Over the past decade British troops have been stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of what was previously called the 'war on terror'. During this period reports have emerged of British soldiers engaging in sexual abuse against local detainees, the killing of innocent Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and the use of banned techniques during interrogations. At the same time, widely televised repatriations of dead and injured soldiers have taken place, and a combination of the proliferation in use of improvised explosive devices by enemy forces and improvements in battlefield medicine has meant increasing numbers of soldiers are returning home with limbs missing and permanent disfigurement. It is unpacking how these specific acts of wartime violence have become possible that this thesis is concerned with. Specifically, this project will ask questions about the relation between contemporary constructions of British militarised masculinity - what I call a 'liberal warrior' - and the enactment of wartime violence. At its core, this thesis will argue that a liberal warrior subjectivity will never be stable or 'complete', and that it is in its precariousness and attempts at stabilisation that specific militarised violences become possible. Building on a burgeoning feminist literature on militarised masculinities and appropriating Avery Gordon's epistemology of ghosts and hauntings, I detail a way of conceptualising a militarised masculine liberal warrior that avoids mapping 'hard' and 'fixed' borders. Constituted through gendered discourses and hierarchical gendered binaries, boundaries are marked around a liberal warrior that excludes traits and characteristics a liberal warrior is not. However, those traits and characteristics that a liberal warrior has attempted to expel remain an integral constituting part of what is included, haunting the subjectivity, and destabilising its attempts at coherent representation. I argue it is through the appearances of ghosts - the concrete materialisation of an aspect of a haunting - that notice can be given to the ever-presence of hauntings. Focusing specifically on attempts at expelling - exorcising - hauntings of (homo)sexual potential, uncontrollability, colonial desires and fears, and the brutality of warfare in the (re)construction of a liberal warrior, the thesis pays attention to the materialisations of ghosts across multiple sites, including basic training, barrack living and during a tour of duty. Emerging as the banal and mundane, and also as spectacular wartime violence, recognising these materialisations as ghosts has several effects. It draws attention to the (im)possibility of a liberal warrior and always already haunting presences, it allows the conceptual space between everyday soldiering 'doings' and the spectacularly violent to be bridged, and it reveals the ways in which attempts at expelling hauntings and (re)articulating the borders of a liberal warrior makes these (sometimes violent) appearances of ghosts possible.

O presente trabalho visa abordar as características do sistema político mexicano que permitiram o passo silencioso de um Estado com traços autoritários para um contrainsurgente. O sistema político mexicano, derivado da Revolução popular iniciada em 1910 e da criação do Partido Revolucionario Institucional(PRI), propiciou uma cultura política que fortaleceu a figura presidencial. Esta extrapolava as atribuições constitucionais e se legitimava tanto na política interna como na externa através do \"nacionalismo revolucionário\". Os governos de Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverría e José López Portillo (1964-1982) estão marcados pela crise hegemônica evidenciada na radicalização das organizações de esquerda. Entre outros motivos, pelo esgotamento do modelo econômico desenvolvimentista, pela crise de representatividade do partido e falta de espaços para a participação política, pela corrupção das instituições e a escalada de violência do Estado contra a oposição. Nesses dezoito anos localizamos uma transformação nas formas de violência institucional pela assimilação da Doutrina de Segurança Nacional e a Doutrina Contrainsurgente dos Estados Unidos da América, por exemplo, na consolidação de grupos paramilitares pagos pelo Estado e treinados em norte-américa. O nacionalismo revolucionário possibilitou então que a submissão à ideologia estadunidense não fosse explícita, gerando dinâmicas repressivas (qualitativamente) similares às vivenciadas nas ditaduras latino-americanas. Ainda que o México tenha sido considerado uma democracia exemplar alheia às guerras sujas e aos golpes de Estado que comoveram o continente na segunda metade do século XX. O objetivo deste trabalho é salientar os elementos contraditórios existentes entre o discurso público, analisado a partir dos informes presidenciais, e o discurso elaborado desde os órgãos de segurança, isto é, os relatórios da Dirección Federal de Seguridad. Nessas contradições podemos ir avaliando as formas de alinhamento às doutrinas de segurança estrangeiras. / The main objective of this Master\'s project is to address the characteristics of the Mexican political system that allowed the silent step from a state with authoritarian traits to a counterinsurgent one. The Mexican political system, derived from the popular revolution that began in 1910 and from the creation of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, maintained a political culture that strengthened the figure of president. This went beyond the powers permitted by the constitution and legitimized both internal and external policies through \"revolutionary nationalism.\" The governments of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverría, and José López Portillo (1964-1982) are marked by a hegemonic crisis seen in the radicalization of leftist organizations. Other motives for this shift include: the depletion of the developmentalist economic model, the crisis of representation in the party and a lack of spaces for political participation, the corruption of institutions, and the escalation of state violence against the opposition. In these eighteen years, a transformation occurs in the form of institutional violence through the assimilation of the National Security Doctrine of the United States; for example, the consolidation of paramilitary groups paid by the state and trained by northern neighbors. Revolutionary nationalism then allowed the non-explicit submission to American ideology, generating results (qualitatively) similar to those experienced in the repressive dynamics of Latin American dictatorships. Still, Mexico has been considered an exemplary democracy, despite dirty wars and coups that shocked the continent in the second half of the twentieth century.The aim of this study is to highlight the contradictory elements between the public discourse, analyzed from the presidential reports, and the discourse developed from the security organs, in other words, the reports of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad. These contradictions we can to evaluated the alignment of forms to foreign security doctrines.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were branded as the most dangerous and deadly extremists in the world by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in January of 2008. The Tamil Tigers are held responsible for perfecting the use of suicide bombers, inventing the suicide belt, being the first to use women in suicide attacks, and killing nearly 4,000 people in the one year prior to 2008. The LTTE is the only terrorist organization to have assassinated two world leaders, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa. They were also the first to acquire air power and their strike on Sri Lanka’s World Trade Center was the largest terrorist assault before the September 11 attacks in 2001. It took the government of Sri Lanka over thirty years to rid the country of this powerful terrorist group. This paper will investigate what caused the fall of the Tamil Tigers. In my second chapter, I will evaluate the policies and military strategies adopted by the government. My third chapter will look at the role of international actors in the conflict and their effects. Lastly, in my fourth chapter, I will examine key mistakes made by the LTTE that may have led to its own demise. In chapter five, I will analyze three possible causes for the defeat of the LTTE and what was the most significant in bringing its fall. It will also include its potential for replication in other countries and effects on foreign policy moving forward.

The initial hypothesis of this dissertation was that Afghan insurgents' attacks on Afghan civilians have lowered popular confidence in the Afghan government and its institutions. The goal of the insurgents has been to convince Afghans that their local, provincial, and national governments and security forces cannot protect them. Insurgents harm and kill civilians as part of their strategy of intimidation. Conversely, counterinsurgents try to convince the Afghan people that their government is responsive, that the economy is promising, that the rule of law is strong, and that Armed Forces of Afghanistan are viable. For the counterinsurgency to have been successful, the level of national confidence would need to have been high. National confidence is intangible, often fleeting, and sometimes difficult to gauge. There are standard measurements of human development, such as economic growth; longevity; access to medicine and health clinics, levels of literacy, potable water, security, and others. However, measuring confidence presents unique challenges for the researcher. The Taliban were, by far, the most powerful and largest of the insurgent groups, but there were others. The strategy of the insurgents to break confidence in the Afghan local, provincial and national governments was based on three basic principles: crippling the economy, terrorizing their domestic enemies; and destroying the will of foreign states to continue their support for Kabul. All these tactics were predicated on violence. In this dissertation, quantitative methods associated the impact of violent incidents, which were the independent variables, to various indicators of national morale, which are the dependent variables. The results confirmed some elements of the hypothesis and disproved others. Several components of national confidence declined from 2008 and 2010, but only marginally. For the scales that were measured, there was a decline of national confidence in four scales, but an increase in one scale. There were decreases in the confidence of economic prosperity in villages and neighborhoods where citizens live, and a decline in the confidence of citizens in national and provincial governments. In security, there was a very slight decline. However, there was an increase in the confidence of citizens in institutions, organizations, and officials. The findings suggest that the overarching counterinsurgency strategy of building national confidence through sustained human development was successful in the years analyzed in this dissertation. Despite a spike in insurgent attacks during 2009, national confidence in 2010 was not significantly eroded. The author of this dissertation is a military analyst for the Department of Defense. All material in this work - its observations, conclusions, recommendations, and opinions - are those of the author and his alone. No element of this dissertation, officially or unofficially, reflects the policy of the Department of Defense or any element or agency of the United States government. / acase@tulane.edu

Doctor of Philosophy (Economics) / This dissertation asks how foreign assistance to one or both sides in a civil war affects the dynamics of the conflict. This overarching question is subsequently divided into two further questions: 1) how does foreign intervention affect the capabilities of the recipient, and 2) how does this affect the nature of the warfare. The puzzle for the first is that the impact of foreign intervention on combat effectiveness frequently varies significantly between recipients. This variation is explained by recipients’ different abilities to convert the inputs of foreign intervention into the outputs of fighting capability. The nature of the warfare in civil war will change in line with the balance of military capabilities between the belligerents. The balance of capabilities will be responsible for the form of warfare at a particular place and time whether it be conventional, irregular or guerrilla/counter-guerrilla. The argument is then illustrated with two extensive case studies, of civil wars in Angola and Afghanistan, where temporal and spatial variation in the type of warfare is shown to correlate with the type, degree, and direction of foreign intervention.

<p>Uppsatsen behandlar det amerikanska konceptet Distributed Operations (DO) kopplat mot den svenska doktrinutvecklingen. Uppsatsen bygger på Mika Ihalainens uppsats om DO som en framtida upprorsbekämpningsmetod. Uppsatsen avser fortsätta på Mika Ihalainens uppsats, och då främst med hans egna förslag på vidare forskning. Syftet med uppsatsen är att besvara frågeställningen ”Är Distributed Operations en förmåga eller en metod utifrån hur konceptet nyttjades under Falklandskriget?” och att ge ett konceptexempel på hur den svenska Försvarsmakten kan hantera en lågtek-nologisk fiende samt bidraga till den svenska doktrinutvecklingen, framförallt genom en definition av begreppen förmåga och metod. Ytterligare ett syfte med uppsatsen är att ”öppna upp” för vidare studier kring ämnet. Problemställningen har angripits med en kvalitativ textanalys där den nominella definitionen av begreppen förmåga och metod har väglett författaren genom empirin och slutligen resulterat i ett försöka att avgöra huruvida DO är en förmåga eller me-tod, sett från hur det nyttjades av SAS i Falklandskriget. Empirin har i huvudsak bestått av major Mika Ihalainens och major Brian L. Gilmans (USMC) uppsatser samt ett urval av deras källor. Även svenska ordböcker och doktriner har använts för framtagandet av en nominell definition av de för uppsatsen centrala begreppen. Uppsatsen visar att Distributed Operations bör betraktas som just ett koncept, ett koncept som skapar, binder samman och driver utvecklingen av metoder i syfte att uppnå vissa förmågor.</p> / <p>The essay deals with the American concept of Distributed Operations (DO) and the Swedish development of doctrines. The essay has its origin in major Mika Ihalainens essay on DO as a future method of fighting Small Wars. This essay intends to continue with Mika Ihalainens suggestion for future research and the dual purpose of this essay is to answer the question “Is Distributed Operations a capability or a method as seen from how it was used during the Falklands war?”. It’s second purpose is to describe a concept to the Swedish Armed Forces as an example on how to deal with a low-tech enemy and also to contribute to the Swedish doctrinal development, especially re-garding the definition of the concepts capability and method. Another purpose of this essay is to open up the subject for more widened and thorough studies. This study has been carried out through a qualitative analysis where the definition of capability and method has guided the author through the empiric material and has fi-nally resulted in an attempt to decide whether DO is a capability or a method, based upon how the concept was used by the SAS during the Falklands war. The empiric ma-terial has mainly consisted of major Mika Ihalainens and major Brian L. Gilmans essays and has been complemented with their original sources. The author has also used Swedish dictionaries and doctrines for the production of the nominal definition of the central notions of the essay. The result of the essay is that Distributed Operations should be considered as a con-cept which creates, binds together and forces the development of methods with the purpose to achieve certain capabilities.</p>

<p>Uppsatsens problemställning utgår från en eventuell brist i utbildning eller kunskap om gällande doktriner för svenska förband i utlandstjänst. Uppsatsen har ansatsen att visa på en ögonblicksbild av hur ett svenskt förband tolkar begreppet legitimitet och hur det arbetar med att stödja detta i genomförandet av verksamheten. Jämförande underlag och även analysverktyg utgår från ett brett urval inom forskning om upprorsbekämpning och även amerikanska doktriner samt reglementen.</p><p>Uppsatsen utgår från att begreppet legitimitet har stor betydelse för teorier kring upprorsbekämpning och även för den använda amerikanska doktrinen. Begreppet legitimitet har definierats med hjälp av tre frågeställningar, <em>Legitimitet för vem, Vem ska uppfatta vad som legitimt?</em> samt<em> Vem genererar legitimiteten åt vad? </em></p><p><p>Resultatet visar på att det svenska förbandet i det undersökta exemplet har en bred syn på begreppet legitimitet och kopplar det till såväl sig själva som statsmakten i värdlandet och detta både mot befolkningen i hemlandet och också i operationsområdet. Skillnaderna mot vad som i uppsatsen redovisas som COIN teori eller amerikansk doktrin är små. En viktig del är dock att uppsatsen visar på att det svenska förbandets huvudsakliga definition av legitimitet inom ett COIN-perspektiv är stärkandet av landets säkerhetsorganisationers legitimitet kontra den egna befolkningen. Detta skulle skilja sig mot ovan redovisad teori och doktrin.</p></p> / <p>The essay presentation of a problem proceed from a possible lack of training or knowledge about valid doctrines for Swedish units conducting service abroad. The essay have the goal to give a snapshoot picture of how a Swedish unit interpret the concept of legitimacy and how the unit works with different aspects to support this. Relating material and also the tool for conducting the analysis are gathered from a wide selection of science in counterinsurgency and also American doctrines.</p><p>The paper assumes that the concept of legitimacy is important in theories surrounding counterinsurgency and also for the used American doctrine. The concept of legitimacy has been defined by three issues, <em>Legitimacy for whom</em>, <em>Who will perceive what is legitimate</em>? and <em>Who generates legitimacy for what</em>?</p><p>The result shows that the Swedish unit in the examined example has a width of vision of the concept of legitimacy and linking it to both themselves as the state of the host country and that both the population in both the home and area of operation. The differences of what is in the paper are reported as COIN theory or the American doctrine is small. An important part is that the paper shows that the Swedish's unit primary definition of legitimacy in a COIN perspective, are the strengthening of the country's security organizations legitimacy versus its own population. This would differ from the above reported theory and doctrine.</p>

<p>Föreliggande arbete undersöker metodmässig interoperabilitet genom att jämföra de kommande svenska reglementena <em>Reglemente för Markoperationer</em> och <em>Markstridsreglemente 6 – Bataljon</em> och deras överensstämmelse med den doktrin som nyttjas av International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) i Afghanistan. Undersökningen syftar till att lämna ett bidrag till den svenska reglementsutvecklingen.</p><p>Arbetet visar att det finns en överensstämmelse avseende grundbudskapet att lokalbefolkningen behöver skyddas och att man måste förstå deras situation. Det föreligger en låg grad av överensstämmelse avseende metoder för att skydda befolkningen.</p><p>Författaren lämnar tre rekommendationer:1. Omarbeta beskrivningen av stabiliserande metoder2. Inkludera begreppet ”Clear-Hold-Build”3. Inarbeta verktyg för att analysera den mänskliga terrängen</p>

<p>Kriget i Afghanistan som startade 2001 har bidragit till att många civila skadats och fått sätta livet till. En av anledningarna till detta är det ökade användandet av flygstridskrafter för att skydda egen marktrupp. Flygattacker är på många sätt en bra metod för att snabbt kunna bekämpa fientliga individer samt med stor eldkraft kunna verka över stora ytor. Baksidan av att använda flygbombningar är att det i flera fall drabbar dem som inte är det utpekade målet. Kan detta vara en bidragande faktor till ett ökat missnöje mot koalitionen i Afghanistan och en direkt ökning för stödet till rebellerna? Syftet med arbetet är att undersöka om det finns ett samband mellan koalitionens flygbombningar i Afghanistan och ett ökat stöd till talibanerna från civilbefolkningen. Den hypotes som jag utgår ifrån i mitt arbete är att flygbombningar som leder till civila förluster ökar stödet tilltalibanerna i Afghanistan. För att få ett svar på min hypotes använder jag mig av statistik över antalet civila dödsfall i flygattacker mellan åren 2006-2008. Statistiken kopplas ihop med statistik över det ökade antalet rebellattacker under samma period för att se om det finns en korrelation mellan dem. Därefter presenteras ett urval av intervjuer med människor som drabbats av flygbombningar gjorda av olika nyhetsbolag samt uttalanden från utomstående personer för att styrka indikationerna från statistiken om att fler civila dödsoffer leder till ökat stöd för talibanerna. Resultatet av undersökningen verifierar min hypotes. En slutsats av undersökningen är att koalitionens användningav flygbombningar måste ändras för att minska de civila dödsoffren och på så sätt inte vända befolkningen emot dem.</p> / <p>The war in Afghanistan that started in 2001 has contributed to numerous civilians that have been injured and killed. One reason for this is the increased use of air power to protect ground troops. Airstrikes can be a good way to quickly strike against individuals and to operate across vast areas with great firepower. But the drawback of aerial bombing is that it in many cases affects those who are not the designated target. Could this be a contributing factor to increased dissatisfaction with the Coalition forces in Afghanistan and a direct increase in support to the rebels? The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is a connection between the coalition air campaign in Afghanistan and the increased support for the Taliban from civilians. The hypothesis which I test in my work is that air campaign, leading to civilian casualties increases support for the Taliban in Afghanistan. To get an answer to my hypothesis, I use statistics on the number of civilian deaths in air strikes between the years 2006 to 2008. As well as on the increasing number of insurgent attacks during the same period to see if there is a correlation between them. I also present support from secondary sources, including interviews with people affected by air bombardments and expert comments that indicate that the number of civilian casualties results in increased support for the rebels. The results validate my hypothesis. One conclusion of the study is that the coalition's use of the air campaigns must be modified to reduce the civilian deaths in order not to turn the population against them.</p>

The military in Mexico started out as a revolutionary army that secured the regime of the governmental party PRI. The article discusses the change of this army into a national and hemispheric police force under the influence of the USA. Today, the functions of the Mexican army are a mix of fighting against drugs, organized delinquency, terrorism and counterinsurgency and cooperating with US as well as other Latin American forces.