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.

Why They Die: Civilian Devastation in Violent Conflict

History

Karina V. Korostelina

Daniel Rothbart

Military

University of Michigan Press

Violent Conflict and Peacebuilding: The Continuing Crisis in Darfur (Routledge Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution)

Johan Brosché

Routledge

The exotic, bustling train station of Napoli Centrale offers a springboard into the city of Naples. Fishmongers, black marketers, and clergymen mingle in open-air markets of lower Naples beneath fluttering laundry. Expeditions to the island of Capri and Matera, a stone-hewn city in mysterious Basilicata region, follow. Seeing Naples revisits another astute observer of the city, Vittorio De Sica, who filmed the city's buildings and alleyways in the early 1950's in his classic movie, The Gold of Naples. It deals with topics of personal power and obligation, self-presentation, gambling, sex, money, love and death, often as played out in public settings, and is pictured in beautiful stills from the movie and the stories retold briefly by the author. Central to the book are Rothbart's conversations and interviews with remarkable Neapolitans and the photographs that accompany them. . The book also interprets dramatic historic narratives linked to the sights of the city, such as the life of Masaniello, a seventeenth century fishmonger, who led a people's rebellion against the Spanish, developed a taste for power and privilege himself, and was assassinated

Seeing Naples: Reports from the Shadow of Vesuvius

Travel

Europe

Edgewise Press

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Books by Daniel Rothbart