Striking aerial views of war, and of the scarred landscapes of its aftermath are the focus of this unique and multidisciplinary book. For the first time, the history, significance, and technology of military aerial photography are brought together and explored by military historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. This new approach opens the door to a modern reassessment of military aerial imagery, reveals the concepts and philosophies that guided their production and interpretation, and illustrates the complex interaction between humans and technology in creating and understanding the landscapes of conflict.

First published in 1995, this acclaimed study challenges generally accepted truths of the Israel-Palestine conflict as well as much of the revisionist literature. This new edition critically reexamines dominant popular and scholarly images in the light of the current failures of the peace process.

Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860–2010 examines the mutual images formed between Japan and Germany from the mid-nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, and the influence of these images on the development of bilateral relations. Unlike earlier research on Japanese-German relations, which focused on the similarity of these countries’ historical trajectories, this publication presents a more nuanced picture. It relativizes perceptions of a special “spiritual relationship” between Japan and Germany as well as their commonalities of “national character” through an exploration of previously untapped historical visual and textual sources. With essays by sixteen leading scholars in the field, this collection is an invaluable contribution to the historiography of modern Japan and Germany, and to the field of international relations. Contributors are: Hans-Joachim Bieber, Fukuoka Mariko, Hakoishi Hiroshi, Iwasa Takurō, Katō Yōko, Kawakita Atsuko, Gerhard Krebs, Kudō Akira, Heinrich Menkhaus, Danny Orbach, Peter Pantzer, Sven Saaler, Satō Takumi, Volker Stanzel, Suzuki Naoko, Tajima Nobuo, Tano Daisuke, and Rolf-Harald Wippich.

This Handbook links the growing body of media and conflict research with the field of security studies. The academic sub-field of media and conflict has developed and expanded greatly over the past two decades. Operating across a diverse range of academic disciplines, academics are studying the impact the media has on governments pursuing war, responses to humanitarian crises and violent political struggles, and the role of the media as a facilitator of, and a threat to, both peace building and conflict prevention. This handbook seeks to consolidate existing knowledge by linking the body of conflict and media studies with work in security studies. The handbook is arranged into five parts: Theory and Principles. Media, the State and War Media and Human Security Media and Policymaking within the Security State New Issues in Security and Conflict and Future Directions For scholars of security studies, this handbook will provide a key point of reference for state of the art scholarship concerning the media-security nexus; for scholars of communication and media studies, the handbook will provide a comprehensive mapping of the media-conflict field.

This book explores the state of European foreign conflict reporting by public-sector broadcasters, post-Cold war and post-9/11. It compares the values of three television news providers from differing public systems: BBC’s News at 10, Russia’s Vremya and France 2’s 20 Heures. The book examines how these three news providers have reported and broadcast the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which pre-dates both the change in East-West relations and the events of 9/11. In doing so, the work identifies and analyses the role of public and state-aligned broadcasters and illustrates how certain news values are consistently prioritised by the broadcasters and the effect this has on how news stories are portrayed. The book is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on 2006 to 2008 and provides a detailed quantitative overview of the broadcasters’ news values. Part II provides an update of the analysis by examining coverage of the war in Gaza 2014 and discusses the findings from audience research into perceptions of this latter war. This book explains that not only do hierarchies in news values exist in foreign conflict reporting but that they are never arbitrary and can be explained, in part, by the structure of the broadcasters and by events occurring within, or associated with, the reporting country, resulting in nationally differentiated perceptions of conflict throughout the world. This book will be of much interest to students of media studies, war and conflict studies, Middle East politics and international relations in general.

War and Art: The Preservation of Italian Treasures is the result of a joint effort by the Embassy of Italy in Washington, D.C., the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento in Rome, the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, and the Woodrow Wilson House in Washington, D.C.. All joined forces to ensure that the 100th anniversary of the start of the Great War is not forgotten. On July 27, 2014 the Embassy of Italy remembered the last day of peace before the tragedy of WWI with a touching ceremony. At Arlington National Cemetery, a trumpeter played the moving notes of our “The Silence” – our equivalent of “Taps” in the US, and traditionally performed when bidding farewell to the fallen – while musicians in other cities throughout the world simultaneously did the same. To fully understand such a world-changing event as the Great War is to ensure and preserve peace and democracy today. In addition, its comprehension enables us to reconcile our legitimate pride in our national identities with the deep awareness of being citizens of the world. This photographic exhibition, based on images from the Museo del Risorgimento’s archive, highlights the ravages that war can wreak not only on human beings, but also on what should be the inviolate beauty of art. This exhibit represents a unique opportunity to recapture and gain more insight into a significant part of our history. The specific focus on preserving cultural heritage provides a first-hand cultural and historical perspective of the conflict, as well as of the broader Italian framework. It was also thanks to the vital support of the US that Italy was able to preserve most of its artistic treasures – and thus of its identity – from ruthless annihilation. This was in some ways the precursor of a tradition that was later embodied by the notable Monuments Men during the Second World War.

Why do ethnic groups adopt violent means? In the 1990's, ethnicity emerged as the principle source of organized violence around the world. Ethnic wars were no longer internal conflicts between substate actors; instead they challenged state sovereignty and taxed the international community's ability to respond. Efforts to understand ethnic conflict remain divorced from the study of systemic change and the declining authority, capacity, and legitimacy of weak multiethnic states. This work proposes that the phenomenon of ethnic violence must be understood through a multilevel approach and that finding a solution to ethnic violence is possible only if we have a clear understanding of the sources that spark such violence in the first place. The Three Images of Ethnic War identifies the causes of ethnic war at three levels of analysis — the group, the state, and the international. These are the three images of ethnic war. This book places the outbreak of violence within context of the state and the international system in which the violence unfolds. Hanlon examines three violent ethnic wars in Yugoslavia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Iraq. Yugoslavia's violent ethnic wars, the war over Nagorno-Karabakh, and the violent conflict between Kurds and Arabs in Iraqi Kurdistan demonstrate that ethnic violence is a complex and multifaceted occurrence. Hanlon argues that the numerous reasons why groups adopt violent means can only be understood through a multilevel framework of the three images of ethnic war and the interrelationship among them.

Brilliant horsemen and great fighters, the Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the first millennium BC. Their steppe homeland bordered on a number of sedentary states to the south - the Chinese, the Persians and the Greeks - and there were, inevitably, numerous interactions between the nomads and their neighbours. The Scythians fought the Persians on a number of occasions, in one battle killing their king and on another occasion driving the invading army of Darius the Great from the steppe. Relations with the Greeks around the shores of the Black Sea were rather different - both communities benefiting from trading with each other. This led to the development of a brilliant art style, often depicting scenes from Scythian mythology and everyday life. It is from the writings of Greeks like the historian Herodotus that we learn of Scythian life: their beliefs, their burial practices, their love of fighting, and their ambivalent attitudes to gender. It is a world that is also brilliantly illuminated by the rich material culture recovered from Scythian burials, from the graves of kings on the Pontic steppe, with their elaborate gold work and vividly coloured fabrics, to the frozen tombs of the Altai mountains, where all the organic material - wooden carvings, carpets, saddles and even tattooed human bodies - is amazingly well preserved. Barry Cunliffe here marshals this vast array of evidence - both archaeological and textual - in a masterful reconstruction of the lost world of the Scythians, allowing them to emerge in all their considerable vigour and splendour for the first time in over two millennia.

This book considers the ways in which Muslims view the way they are being viewed, not viewed, or incorrectly viewed, by the West. The book underscores a certain “will-to-visibility” whereby Muslims/ Arabs wish just to be “seen” and to be marked as fellow human beings. The author relates the failure to achieve this visibility to a state of desperation that inextricably and symmetrically ties visibility to violence. When Syrian and Palestinian refugees recently started refusing to be photographed, they clearly ushered the eventual but inevitable collapse of the image and its final futility. The photograph has been completely emptied of its last remaining possibility of signification. The book attempts to engage with questions about the ways in which images are perceived within cross cultural contexts. Why and how do people from different cultural backgrounds view the same image in opposing ways; why do cartoon, photographs, and videos become both the cause and target of bloody political violence – as witnessed recently by the deadly attacks against Charlie Hebdo in France and in the swift military response by the US, Jordan, France, and others to videotaped violence by ISIS.

Das "lange 19. Jahrhundert" der Nationalstaatenbildung ist auch das Jahrhundert der "Erfindung" der Fotografie wie auch der Geburt der modernen Archivwissenschaften. Die Fotografie wurde bald von den Nationalstaaten in ihrem Bedürfnis nach bildlicher Visualisierung in den Dienst genommen. Nach dem II. Weltkrieg, dem Zerfall der kolonialistischen Systeme und schließlich dem Fall der Berliner Mauer erlangten nationale Fragen erneut Aktualität - nun in einem globalen Rahmen. Die Beiträge in diesem Band untersuchen den Zusammenhang zwischen Fotografie/Fotoarchiven und der Idee der Nation, wobei das Objektiv sich nicht auf einzelne Ikonen, sondern auf die weitreichende Dimension des Archivs richtet.