Ending Wars

Though scholars of political science and moral philosophy have long analyzed the justifications for and against waging war as well as the ethics of warfare itself, the problem of ending wars has received less attention. In the first book to apply just war theory to this phase of conflict, Eric Patterson presents a three-part view of justice in end-of-war settings involving order, justice, and reconciliation. Patterson’s case studies range from successful applications of jus post bellum, such as the U.S. Civil War or Kosovo, to challenges such as present-day Iraq.

Many books have been written about war, but few have focused on how wars can be brought to an end. Wars are rarely inevitable however and this book is aimed at understanding how violent conflicts can be brought to a close through intervention, mediation and political negotiation. The simple premise underlying the book is that wars between states and wars within states are generally fought by rational people for particular political goals or perceived interests. War is better understood as a methodology rather than an ideology. When the context, issues and actors in these armed conflicts change then it is often possible to control, or even transform such violence. By bringing together a number of existing debates from peace and conflict research as well as scholars of international relations, the book examines the dynamic forces that lie behind the ending of wars and how these have changed over time. Examples are drawn from a wide range of armed conflicts to analyse the efforts that have been made to move from War-War to Jaw-Jaw, or more typically Jaw-War. Efforts at third-party intervention, mediation and political negotiation across a range of conflict zones from Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa are discussed in full. Neither idealistic nor fatalistic, this book is a must-read for all students of international politics and security studies.

The first comprehensive treatment of how the United States has handled the final stages of its conflicts-from World War I to Iraq-spoiled repeatedly by leaders' failures to plan clearly for what to do when the guns fall silent. Concerned with not repeating past errors, our leaders miscalculate and prolong the conflict or invite unwelcome results. In his penetrating analysis of past, present, and future wars, Rose suggests how to break this cycle.

This Adelphi offers a series of economic perspectives on conflict resolution, to show how the challenges of peacebuilding can be more effectively tackled.

Will war ever end? Women across the world are proving that they can oppose patriarchal capitalist violence

"Dan Reiter explains how information about combat outcomes and other factors may persuade a warring nation to demand more or less in peace negotiations, and why a country might refuse to negotiate limited terms and instead tenaciously pursue absolute victory if it fears that its enemy might renege on a peace deal. He fully lays out the theory and then tests it on more than twenty cases of war-termination behavior, including decisions during the American Civil War, the two world wars, and the Korean War. Reiter helps solve some of the most enduring puzzles in military history, such as why Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, why Germany in 1918 renewed its attack in the West after securing peace with Russia in the East, and why Britain refused to seek peace terms with Germany after France fell in 1940.".

Since 1945, the average length of civil wars has increased three-fold. What explains this startling fact? Hironaka points to the crucial role of the international community in propping up new and weak states that resulted from the postwar decolonization movement. These states are prone to conflicts and lack the resources to resolve them decisively.

In this riveting and suspenseful New York Times best-selling book, Adam Hochschild brings WWI to life as never before... World War I was supposed to be the “war to end all wars.” Over four long years, nations around the globe were sucked into the tempest, and millions of men died on the battlefields. To this day, the war stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. To End All Wars focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Many of these dissenters were thrown in jail for their opposition to the war, from a future Nobel Prize winner to an editor behind bars who distributed a clandestine newspaper on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain’s most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other. Hochschild forces us to confront the big questions: Why did so many nations get so swept up in the violence? Why couldn’t cooler heads prevail? And can we ever avoid repeating history?