Recent research on violence against civilians during wars has emphasized warrelated factors over political ones. For example, factors such as control of territory or characteristics of the armed groups have been prioritized at the expense of factors such as ideological alignments or local political competition. In this paper, I argue that the emphasis on war-related factors is conditioned by th...

During World War II and the brutal experience of German attacks against civilians on the home front, Britain underwent a consequential, yet unstudied, development. This total war elevated British psychoanalysis to a role not enjoyed anywhere else in the world. Under the shock of bombing and evacuation, exiled continental analysts such as Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud’s daughter) and Melanie Klein a...

On the first day of this war, I listened to the conversation of a colonel and a member of the Indian Civil Service. Both were retired men whose whole lives had been spent in unselfish service to others, who had brought particularly able minds to each problem that had occurred in their work. The colonel had started as a youngster in the South African War and his life work had been governed by hi...

A collective memory is a representation of the past that is shared by members of a group. We investigated similarities and differences in the collective memories of younger and older adults for three major wars in U.S. history (the Civil War, World War II, and the Iraq War). Both groups were alive during the recent Iraq War, but only the older subjects were alive during World War II, and both g...

In some very important respects, the institution of war is clearly in decline. Certain standard, indeed classic, varieties of war – particularly major war or wars among developed countries – have become so rare and unlikely that they could well be considered to be obsolescent, if not obsolete. Also in notable decline, it appears, are conventional war more generally, conventional civil war, colo...

BACKGROUND Epidemiologic studies have implicated wartime exposures to acetylcholinesterase (AChE)-inhibiting chemicals as etiologic factors in Gulf War illness (GWI), the multisymptom condition linked to military service in the 1991 Gulf War. It is unclear, however, why some veterans developed GWI while others with similar exposures did not. Genetic variants of the enzyme butyrylcholinesterase ...