivistic literature on the protection of civilians; (3) peacekeeping’s beneficial effects on conflict contagion and war recurrence; (4) other favorable effects on post-conflict state institutions, democratization, and civil society; (5) qualitative and critical perspectives on peacekeeping; (6) “how peacekeeping works” and debates about the use of force; (7) gender in peacekeeping and sexual abuse and exploitation; (8) peacekeeping by actors other than the UN; (9) works by peacekeeping leaders and practitioners; and (10) resources for peacekeeping research. Qualitative and quantitative scholars have very different approaches to the study of peacekeeping, and very different resulting analyses. Positivistic analyses (which, by definition, take into consideration both sides of the coin) generally find many positive effects from peacekeeping. In comparing situations with and without peacekeepers, they find that peacekeepers correlate with fewer civilian deaths, a geographic contraction of conflict, less return to civil war, better gender-balancing in security institutions, improved justice and security sectors, greater chances of democratization, increased robustness of civil society, and less sexual violence during conflict. Peacekeepers, however, do increase the risk of transactional sex and sex trafficking. In contrast, critical approaches are, by definition, critical. Critical and many qualitative scholars—often based on firsthand experience with the United Nations—see a peacekeeping world of cultural misunderstanding, Western arrogance, self-defeating practices, unintended consequences, and liberal cosmopolitanism gone wrong. Both perspectives hold merit: researchers have found numerous robust relationships between peacekeepers and positive outcomes, despite self-defeating practices. In order to understand contemporary peacekeeping, it is necessary to read widely in both literatures. This review takes into account publications by dozens of top scholars, analysts, and practitioners of peacekeeping.
Historians still debate what to call the conflict that convulsed Central Europe from 1618 to 1648. Although it is largely accepted that this is “The Thirty Years War,” and indeed some people called it that shortly after it was over, some historians use this phrase to denote other wars, beginning earlier or ending later. This Thirty Years War was one of the most destructive conflicts on earth. Although the fighting took place primarily in central Europe, this complex multifaceted struggle eventually sucked in people from Ireland to Muscovy west to east, and from Norway to Italy north to south. Compared to the population at the time, it may have been proportionally more deadly than any war in western or central Europe before or since. This is an excellent time for Thirty Years War research. Some tenacious misunderstandings about the way early-17th-century strategy and combat worked are being rooted out. Primary source research is being done. Sterile debates that occupied the entire 19th and early 20th centuries are now barely even remembered. A full bibliography would list hundreds of thousands of works over four hundred years; here are several.
Until rather recently, piracy as a form of seaborne organized crime seemed to be a phenomenon of the past—something that was relegated to a great number of books, some comics, and, of course, the silver screen: many Hollywood blockbusters revolve around pirates as larger-than-life swashbuckling characters, played for example by Douglas Fairbanks (The Black Pirate, 1926), Errol Flynn (Captain Blood, 1935), Yul Brynner (The Buccaneer, 1958), or Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, 2003 onward). Even the Muppets had a (comedy) go at pirates with Muppets Treasure Island (1996). That “real” pirates still exist and pose a formidable danger to seafarers at least in some parts of the world was known only to a small group of people outside the mariner community such as legal experts and some scholars, mainly from history departments. This blissful ignorance was swept away by the advent of Somali piracy between 2005 and 2008: suddenly, “real” pirates made headlines again, sparking a renewed interest in all things pirate, modern or not. It also resulted in a wave of publications focusing on modern pirates, trying to make sense out of why this age-old menace had returned with a vengeance. Even for specialists, this burgeoning literature, ranging from books aimed at the wider public and offering general overviews to very specialized research articles appealing to equally specialized audiences, it is difficult to keep track. This bibliography aims at referencing the leading works, in order to offer the reader a quick access to the vast repository of knowledge which is nowadays available. It will commence with general overviews, to then move to the most dangerous regional hot-spots of current piracy, which are West Africa (Gulf of Guinea), East Africa (Gulf of Aden and Somali Basin), and Southeast Asia (Straits of Malacca and Singapore plus South China Sea). Also, some secondary hot spots such as the Persian/Arabian Gulf and the Sundarbans at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal are referenced as well, although not much has been written about these manifestations of piracy. This is followed by works on root causes (why do people become pirates in modern times?), and works on modern pirates’ modus operandi, in particular their weapons and tactics (what do modern pirates do?). Finally, the focus will shift from piracy to counter-piracy at sea, on land, and at court—the latter part also including publications dealing with legal definitions of piracy such as included in the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention (LoSC). As regards the nature of the sources referenced, it should be noted that in order to reach out to a wide range of audiences, not only academic and scholarly publications are included, but also publications with a more journalistic approach that aim at the general public. Furthermore, great care was taken to include publications which are easily accessible—also for the benefit of a wider audience.
The War of the Spanish Succession was a large military conflict that encompassed most of western and central Europe spawning additional fighting in the Americas and the world’s oceans. Hostilities began with the invasion of Lombardy by imperial forces in 1701 and were concluded be the treaties of Utrecht (1713), Rastatt, and Baden (1714). The trigger for the war was the long-anticipated death of the childless King Charles II of Spain in 1700 and his will, which ignored several partition treaties signed by other powers and passed the entirety of the Spanish monarchy to Louis XIV of France’s grandson, Philip, Duke of Anjou (Philip V of Spain). The Austrian Habsburgs under Emperor Leopold I contested the will on the behalf of his second son the Archduke Charles (Charles VI of the Holy Roman Empire). With the European balance of power jeopardized by the prospect of a Bourbon succession in Spain, the Kingdom of England (Great Britain after 1707) and the United Provinces joined the Holy Roman Emperor in forming the Grand Alliance in 1702. The Grand Alliance, heretofore referred to as the Allies, expanded to consist ultimately of the emperor of and the states of the Holy Roman Empire (with a few notable exceptions), Great Britain, the United Provinces, Portugal, and the Duchy of Savoy-Piedmont. The pro-Bourbon alliance opposing the Grand Alliance consisted of France, Spain, the Electorate of Bavaria, and the Archbishopric of Cologne. The main military operations largely occurred along the frontiers of France and in the Spanish possessions in Europe such as the Spanish Netherlands, Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula. Of notable exception were the Bavarian campaigns in 1703 and 1704. Throughout the war, each side tried to exploit real and potential revolts/insurgencies in the other’s territory. The Allies maintained a large military presence in Catalonia and set up a rival court in Barcelona under the Archduke Charles as “Charles III of Spain.” The land war in Europe was characterized by the military victories of the Allied commanders, the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy in Flanders, Germany, and Italy. However, the Bourbons maintained their supremacy in Spain itself. As the war protracted, financial and political exhaustion beset all sides. Despite sustained losses bringing France to the brink of collapse, Louis XIV continued to resist until Allied resolve softened with the events of 1710 and 1711 (the Tory victory in the British elections, the battle of Brihuega, and the death of Emperor Joseph I). The war ended with the signing of the treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt, and Baden (collectively known as the Peace of Utrecht) in 1713 and 1714. The British gained significant colonial possessions and concessions from the Bourbon powers as well as the territories of Gibraltar and Minorca. The Dutch received a reinforced barrier in the Low Countries. The Austrians received Spain’s possessions in Italy and the Low Countries. Philip V retained Spain and its colonial possessions.
