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Can the plight of civilians in war be improved? Can martial forces adopt and implement policies that transcend parochial national interests and that override the polarizing militaristic framing of war—victory/defeat, allies/enemy, costs/benefits? Can the agents of war avoid succumbing to the patterns of civilian objectification? Can these agents find the shared humanity of the innocents of war, recognizing that all citizens of the world are potential civilians in war? What policy changes are needed to address the humanitarian imperatives in conjunction with the rights of nations (or non-state actors) to engage in just war? Chapter 16, by the volume editors, provides a critical overview of the plight of civilians in war, focusing on the political and normative underpinnings of decisions, actions, policies, and practices of major sectors of war. Policy recommendations are offered that seek to humanize the civilian Other.
This book explores the issue of civilian devastation in modern warfare, focusing on the complex processes that effectively establish civilians’ identity in times of war.
Underpinning the physicality of war’s tumult are structural forces that create landscapes of civilian vulnerability. Such forces operate in four sectors of modern warfare: nationalistic ideology, state-sponsored militaries, global media, and international institutions. Each sector promotes its own constructions of civilian identity in relation to militant combatants: constructions that prove lethal to the civilian noncombatant who lacks political power and decision-making capacity with regards to their own survival.
Civilians and Modern War provides a critical overview of the plight of civilians in war, examining the political and normative underpinnings of the decisions, actions, policies, and practices of major sectors of war. The contributors seek to undermine the ‘tunnelling effect’ of the militaristic framework regarding the experiences of noncombatants.
This book will be of much interest to students of war and conflict studies, ethics, conflict resolution, and IR/Security Studies.
