Modern War: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by English Richard

Author:English, Richard [English, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-07-24T22:00:00+00:00

6. Damage done by German rockets in London, 1944

7. Damage done by Allied bombing, Hamburg, 1943

Wilson’s argument here is that Ulster’s more clear-cut religious boundary required less (and less intense and grotesque) violence to maintain it, than was needed to establish communal difference in Upper Silesia, where division was marked by the more fluid, porous, and unstable line of linguistic division. In Ulster, ‘where boundaries were already so clear between unionists and nationalists, less violence was needed to maintain division’. The limited task of Ulster boundary maintenance could afford to be less transgressive and bloody than the more ambitious Upper Silesian process of boundary creation: ‘In short: atrocity clarified allegiances’, and ‘not all identity boundaries function the same way in national conflicts’.

An equally brilliant, very different argument regarding variations in levels and types of violence has been offered by Jeremy Weinstein, who suggests that the explanation for some insurgent groups acting abusively, brutally, and violently in conflict with civilian populations, while others engage more harmoniously and consensually with them, lies in the initial conditions of group formation, and especially in the varied endowments and resources available to such groups when they mobilize. According to Weinstein, groups with easy access to material resources tend to attract low-commitment, opportunistic ‘consumers’ as members—effectively, people keen on short-term gain. Rebel groups which, by contrast, have no such easy access to material or economic resources, draw in more committed, long-termist ‘investors’ as recruits; they rely on more harmonious engagement with communities, drawing on social resources and connections (shared ethnicity, shared religion) for sustenance; and they deploy violence more restrainedly, discriminatingly, and selectively as a result. The former are less disciplined and more coercive; the latter, more cooperative, and less prone to extreme violence and to self-serving plunder. Although perhaps vulnerable to charges of over-simplifying rebel identities (are people really so neatly classifiable as either investors or consumers?) and of attributing behaviour too narrowly to rationality alone (‘I begin with the assumption that individuals are rational and that their actions reflect deliberate decisions designed to maximize payoffs’), this extremely well-researched, closely focused, comparative argument about political violence powerfully leads us away from an over-concentration on rhetorical self-justifications, and towards a valuable layer of interpretation and explanation for varied strategies and tactics adopted in war (in this case, in civil wars).

Whether or not one is persuaded by their arguments, what Wilson and Weinstein both powerfully articulate is a case for establishing what the key variables actually are when we try to account for greater (or lesser) levels of atrocious violence in war. Moreover, they do this by testing wide-angled arguments and hypotheses valuably against detailed, first-hand knowledge of particular violent contexts.

First-hand evidence can provide nuanced understanding of exactly how individuals themselves calibrated and dealt with their pain. Charles Rodger Walker, born in Montrose in Scotland, served in the British forces in Palestine during 1917–19 (Figure 8). Writing in September 1918 to his mother, he recounted his latest injury, phlegmatically and with a sense of proportion and real

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