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How does past political violence impact subsequent development and practices, long beyond the life of the regime that perpetrated violence? Prior research focuses on physical destruction without much attention to weapons left behind in conflict zones. I contend that unexploded ordnance create direct and imminent threats to rural livelihoods. Individuals respond by shortening time horizons and avoiding investment in activities for which there is an immediate security cost but a distant return. Short‐term adjustments in agricultural methods accumulate to long‐term underdevelopment and poverty. In Cambodia, I find that the historic bombing of high‐fertility land, where impact fuses hit soft ground and were more likely to fail, reduces contemporary household production and welfare. Counterintuitively, the most fertile land becomes the least productive. This reversal of fortune qualifies the presumption that post‐war economies will eventually converge back to steady‐state growth.

China has upset the security balance in East Asia through the development of a longrange strike complex composed of anti-ship ballistic missiles, drones and cruise missiles, and hypersonic missiles that put U.S. naval fleets at risk. Beijing's innovative approach to sea control through the projection of power from land-based fires highlights three important differences between the law applicable to naval warfare and the law of armed conflict (LOAC) as it is implemented on land.1 These legal distinctions are subtle in law, but they shape concrete choices available to naval commanders and could determine the outcome of war at sea. First, the standard for what constitutes a military objective in naval warfare is broader than in land warfare. For example, enemy war-sustaining industries and commercial shipping may be captured or even destroyed in conflict at sea, whereas private property on land is generally protected. Second, in war on land, commanders must take all feasible precautions in attack to consider alternative methods or means to reduce injury to civilians or civilian objects, a high standard. During armed conflict at sea, only reasonable precautions must be taken. This lower bar makes sense because it is less likely that civilians and civilian objects will be caught up in a naval war. The practical result is that war at sea has fewer precautions. Third, attacks against military objectives in the law of armed conflict require a proportionality analysis, which operates differently at sea than on land. Those who plan, approve, or execute an attack are subject to the rule of proportionality, which prohibits attacks in which the expected collateral damage is excessive relative to the anticipated military advantage to be gained. Since naval warfare is fought from platforms, such as warships, submarines, and military aircraft, the proportionality analysis includes only civilians or civilian objects near the platform but does not include civilians or civilian objects on board. These legal nuances would govern any naval conflict between China and the United States and could quickly intensify and widen the conflict.

Armies sometimes use fratricidal coercion—violence and intimidation against their own troops—to force reluctant soldiers to fight. How this practice affects battlefield performance remains an open question. We study fratricidal coercion using a mixed-methods strategy, drawing on (1) monthly panel data on Soviet Rifle Divisions in World War II, built from millions of declassified personnel files; (2) paired comparisons of Rifle Divisions at the Battle of Leningrad; and (3) cross-national data on 526 land battles and war outcomes from 75 conflicts (1939–2011) to assess generalizability. We offer three sets of empirical findings. First, coercion keeps some soldiers from fleeing the battlefield, but at the cost of higher casualties and reduced initiative. Second, wartime and prewar coercion (such as mass repression and officer purges) affect soldiers’ behavior in similar, mutually reinforcing ways. Third, the resolve-boosting, initiative-dampening effects of fratricidal coercion generalize across belligerents and wars. Fratricidal coercion generates compliance through fear, compelling soldiers with variable levels of resolve to conform to a uniform standard of battlefield behavior. But the net utility of this approach is dubious. On balance, countries employing fratricidal coercion are less likely to win wars.

Levy talks about the opportunity for Israel, a war in Lebanon. When it comes to war, Israel is the land of unlimited opportunities. Every war is an opportunity and every opportunity brings a war. It's one thing to regard war as a horrific necessity, but it's something else when seen as an opportunity: an opportunity to shape a new world, a new reality, a better one. Hamas will be eradicated, the hostages released and Hezbollah will be ridiculed. The evacuated residents of the north will return to their homes, the Galilee will flourish and its flowers will bloom. The same will happen in communities along the Gaza border. What a wonderful opportunity war provides. The very concept of war as an opportunity points to a sick mindset. Viewing war as a sole and primary means of solving problems suggests a mental distortion. But in a country in which Karni Eldad, a columnist in the daily Israel Hayom, calls the dozens of people killed, the thousands of people wounded and the hundreds blinded by exploding pagers in Lebanon \"an immense gift to our nation, which greatly deserves it ahead of the new year,\" one is not surprised by anything. (Reprint 2023)

This essay analyzes the failure of Vladimir Putin's military in Ukraine in terms of five key factors. The first of these is Putin's monopolization of control over the armed forces, which has driven critical voices and honest debates out of military and defense matters. Second is the failure of reform: Efforts to overhaul the bloated, ill-equipped post-Soviet military have not produced a twenty-first–century fighting force that can match the world's best armies or counter their capabilities. Third, Russia's military has been unable to attract talented young people. Fourth, Russia's mammoth defense industry produces too few weapons, and those it does turn out cannot match sophisticated Western arms. Finally, the operations in Georgia, Crimea, and Syria were conducted against feeble adversaries and said zero about how Russian forces would perform in a conventional land war against a resolute, well-armed enemy. In short, the Russian military is a reflection of the state that created it: Autocratic, security-obsessed, and teeming with hypercentralized decisionmaking, dysfunctional relations between civilian and military authorities, inefficiency, corruption, and brutality.

The study examined the Land governance reforms in post conflict areas by focussing on managing land matters in a cohesive society of Northern Uganda. The objectives of the study were to analyse the factors contributing to the persistence of land conflicts in post conflict communities in Northern Uganda and to find out the land governance reforms which were carried out to resolve land disputes in post conflict areas of Northern Uganda. The study adopted a case study research design on a sample of 69 respondents using interviews, focus groups discussion and document review. Data were analysed qualitatively through discursive thematic methods by use of narratives and descriptions. The findings of the study revealed that despite the existing land governance reforms implemented, post war land conflicts have continued to exist in Northern Uganda due to a number of the factors. The study concluded that land conflicts as a result of such factors need to be effectively resolved to ensure harmony in the community. The study recommended that in resolving of post war land conflicts, the Government should ensure that it facilitates the people to register land, empower traditional leaders to be able to resolve conflicts and monitor courts to ensure that they dispense justice in a timely manner.

While humans are imperfect, machines have their limitations, too. Though humans cannot match the speed and accuracy of machines, the ideology, pride and will to dominate and rule are qualities only attributed to humans. The latter’s capability to change and evolve, opens new vistas of opportunities, innovations, integrations, and alignments, such as to deceive, distract, and defile the most invincible assailant. In this context, the fifth generation warfare marks a shift from conventional Clauswitzian understanding of war to the battle of ‘information and perception’. As for the generational concept in warfare, it depicts the evolution of war tactics enabled by advances in science and the accompanying growth in the sophistication of warfare tools. Today warfare relies less on the use of brute force and focuses more on non-kinetic means such as narrative, perception management, and asymmetric conflict to achieve political ends. This paper looks at the evolution of warfare from first to fifth generation. It also explores the latest war trends in land and air warfare and analyzes the hybrid and ‘Everywhere Battlefield’, which though marks technical superiority, yet points to a decline in humanity and human values.

This paper uses Edward Said's concept of colonial discourse to examine how Mars is colonized by the governments of Earth and dominated by transnational capitalism, as it is depicted in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. The novel portrays Mars as a battlefield for the imperial powers of Earth, where the wars for Martian land proceed from well-known predilections for imperialist and neo-colonial capitalism. Mars appears as a \"frontier,\" neither settled nor exploited, that can be colonized, where both the colonizers and colonized struggle for dominance. But Martian colonists reject corporate and institutional control and fight their own battles reminiscent of anti-colonial struggles on Earth. This qualitative study investigates how Mars can be viewed as an extension of neocolonialism by arguing that Robinson has depicted Mars as a colonial/neocolonial space. The novel serves as a warning to the institutions of Earth as it demonstrates that conquest, corporate dominance, and economic exploitation are challenges that must be continually opposed. The research underlines the need to create a system based on justice, freedom, and the wellbeing of all settlers. It raises both political and ethical questions and illustrates how speculative fiction like Red Mars plays a role in policymaking conversations.

Prominent theories stress the role of economic grievances in promoting political instability and conflict. They often point to inequality in the ownership of land as a primary source of such grievances. However, cross-national empirical studies fail to confirm a link between unequal distributions of land and civil war. These findings, I contend, stem from problems in theorizing and measuring rural inequality. This article distinguishes between the effects of total landholding inequality and the concentration of land ownership on conflict. Total landholding inequality, which includes landlessness, captures economic grievances in the countryside and is positively associated with conflict. Gini coefficients of landholding concentration capture both grievances and landowners’ capacity to organize as rebels and a repressive rural elite. The relationship between landholding Ginis and conflict is shaped like an inverted “U”: inequality correlates with an increasing likelihood of conflict, but as the concentration of landholdings reaches very high levels, the likelihood of conflict decreases with the formation of a small repressive class of landowners. Results of cross-national regressions—using new data on total landholding inequality and the concentration of landholdings—confirm these predictions. My findings provide evidence that landholding inequality is an important underlying cause of civil war.

This article sets out to answer a seemingly simple question: what is no-man's land? By positing this question, we aim to problematise the taken-for-granted status of no-man's land and its proliferation as a convenient colloquialism that is applied to a vast set of spaces, material conditions and socio-political circumstances. Despite its popular association with the killing fields of the First World War, no-man's land is considered here as a rich analytical category, which resonates in a broader historical and intellectual corpus. We present a conceptual framework for the study of no-man's land as a space produced by simultaneous forces of abandonment and enclosure. The analysis explores the function of no-man's lands as a critical quality that bears on concrete spatio-political realities. In doing so, we aim to open up future research avenues that will further deepen the conceptual and analytical challenges of no-man's lands in the 21st century.