This book explores the issue of civilian devastation in modern warfare, focusing on the complex processes that effectively establish civilians’ identity in times of war.

Underpinning the physicality of war’s tumult are structural forces that create landscapes of civilian vulnerability. Such forces operate in four sectors of modern warfare: nationalistic ideology, state-sponsored militaries, global media, and international institutions. Each sector promotes its own constructions of civilian identity in relation to militant combatants: constructions that prove lethal to the civilian noncombatant who lacks political power and decision-making capacity with regards to their own survival.

Civilians and Modern War provides a critical overview of the plight of civilians in war, examining the political and normative underpinnings of the decisions, actions, policies, and practices of major sectors of war. The contributors seek to undermine the ‘tunnelling effect’ of the militaristic framework regarding the experiences of noncombatants.

This book will be of much interest to students of war and conflict studies, ethics, conflict resolution, and IR/Security Studies.

A full list of chapter Abstracts is available here

Chapters by S-CAR Contributors

Civilians Overshadowed by Soldiers: Faceless Victims of the
Public Media

By Mohammed Cherkaoui

Israeli Soldiers' Perceptions of Palestinians Civilians during the 2009 Gaza War

By Neta Oren

The Role of Civilians in American War Ideology

By Richard Rubenstein

Civilians Under the Law: Inequality, Intersectionality, and Irony

By Susan F. Hirsch

Preventing Genocide: The Quest for System Response

By Andrea Bartoli and Tetsushi Ogata

Civilians, Pundits and Mediatized Ideology

By Mohammed Cherkaoui

Double Victims: the Recruitment and Treatment of Child Soldiers in Chechnya

By Karina Korostelina

The Place and Plight of Civilians in Modern War

By Daniel Rothbart, Karina Korostelina, and Mohammed Cherkaoui

The Politics of Civilian Identity

By Daniel Rothbart

Devastating Civilians at Home: The Plight of Crimean Tatars and Californians of Asian Decent during World War II

By Karina Korostelina

Conclusion: the Road Ahead

By Daniel Rothbart, Karina Korostelina, Mohammed Cherkaoui

Keep an eye out for the more affordable Paperback edition coming soon!

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Other books by authors from the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution