A Slaveholders' Republic in the Tumult of War

Review essay of recent work on wartime disaffection in the southern Confederacy: Stephanie McCurry's award-winning _Confederate Reckoning_ and Victorian Bynum's _Long Shadow of the Civil War_. Includes a broader assessment of recent historiography, state of the field.

Voyage(s) to Sarajevo: Jean-Luc Godard and the Image of War

This essay discusses Jean-Luc Godard’s artistic response to the Bosnian War (1992-95), and its representations in the Western mass media. For Godard, the reluctance of Europe’s advanced liberal democracies to intervene meaningfully in Bosnia – their insistence that 'humanitarianism' rather than protective intervention was the order of the day – was tantamount to supporting Serbian fascism, and – a fortiori – regressing to a policy of appeasement reminiscent of the days of the Munich Agreement. Although Godard's stance set him against some of his former compatriots on the left, speculating on his ideological motivations is beside the point. Rather, it is is in his filmmaking, in his vision of cinema, and how it relates to other histories of the image, that Godard’s sensibility can be most keenly felt and understood. As the essay points out, even his recent contribution to Jean-Michel Frodon's compilation film, Bridges of Sarajevo/Les ponts de Sarajevo (2014, 114 mn.), persists in posing questions about how the past continues to shape the present, and how Sarajevo and its contemporary history still delineates the identity of Europe. 

The Climate of War: Violence, Warfare and Climatic Reductionism

National security agencies and other interested parties now often regard conflict as the inevitable consequence of climate change. This inclination to reduce war to the vicissitudes of climate is not new however. Here I examine some of the earlier ways in which violence was attributed to climatic conditions, particularly in the United States, and trace links between these older advocates of climatic determinism and the recent writings of those insisting that climate change will usher in a grim world of chronic warfare. It ends by drawing attention to the writings of some critics who are troubled by the ease with which climatic reductionism is capturing the public imagination.

Review of Mark F. Chingono. The State, Violence and Development. The Political Economy of War in Mozambique, 1975–1992.

Book review of: Mark F. Chingono. The State, Violence and Development. The Political Economy of War in Mozambique, 1975–1992. Avebury (Aldershot, Brookfield USA, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney), 1996. 291 pp. Foreword by Keith Hart. Tables. Appendix. Selected Bibliography. Index. £42.00. $71.95. Cloth.

Holidays in the Danger Zone: Entanglements of War and Tourism

A timely, and uniquely historical, look at how war turns soldiers, and all of us, into tourists. Holidays in the Danger Zone exposes the mundane and everyday entanglements between two seemingly opposed worlds—warfare and tourism. Debbie Lisle shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behavior of soldiers in war���especially the experiences of Western military forces in “exotic” settings. This includes not only R&R but also how battlefields themselves become landscapes of leisure and tourism. It further explores how a military sensibility shapes the development of tourism in the postwar context, from “Dark Tourism” (engaging with displays of conflict and atrocity) to exhibitions of conflict in museums and at memorial sites, as well as in advertising, film, journals, guidebooks, blogs, and photography. Focused on how war and tourism reinforce prevailing modes of domination, Holidays in the Danger Zone critically examines the long historical arc of the war-tourism nexus from nineteenth-century imperialism to World War I and World War II, from the Cold War to globalization and the War on Terror.