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This chapter summarizes the key empirical findings and address extension of the basic argument to cyberconflict and violence within states (i.e., civil wars, terrorism). A consistent theme of the book is that the backstage of war sometimes features direct combat encounters by outside powers that were publicly understood to have avoided such entanglements. The chapter then presents a brief case study of a post-Cold War conflict: the Iranian covert weapons supply program during the U.S. occupation of Iraq (2003–2011). The U.S. occupation of Iraq and the Iranian covert intervention that followed suggest the links between limited war, covertness, and collusion continue to be relevant. Though conclusions about the case are necessarily preliminary, the chapter reviews this conflict to illustrate how the claims of the theory travel to a more recent case. It also addresses questions about the initial choice to intervene, mistakes and exploitation, and the possible implications of social media and leaks in the contemporary era. It concludes by discussing the implications of secrecy's role in escalation control for policy and scholarship.

This chapter explains how new concepts and strategies had to be devised to face the new North–South divide that seemed to be replacing the classic Cold War conflict. By the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union were conservative status quo powers that had more in common with each other than with the Global South. The Cold War was embedded in the international system and worked at much lower levels of tension than in earlier years. Would an East–West cooperation to deal with the Global South be viable? The Soviet Bloc did not appear to be keen on discussing a joint path out of the global economic turmoil, which it interpreted as the long-awaited crisis of capitalism. It was the European Economic Community (EEC), instead, that stood up as a distinctive actor, claiming to be distant from its members' imperial past and to offer a third way for the Third World, with goals that were not those of the Cold War superpowers.

This Chapter looks in more detail at the research undertaken at the Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation (NICTT), in Omagh. This included the randomised controlled trial (RCT) (in partnership with King’s College, London) of its trauma focused cognitive behavioural therapy programme, along with a series of studies undertaken in partnership with Ulster University that examined the epidemiological impact of the Troubles on the population of Northern Ireland. Both provided important new findings relating to the levels of exposure, levels of psychological problems and the social and economic consequences arising from personal experiences of violence linked to the Troubles. The Chapter concludes with a lengthy discussion on the challenges of undertaking research in communities affected by war and conflict, into the mental health and related impacts. This includes a discussion on how methods and approaches to studies in such contexts need to, for example, ask the right questions, if we are to understand and be able to respond to the impact of war and conflict on communities. The challenge of taking findings from research into policy advice, policy formulation, political and service development decisions - particularly in the context of conflict - is also discussed.

This chapter examines how Israel Defense Force (IDF) lawyers came to play a crucial role in aerial targeting operations in Gaza and how they helped to develop a targeted killing policy in the post-2000 Second Intifada period. It outlines the historical roots of the Military Advocate General Corps (MAG Corps) in the creation and administration of the occupied Palestinian Territories. It then shows how in the early 2000s Israeli military lawyers became instrumental in devising new legal concepts and categories to expand the definition of what (and who, under what circumstances) constitutes a lawful target. It further argues that Israeli military lawyers have been pivotal in calibrating military violence in all of the recent major aerial assaults on Gaza, including ‘Operation Cast lead’ (2008–2009), ‘Operation Pillar of Defense’ (2012), and ‘Operation Protective Edge’ (2014). The mutual influence of US and Israeli targeting policies is also examined.

This chapter considers the political career of one of the Land War's pivotal figures, Matthew Harris. Harris was one of the Fenians leaders who felt that an agrarian agitation could be made into a powerful revolutionary weapon outside of parliament, and that lay beyond the control of the constitutional politicians. Much effort is given to showing how the establishment of the Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association in May 1876 helped to consolidate the alliance between the Fenians and small farmers that became a critical foundation of the early Land League. The opposition Harris encountered, for class and political reasons, is explored. The chapter also reflects on how revealing biography can be in the study of popular agrarian movements.

Shortly after the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster in Sheffield, England, sixteen people brought actions claiming to suffer a “nervous shock” as a result of learning from the media about the fatal human crush that occurred during a soccer match. The plaintiffs, most of whom were relatives of the victims, demanded compensations as secondary victims, arguing that their injury was within the “immediate aftermath”—a category recognized by British law as having been involved in the consequences of a tragic event. The court rejected the claim, but not before speculating on the hypothetical possibility of a traumatic live broadcast. Numerous claims for psychiatric injury had been filed prior to this case, yet this is probably one of the first to consider whether media could cause trauma to viewers, and consequently be compensable by law. Were such a case to be heard today, however, it might find support from recent developments in psychiatric research. For there is now a growing acceptance among mental health experts that trauma could transfer, under certain conditions, through visual media. Referring to notions such as “distant trauma,” “traumatic media exposure,” and “vicarious traumatization,” clinicians and researchers are now willing to acknowledge that witnessing disastrous events through the media could cause a reaction that complies with existing PTSD clinical criteria. How did this development come about? How does such mediated trauma manifest itself? What are its social, legal, and moral consequences? And what are the implications for our understanding of both media and trauma? These are the questions this chapter sets out to explore. Psychiatry has long been in the business of understanding how external violence affects mental processes. While operating under various nomenclatures, modern conceptions of trauma have dovetailed with modern developments in technology and warfare. As already noted earlier in this book, trauma is a central theme in the grand narrative of the shock of modernity.