Koprcanje u vodi: žene, feminizam i oružane snage

This paper consists of five parts. Part I argues that, contrary to common perceptions, the attempt of modern feminism to put relations between men and women on a new and equal basis is not going anywhere. Part II extends the argument to the military and war, suggesting that women have only made limited inroads into “the last bastion" of male superiority and that what inroads they did make have often been more illusory than real. Part III argues that, even to the very limited extent women have succeeded in penetrating the military, the process has peaked and may now start going into reverse. Part IV suggests that, both in civilian life and in the military, what achievements feminism can show have been bought at such heavy cost as to be counterproductive. Finally, part V sums up the argument by suggesting that, both in civilian life and in the military, feminism’s quest for liberation has been both a myth and a cul de sac. And the faster women realize it, the better both for them and for men.Rad se sastoji iz pet dijelova. U prvom se dijelu dokazuje da, suprotno ustaljenim predodžbama, pokušaj modernog feminizma da odnose između muškaraca i žena postavu na nove temelje jednakosti ne vodi nikamo. Drugi dio ovaj argument proširuje na oružane snage i rat, pokazujući da su žene ostvarile samo ograničeni ulazak u “posljednji bastion” muške nadmoćnosti te da je taj ulazak u više slučaja iluzoran nego stvaran. U trećem se dijelu tvrdi da je proces - usprkos vrlo ograničenim razmjerima ženske penetracije u oružane snage - dosegao vrhunac i da bi sada mogao početi ići u obratnom smjeru. Četvrti dio zagovara tezu da je za sva postignuća feminizma plaćena tako visoka cijena da je cijela stvar kontraporoduktivna. Konačni, peti dio zaključuje raspravu tvrdnjom da je feministička borba za oslobođenje, kako u civilnom tako i u vojnom životu, bila i mit i slijepa ulica. Što to žene brže shvate, to će biti bolje i za njih i za muškarce

Through a Glass, Darkly

Confronted with its own supreme product, nuclear weapons, large-scale interstate war as a phenomenon is slowly but surely being squeezed below the historical horizon. What will arise in its place

Preface. The Study of War

Preface to the Estonian Yearbook of Military History 7 (13) 201

War Craft: The embodied politics of making war

This article makes the case for examining war from what Stephanie Bunn calls a ‘making point of view’. Makers and their material production of and for war have been neglected in our accounts of war, security and international relations. An attention to processes of making for war can reveal important things about how such processes are lived and undertaken at the level of the body. The article focuses on the particular phenomena of martial craft labour – the recreational making of ‘stuff’, including hats and pillowcases, by civilians for soldiers. To explore embodiment within this social site, an ethnographic method is outlined that enables the reading of objects as embodied texts, the observation of others in processes of making, and the undertaking of making by the researcher. Analysing embodied registers of aesthetic expression and the social values that attend such crafting for war reveals how this making is a space through which intimate embodied, emotional circulations undertake work for liberal-state and military-institutional logics and objectives, obscure violence, normalize war, and produce the military as an abstract social cause. Beyond the immediate empirical focus of this article, a much wider political entanglement of violence, embodiment and material production necessitates a concerted research agenda

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

The role of war in deep transitions: exploring mechanisms, imprints and rules in sociotechnical systems

This paper explores in what ways the two world wars influenced the development of sociotechnical systems underpinning the culmination of the first deep transition. The role of war is an underexplored aspect in both the Techno-Economic Paradigms (TEP) approach and the Multi-level perspective (MLP) which form the two key conceptual building blocks of the Deep Transitions (DT) framework. Thus, we develop a conceptual approach tailored to this particular topic which integrates accounts of total war and mechanisms of war from historical studies and imprinting from organisational studies with the DT framework’s attention towards rules and meta-rules. We explore in what ways the three sociotechnical systems of energy, food, and transport were affected by the emergence of new demand pressures and logistical challenges during conditions of total war; how war impacted the directionality of sociotechnical systems; the extent to which new national and international policy capacities emerged during wartime in the energy, food, and transport systems; and the extent to which these systems were influenced by cooperation and shared sacrifice under wartime conditions. We then explore what lasting changes were influenced by the two wars in the energy, food, and transport systems across the transatlantic zone. This paper seeks to open up a hitherto neglected area in analysis on sociotechnical transitions and we discuss the importance of further research that is attentive towards entanglements of warfare and the military particularly in the field of sustainability transitions