Digital Commons Network^™

Don't Shoot The Messenger By One Of The Messengers: A Response To Merlino Et Al., Simon A. Cole

Tulsa Law Review

No abstract provided.

Become The Change Newsletter For September 2009, Center For Nonviolence And Peace Studies

Center for Nonviolence & Peace Studies

The September 2009 issue of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies newsletter, Become the Change, is a periodical with articles written by faculty, ongoing research projects, upcoming course offerings and Center events.

A Tragedy Of The Commons: Property Rights Issues In Shanghai Historic Residences, Kara L. Phillips, Amy L. Sommers

Penn State International Law Review (1982 - 2011)

No abstract provided.

If They Just Weren't So Rich!, Anja Mihr

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The deadliest war on earth-as it is called-in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will only end when the country's richness fades or is kept under surveillance. Human rights and peace might have a chance if Congo's lucrative diamond, gold or coltan mines were under shared control by non-profit agencies or international organizations with the intention to spread the mines' benefits and wealth among the Congolese people. Wishful thinking? Most likely it is, but what other alternative is there? The country's extraordinary wealth in natural resources is the main reason for the immense corruption, the extermination of entire villages, the …

In The Trenches At Petersburg: Field Fortifications And Confederate Defeat., Samuel Watson

Civil War Book Review

A Look at the Role of Field Fortifications in Confederate Defeat

Cwbr Author Interview: No Quarter: The Battle Of The Crater, 1864, Richard Slotkin

Civil War Book Review

Interview with Dr. Richard Slotkin

Interviewed by Nathan Buman

Dealing With Political Ferment In Latin America: The Populist Revival, The Emergence Of The Center, And Implications For U.S. Policy, Hal Brands Dr.

Books, Monographs & Collaborative Studies

The current political dynamics in Latin America is analyzed, and their meaning for the United States is evaluated. The author argues that references to a uniform “left turn” in the region are misleading, and that Latin America is actually witnessing a dynamic competition between two very different forms of governance. Represented by leaders like Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and others, radical populism emphasizes the politics of grievance and a penchant for extreme solutions. Moderate, centrist governance can be found in countries like Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay. It stresses diplomatic pragmatism, the protection of democratic practices, and the need …

A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role Of Guerrillas In The American Civil War, Jeremy Neely

Civil War Book Review

Civil War Guerrillas

Using Communication Theories In Min-Risk Education Campaigns: The Case Of Vietnam, Duong Trong Hue

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Landmines and unexploded ordnances (UXO) are long-term public health problems in both conflict and post-conflict countries. Consequences from landmines and UXO incidents result in deaths, injuries, subsequent disabilities, and other socioeconomic burdens from the investments in healthcare resources (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 1997). In 2005, the total number of landmine and UXO casualties in the world was 7,328, in which 24 percent were killed. Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, 38,849 people have been killed in Vietnam alone, and 65,852 have been injured. More than thirty years after the war, Vietnam continues to suffer consequences, …

The Captures Clause, Ingrid Wuerth

University of Chicago Law Review

The Captures Clause of the United States Constitution gives Congress the power to "make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water." A variety of courts, scholars, politicians, and others have recently cited the Clause to support conflicting arguments about the scope of Congress's power to initiate and prosecute war. Some claim or assume that the Captures Clause gives Congress power over the taking and detention of people, while others conclude that the power is limited to property only. Similarly, those who view Congress's power broadly understand the Captures Clause as giving Congress the general power to determine what (or whom) …

The Tipping Point: Biological Terrorism, Scott Cary

Journal of Strategic Security

This article presents a strategic, operational, and tactical analysis of information currently available on the state of bio-weapons development by non-state actors, primarily Islamist jihadists. It discusses the evidence supporting a practical assessment that non-state actors have begun to acquire, and in the near-term intend to employ, bio-weapons. A pathogen and method of attack specifically designed to achieve the strategic goals of jihadists are presented as functional examples of the problem of the emerging global bio-weapons threat.Is a terrorist attack utilizing biological weapons a real threat? If so, is there a way to predict the circumstances under which it might …

Book Reviews, J. Kelly Stewart, Mark J. Roberts, Jeffery Ahn, Lloyd H. Hoffman, Donald J. Goldstein

Journal of Strategic Security

The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. By David Kilcullen.

Aviation and Airport Security: Terrorism and Safety Concerns. By Kathleen M. Sweet.

Executive Measures, Terrorism and National Security: Have the Rules of the Game Changed? By David Bonner.

Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spy techs from Communism to Al-Qaeda. By Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, with Henry Robert Schlesinger.

Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels who brought Churchill to Power and Saved England. By Lynne Olson.

Review: Digital Culture, Play And Identity: A World Of Warcraft Reader, Jordan Lieser

Collected Faculty Scholarship

Both the digital and real societies produced by Blizzard's Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft, have received a lot of attention in the relatively new field of game studies. Due to its phenomenal size and cultural significance, the interest World of Warcraft draws is justifiable. The book, Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader attempts to dissect the gaming industry's largest MMORPG through a compilation of work consisting of thirteen separate analyses, representing a wide variety of scholars trained with different analytical toolsets. This format was deliberately chosen by the editors, Hilde G. …

Cyberspace And The “First Battle” In 21st-Century War, Robert A. Miller, Daniel T. Kuehl

Defense Horizons

Wars often start well before main forces engage. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, combat often began when light cavalry units crossed the border. For most of the 20th century, the “first battle” typically involved dawn surprise attacks, usually delivered by air forces.¹ While a few of these attacks were so shattering that they essentially decided the outcome of the struggle or at least dramatically shaped its course—the Israeli air force’s attack at the opening of the June 1967 Six-Day War comes to mind—in most cases the defender had sufficient strategic space—geographic and/or temporal—to recover and eventually redress …

Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy, Justin Kelly Brigadier, Michael James Brennan Dr.

Books, Monographs & Collaborative Studies

The publication of the 1982 version of Army Field Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations, introduced to the English-speaking world the idea of an operational level of war encompassing the planning and conduct of campaigns and major operations. It was followed 3 years later by the introduction of the term “operational art” which was, in practice, the skillful management of the operational level of war. This conception of an identifiably separate level of war that defined the jurisdiction of the profession of arms was, for a number of historical and cultural reasons, attractive to U.S. practitioners and plausible to its English-speaking allies. …

Alfonso X, St. James, And The Virgin, Anthony Cárdenas-Rotunno

Research Papers

This study explores how pilgrimage connects to the political Weltanschuung of Alfonso X, born in 1221-1284, especially as concerns the perceived rivalry between the shrine of Mary at Villa-Sirga and of Santiago at Compostela. By reviewing Alfonsos pragmatism behind all of the works he sponsored, by viewing the relationship between the Mother of God and St. James, by focusing on miracles in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, and especially viewing Alfonso's creation of a military order dedicated to the Virgin, it concludes that perceived rivalry between the two shrines was exclusively popular and not regal as proposed by some.'

Defending The Military Food Supply: Acquisition, Preparation, And Protection Of Food At U.S. Military Installations, Andrew S. Mara, Lynn Mcgrath

Defense and Technology Papers

This paper examines current measures in place to defend the military food supply and provides a series of recommendations that will enhance food defense and provide ancillary benefits to the military.

Rhetoric And Context In Saramago's Levantado Do Chão, David Frier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Rhetoric and Context in Saramago's Levantado do Chão" David Frier analyses the 1980 novel by Nobel in Literature 1998 José Saramago. The novel, as-of-yet not translated to English, Risen from the Ground, achieves its success as a key text of the Portuguese post-Revolutionary period in part through its resourceful rhetorical development of textual conventions and echoes derived from a wide range of high- and popular cultural contexts, ranging from the epic poetry of Camões's Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads) of 1578, through glamorized medieval battle-scenes to popular stories and beliefs and to the Fado music of Amália Rodrigues. …

Iraq: Strategic Reconciliation, Targeting, And Key Leader Engagement, Jeanne F. Hull Captain

Books, Monographs & Collaborative Studies

Discussion of Key Leader Engagements (KLE) as a nonlethal option for countering insurgent organizations. Outreach to insurgent organizations through KLE can be both an economy of force measure and, in some circumstances, could be more effective than engaging insurgent organizations with lethal force. The challenge with insurgent outreach to KLE, though, is that it must be tied to a legitimate host-nation government effort towards reconciliation or, at a minimum, accommodation with the insurgent organizations in question. Through the lens of the Multi-National Forces-Iraq Force Strategic Engagement Cell (FSEC), the author illustrates how KLEs can be incorporated as targets in the …

A Comprehensive Approach To Improving U.S. Security Force Assistance Efforts, Theresa Baginski Lieutenant Colonel, Francis Donovan Lieutenant Colonel, Richard A. Lacquement Colonel, Simon Don Roach Brigadier

Books, Monographs & Collaborative Studies

Security Force Assistance is analyzed, and some specific recommendations designed to improve U.S. performance are provided. While SFA may be a new term, the activities themselves are familiar ones related to how the Department of Defense works to train, advise, and assist foreign partners' security establishments to accomplish common objectives. The United States has demonstrated serious SFA deficiencies in recent years. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has noted, the United States is likely to remain actively and broadly engaged in SFA for many years to come. The need for comprehensive improvement encompasses DoD military and civilian efforts and requires …

A "New" Dynamic In The Western Hemisphere Security Environment: The Mexican Zetas And Other Private Armies, Max G. Manwaring Dr.

Books, Monographs & Collaborative Studies

This monograph is intended to help political, military, policy, opinion, and academic leaders think strategically about explanations, consequences, and responses that might apply to the volatile and dangerous new dynamic that has inserted itself into the already crowded Mexican and hemispheric security arena, that is, the privatized Zeta military organization. In Mexico, this new dynamic involves the migration of traditional hard-power national security and sovereignty threats from traditional state and nonstate adversaries to hard and soft power threats from professional private nonstate military organizations. This dynamic also involves a more powerful and ambiguous mix of terrorism, crime, and conventional war …

Escalation And Intrawar Deterrence During Limited Wars In The Middle East, W. Andrew Terrill Dr.

Books, Monographs & Collaborative Studies

A central purpose of this monograph is to reexamine two earlier conflicts for insights that may be relevant for ongoing dangers during limited wars involving nations possessing chemical or biological weapons or emerging nuclear arsenals. These conflicts are the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the 1991 Gulf War. Both of these wars were fought at the conventional level, although the prospect of Israel using nuclear weapons (1973), Egypt using biological weapons (1973), or Iraq using chemical and biological weapons (1991) were of serious concern at various points during the fighting. This monograph will consider why efforts at escalation control and intrawar …

Synthesis, Interdiction, And Protection Of Layered Networks, Kevin T. Kennedy

Theses and Dissertations

This research developed the foundation, theory, and framework for a set of analysis techniques to assist decision makers in analyzing questions regarding the synthesis, interdiction, and protection of infrastructure networks. This includes extension of traditional network interdiction to directly model nodal interdiction; new techniques to identify potential targets in social networks based on extensions of shortest path network interdiction; extension of traditional network interdiction to include layered network formulations; and develops models/techniques to design robust layered networks while considering trade-offs with cost. These approaches identify the maximum protection/disruption possible across layered networks with limited resources, find the most robust layered …

International Law In Crisis: A Qualitative Empirical Contribution To The Compliance Debate, Michael P. Scharf

Cardozo Law Review

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Professors Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner published The Limits of International Law, a potentially revolutionary book that employs rational choice theory to argue that international law is really just "politics" and does not render a "compliance pull" on State decision-makers. Critics have pointed out that Goldsmith and Posner's identification of the role of international law in each of their case studies is largely conjectural, and that what is needed is qualitative empirical data that identifies the international law-based arguments that were actually made and the policy-makers' responses to …

Practical Localized Waves Generation, Mohamed Ahmed Salem

Dissertations

Since the early works on localized waves (LW), extensive results were published on this important subject, from both the theoretical and the experimental points of view. Nevertheless, those experimental techniques of LW generation suffer from several shortcomings. A major one is that only pulse peaks were accredited. Either the full profile of the generated pulse was not reported, or it was not closely matching the theoretical profile. Additionally, low resolutions of the generated LWs were reported in the acoustic X-Waves. The conductors of the experiment attributed this effect to the limited bandwidth of the excitation elements.

The interest in the …

Ethics Of Human Enhancement: 25 Questions & Answers, Fritz Allhoff, Patrick Lin, James Moor, John Weckert

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

The Utah Statesman, August 28, 2009, Utah State University

The Utah Statesman

Weekly student newspaper of Utah State University in Logan.

Guatemala: Constructing Cleaner Stoves, Kevin Fisher, Scott Caltabiano

ETHOS Technical Reports

Work was done by ETHOS students in Comitancillo, Guatemala from May of 2009 until August of 2009. Comitancillo is located in the Northwest region of Guatemala. The students worked through the locally ran Non-Profit Organisation called Asociación Maya-Mam de Investigación y Desarrollo (AMMID). AMMID works with the community of Comitancillo to help promote woman empowerment as well as the preservation and well being of the Mayan-Mam culture. The students’ main focus was to deliver help on appropriate technology projects to Comitancillo. During the time in Guatemala six stoves were funded and built by the students with the help of AMMID …

Kc-135 Simulator Systems Engineering Case Study, Air Force Center For Systems Engineering, Macaulay-Brown, Inc., Don Chrislaghi, Richard Dyer, Free Jay

AFIT Documents

No abstract provided.

The Necessity Of "Conflict Transformation" In Approaches To Psychosocial Interventions, Kay Naito

Theses, Dissertations, and Projects

This theoretical study examines the psychosocial discourse in humanitarian aid. International humanitarian assistance through psychosocial interventions is now common in complex emergencies – the context that emerges from war and violent conflict that is unique to the contemporary era of globalization. Humanitarian assistance aims to meet the needs of war-affected communities, alleviate suffering, remove barriers to health and development, quell cycles of violence, work towards long-term benefits, and maintain the core principle of 'do no harm' at the center of its moral intentions. Lively ethical, medical and cultural debates have contributed to the development of a wide range of different …