BiblioVault - Books about War

Earthmoving

Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan

Eray Çayli

University of Texas Press, 2025

Focuses on contemporary art and media to examine the role of visuals in environmental violence and war in Northern Kurdistan.

Extractivism—exploiting the earth for resources—has long driven racial capitalism and colonialism. And yet, how does extractivism operate in a world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are unprecedentedly widespread? Eray Çaylı argues it does so by mobilizing these sensibilities in new ways. Extractivism is no longer only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also leaving those who witness this violent displacement sentimentally moved.

Earthmoving conceptualizes this duality. Derived from Çaylı’s years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world’s largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century—Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. Together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism both by making its harm visible and by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms.

[more]

“Eastern Europe” and War

A New Kidnapping?

Aliaksei Kazharski

Central European University Press, 2026

This edited volume focuses on the effects that Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine had on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It includes chapters covering fourteen countries situated in different corners of the broader region. Individual contributions shed light on how these CEE countries positioned themselves vis-à-vis the war and (re)defined their own regional identities and geopolitical belonging. The chapters offer a rich survey of the local discourses and perspectives, grasping the region in its persisting complexity and diversity.

[more]

Economic Behaviour in Adversity

Jack Hirshleifer

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Conflict, disaster, and destruction—despite their historical and current significance—have not yet been adequately studied from the economic point of view. Economic Behaviour in Adversity brings together ten important essays, several previously unpublished, dealing with the choices people make in times of disaster and conflict. These essays help explain the possibilities and limits of human cooperation under severe environmental pressure.

Part I, "Disaster and Recovery," contains previously unpublished studies of major historical catastrophes, among them the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the Civil War in Russia that followed the Bolshevik revolution, and the mass bombing of Germany and of Japan during World War II. Accompanying the historical studies are several analytical papers that interpret the disaster experience.

The essays in Part II, "Cooperation and Conflict," represent innovative theoretical analyses based on a common theme—that cooperation and conflict are alternative strategies whereby individuals, groups, and different forms of social organization struggle with one another for evolutionary survival. Ultimately, these essays indicate, the political economy of the human species is an instance of Darwin's "economy of nature."

[more]

Embracing Arms

Cultural Representation of Slavic and Balkan Women in War

Yana Hashamova

Central European University Press, 2012

Discursive practices during war polarize and politicize gender: they normally require men to fulfill a single, overriding task—destroy the enemy—but impose a series of often contradictory expectations on women. The essays in the book establish links between political ideology, history, psychology, cultural studies, cinema, literature, and gender studies and addresses questions such as— what is the role of women in war or military conflicts beyond the well-studied victimization? Can the often contradictory expectations of women and their traditional roles be (re)thought and (re)constructed? How do cultural representations of women during war times reveal conflicting desires and poke holes in the ideological apparatus of the state and society?

[more]

Emergency Presidential Power

From the Drafting of the Constitution to the War on Terror

Chris Edelson; Foreword by Louis Fisher

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

Can a U.S. president decide to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely without charges or secretly monitor telephone conversations and e-mails without a warrant in the interest of national security? Was the George W. Bush administration justified in authorizing waterboarding? Was President Obama justified in ordering the killing, without trial or hearing, of a U.S. citizen suspected of terrorist activity? Defining the scope and limits of emergency presidential power might seem easy—just turn to Article II of the Constitution. But as Chris Edelson shows, the reality is complicated. In times of crisis, presidents have frequently staked out claims to broad national security power. Ultimately it is up to the Congress, the courts, and the people to decide whether presidents are acting appropriately or have gone too far.

Drawing on excerpts from the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court opinions, Department of Justice memos, and other primary documents, Edelson weighs the various arguments that presidents have used to justify the expansive use of executive power in times of crisis. Emergency Presidential Power uses the historical record to evaluate and analyze presidential actions before and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The choices of the twenty-first century, Edelson concludes, have pushed the boundaries of emergency presidential power in ways that may provide dangerous precedents for current and future commanders-in-chief.

Winner, Crader Family Book Prize in American Values, Department of History and Crader Family Endowment for American Values, Southeast Missouri State University

[more]

An Empire of Indifference

American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management

Randy Martin

Duke University Press, 2007

In this significant Marxist critique of contemporary American imperialism, the cultural theorist Randy Martin argues that a finance-based logic of risk control has come to dominate Americans’ everyday lives as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Risk management—the ability to adjust for risk and to leverage it for financial gain—is the key to personal finance as well as the defining element of the massive global market in financial derivatives. The United States wages its amorphous war on terror by leveraging particular interventions (such as Iraq) to much larger ends (winning the war on terror) and by deploying small numbers of troops and targeted weaponry to achieve broad effects. Both in global financial markets and on far-flung battlegrounds, the multiplier effects are difficult to foresee or control.

Drawing on theorists including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Achille Mbembe, Martin illuminates a frightening financial logic that must be understood in order to be countered. Martin maintains that finance divides the world between those able to avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk taking (investors) and those who cannot do so, who are considered “at risk.” He contends that modern-day American imperialism differs from previous models of imperialism, in which the occupiers engaged with the occupied to “civilize” them, siphon off wealth, or both. American imperialism, by contrast, is an empire of indifference: a massive flight from engagement. The United States urges an embrace of risk and self-management on the occupied and then ignores or dispossesses those who cannot make the grade.

[more]

Empire State-Building

War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–1952

Joanna Lewis

Ohio University Press, 2001

This history of administrative thought and practice in colonial Kenya looks at the ways in which white people tried to engineer social change.

It asks four questions:
- Why was Kenya’s welfare operation so idiosyncratic and spartan compared with that of other British colonies?
- Why did a transformation from social welfare to community development produce further neglect of the very poor?
- Why was there no equivalent to the French tradition of community medicine?
- If there was a transformatory element of colonial rule that sought to address poverty, where and why did it fall down?

The answers offer revealing insight into the dynamics of rule in the late colonial period in Kenya.

[more]

The Ends of Research

Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods

Tom Özden-Schilling

Duke University Press, 2023

In The Ends of Research Tom Özden-Schilling explores the afterlives of several research initiatives that emerged in the wake of the “War in the Woods,” a period of anti-logging blockades in Canada in the late twentieth century. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among neighboring communities of White environmental scientists and First Nations mapmakers in northwest British Columbia, Özden-Schilling examines these researchers’ lasting investments and the ways they struggle to continue their work long after the loss of government funding. He charts their use of planning documents, Indigenous territory maps, land use plots, reports, and other documents that help them not only to survive institutional restructuring but to hold on to the practices that they hope will enable future researchers to continue their work. He also shows how their lives and aspirations shape and are shaped by decades-long battles over resource extraction and Indigenous land claims. By focusing on researchers’ experiences and personal attachments, Özden-Schilling illustrates the complex relationships between researchers and rural histories of conservation, environmental conflict, resource extraction, and the long-term legacies of scientific research.

[more]

The Ends of War, Volume 25

Patrick Deer , ed.

Duke University Press

This special issue of Social Text examines the self-perpetuating nature of postmodern war and war culture. It looks at the instrumental nature of war discourse as a political force and challenges its vision of endless warfare as the means to control both domestic and foreign populations in an era of globalization. Essays analyze the historical and material interests that war serves and challenge the seductive mythology of high-tech precision warfare, which allows the traumatic effects of war to be considered at a great distance. The issue also argues that the increasing tendency to discuss war metaphorically—as in the phrases “War on Drugs” and “War on Terror”—blurs the boundaries between civilian and soldier and between combatant and noncombatant and defers the human cost of permanent warfare.

The contributors to this special issue—drawing on cultural studies, anthropology, economics, psychoanalysis, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and war literature—target the blind spots in current debates about war. One essay examines the financing of war, challenging the myth that our military-industrial complex generates economic bounty. Another contributor addresses strategies of high-tech urban warfare now being developed by the U.S. military and warns of the historical limits of colonial policing techniques that build on practices of surveillance. Other essays discuss the eroticization of “consent” embodied in the practice of torture at Abu Ghraib; the paradoxes of paramilitary policing and popular resistance along the militarized Mexico-U.S. border; and the continuities between the permanent war economy that emerged in the United States during World War II and the current disastrous confluence of militarism, global outsourcing, and economic depletion.

Contributors. Ashley Dawson, Patrick Deer, Jonathan Michael Feldman, Kennan Ferguson, Jean Franco, Randy Martin, Leerom Medovoi, Rosalind C. Morris, Gilberto Rosas

[more]

Ethics Beyond War's End

Eric Patterson, Editor

Georgetown University Press, 2015

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have focused new attention on a perennial problem: how to end wars well. What ethical considerations should guide war’s settlement and its aftermath? In cases of protracted conflicts, recurring war, failed or failing states, or genocide and war crimes, is there a framework for establishing an enduring peace that is pragmatic and moral?

Ethics Beyond War’s End provides answers to these questions from the just war tradition. Just war thinking engages the difficult decisions of going to war and how war is fought. But from this point forward just war theory must also take into account what happens after war ends, and the critical issues that follow: establishing an enduring order, employing political forms of justice, and cultivating collective forms of conciliation. Top thinkers in the field—including Michael Walzer, Jean Bethke Elshtain, James Turner Johnson, and Brian Orend—offer powerful contributions to our understanding of the vital issues associated with late- and post conflict in tough, real-world scenarios that range from the US Civil War to contemporary quagmires in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and the Congo.

[more]

Ethics, Nationalism, and Just War

Medieval and Contemporary Perspectives

Henrik Syse

Catholic University of America Press, 2007

The book covers a wide range of topics and raises issues rarely touched on in the ethics-of-war literature, such as environmental concerns and the responsibility of bystanders.

[more]

The Ethics of War and Peace Revisited

Moral Challenges in an Era of Contested and Fragmented Sovereignty

Daniel R. Brunstetter and Jean-Vincent Holeindre, Editors

Georgetown University Press

How do we frame decisions to use or abstain from military force? Who should do the killing? Do we need new paradigms to guide the use of force? And what does “victory” mean in contemporary conflict?

In many ways, these are timeless questions. But they should be revisited in light of changing circumstances in the twenty-first century. The post–Cold War, post-9/11 world is one of contested and fragmented sovereignty: contested because the norm of territorial integrity has shed some of its absolute nature, fragmented because some states do not control all of their territory and cannot defeat violent groups operating within their borders. Humanitarian intervention, preventive war, and just war are all framing mechanisms aimed at convincing domestic and international audiences to go to war—or not, as well as to decide who is justified in legally and ethically killing. The international group of scholars assembled in this book critically examine these frameworks to ask if they are flawed, and if so, how they can be improved. Finally, the volume contemplates what all the killing and dying is for if victory ultimately proves elusive.

[more]

Extinction Song

John James

Tupelo Press, 2026

A collection that combines fixed poetic forms with long-form meditative lyrics to explore questions of agency in the Anthropocene.

Extinction Song begins with a tender depiction of early parenthood, as the speaker cradles his newborn son while imagining a dystopian climate future. The poems open into a broader consideration of overlapping and interrelated systems, from the confines of received knowledge to the closed circuit of ideology to the circularity of pollutive environmental cycles. Attentive to the levels of sound and of visual architecture, these poems highlight both destruction and unseen possibilities. By turns meditative and probing, and sometimes slyly funny, Extinction Song unwinds the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.

[more]

The Eye of War

Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone

Antoine Bousquet

University of Minnesota Press, 2018

How perceptual technologies have shaped the history of war from the Renaissance to the present

From ubiquitous surveillance to drone strikes that put “warheads onto foreheads,” we live in a world of globalized, individualized targeting. The perils are great. In The Eye of War, Antoine Bousquet provides both a sweeping historical overview of military perception technologies and a disquieting lens on a world that is, increasingly, one in which anything or anyone that can be perceived can be destroyed—in which to see is to destroy.

Arguing that modern-day global targeting is dissolving the conventionally bounded spaces of armed conflict, Bousquet shows that over several centuries, a logistical order of militarized perception has come into ascendancy, bringing perception and annihilation into ever-closer alignment. The efforts deployed to evade this deadly visibility have correspondingly intensified, yielding practices of radical concealment that presage a wholesale disappearance of the customary space of the battlefield. Beginning with the Renaissance’s fateful discovery of linear perspective, The Eye of War discloses the entanglement of the sciences and techniques of perception, representation, and localization in the modern era amid the perpetual quest for military superiority. In a survey that ranges from the telescope, aerial photograph, and gridded map to radar, digital imaging, and the geographic information system, Bousquet shows how successive technological systems have profoundly shaped the history of warfare and the experience of soldiering.

A work of grand historical sweep and remarkable analytical power, The Eye of War explores the implications of militarized perception for the character of war in the twenty-first century and the place of human subjects within its increasingly technical armature.

[more]