Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The story of peace is as old as the story of humanity itself, and certainly as old as war. It is a story of progress, often in very difficult circumstances. Historically, peace has often been taken, to imply an absence of overt violence or war between or sometimes within states- in other words, a negative peace. War is often thought to be the natural state of humanity, peace of any sort being fragile and fleeting. I would challenges this view.
By Gordon Martel
The choice between war and peace hung in the balance on Saturday, 1 August 1914. Austria-Hungary and Russia were proceeding with full mobilization: Austria-Hungary was preparing to mobilize along the Russian frontier in Galicia; Russia was preparing to mobilize along the German frontier in Poland.
By Fiona Robertson and Anthony Mellors
Closely associated with a group of writers dedicated to refashioning American fictional style, and with his roots in journalism and popular entertainment, Crane produced in his Civil-War tale The Red Badge of Courage an uncompromisingly spare modern account of the first-hand experience of battle.
By Michael R. Katz
In his classic study Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), the literary theorist, scholar, and philosopher of language, Mikhail Bakhtin included a brilliant “exercise” in literary “what-ifs.” In the chapter entitled “The Hero in Dostoevsky’s Art,” Bakhtin analyzes as a characteristic example of the Leo Tolstoy’s “monologic manner” and poses the following question
By Steven Casey
Just over forty years ago, President Richard M. Nixon ran a successful reelection campaign based partly on a simple insight. Americans, he believed, were not opposed to the Vietnam War as such; they were simply opposed to their boys dying in Vietnam.
By John Gittings
When Ban Ki-moon, speaking in The Hague, called recently on member countries to “give peace a chance” in Syria, and condemned the supply of weapons to both sides, he was taking part in a ceremony at the Peace Palace to mark the centennial of its foundation (a result of the Hague Peace Conference in 1899) which otherwise was ignored by the media.
By Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Fifty years ago, the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union signed a pact to stop testing nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, oceans, and space. As we commemorate the treaty, we will not agree on what to celebrate. There are two sides of the story.
By Louis René Beres
It is hard to understand at first, but Israel’s survival is linked to certain core insights of the great Spanish existentialist philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset. Although he was speaking to abstract issues of art, culture, and literature, Ortega’s insights can be extended productively to very concrete matters of world politics.
By Dr. David Milne
When I was invited to review the second volume of Odd Arne Westad’s and Melvyn Leffler’s The Cambridge History of the Cold War in 2010, I compared the enterprise to Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie — which I intended both as a compliment and as a criticism. Sweeping in its coverage, the Encyclopédie aimed to capture the main currents of Enlightenment thinking.
By Cécile Fabre
On the eve of the battle of Borodino, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, one of the main characters in War and Peace and, in that scene at least, Tolstoy’s mouthpiece, describes war as follows: ‘But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare?…’
By Corey Robin
Ron Paul has two problems. One is his and the larger conservative movement of which he is a part. The other is ours—by which I mean a left that is committed to both economic democracy and anti-imperialism.
By Professor Louis René Beres
Admiral Leon “Bud” Edney
General Thomas G. McInerney
For now, the “Arab Spring” and its aftermath still occupy center-stage in the Middle East and North Africa. Nonetheless, from a regional and perhaps even global security perspective, the genuinely core threat to peace and stability remains Iran. Whatever else might determinably shape ongoing transformations of power and authority in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Saudi Arabia, it is apt to pale in urgency beside the steadily expanding prospect of a nuclear Iran.
By Alan Jacobs
While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that’s to be expected. Serious “deep attention” reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea (only about 150 years old) that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level.
I’ve been seeing gods everywhere lately. Not gods like Thor, Ganesha, and God. My cinnamon rolls have been deity-free, if not gluten-free. It’s lexical gods I can’t seem to escape. Everywhere I look someone is thanking, cursing, or begging some specific group of supreme beings. For example, I’ve recently spotted the following religious invocations: • […]
In an important work of contemporary philosophy and social science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn articulates the vital idea of “paradigm.” By this idea, which has obvious parallels in the arts, Kuhn refers to certain examples of scientific practice that provide theoretical models for further inquiry: Ptolemaic or Copernican astronomy; Aristotelian dynamics; Newtonian mechanics, and so on. At any given moment in history, we learn, the prevailing paradigm within a given discipline defines the basic contours of all subsequent investigation.
By Dana H. Allin and Steven Simon
The Wikileaks trove of diplomatic documents confirms what many have known for a long time: Israel is not the only Middle Eastern country that fears a nuclear armed Iran and wants Washington to do something about it.
If Tehran was listening, the truth of this fear was apparent last month in Bahrain, where the International Institute for Strategic Studies organized a large meeting of Gulf Arab ministers, King Abdullah of Jordan, Iran’s foreign minister Mottaki, and top officials from outside powers including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The convocation was polite: no one said it was time to “cut off the head of the snake,” as Saudi Arabia’s King was reported, in one of the Wikileaks cables,