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Exporting British Policing during the Second World War
Exporting British Policing is a comprehensive study of British military policing in liberated Europe during the Second World War. Preventing and detecting thefts, receiving and profiteering together with the maintenance of order in its broadest sense are, in the peacetime world, generally confided to the police. However, the Second World War witnessed the use of civilian police to create a detective division of the British Army’s Military Police (SIB), and the use of British civilian police, alongside American police, as Civil Affairs Officers to restore order and civil administration. Part One follows the men of the SIB from their pre-war careers to confrontations with mafiosi and their investigations into widespread organised crime and war crimes during which they were constantly hampered by being seen as a Cinderella service commanded by ‘temporary gentlemen’. Part Two focuses on the police officers who served in Civil Affairs who tended to come from higher ranks in the civilian police than those who served in SIB. During the war they occupied towns with the assault troops, and then sought to reorganise local administration; at the end of the war in the British Zones of Germany and Austria they sought to turn both new Schutzmänner and police veterans of the Third Reich into British Bobbies. Using memoirs and anecdotes, Emsley critically draws on the subjective experiences of these police personnel, assessing the successes of these wartime efforts for preventing and investigating crimes such as theft and profiteering and highlighting the importance of historical precedent, given current difficulties faced by international policing organizations in enforcing democratic police reform in post-conflict societies.
eBook
Knowing the adversary
States are more likely to engage in risky and destabilizing actions such as military buildups and preemptive strikes if they believe their adversaries pose a tangible threat. Yet despite the crucial importance of this issue, we don't know enough about how states and their leaders draw inferences about their adversaries' long-term intentions.Knowing the Adversarydraws on a wealth of historical archival evidence to shed new light on how world leaders and intelligence organizations actually make these assessments.
Keren Yarhi-Milo examines three cases: Britain's assessments of Nazi Germany's intentions in the 1930s, America's assessments of the Soviet Union's intentions during the Carter administration, and the Reagan administration's assessments of Soviet intentions near the end of the Cold War. She advances a new theoretical framework-called selective attention-that emphasizes organizational dynamics, personal diplomatic interactions, and cognitive and affective factors. Yarhi-Milo finds that decision makers don't pay as much attention to those aspects of state behavior that major theories of international politics claim they do. Instead, they tend to determine the intentions of adversaries on the basis of preexisting beliefs, theories, and personal impressions. Yarhi-Milo also shows how intelligence organizations rely on very different indicators than decision makers, focusing more on changes in the military capabilities of adversaries.
Knowing the Adversaryprovides a clearer picture of the historical validity of existing theories, and broadens our understanding of the important role that diplomacy plays in international security.
eBook
NATO and Peace Support Operations, 1991-1999
This new book addresses the key question of how NATO and three of its member states are configuring their policies and military doctrines in order to handle the new strategic environment.
This environment is increasingly dominated by 'new wars', more precisely civil wars within states, and peacekeeping as the strategy devised by outside actors for dealing with them. The book seeks to explain how this new strategic environment has been interpreted and how the new conflicts and peacekeeping have been fitted into 'defence' and 'war' - key concepts in the field of security studies.
eBook
Palestinian Collaboration with the British: The Peace Bands and the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–9
This article examines an aspect of British counter-insurgency in Palestine in the 1930s during the Arab revolt there against British colonial rule and Jewish settlement: the pro-British, anti-rebel Palestinian militia 'peace bands', associated with the Palestinian Nashashibi family and raised with British and Jewish military and financial assistance, and with support from the British Consul in Damascus, Gilbert MacKereth. Using Hebrew, Arabic and untapped local British regimental sources, it details how the British helped to raise the peace bands and the bands' subsequent activities in the field; it assesses the impact of the bands on the course of the Arab revolt; and it sets out the views of the British Army towards those willing to work with them. In doing this, it extends the recent thesis of Hillel Cohen on Palestinian collaboration with Zionists to include the British and it augments the useful but dated work of Yehoshua Porath and Yuval Arnon-Ohanna on the subject. Such a study is significant for our understanding of British methods of imperial pacification, especially the British Army's manipulation during colonial unrest of 'turned' insurgents as a 'loyalist' force against rebels, an early form of 'pseudo' warfare. The collaboration by Palestinians resonates with broader histories of imperial and neo-imperial rule, it extends military histories on colonial pacification methods, and it provides rich, new texture on why colonial subjects resisted and collaborated with the emergency state, using the Palestinians as a case study.
Journal Article
The Decline of European Naval Forces
This book aims to provide insight into the development of Europe's naval forces since the end of the Cold War. In order to comprehend the drastic changes the majority ofEuropean navies have undergone over the last twenty five years, the defense policies and naval strategies of eleven European states as well as the evolution, deployment,and capabilities of their respective naval forces are analyzed. The book is divided into three parts.The first part introduces the underpinning elements of the maritime domain as well as the principal theories of seapower, based on the writings of the most renowned naval strategists. Furthermore, the current changes to the established post-Cold War order are addressed. This includes the rise of major powers in the Asian-Pacific Region, the coinciding shift in the global naval balance from the West (Atlantic) to the East (Indian Ocean and Pacific), and the consequences this will arguably have for European powers in protecting their interests at and from the sea.Part two represents the mainstay of the book. In eleven case studies the development of Europe's most important naval forces is construed according to the respective strategic framework in which they have operated over the past two decades. In addition, the general composition of their forces, the range of their capabilities, aswell as important technical features are described. The study shows that since the end of the Cold War, all but few European navies have significantly decreased in sizeand, thus, have ceded important capabilities along the way. Moreover, more traditional naval roles, such as sea-control and conventional deterrence, lost much of theirimportance as the new security environment required navies to focus on expeditionary capabilities and maritime security operations such as low-intensity peace-keepingmissions at great distances from European shores.In the final part of the book, the findings of the preceding chapters will be summarized to form the argument that more than two decades of continuous cuts to Europe's naval defense sector can be considered serious brinkmanship. Based on the understanding of seapower as a prerequisite for political influence and economic health, the consequences of the geopolitical shift towards the Asian-Pacific Region, and most importantly the general decline of European traditional naval capabilities, the author concludes that the ability of European states to influence events near and abroad by means of their naval forces has been atrophied and will continue to be called into question in the future.
eBook
British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike
In the spring of 1878 male political prisoners in the Peter and Paul Fortress of St. Petersburg went on hunger strike to protest against the oppressive conditions in which they were held by the tsarist regime. After three days, news of the strike reached the prisoners' families, who appealed for relief to the director of military police, General N. V. Mezentsev. The director dismissed their pleas and reportedly declared of the hunger strikers, “Let them die; I have already ordered coffins for them all.” It was a volatile period of repression and reprisal in the Russian revolutionary movement. The tsarist regime had cracked down on the revolutionary populists, the narodniki, and the era of terrorism had just begun in St. Petersburg that January, when Vera Zasulich shot and seriously wounded the city's governor. The hunger strikers were among a group of 193 revolutionaries who had been recently tried for treason and sentenced to various forms of punishment, including hard labor and imprisonment in Siberia. In these circumstances the news of Mezentsev's response spread quickly beyond the strikers' families, soon reaching a would-be terrorist and former artillery officer, Sergius Kravchinskii. Kravchinskii killed Mezentsev with a dagger on a city street, then fled Russia and made his way to Great Britain, a haven for Russian revolutionaries since Alexander Herzen had arrived in 1852 and established the first Russian revolutionary press abroad. Kravchinskii likewise wrote against the tsarist regime, under the pen name Sergius Stepniak, and in 1890 he became the editor of a new, London-based periodical, Free Russia. Its first number chronicled a dramatic series of hunger strikes led by female revolutionaries imprisoned at Kara in the Trans-Baikál of eastern Siberia. These strikes had culminated in the death of one woman after she was flogged and in five suicides by female and male political prisoners who, after the death of their comrade, had ended their hunger strikes to eat poison. Having been inspired to terror by his sympathy for revolutionary hunger strikers, Stepniak, like other Russian exiles, believed that the hunger strike would win sympathy and support for Russian revolutionaries in Britain.
Journal Article
From Mercenary to Citizen Armies: Explaining Change in the Practice of War
Mercenary armies went out of style in the nineteenth century; it became common sense that armies should be staffed with citizens. I argue that even though realist explanations focusing on the fighting prowess of citizen armies and sociological explanations focusing on the fit between citizen armies and prevailing ideas can rationalize this change, they cannot explain it. I examine, instead, the politics behind the new reliance on citizen armies and argue that material and ideational turmoil provided important antecedent conditions for change. Beyond this, individual states were more likely to move toward citizen armies when they had been defeated militarily and when the ruling coalition was split or indifferent about the reforms tied to citizen armies. Finally, the apparent success of citizen armies in France and then Prussia made do mestic conditions for reform easier to obtain in other countries, reinforcing the likelihood that the solution would be replicated. I conclude that the interaction between domestic politics and path dependency provides a promising source of hypotheses for explaining the conditions under which new ways of war emerge and spread.
Journal Article
Enforcing the Peace
Anarchy makes it easy for terrorists to set up shop. Yet the international community has been reluctant to commit the necessary resources to peacekeeping—with devastating results locally and around the globe. This daring new work argues that modern peacekeeping operations and military occupations bear a surprising resemblance to the imperialism practiced by liberal states a century ago. Motivated by a similar combination of self-interested and humanitarian goals, liberal democracies in both eras have wanted to maintain a presence on foreign territory in order to make themselves more secure, while sharing the benefits of their own cultures and societies. Yet both forms of intervention have inevitably been undercut by weak political will, inconsistent policy choices, and their status as a low priority on the agenda of military organizations. In more recent times, these problems are compounded by the need for multilateral cooperation—something even NATO finds difficult to achieve but is now necessary for legitimacy. Drawing lessons from this provocative comparison, Kimberly Zisk Marten argues that the West’s attempts to remake foreign societies in their own image—even with the best of intentions—invariably fail. Focusing on operations in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor in the mid- to late 1990s, while touching on both post-war Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq, Enforcing the Peace compares these cases to the colonial activities of Great Britain, France, and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The book weaves together examples from these cases, using interviews Marten conducted with military officers and other peacekeeping officials at the UN, NATO, and elsewhere. Rather than trying to control political developments abroad, Marten proposes, a more sensible goal of foreign intervention is to restore basic security to unstable regions threatened by anarchy. The colonial experience shows that military organizations police effectively if political leaders prioritize the task, and the time has come to raise the importance of peacekeeping on the international agenda.
eBook