Karina Korostelina – författare

This book analyses the role of history education in conflict and post-conflict societies, describing common history textbook projects in Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Far East and the Middle East. Ever since the emergence of the modern school system and the implementation of compulsory education, textbooks have been seen as privileged media. The knowledge they convey is relatively persistent and moreover highly selective: every textbook author must choose and omit, condense, structure, reduce, and generalize information. Within this context, history textbooks are often at the centre of interest. There are unquestionably significant differences regarding homogeneity or plurality of interpretations when concepts of history education are compared internationally.This volume conducts a comparative analysis of common history projects in different countries and provides conceptual frameworks and methodological tools for enhancing the roles of these projects in the processes of conflict prevention and resolution. This book is timely, as issues of history education in conflict and post-conflict societies are becoming more popular with the increased realisation that unresolved disagreements about historical narratives can, and often do, lead to renewed conflict or even violence.This book will be of interest to students of peace studies and conflict resolution, political science, history, sociology, anthropology, social psychology, and international relations in general.

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.

Why do civilians suffer most during times of violent conflict? Why are civilian fatalities as much as eight times higher, calculated globally for current conflicts, than military fatalities? In Why They Die, Daniel Rothbart and Karina V. Korostelina address these questions through a systematic study of civilian devastation in violent conflicts. Pushing aside the simplistic definition of war as a guns-and-blood battle between two militant groups, the authors investigate the identity politics underlying conflicts of many types. During a conflict, all those on the opposite side are perceived as the enemy, with little distinction between soldiers and civilians. As a result, random atrocities and systematic violence against civilian populations become acceptable.Rothbart and Korostelina devote the first half of the book to case studies: deportation of the Crimean Tatars from the Ukraine, genocide in Rwanda, the Lebanon War, and the war in Iraq. With the second half, they present new methodological tools for understanding different types of violent conflict and discuss the implications of these tools for conflict resolution.

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.