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9/11 and its aftermath was to have a dramatic impact on the visual arts and the artistic response to the War on Terror. This study surveys the evolution of these responses from the dramatic events of 11 September 2001 to the longer term reactions generated by the two-decade long encounter with the so-called War on Terrorism, primarily via the Imperial War Museum's Age of Terror/Art Since 9/11 exhibition of 2017–2018. The analysis suggests that the visual artistic response moved from the initial amazement at the destruction of the Twin Towers, through satirical caricature of the terrorist persona, to a trite predictability that mirrored official equivocation about the threat posed by violent jihadist activism. Artistic endeavor on these terms became notable only for its moral ambiguity and complicity in self-censorship rather than contributing to the creation of artwork of enduring value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular music was the most immediate way in which the cultural response to 9/11 manifested itself. Initially music offered a way of mourning and coping with grief. As the United States moved toward the invasion of Iraq, pop music also began to reflect the divisions in society between patriot-artists who supported the invasion, most notably in country music, and protest-artists who articulated critical attitudes to war. These anti-war songs did not attain the stature of those that characterized the era of protest during the Vietnam War, nor did they offer a musical accompaniment to a social movement with any enduring political significance. One little observed dissonance that a longitudinal survey of the musical response to political violence reveals, however, is that over time the attitudes of protest songwriters and the patriots transvalued. Ironically, interventionist "rednecks" became disillusioned with the endless wars of intervention, whilst the "protest" writers lost their voices after President Obama came to power. Ironically, icons of popular music instead turned their ire on those who voted for an anti-establishment President Trump who vowed not to involve the U.S. in further military adventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In theory, the idea of strategy is easy to comprehend but in practice it is a hard taskmaster because it often involves calculations of political values that are rarely amenable to the kind of rationalistic application of "expert" opinion to which Western nations invariably default when considering overseas interventions. Based on remarks to the Oxford Changing Character of War Centre, this research note argues that foreign policy experts frequently find themselves out of touch with the sentiments of their own populations, which in part is responsible for the poor strategic outcomes that Western foreign policies have incurred in recent years. A number of remedies are suggested, based principally on returning Western policy making to a tradition of prudential realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines what factors cause states to withdraw from foreign territorial interventions. Scholarly analyses of withdrawal are rare, whilst within the broader research area of territorial conflict, studies are often dichotomized into neorealist or constructivist-inspired works, emphasizing a select few variables and one level of analysis alone. We argue these excessive simplifications of international politics lack utility for understanding territorial withdrawal. Instead, we employ the principles of strategic theory informed by a Clausewitzian paradigm, and construct a framework of three "arenas of bargaining," spanning multiple variable-types and levels of analysis, to explain territorial withdrawal. In so doing, the analysis delineates a comprehensible and novel theoretical framework for understanding an under-researched policy problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few academically rigorous accounts exist of the financial activities that sustained the rise of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) during the Northern Ireland Troubles. Through a sustained methodology this study seeks to challenge some popular preconceptions and address omissions in the limited historical record. The article explores the organization's evolving financial sophistication by analyzing PIRA's acquisition of capital rather than its arms dealings. Using a new quantitative evaluation, this investigation confronts the prevailing understanding that Irish-American funds were of unrivaled significance to PIRA. It points to an array of domestic fund-raisers that collectively provided the overwhelming bulk of revenue. The study reveals also how PIRA developed an extensive reliance on criminal gangs for its expertise in illegal fund-raising, suggesting that moneymaking schemes were perceived as a necessary but unpopular byproduct of the greater political objective. Finally, this article briefly explores how the British authorities sought to interdict PIRA's funding. While the general perception is that little was done to counteract PIRA's financing initiatives in the early phases of its violent campaign, this study, nevertheless, reveals that a subtle counterfinance initiative did take place in Belfast across the 1970s. Overall, the analysis enables a more rounded comprehension of the group's financial resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although much has been written on the Sri Lankan state's civil war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), less has been said about how the conflict's dynamics evolved. How did the parties come to utilize the methods they did? Why did the war become so brutal, characterized by a predisposition toward extreme violence on both sides? Using the typology of “dirty war,” this investigation seeks to address such questions, demonstrating how the strategic choices of the main belligerents shaped the conflict. The analysis shows that while the conflict emerged out of deep-rooted social and ethnic divisions, these factors do not account for how the war came to be defined so comprehensively by the methods of dirty war. It finds that dirty war developed from a sporadic tactic to advance political goals to dominant military practice by a reciprocal process of escalation that eventually internalized dirty war as the accepted mode of strategic communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much analytical commentary implies that a generic West is the principal target of jihadist activism. This study contends that this is a misconception fostered by jihadist groups like Al Qaeda in order to accentuate their stature in the Islamic world and to obscure their true aims, which are first and foremost to secure the dominance of the Salafist interpretation of Islam. The analysis situates Al Qaeda in the tradition of Islamic reform movements and shows that a violent Sufi/Salafist conflict pervades nearly all current examples of strife within the Muslim world. In these conflicts, the role of the 'West' is instrumental, not central to the struggle. Consequently, this study offers a qualification to notions of a 'global jihad' and suggests this has important considerations for policymakers in determining the nature of the threat posed by Islamist militancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington, D.C. in 2001 the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication devised a new classification. The category, September 11 Terrorist Attacks 2001-Fiction, responds to a distinct genre of political novels. In the light of the philosopher Richard Rorty's contention that the Western novel can clarify the moral and political options that confront the West, the article examines what insight, if any, into the motive for violence, and the capacity to recuperate a sense of liberal progressive purpose, the novels of 11 September afford? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically appraises Malachi O'Doherty, book "The Trouble With Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional IRA." It is with pieces of outstanding historical revisionism like "The Trouble With Guns" that doubts about one's chosen profession arise. This book is the first to offer a serious reinterpretation of the Provisional IRA and Northern Ireland history since 1969. In a way, we have waited over twenty years for such a study that questions the popular imagery surrounding this small, but still controversial, and highly written about, civil conflict. Yet the disturbing truth for an academic pro- fession that cherishes its freedom of inquiry is that a book of this nature should have been written long ago by one of their number. The fact that a journalist, Malachi O'Doherty, has accomplished this task is evidence not only of his intellectual rigor, but also of the academic neglect of the military and strategic dimensions of the conflict, the result of which has been to allow partial, ill-formed images to flourish unchallenged.

The article focuses on the book "The Fight for Peace: The Inside Story of the Irish Peace Process," 2nd ed., by Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick. The authors of The Fight for Peace dig deep into the complex workings of the current so-called peace process in Northern Ireland and examine the events lead- ing up to the declaration of the IRA and loyalist paramilitary cease-fires in 1994. Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick evaluate the peace process as "an initiative which emerged from within Irish nationalism and republicanism" and focus on the changing perceptions of the republican movement toward its traditional strategy of obtaining the goal of a united Ireland through physical force. The book's predisposition has a ready empathy with the modem Irish political tradition, which has periodically away nationalist elements from violence and enfolded them in constitutional politics. Yet there is no corresponding appreciation that this is a concept largely alien to the British political experience and therefore always likely to inform British wariness of engaging with, as they see it, representatives of an armed grouping that has waged twenty-five years of unrelenting violent subversion.