Why did we bomb Belgrade?

We are told that Kosovo marks a new era of humanitarian intervention, when promoting and protecting values will be reason enough for coercive military action. However, a review of the evidence, as outlined in this article, suggests that it was Western interests, rather than values, that led to the largely unintended bombing campaign. One can identify two objectives underlying NATO policy—one substantive and the other relating to image. It was the latter that determined the timing of NATO's response to the Kosovo crisis, which had such damaging consequences, many yet to be fully realized. Kosovo shared several characteristics with the Suez crisis that turned out to have been a watershed in the post-Second World War world; so, too, may Kosovo turn out to have been a watershed in the post-Cold War world.     

Does my bomb look big in this? Britain's nuclear choices after Trident

The United Kingdom's present strategic nuclear deterrent, the Trident submarine-based system, has been in full operation for less than four years. But the government will have to consider questions about the follow-on to this system before the end of this parliament and its successor government will almost certainly have to start taking, and implementing, decisions before 2008–9. In the past, political and public debates about the UK's nuclear weapons tended to flow forward on their own technical momentum, backed by the strategic imperatives of the Cold War. The next successor decisions, however, will be made in an era where both the technical questions and the strategic environment will be radically different. There may or may not be another vigorous public debate, but the present, and next, government will face some fundamental     

Re/negotiating “suspicion”: exploring the construction of self in Irish migrants' memories of the 1996 Manchester bomb

On 15 June 1996 the Provisional IRA exploded a 3000 lb bomb in the city of Manchester, home to a large Irish community. This article uses oral history to explore the distinct ways in which two male Irish migrants, both of whom settled in the Manchester area during the post-war period, recall and negotiate their experiences of the bomb and its aftermath. Focusing on how memory production is shaped though interactions between different cultural forms and interior psychic processes, the article uses memories of the bomb to explore how the culture of suspicion generated around Irishness in Britain during “The Troubles” could be productive of distinct forms of Irish migrant subjectivity.