Kobi Michael - Böcker

With the end of the Cold War, the euphoria of the Gulf War of the 1990s and the avowal of a New World Order, peace-operations were declared as the recipe for a better world through international intervention in conflict arenas. However, the debacles and failures in Cambodia, Somalia, or the Balkans led to disillusionment and a sense of strategic helplessness among leaders, experts and scholars in the industrial democracies. While these arguments have been the focus of intense criticism and discussion, they nevertheless underscore the fact that since the end of the Cold War the armed forces of the industrial democracies have undergone very significant transformations. This is the first work linking the changes in armed forces to Peace Support Operations (PSOs), those operations with major state-building components that demand broad and coherent cooperation between military forces and civilian entities.The Transformation of the World of War and Peace Support Operations is timely as the recent debates over PSOs continue to take center stage. This work embodies a new set of ideas and concepts that aid in grasping and interpreting the transformations taking place in the world of war and in PSOs. It seeks to understand how social, economic, political, and organizational transformations around the globe are related to the complex links between armed forces and PSOs. Additionally, this work addresses issues that continue to define the character and makeup of modern warfare and the missions of PSOs for coming decades.

This book sets out the major social scientific approaches to the study of Special Operations Forces. Despite consistent downsizing, over the past two decades the armed forces of the industrial democracies have seen a huge growth in Special Operations Forces (SOF). Through increasing numbers of personnel and more frequent deployments, SOF units have wielded considerable influence in conflicts around the world, with senior SOF officers having led major strategic operations. This increased presence and unprecedented expansion for SOF is largely a result of the ‘new’ kinds of conflicts that have emerged in the 21st century. At the same time, even with this high profile in the military, policy and media and popular cultural arenas, there is relatively little social scientific research on SOF. This volume aims to fill this gap by providing a series of studies and analyses of SOF across the globe, since the end of World War II. Analysing SOF at the micro, mezzo and macro levels provides broad and diverse insights. Moreover, the volume deals with new issues raised by the use of such forces that include emerging modes of civilian control, innovative organizational forms and the special psychological characteristics necessitated by SOF operatives. It concludes with a discussion of a question which continues to be debated in today’s militaries: what makes SOF ‘special’?Filling a clear gap in the literature, this book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, civil-military relations, irregular warfare, security studies, and international relations.