In The Midst Of Wars

Civil wars have caused tremendous human suffering in the last century, and the United Nations is often asked to send peacekeepers to stop ongoing violence. Yet despite being the most visible tool of international intervention, policymakers and scholars have little systematic knowledge about how well peacekeeping works. Peacekeeping in the Midst of War offers the most comprehensive analyses of peacekeeping on civil war violence to date. With unique data on different types of violence in civil wars around the world, Peacekeeping in the Midst of War offers a rigorous understanding of UN intervention by analysing both wars with and without UN peacekeeping efforts. It also directly measures the strength of UN missions in personnel capacity and constitution. Using large-n quantitative analyses, the book finds that UN peacekeeping missions with appropriately constituted force capacities mitigate violence in civil wars. The authors conclude by analyzing the broader context of UN intervention effectiveness, and conclude that peacekeeping is a more generally effective way to reduce the human suffering associated with civil war.

A Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus, Kilcullen's vision of war dramatically influenced America's decision to rethink its military strategy in Iraq. Now, Kilcullen provides a remarkably fresh perspective on the War on Terror.

Robert Ross, a sensitive nineteen-year-old Canadian officer, went to war--The War to End All Wars. He found himself in the nightmare world of trench warfare, of mud and smoke, of chlorine gas and rotting corpses. In this world gone mad, Robert Ross performed a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death.

Annotation This book captures the human face of the frontlines, revealing both the visible and the hidden realities of contemporary war, power, and international profiteering in the 21st century.

Edward Geary Lansdale (1908-1987) truly became a legend in his own time. His mission to the Philippines in the early 1950s as an Air Force officer and CIA agent resulted in the defeat of the communist-led Hukbalahap movement and the subsequent election of Ramon Magsaysay, arguably the most popular president that the people of the Philippines have known. In 1954 Lansdale was sent to Vietnam, where he hoped to repeat the program of counterinsurgency that was so successful in the Philippines. His ideas of land redistribution, grass roots village democracy, and elimination of corruption in the South Vietnamese government and army gradually were superseded by massive air and ground operations. When Lansdale returned to the United States for duty in Washington, he never ceased to promote the advancement of democratic ideology as the key tool to "win the hearts and minds of the people of Asia." He became romanticized in "The Quiet American" by Graham Greene, "The Ugly American" by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, and "Le Mal Jaune" by Jean Larteguy. "In the Midst of Wars" is history as Edward Lansdale saw it.

This is a philosophical treatise on war written by an Oxford grad who served in Afghanistan.