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SOCIAL

1. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was existed in Central Europe from the late 19th century to the early 20th century

2. With a population of 50 million people.

3. This empire was a multicultural country, including various races, languages, and cultures.

4. However, as there were various ethnic groups within the empire, conflicts arose between countries due to differences in language and culture.

ECONOMIC

1. Coal output each year is 47 million tonnes.

2. Steel output each year is 5 million tonnes.

3. The economy was characterised by regional disparities and diverse ethnic groups.

4. Agriculture was a significant sector, with Hungary being the primary agricultural producer.

5. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 further strained the economy, leading to its eventual dissolution after the war.

POLITICAL

1. People were unhappy and rioting against the Austria-Hungary government.

2. The governmental leader was the eldest out of other countries leaders.

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES

1. Had no oversea colonies

2. Relied on Germany

3. Central powers member

4. Invaded Serbia  and Romania

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SOI: War is fought through systems of power that utilise different processes over time and place.

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SOI: War is fought through systems of power that utilise different processes over time and place.

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1. War - A state of conflict between countries or nations in which military action is taken by the involved parties.

2. Peace - A state of calm and tranquility characterised by the absence of conflict, violence, or disturbance.

3. Power - The ability or capacity to control, influence, or direct the actions and decisions of others.

4. Military power - The strength and capability of a country's armed forces, including its weapons, personnel, and resources.

5. Diplomatic power - The ability of a country to influence the actions and decisions of others through diplomatic means, such as negotiations, treaties, and alliances.

6. Economic power - The ability of a country to influence the actions and decisions of others through economic means, such as trade, investment, and financial assistance.

7. Political power - The ability of a country to influence the actions and decisions of others through political means, such as elections, lobbying, and pressure.

8. System of government - A set of political institutions, laws, and practices by which a country is governed.

9. Military system - The set of institutions, laws, and practices that govern a country's armed forces and their role in the country's security and defence.

10. International system - The network of relationships and interactions between countries, including their political, economic, and military interactions.

11. Balance of power - The distribution of military, economic, and political power among countries or nations, which can impact their decisions and actions in international relations.

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1) Add comments to the Padlet points for the key, related and global context.

2) Add resources, evidence and pictures to help  to build a bigger picture.

3) Make connections between the different concepts and contexts - how are they connected?

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Add your ideas based on the SOI.

- What have you learnt?
- How does it apply to our inquiry?
- Can you add any resources or evidence to back up your ideas?

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Add your ideas based on the SOI.

- What have you learnt?
- How does it apply to our inquiry?
- Can you add any resources or evidence to back up your ideas?

# data[].attributes.body
Add your ideas based on the SOI.

- What have you learnt?
- How does it apply to our inquiry?
- Can you add any resources or evidence to back up your ideas?

# data[].attributes.body
Add your ideas based on the SOI.

- What have you learnt?
- How does it apply to our inquiry?
- Can you add any resources or evidence to back up your ideas?

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All Quiet on the Western Front | Official Trailer | Netflix

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War | History, Causes, Types, Meaning, Examples, & Facts

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War, in the popular sense, a conflict between political groups involving hostilities of considerable duration and magnitude. Sociologists usually apply the term to such conflicts only if they are initiated and conducted in accordance with socially recognized forms.

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Military conflict took place during every year of the 20th Century. There were only short periods of time that the world was free of war. The total number of deaths caused by war during the 20th Century has been estimated at 187 million and is probably higher.

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The Museum's collections database contains more than 270,000 records, including:

Photos and albums -Images of life before, during, and after the Holocaust

Personal stories -Interviews, home movies, memoirs, and diaries

Films -Historical footage and contemporary films about the Holocaust

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A living memorial to the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum inspires citizens and leaders worldwide to confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity.

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What happens when two systems competing systems collide? 

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What happens when two systems competing systems collide? 

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Containment

By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called "containment." In his famous "Long Telegram," the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) explained the policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was "a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree]." As a result, America's only choice was the "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

"It must be the policy of the United States," he declared before Congress in 1947, "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation...by outside pressures." This way of thinking would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades.

Did you know? The term 'cold war' first appeared in a 1945 essay by the English writer George Orwell called 'You and the Atomic Bomb.'

The Cold War: The Atomic Age

The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States. In 1950, a National Security Council Report known as NSC-68 had echoed Truman's recommendation that the country use military force to contain communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring. To that end, the report called for a four-fold increase in defense spending.

In particular, American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II. Thus began a deadly " arms race." In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or "superbomb." Stalin followed suit.

As a result, the stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed radioactive waste into the atmosphere.

The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They practiced attack drills in schools and other public places. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans' everyday lives.

The Cold War and the Space Race

Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for "traveling companion"), the world's first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth's orbit. Sputnik's launch came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to most Americans.

In the United States, space was seen as the next frontier, a logical extension of the grand American tradition of exploration, and it was crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile-seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space-made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.

In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.

That May, after Alan Shepard become the first American man in space, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) made the bold public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA's Apollo 11 mission, became the first man to set foot on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans.

U.S. astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.

The Cold War and the Red Scare

Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC) brought the Cold War home in another way. The committee began a series of hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well.

In Hollywood, HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these "blacklisted" writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade. HUAC also accused State Department workers of engaging in subversive activities. Soon, other anticommunist politicians, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), expanded this probe to include anyone who worked in the federal government.

Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify against colleagues and "loyalty oaths" became commonplace.

The Cold War Abroad

The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the Soviet threat abroad. In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People's Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south. Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option. Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the Korean War dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.

In 1955, the United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made West Germany a member of NATO and permitted it to remilitarize. The Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria that set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union.

Other international disputes followed. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial "Third World."

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully "contain" communist expansionism there, they would have to intervene more actively on Diem's behalf. However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a 10-year conflict.

The End of the Cold War and Effects

Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) began to implement a new approach to international relations. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile, "bi-polar" place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.

At the same time, he adopted a policy of "détente"-"relaxation"-toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.

Despite Nixon's efforts, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.

Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, however, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. In response to severe economic problems and growing political ferment in the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that redefined Russia's relationship to the rest of the world: "glasnost," or political openness, and " perestroika," or economic reform.

Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a noncommunist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall-the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War-was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.

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Cold War: Summary, Combatants, Start & End

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The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted for decades and resulted in anti-communist suspicions and international incidents that led the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear disaster.

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The 20th century was dominated by wars. An estimated 80 million people died in two world wars. Then there was the Cold War: an arms race between the USA and Russia. In Europe and large parts of the world, two hostile sides faced each other. In Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America, the global powers financed bloody proxy wars.

Peaceful revolutions finally brought down the Iron Curtain in 1989. The Cold War was declared over. "We hoped that after the end of the cold war, there would be an era of peace," says Sarah Brockmeier, UN peacekeeping expert at the Global Public Policy Institute, a Berlin-based think tank.
Are there fewer wars today than before?
However, this hope soon proved to be unfounded. There are still many conflicts around the world. Since the mid-2000s, their number has increased again. According to Brockmeier: "We've seen more conflict, more violence, and - especially since the start of the Syrian war - more conflict deaths."

This is mainly due to the intrastate conflicts of the 1990s, which nobody had seen coming after the fall of the Berlin Wall, says Brockmeier. Among them are the Yugoslav wars and the conflicts in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The war in Mali from 2012 and the continuing war in Syria, which began in 2011, seem to continue the trend.

In the last ten years alone, researchers from the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University have counted 23 wars and 162 minor conflicts with fewer than 100 deaths per year.

According to Brockmeier, we have become better at recognizing the warning signs of conflicts. Still, we are often unable to prevent them. "We have not learned the lessons of mobilizing the political will early to already intervene before armed violence breaks out."

Who are the major players in northern Syria?

IS: A renewed role?

One possible future actor is IS. While it was essentially defeated in March 2019, tens of thousands of its fighters and their families remain in prisons or guarded camps in the Kurdish area of the country. Nearly a thousand alone have already escaped from a camp that was caught in the fighting between Kurdish militias and Turkish forces. Should the situation grow more unstable, IS could regroup.

Author: Uta Steinwehr, Cristina Burack

Conflicts becoming more complex and international
With increasing globalization, wars have become more complex since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In addition to the model of bilateral conflict with two opposing sides, there are often other parties involved as well who may, for example send troops or supply weapons, expertise or training. Until the beginning of the 2000s, only two or three external parties, on average, participated in any given conflict. In the following years, that average rose to between four and five.

The main reason for this is the complex conflicts in the Middle East: In 2009, 46 external parties were involved in the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan. These include the countries in international alliances such as NATO, which, in Afghanistan's case, headed the International Security Assistance Force. The war in Syria today is similarly complex: Bloomberg, for example, counted ten different main participants alone in the constantly changing network of interests at the beginning of October 2019.
Global military spending is decreasing
In 2017, countries around the world invested a combined €1.8 trillion ($1.98 trillion) into their militaries. That adds up to around two percent of the world's gross domestic product, marking a record low. Relative global military spending has in fact declined steadily over the past decades

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The 20th century was dominated by wars. An estimated 80 million people died in two world wars. Then there was the Cold War: an arms race between the USA and Russia. In Europe and large parts of the world, two hostile sides faced each other.

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Total war: Total war, military conflict in which the contenders are willing to make any sacrifice in lives and other resources to obtain a complete victory, as distinguished from limited war. Throughout history, limitations on the scope of warfare have been more economic and social than political. Simple

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"War remains, as it always has been, one of the chief human mysteries."

War. The word alone raises a range of emotions from horror to admiration. Some of us choose to avert our eyes as if the very act of remembering and thinking about war somehow brings it closer. Others of us are fascinated by it and can find in war excitement and glamour. As a historian I firmly believe that we have to include war in our study of human history if we are to make any sense of the past. War's effects have been so profound that to leave it out is to ignore one of the great forces, along with geography, resources, economics, ideas, and social and political changes, which have shaped human development and changed history. If the Persians had defeated the Greek city-states in the fifth century b.c.; if the Incas had crushed Pizarro's expedition in the sixteenth century; or if Hitler had won the Second World War, would the world have been different? We know that it would although we can only guess by how much.

And the what-ifs are only a part of the conundrums we face. War raises fundamental questions about what it is to be human and about the essence of human society. Does war bring out the bestial side of human nature or the best? As with so much to do with war, we cannot agree. Is it an indelible part of human society, somehow woven in like an original sin from the time our ancestors first started organizing themselves into social groups? Our mark of Cain, a curse put on us which condemns us to repeated conflict? Or is such a view a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy? Do changes in society bring new types of war or does war drive change in society? Or should we even try to say what comes first, but rather see war and society as partners, locked into a dangerous but also productive relationship? Can war-destructive, cruel and wasteful-also bring benefits?

Important questions all, and I will try to answer them, and others that will come up along the way, as I explore the subject. I hope to persuade you of one thing, however. War is not an aberration, best forgotten as quickly as possible. Nor is it simply an absence of peace which is really the normal state of affairs. If we fail to grasp how deeply intertwined war and human society are-to the point where we cannot say that one predominates over or causes the other-we are missing an important dimension of the human story. We cannot ignore war and its impact on the development of human society if we hope to understand our world and how we reached this point in history.

[ Return to the review of "War." ]
Western societies have been fortunate in the last decades; since the end of the Second World War they have not experienced war firsthand. True, Western countries have sent military to fight around the world, in Asia, in the Korean or Vietnam Wars or in Afghanistan, in parts of the Middle East or in Africa, but only a very small minority of people living in the West have been touched directly by those conflicts. Millions in those regions of course have had very different experiences and there has been no year since 1945 when there has not been fighting in one part of the world or another. For those of us who have enjoyed what is often called the Long Peace it is all too easy to see war as something that others do, perhaps because they are at a different stage of development. We in the West, so we complacently assume, are more peaceable. Writers such as the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker have popularized the view that Western societies have become less violent over the past two centuries and that the world as a whole has seen a decline in deaths from war. So while we formally mourn the dead from our past wars once a year, we increasingly see war as something that happens when peace-the normal state of affairs-breaks down. At the same time we can indulge a fascination with great military heroes and their battles of the past; we admire stories of courage and daring exploits in war; the shelves of bookshops and libraries are packed with military histories; and movie and television producers know that war is always a popular subject. The public never seems to tire of Napoleon and his campaigns, Dunkirk, D-Day or the fantasies of Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. We enjoy them in part because they are at a safe distance; we are confident that we ourselves will never have to take part in war.

The result is that we do not take war as seriously as it deserves. We may prefer to avert our eyes from what is so often a grim and depressing subject, but we should not. Wars have repeatedly changed the course of human history, opening up pathways into the future and closing down others. The words of the Prophet Muhammad were carried out of the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula into the rich settled lands of the Levant and North Africa in a series of wars, and this has had a lasting impact on that region. Imagine what Europe might be like today if Muslim leaders had managed to conquer the whole continent, as they came close to doing on a couple of occasions. Early in the eighth century Muslim invaders conquered Spain and moved north across the Pyrenees into what is today's France. They were defeated at the Battle of Tours in 732, marking the end of the surge northward. Had it continued, it is possible to imagine a Muslim and not a Catholic France shaping French society and European history over the next centuries. Some 800 years later the great Ottoman leader Suleiman the Magnificent swept through the Balkans and most of Hungary; in 1529 his troops were outside Vienna. If they had taken that great city the center of Europe might have become part of his empire and its history would have been a different one. The spires of Vienna's many churches would have been joined by minarets and a young Mozart might have heard different forms of music played on different instruments. Closer to our own times, let us imagine what might have happened if the Germans had wiped out the British and the Allies at Dunkirk in May 1940 and then destroyed Britain's fighter command in the Battle of Britain that summer. The British Isles might have become another Nazi possession.

War in its essence is organized violence, but different societies fight different sorts of wars. Nomadic peoples fight wars of movement, attacking when they have an advantage and slipping away into vast open spaces when they do not. Settled agricultural societies need walls and fortifications. War forces change and adaptation, and conversely changes in society affect war. The ancient Greeks believed that citizens had an obligation to come to the defense of their cities. That participation in war in turn brought an extension of rights and democracy. By the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution made it possible for governments to assemble and maintain huge armies, bigger than anything the world had seen before, but that also created an expectation among those millions of men who were conscripted that they would have a greater say in their own societies. Governments were obliged not only to listen but also to provide a range of services, from education to unemployment insurance. The strong nation-states of today with their centralized governments and organized bureaucracies are the products of centuries of war. Memories and commemorations of past victories and defeats become part of the national story and nations require stories if they are to be cohesive. Such centralized polities, whose people see themselves as part of a shared whole, can wage war on a greater scale and for longer because of their organization, their capacity to use the resources of their societies and their ability to draw on the support of their citizens. The capacity to make war and the evolution of human society are part of the same story.

Over the centuries war has become more deadly, with greater impact. There are more of us; we have more resources and more organized and complex societies; we can mobilize and engage millions in our struggles; and we have a much greater capacity to destroy. We had to come up with new terms to describe the two great wars of the twentieth century: world war and total war. While some threads run consistently through the history of war and human society-such as the impact of changes in society or technology, attempts to limit or control war, or the differences between warriors and civilians-I will be paying a lot of attention to the period since the end of the eighteenth century, because war has become not just quantitatively different but qualitatively. I will also draw many of my examples from the history of the West, because it has pioneered so much in the recent past in war, as well as, it must be said, attempts to keep it under control.

Yet in the majority of Western universities the study of war is largely ignored, perhaps because we fear that the mere act of researching and thinking about it means approval. International historians, diplomatic historians and military historians all complain about the lack of interest in their fields, and of jobs too. War or strategic studies are relegated, when they exist, to their own small enclosures where those called military historians can roam away, digging up their unsavory tidbits and constructing their unedifying stories, and not bother anyone else. I remember years ago, in my first history department, we had a visit from an educational consultant to help us make our courses more appealing to students. When I told him that I was drawing up plans for a course called "War and Society" he looked dismayed. It would be better, he urged, to use the title "A History of Peace."

It is a curious neglect, because we live in a world shaped by war, even if we do not always realize it. Peoples have moved or fled, sometimes disappeared literally and from history, because of war. So many borders have been set by war, and governments and states have risen and fallen through war. Shakespeare knew this well: in his plays war often provides the mechanism by which kings rise and fall while the ordinary citizens keep their heads down and pray that the storm will leave them unscathed. Some of our greatest art has been inspired by war or the hatred of war: the Iliad, Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, Goya's The Disasters of War, Picasso's Guernica or Tolstoy's War and Peace.

War is in the games children play-capture the flag or the fort-and one of the most popular video games of 2018 in the United States was Call of Duty, based on the Second World War. The crowds who go to sporting events sometimes treat them as battles with the other team as the enemy. In Italy those who are known as Ultra fans arrive at soccer matches in highly organized groups with a firm hierarchy of command. They wear uniforms and give themselves names such as Commandos, Guerrillas and, much to the dismay of many of their fellow Italians, some borrowed from the partisan bands of the Second World War. They come to do battle with supporters of the rival team more than to watch the match. The modern Olympics were meant to build international fellowship but from almost their first moment they mirrored competition between the different nations. The games were not war but they took on many of its attributes, with the awarding of medals, the playing of national anthems and teams in uniforms marching in unison behind their national flags. Hitler and Goebbels famously envisaged the 1936 Berlin Olympics as key in their campaign to show the superiority of the German people and, during the Cold War, tallies of medals were read as showing the superiority of one side over the other.
[ Return to the review of "War." ]
Even our language and our expressions bear the imprint of war. After they defeated the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars the Romans continued to use the expression "Punic good faith" ( fides Punica) sarcastically. In English we say dismissively that someone or something is a flash in the pan without realizing that the expression originated with early guns, when the gunpowder meant to ignite the charge flared to no effect. If the British want to be rude they will call something French or Dutch, because those nations were once enemies. Taking French leave means departing rudely and abruptly, while Dutch courage means drinking gin. (And the words "British" and "English" fill the same role for the French and the Dutch.) So many of our favorite metaphors come from the military, for the British especially from the navy. If we are three sheets to the wind, eating a square meal might help. If we run into a spot of trouble we can wait for it to blow over or give it lots of leeway. If you don't believe me you can always say, "Go tell it to the marines!" Our conversation and writing are sprinkled with military metaphors: wars on poverty, on cancer, drugs or obesity (I once saw a book entitled My War on My Husband's Cholesterol). Obituaries talk about the deceased as having "lost the battle" with their illness. We speak freely of campaigns, whether in advertising or to raise money for charity. Business leaders read a Chinese work on strategy written 2,000 years ago for tips on how to outsmart the opposition and carry their enterprises to victory. They boast of their strategic goals and their innovative tactics and are fond of comparing themselves to great military leaders such as Napoleon. When politicians go to ground to avoid questions or scandals-firestorms, they are often called-the media report that they are in their bunkers trying to rally their troops and planning an offensive. In December 2018 a New York Times headline read: "For Trump, a War Every Day, Waged Increasingly Alone."

War is there too in so much of our geography. In the names of places: Trafalgar Square in London after Nelson's triumph; the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris after one of Napoleon's greatest victories; Waterloo Station in London after his final defeat. In Canada there is a town which was once called Berlin-Potsdam because it had been settled in the nineteenth century by German immigrants; when the First World War broke out, it suddenly became Kitchener-Waterloo. Our towns and cities almost always have their war memorials with the names of those who died or monuments to long-gone heroes. Nelson stands on his column in London; Grant's tomb is a popular meeting place in New York's Riverside Park. Increasingly in the past century, memorials have appeared to the rank and file, the often anonymous participants in war, such as nurses, pilots, infantry soldiers, marines, ordinary seamen and even, in the case of the United Kingdom, to the animals used in the two world wars. Reminders of past wars are so much part of the scenery we often do not see them. I have walked up and down Platform 1 at London's Paddington Station more times than I can remember, never noticing a large memorial to the 2,524 employees of the Great Western Railway company who died in the First World War. At Paddington too is a striking bronze statue of a soldier who stands there, dressed for war, reading a letter from home. Without the commemorations of the hundredth anniversary of the war I would not have stopped to see it, or taken the time at Victoria Station to search for the plaques to the vast numbers of soldiers who entrained there on their way to France, or the one to the body of the Unknown Soldier which arrived back in 1920.

If we pause to reflect on our own histories we can often find traces of war in our memories. I grew up in a peaceful Canada but many of the books and comics I read were about war, from the seemingly inexhaustible supply of G. A. Hentys, with stories of noble and heroic boys in most of the major conflicts before 1914, through the intrepid pilot Biggles and his crew in the Second World War to the Black Hawk comic books, which had started out in that war but moved seamlessly into the Korean one. At Brownies we sang songs-much cleaned up, I later realized- from the First World War and learned semaphore and how to make bandages. At school in the early 1950s we collected string and foil for the war effort in Korea. We also practiced sitting under our desks in case nuclear war broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Many of us will have heard stories told by older generations who knew war firsthand. Both my grandfathers were in the First World War as doctors, the Welsh one with the Indian Army at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia, and the Canadian one on the Western Front. My father and all four of my uncles were in the Second World War. They told us some but not all of what they had experienced. My father, who was on a Canadian ship escorting convoys across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean, mostly had funny stories, but once and only once he told us how close they had come to being sunk. His voice shook and he could not go on. His own father never told him much about the trenches, but as often happens he talked to a grandchild, my sister, who was too young to understand much of it. Our grandfather also brought back a hand grenade as a souvenir which sat in my grandmother's curio cabinet along with such treasures as a miniature Swiss cottage and a tiny wooden Scotty dog. We played with the grenade as children, rolling it around on the floor, until someone noticed that it still had its pin. Many families must have such stories and mementoes, the packages of letters from war zones, artifacts picked up on battlefields, the old binoculars and helmets, or the umbrella stands made out of shell casings.

And the souvenirs keep coming as the battlefields around the world give up their debris. Eurostar has had to put up signs to remind passengers who have been to the battlefields of the First World War not to bring on board shells or weapons they have collected as souvenirs. Every spring Belgian and French farmers along what was once the Western Front pile up what they call the Iron Harvest. The winter frosts have heaved the land, bringing to the surface old barbed wire, bullets, helmets and unexploded shells, some of them containing poison gas. Units of the French and Belgian armies collect the munitions for safe disposal, but the war still claims its victims, among farmers and the bomb disposal experts, workers who dig in the wrong place or the woodcutters who build a fire for warmth on top of a live shell. Construction in London and Germany still turns up, from time to time, unexploded bombs from the Second World War. And relics surface from much older wars. A ship dredging Haifa harbor in Israel found a magnificent Greek helmet from the sixth or fifth century b.c. A retired schoolteacher out for a walk with his metal detector found a Roman helmet buried in a hill in Leicestershire. Scuba divers on a routine training exercise on the Shannon River in Ireland found a Viking sword from the tenth century.

Many societies have war museums and days of national commemoration when they remember their dead. And the dead themselves make unexpected appearances to remind us of the costs of war. On the quiet Swedish island of Gotland archeologists unearthed the body of a local soldier in his chain mail. He had been killed along with many of his fellows fighting Danish invaders in 1361. Bodies can be preserved for centuries if they are buried in mud or mummified in hot countries. In the summer of 2018 archeologists surveying land near Ypres for a housing development found the remains of 125 soldiers, German mainly, but also Allied, who had lain there since they fell in the First World War. In 2002 thousands of corpses, still dressed in their blue uniforms with buttons bearing the numbers of their regiments, were discovered in a mass grave outside Vilnius. They had died during Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812.

When we pause to remember war we think of its costs-the waste of human beings and resources-its violence, its unpredictability and the chaos it can leave in its wake. We less often recognize just how organized war is. In 1940 Germany tried to force Britain into surrender and for nearly two months London was bombed day and night. Many nonessential civilians were evacuated to the countryside. Those who remained slept in makeshift shelters or the Underground. The British Broadcasting Corporation-the BBC-which was based in the center of London, sent several departments away. Music went to Bedford, Drama and Variety to Bristol, until that got too dangerous, and Variety went off to languish rather glumly in the sedate town of Bangor in North Wales. The remaining staff often could not get home at night so the BBC-not nicknamed Auntie for nothing-turned its Radio Theatre into a dormitory, with a curtain down the middle to keep the sexes apart. In October two bombs hit the building. Seven members of staff died as they tried to remove an unexploded one and the fire department rushed to the scene to keep the flames from spreading. The news reader for the nine o'clock news paused briefly as the building shook and then kept going, covered in soot and dust. By the next morning scaffolding had gone up around Broadcasting House and the rubble was being cleared. Think for a moment of the organization that was involved in that single episode, a tiny one in the overall history of the war. The German bombers, with their fighter escorts, were the products of Germany's war industry, which had mobilized resources from materials to labor and factories in order to get the planes made and into the air. Their crews had been chosen and trained. German intelligence and planners had done their best to select important targets. And the British response was equally organized. The Royal Air Force tracked the incoming planes and did its best to stop them, while on the ground crews manned barrage balloons and searchlights. The blackout over London and other key cities was complete and carefully monitored. The BBC had made contingency plans, the fire department came and the work of clearing up started at once.

War is perhaps the most organized of all human activities and in turn it has stimulated further organization of society. Even in peacetime, preparing for war-finding the necessary money and resources-demands that governments assume greater control over society. That has become increasingly true in the modern age because the demands of war have grown with our capacity to make it. In increasing the power of governments, war has also brought progress and change, much of which we would see as beneficial: an end to private armies, greater law and order, in modern times more democracy, social benefits, improved education, changes in the position of women or labor, advances in medicine, science and technology. As we have got better at killing, we have also become less willing to tolerate violence against each other. Murder rates are down in most parts of the globe, yet the twentieth century saw the greatest deaths in war in absolute figures in history. So there is yet another question: How do we reconcile killing on such a scale while simultaneously deploring violence? Most of us clearly would not choose to make war to get its benefits. Surely there is some other way of doing it. But have we yet found it?

There are many such paradoxes about war. We fear war but we are also fascinated by it. We may feel horror at the cruelty of war and its waste, but we can also admire the courage of the soldier and feel the dangerous power of war's glamour. Some of us even admire it as one of the noblest of human activities. War gives its participants license to kill fellow human beings, yet it also requires great altruism. After all, what can be more selfless than being willing to give up your life for another? We have a long tradition of seeing war as a tonic for societies, as bracing them up and bringing out their nobler sides. Before 1914 the German poet Stefan George dismissed his peaceful European world as "the cowardly years of trash and triviality" and Filippo Marinetti, founder of the Futurist movement and future fascist, proclaimed, "War is the sole hygiene of the world." Mao Zedong later said something very similar: "Revolutionary war is an antitoxin which not only eliminates the enemy's poison but also purges us of our own filth." But we have another, equally long tradition of seeing war as an evil, productive of nothing but misery, and a sign, perhaps, that we as a species are irredeemably flawed and doomed to play out our fate in violence to the end of history.

Svetlana Alexievich is right. War is a mystery, and a terrifying one. That is why we must keep trying to understand it.
[ Return to the review of "War." ]

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'War: How Conflict Shaped Us,' by Margaret MacMillan: An Excerpt (Published 2020)

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"War remains, as it always has been, one of the chief human mysteries." War. The word alone raises a range of emotions from horror to admiration. Some of us choose to avert our eyes as if the very act of remembering and thinking about war somehow brings it closer.

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How does physical Geography affect conflict?
What is the physical geography of Iraq like?
How has physical geography affected the war in Iraq?
The physical Geography of a place can have a major impact on conflict.

As well as conflict having an impact on Geography, Geography, and in particular physical Geography, can have a major impact on conflict.

Historically, when siting settlements, people looked for defensive sites, such as the inside bend of a river meander or the top of a hill, which could be easily defended in the event of an enemy attack. Topography also played an important part in the Battle of Hastings as Harold deployed his army on Senlac Hill and therefore had the geographical advantage over William whose army was at the bottom of the hill. However, some of Harold's army broke rank and started moving down the hill, weakening their position as they were then on a level playing field and William was victorious. Some environments though make conflict challenging. For example, desert landscapes provide little cover and the lack of landmarks makes navigation difficult. This has been one of the most notable challenges about the conflict in Iraq. Marsh land and mountainous regions are also notoriously difficult environments in which to engage in conflict as, in the former, the land is unstable and it is difficult to set up a base or equipment and, in the latter, temperatures are low and conditions harsh.

The physical Geography of Iraq has had a major impact on conflict in the country.
The physical Geography in Iraq has had a major impact on conflict in the country. The desert environment, as well as providing challenges can present some advantages. For example, the flat terrain means that the pace of advance is fast and the lack of cover favours coalition forces who possess weapons with a greater range than the insurgents. However, the Zagros Mountains to the north and the Syrian desert to the west both mean that mass migration of refugees as a result of the conflict is unlikely and instead there is likely to be small pockets of refugee movement. Also, the majority (70%) of Iraq's population live between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers where the capital, Baghdad is also located. It is these areas of dense population where the focus of the conflict is likely to remain and also means that the likelihood of civilian casualties is very high.

For further information as to how the physical Geography of Iraq has affected the conflict read the National Geographic article Geography shapes nature of war in Iraq.

Take a look at the did you know PowerPoint slide. It gives you some information about how the physical landscape influenced the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Which physical factors do you think would be advantageous to conflict?
Which physical factors do you think would be disadvantageous to conflict?

Physical factors

In the physical factors card sorting activity your task is to match the different physical factors with their descriptions to explain how they can each influence conflict.

How do physical factors influence the conflict in Iraq?

To find out how physical factors have influenced the ongoing conflict in Iraq, you are going to make a 3D model of the country.

The model of Iraq PowerPoint presentation will take you through all of the steps in making your model of Iraq, for which you will also need to download this worksheet.

Once you have made your model, you will need to annotate it with some information about how geography has influenced the conflict.

Read the article from the National Geographic website: 'Geography shapes the nature of war in Iraq' and add some statements from the article to your model to explain the impact of the physical landscape.

If you need some help, the Iraq statements will provide you with some ideas.

Return to your physical factors cards from this lesson's starter activity.

Think back over what you have learnt this lesson. Which of the physical factors do you think has the greatest influence over a conflict? Rank the cards from the most important to the least important and share your thoughts with the person sitting next to you.

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Royal Geographical Society - Resources for schools

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How does physical Geography affect conflict? What is the physical geography of Iraq like? How has physical geography affected the war in Iraq? The physical Geography of a place can have a major impact on conflict. As well as conflict having an impact on Geography, Geography, and in particular physical Geography, can have a major impact on conflict.

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Books, Films, Websites - Recommendations 

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Books, Films, Websites - Recommendations 

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Books

1. "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy

2. "The Diary of Anne Frank" by Anne Frank

3. "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut

4. "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak

5. "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien

6. "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" by Ishmael Beah

7. "Night" by Elie Wiesel

8. "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker

9. "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman

10. "The Good War" by Studs Terkel

Films

1. "Schindler's List" (film) directed by Steven Spielberg

2. "The Pianist" (film) directed by Roman Polanski

3. "Saving Private Ryan" (film) directed by Steven Spielberg

4. "The Thin Red Line" (film) directed by Terrence Malick

5. "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien

6. "The Hurt Locker" (film) directed by Kathryn Bigelow

7. "1917" (film) directed by Sam Mendes

8. "All Quiet on the Western Front" (film) directed by Edward Berger

Websites:-

1. Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/): Offers comprehensive and accessible educational resources for a range of subjects, including history and social studies.

2. National World War I Museum and Memorial (https://www.theworldwar.org/): Offers a wealth of information and resources about World War I, including primary sources, multimedia content, and educational resources for students.

3. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (https://www.ushmm.org/): Provides a comprehensive and interactive website that offers a range of resources, including educational materials, primary sources, and multimedia content, related to the Holocaust and its impact on world history.

4. United States Institute of Peace (https://www.usip.org/): Offers a range of educational resources and programs, including online courses, interactive simulations, and lesson plans, aimed at promoting peace and conflict resolution.

5. Teachers' Domain (https://www.teachersdomain.org/): A free multimedia library for K-12 teachers and students, including videos, audio, images, and more, that provides educational resources on a range of subjects, including war and peace.

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War is always started by the ambition to gain power by intruding a country’s establishments with certain processes. As though war isn’t a positive choice, a country must have a stable and strong position in society which is possible only by asserting power economically, socially or conquering land. War is fought to destroy a country’s establishments with certain processes over time and place.
Peace can be attained by treaties ( peace treaties) these are processes that form a system which is held by the stronger one in war. Hence war is always fought by the powerful forces to demolish a community’s systems with processes over time and place the context has changed.

Sansakriti and Elias