The British Army, information management and the First World War revolution in military affairs

Information Management (IM) – the systematic ordering, processing and channelling of information within organisations – forms a critical component of modern military command and control systems. As a subject of scholarly enquiry, however, the history of military IM has been relatively poorly served. Employing new and under-utilised archival sources, this article takes the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of the First World War as its case study and assesses the extent to which its IM system contributed to the emergence of the modern battlefield in 1918. It argues that the demands of fighting a modern war resulted in a general, but not universal, improvement in the BEF’s IM techniques, which in turn laid the groundwork, albeit in embryonic form, for the IM systems of modern armies. KEY WORDS: British Army, Information Management, First World War, Revolution in Military Affairs, Adaptatio

Directorate of Democratic Citizenship and Participation DGII-Directorate General of Democracy Council of Europe, 2014

Guide to policy developmen

Discourses of gender identities and gender roles in Pakistan: Women and non-domestic work in political representations

This paper aims to explore some of the manifold and changing links that official Pakistani state discourses forged between women and work from the 1940s to the late 2000s. The focus of the analysis is on discursive spaces that have been created for women engaged in non-domestic work. Starting from an interpretation of the existing academic literature, this paper argues that Pakistani women's non-domestic work has been conceptualised in three major ways: as a contribution to national development, as a danger to the nation, and as non-existent. The paper concludes that although some conceptualisations of work have been more powerful than others and, at specific historical junctures, have become part of concrete state policies, alternative conceptualisations have always existed alongside them. Disclosing the state's implication in the discursive construction of working women's identities might contribute to the destabilisation of hegemonic concepts of gendered divisions of labour in Pakistan