Brantley W. Gasaway
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781469617725
- eISBN:
- 9781469617749
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469617725.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
This chapter examines peacemaking as a representation of the progressive evangelicals' comprehensive dedication to social justice. It considers the progressive evangelicals' opposition to American ...
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This chapter examines peacemaking as a representation of the progressive evangelicals' comprehensive dedication to social justice. It considers the progressive evangelicals' opposition to American nationalism and militarism. Aside from the absence of war, many writers believe that peace also means just economic relationships with other people, fair division of economic resources, and limitations of extreme wealth and poverty. The leadership of Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA), and The Other Side also recommended that biblical teachings on nonviolence and love for enemies should guide public engagement of Christians. As a result, pacifist progressive evangelicals protested the lethal nature of militaristic policies and warfare, and united in their commitment to the public task of active peacemaking.Less
This chapter examines peacemaking as a representation of the progressive evangelicals' comprehensive dedication to social justice. It considers the progressive evangelicals' opposition to American nationalism and militarism. Aside from the absence of war, many writers believe that peace also means just economic relationships with other people, fair division of economic resources, and limitations of extreme wealth and poverty. The leadership of Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA), and The Other Side also recommended that biblical teachings on nonviolence and love for enemies should guide public engagement of Christians. As a result, pacifist progressive evangelicals protested the lethal nature of militaristic policies and warfare, and united in their commitment to the public task of active peacemaking.
Jonathan M. Hansen
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226315836
- eISBN:
- 9780226315850
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226315850.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
During the years leading up to World War I, America experienced a crisis of civic identity. How could a country founded on liberal principles and composed of increasingly diverse cultures unite to ...
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During the years leading up to World War I, America experienced a crisis of civic identity. How could a country founded on liberal principles and composed of increasingly diverse cultures unite to safeguard individuals and promote social justice? This book tells the story of a group of American intellectuals who believed the solution to this crisis lay in rethinking the meaning of liberalism. Intellectuals such as William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, and W. E. B. Du Bois repudiated liberalism's association with acquisitive individualism and laissez-faire economics, advocating a model of liberal citizenship whose virtues and commitments amount to what the book calls cosmopolitan patriotism. Rooted not in war but in dedication to social equity, cosmopolitan patriotism favored the fight against sexism, racism, and political corruption in the United States over battles against foreign foes. Its adherents held the domestic and foreign policy of the United States to its own democratic ideals and maintained that promoting democracy universally constituted the ultimate form of self-defense. Perhaps most important, the cosmopolitan patriots regarded critical engagement with one's country as the essence of patriotism, thereby justifying scrutiny of American militarism in wartime.Less
During the years leading up to World War I, America experienced a crisis of civic identity. How could a country founded on liberal principles and composed of increasingly diverse cultures unite to safeguard individuals and promote social justice? This book tells the story of a group of American intellectuals who believed the solution to this crisis lay in rethinking the meaning of liberalism. Intellectuals such as William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, and W. E. B. Du Bois repudiated liberalism's association with acquisitive individualism and laissez-faire economics, advocating a model of liberal citizenship whose virtues and commitments amount to what the book calls cosmopolitan patriotism. Rooted not in war but in dedication to social equity, cosmopolitan patriotism favored the fight against sexism, racism, and political corruption in the United States over battles against foreign foes. Its adherents held the domestic and foreign policy of the United States to its own democratic ideals and maintained that promoting democracy universally constituted the ultimate form of self-defense. Perhaps most important, the cosmopolitan patriots regarded critical engagement with one's country as the essence of patriotism, thereby justifying scrutiny of American militarism in wartime.
Michael G. Thompson
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801452727
- eISBN:
- 9781501701801
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801452727.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This chapter presents a theoretical framework with which to read The World Tomorrow—one that fuses an old category, “foreign policy public,” and a new term, “counterpublic.” With Kirby Page as ...
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This chapter presents a theoretical framework with which to read The World Tomorrow—one that fuses an old category, “foreign policy public,” and a new term, “counterpublic.” With Kirby Page as editor, the journal presented a distinctive mix of muckraking rage and middlebrow didacticism as it sought to educate readers about the hidden realities of American imperialism in Latin America and American militarism everywhere, from colleges to Cosmopolitan magazine. In the 1930s, as The World Tomorrow became interested in disrupting wider public discourse, it amassed American clergy opinion in a series of highly publicized surveys. The oppositional nature of the journal was at its peak when U.S. Army chief Douglas MacArthur wrote an open letter condemning the nearly treasonous internationalism of the journal.Less
This chapter presents a theoretical framework with which to read The World Tomorrow—one that fuses an old category, “foreign policy public,” and a new term, “counterpublic.” With Kirby Page as editor, the journal presented a distinctive mix of muckraking rage and middlebrow didacticism as it sought to educate readers about the hidden realities of American imperialism in Latin America and American militarism everywhere, from colleges to Cosmopolitan magazine. In the 1930s, as The World Tomorrow became interested in disrupting wider public discourse, it amassed American clergy opinion in a series of highly publicized surveys. The oppositional nature of the journal was at its peak when U.S. Army chief Douglas MacArthur wrote an open letter condemning the nearly treasonous internationalism of the journal.
Rebecca A. Adelman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823281671
- eISBN:
- 9780823284788
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823281671.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Figuring Violence catalogs the affects that define the latter stages of the war on terror and the imaginative work that underpins them. These affects—apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, ...
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Figuring Violence catalogs the affects that define the latter stages of the war on terror and the imaginative work that underpins them. These affects—apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and righteous anger—are far more pleasurable and durable than their predecessors. Hence, they are deeply compatible with the ambitions of a state embroiling itself in a perpetual and essentially unwinnable war. Surveying the cultural landscape of this sprawling conflict, Figuring Violence reveals the varied mechanisms by which these affects have been militarized. This book tracks their convergences around six types of beings: civilian children, military children, military spouses, veterans with PTSD and TBI, Guantánamo detainees, and military dogs. All of these groups have become preferred objects of sentiment in wartime public culture, but they also have in common their status as political subjects who are partially or fully unknowable. They become visible to outsiders through a range of mediated and imaginative practices that are ostensibly motivated by concern or compassion. However, these practices actually function to reduce these beings to abstracted figures and so make them easy targets for affective investment. This is a paradoxical and conditional form of recognition that eclipses the actual beings upon whom those figures are patterned, silencing their political subjectivities and obscuring their suffering. As a result, they are erased and rendered hypervisible at once. Figuring Violence demonstrates that this dynamic ultimately propagates the very militarism that begets their victimization.Less
Figuring Violence catalogs the affects that define the latter stages of the war on terror and the imaginative work that underpins them. These affects—apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and righteous anger—are far more pleasurable and durable than their predecessors. Hence, they are deeply compatible with the ambitions of a state embroiling itself in a perpetual and essentially unwinnable war. Surveying the cultural landscape of this sprawling conflict, Figuring Violence reveals the varied mechanisms by which these affects have been militarized. This book tracks their convergences around six types of beings: civilian children, military children, military spouses, veterans with PTSD and TBI, Guantánamo detainees, and military dogs. All of these groups have become preferred objects of sentiment in wartime public culture, but they also have in common their status as political subjects who are partially or fully unknowable. They become visible to outsiders through a range of mediated and imaginative practices that are ostensibly motivated by concern or compassion. However, these practices actually function to reduce these beings to abstracted figures and so make them easy targets for affective investment. This is a paradoxical and conditional form of recognition that eclipses the actual beings upon whom those figures are patterned, silencing their political subjectivities and obscuring their suffering. As a result, they are erased and rendered hypervisible at once. Figuring Violence demonstrates that this dynamic ultimately propagates the very militarism that begets their victimization.
Christine Sylvester
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190840556
- eISBN:
- 9780190840587
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190840556.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics, Political Economy
This chapter begins the book by considering the knowledge on war that a seemingly unrelated abstract painting can harbor. That relationship introduces readers to the major theme of war authority as a ...
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This chapter begins the book by considering the knowledge on war that a seemingly unrelated abstract painting can harbor. That relationship introduces readers to the major theme of war authority as a decentralized and multilocated phenomenon. Background overviews provide information on America’s two wars studied here—in Vietnam and Iraq—the rise of militarism in the United States after the Vietnam War, and the heroization of soldiers today. The research sites for the study come into view along with the concepts that frame the study, including war as experience, memory, curation, and material objects as bearers of curator-coordinated war knowledge. The key argument to be sustained throughout the book is: war is experiential injurious politics that produces numerous sites of war expertise, many of which are overpowered by stories that gain truth through technical dominance, repetition and practice.Less
This chapter begins the book by considering the knowledge on war that a seemingly unrelated abstract painting can harbor. That relationship introduces readers to the major theme of war authority as a decentralized and multilocated phenomenon. Background overviews provide information on America’s two wars studied here—in Vietnam and Iraq—the rise of militarism in the United States after the Vietnam War, and the heroization of soldiers today. The research sites for the study come into view along with the concepts that frame the study, including war as experience, memory, curation, and material objects as bearers of curator-coordinated war knowledge. The key argument to be sustained throughout the book is: war is experiential injurious politics that produces numerous sites of war expertise, many of which are overpowered by stories that gain truth through technical dominance, repetition and practice.
Khary Oronde Polk
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781469655505
- eISBN:
- 9781469655529
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469655505.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
From 1898 onward, the expansion of American militarism and empire abroad increasingly relied on black labor, even as policy remained inflected both by scientific racism and by fears of contagion. ...
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From 1898 onward, the expansion of American militarism and empire abroad increasingly relied on black labor, even as policy remained inflected both by scientific racism and by fears of contagion. Black men and women were mobilized for service in the Spanish-Cuban-American War under the War Department’s belief that southern blacks carried an immunity against tropical diseases. Later, in World Wars I and II, black troops were stigmatized as members of a contagious “venereal race” and were subjected to experimental medical treatments meant to curtail their sexual desires. By turns feared as contagious and at other times valued for their immunity, black men and women played an important part in the U.S. military’s conscription of racial, gender, and sexual difference, even as they exercised their embattled agency at home and abroad. By following the scientific, medical, and cultural history of African American enlistment through the archive of American militarism, this book traces the black subjects and agents of empire as they came into contact with a world globalized by warfare.Less
From 1898 onward, the expansion of American militarism and empire abroad increasingly relied on black labor, even as policy remained inflected both by scientific racism and by fears of contagion. Black men and women were mobilized for service in the Spanish-Cuban-American War under the War Department’s belief that southern blacks carried an immunity against tropical diseases. Later, in World Wars I and II, black troops were stigmatized as members of a contagious “venereal race” and were subjected to experimental medical treatments meant to curtail their sexual desires. By turns feared as contagious and at other times valued for their immunity, black men and women played an important part in the U.S. military’s conscription of racial, gender, and sexual difference, even as they exercised their embattled agency at home and abroad. By following the scientific, medical, and cultural history of African American enlistment through the archive of American militarism, this book traces the black subjects and agents of empire as they came into contact with a world globalized by warfare.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780748693023
- eISBN:
- 9781474406086
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748693023.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Conflict Politics and Policy
The Road to Iraq is an empirical investigation that explains the causes of the Iraq War, identifies its main agents, and demonstrates how the war was sold to decision makers and by decision makers to ...
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The Road to Iraq is an empirical investigation that explains the causes of the Iraq War, identifies its main agents, and demonstrates how the war was sold to decision makers and by decision makers to the public. It shows how a small but ideologically coherent and socially cohesive group of determined political agents used the contingency of 9/11 to outflank a sceptical foreign policy establishment, military brass and intelligence apparatus and provoked a war that has had disastrous consequences.Less
The Road to Iraq is an empirical investigation that explains the causes of the Iraq War, identifies its main agents, and demonstrates how the war was sold to decision makers and by decision makers to the public. It shows how a small but ideologically coherent and socially cohesive group of determined political agents used the contingency of 9/11 to outflank a sceptical foreign policy establishment, military brass and intelligence apparatus and provoked a war that has had disastrous consequences.
Atul Kohli
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- February 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190069629
- eISBN:
- 9780190069650
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190069629.003.0007
- Subject:
- Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Relations and Politics
This chapter analyzes America’s global assertion in the post–Cold War period. This assertion has followed both economic and military pathways. The imposition of the Washington Consensus on Latin ...
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This chapter analyzes America’s global assertion in the post–Cold War period. This assertion has followed both economic and military pathways. The imposition of the Washington Consensus on Latin American countries is an example of economic assertion. The United States was moved in this direction to first rescue highly indebted American banks and then to roll back statist models of economic development in the region. Economic benefits to the United States were considerable. Latin American countries experienced a lost decade of growth, followed by some resumption of growth, but were still mainly dependent on commodity exports. Hard militarism in the Middle East has been motivated by goals that were vaguer but included establishing primacy over an oil-rich region. The results have been at best, mixed. The war in Iraq was very costly. A half million Iraqis died. The benefits to the United States are not obvious and Iraq struggles to be a functioning state under American influence.Less
This chapter analyzes America’s global assertion in the post–Cold War period. This assertion has followed both economic and military pathways. The imposition of the Washington Consensus on Latin American countries is an example of economic assertion. The United States was moved in this direction to first rescue highly indebted American banks and then to roll back statist models of economic development in the region. Economic benefits to the United States were considerable. Latin American countries experienced a lost decade of growth, followed by some resumption of growth, but were still mainly dependent on commodity exports. Hard militarism in the Middle East has been motivated by goals that were vaguer but included establishing primacy over an oil-rich region. The results have been at best, mixed. The war in Iraq was very costly. A half million Iraqis died. The benefits to the United States are not obvious and Iraq struggles to be a functioning state under American influence.
