232 research outputs found
Book review: False prophets: British leaders’ fateful fascination with the Middle East from Suez to Syria by Nigel Ashton
No full textIn False Prophets: British Leaders’ Fateful Fascination with the Middle East from Suez to Syria, Nigel Ashton offers a new history of how successive British governments have engaged with the Middle East and North Africa from the Suez Crisis to the Syrian Civil War. Geraint Hughes strongly recommends this comprehensive, authoritative and engaging account to readers interested in the history of British foreign policy and to specialists on the Middle East. False Prophets: British Leaders’ Fateful Fascination with the Middle East from Suez to Syria. Nigel Ashton. Atlantic Books. 2022
Harold Wilson's Cold War:the Labour government and East-West politics, 1964-1970
No full text"Harold Wilson's Cold War analyses the Labour government's efforts to promote East-West detente and to improve Anglo-Soviet relations from 1964 to 1970." "Geraint Hughes challenges the caricature of Harold Wilson's rigid subservience to America, and shows how, as Prime Minister, he proposed to develop closer contacts with the Soviet leadership, and to foster co-operation on arms control, conflict resolution in Vietnam, and East-West trade."--BOOK JACKE
'Enemy Action': The UK Ministry of Defence, Academia and the Historical Record
No full textThe publication of Uncivil War, Huw Bennett’s history of the early years of the Northern Ireland conflict, has highlighted an increasingly obstructive and uncooperative approach by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) towards academic researchers. Geraint Hughes argues that the impediments the MoD is placing by restricting access to archival evidence on recent military conflicts is not only undemocratic, but also distorts public awareness of the complexities of these wars, and hampers the British armed forces’ own efforts to develop as ‘learning institutions’ that can use military history to support their own professional understanding of the challenges posed by contemporary warfare. He calls for a dialogue between the MoD and the academic community that addresses the balance between operational security and accountability, and contributes to a mutually beneficial relationship where scholarship can contribute to the armed forces’ own process of self and institutional education.◼.</p
The Abject Object
No full textA group exhibition curated by Geraint Evans that explores contemporary painterly representations of objects with reference to the still life tradition and with a particular interest in the notion of thingness and abjection.
The starting point is Norman Bryson’s description of still life as “…an object world that has dispensed with human attention and in a sense makes human attention and the human subject obsolete.” The exhibition is concerned with the ways in which paint’s materiality resonates with meaning and articulates the relationship between subject and object, the observer and the observed.
Artists include: Sophie Birch,
G L Brierley, Simon Callery, Mark Fairnington, Ana Genovés, John Greenwood, Paul Housley, Damien Meade and Donal Moloney.
Panel discussion: was held on Thursday 12 May 4.30-6.30pm in the lecture theatre at Wimbledon College of Arts to discuss and debate the issues raised by the exhibition.
Participants included curator Geraint Evans, Course Leader for MA Painting at Wimbledon; Mark Fairnington, participating artist and Reader in Painting CCW; Frances Woodley, artist, academic and curator of exhibitions ‘All Coherence Gone? Historical currents in contemporary still life’ 2014 and ‘Still Life: Ambiguous Practices’ 2015; Dr Fiona Candlin, Senior Lecturer in Museum Studies at Birkbeck University of London and co-author of ‘The Object Reader’ and painter Damien Meade, recent exhibitor in the London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London 2015
The Legacy of the Special Air Service in Dhofar 1970-1976: When the Iron Fist was in the Velvet Glove
No full textBetween July 1970 and September 1976, the elite 22 Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) secretly deployed to the Southern Province of Dhofar in the Sultanate of Oman under the codename Operation Storm. Working under the nom de guerre ‘British Army Training Team’ (BATT), successive SAS squadrons supported a broader coalition of the Sultan’s Armed Forces (SAF) to defeat the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Gulf (PFLOAG). Additional to combat operations against a formidable insurgency, SAS sub-units dispensed medical and veterinary care, handled information operations, and organised the ‘Firqat’ fighting force. The war was officially declared a victory for the Sultanate on 11 December 1975.
There remains no principal monograph study of the SAS in Dhofar even though it is routinely described in secondary source material, often written by veterans themselves, as a ‘model campaign’ and lauded as ‘the most important and far-reaching [campaign] ever fought by the SAS’. However, the post-war character of the secretive SAS unit has remained concealed from the historical record and rigour of academic debate. The proliferation of veterans’ memoirs and the unit’s rigid posture not to confirm nor deny its activities, except through ‘authorised’ or ‘official’ histories, has contributed to a complex and self-perpetuating mythology. Evoking two extreme narratives, the SAS unit are regarded either as the nation’s heroes, or as its villains.
In light of the allegations confronting the present-day SAS of egregious misconduct during its counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, there is a need to understand how the SAS has evolved its practice of elite counterinsurgency. According to veterans, the claims are the antithesis of the Dhofar operational record and the unit’s founding principles of humility and discipline. They fear that their ‘unblemished’ Dhofar legacy is now in jeopardy. This study will respond to the debate by piercing the SAS’s mythology to reappraise the elite unit’s record in Dhofar
Seabed foraging by Antarctic krill: Implications for stock assessment, bentho-pelagic coupling, and the vertical transfer of iron
No full textA compilation of more than 30 studies shows that adult Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) may frequent benthic habitats year-round, in shelf as well as oceanic waters and throughout their circumpolar range. Net and acoustic data from the Scotia Sea show that in summer 2-20% of the population reside at depths between 200 and 2000 m, and that large aggregations can form above the seabed. Local differences in the vertical distribution of krill indicate that reduced feeding success in surface waters, either due to predator encounter or food shortage, might initiate such deep migrations and results in benthic feeding. Fatty acid and microscopic analyses of stomach content confirm two different foraging habitats for Antarctic krill: the upper ocean, where fresh phytoplankton is the main food source, and deeper water or the seabed, where detritus and copepods are consumed. Krill caught in upper waters retain signals of benthic feeding, suggesting frequent and dynamic exchange between surface and seabed. Krill contained up to 260 nmol iron per stomach when returning from seabed feeding. About 5% of this iron is labile, i.e., potentially available to phytoplankton. Due to their large biomass, frequent benthic feeding, and acidic digestion of particulate iron, krill might facilitate an input of new iron to Southern Ocean surface waters. Deep migrations and foraging at the seabed are significant parts of krill ecology, and the vertical fluxes involved in this behavior are important for the coupling of benthic and pelagic food webs and their elemental repositories
The Military\u27s Role in Counterterrorism: Examples and Implications for Liberal Democracies
Get PDFThe author examines historical and contemporary examples of military involvement in counterterrorism, outlining the specific roles which the armed forces of liberal democracies have performed in combating terrorism, both in a domestic and international context. He describes the political, strategic, conceptual, diplomatic, and ethical problems that can arise when a state’s armed forces become engaged in counterterrorism, and argues that military power can only be employed as part of a coordinated counterterrorist strategy aimed at the containment and frustration, rather than the physical elimination, of the terrorist group(s) concerned.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1335/thumbnail.jp
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