Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond

Portada
Macmillan, 2001 M06 2 - 256 páginas

For a decade, Michael Ignatieff has provided eyewitness accounts and penetrating analyses from the world's battle zones. In Virtual War, he offers an analysis of the conflict in Kosovo and what it means for the future of warfare. He describes the latest phase in modern combat: war fought by remote control. In "real" war, nations are mobilized, soldiers fight and die, victories are won. In virtual war, however, there is often no formal declaration of hostilities, the combatants are strike pilots and computer programmers, the nation enlists as a TV audience, and instead of defeat and victory there is only an uncertain endgame.

Kosovo was such a virtual war, a war in which U.S. and NATO forces did the fighting but only Kosovars and Serbs did the dying. Ignatieff examines the conflict through the eyes of key players--politicians, diplomats, and generals--and through the experience of the victims, the refugees and civilians who suffered. As unrest continues in the Balkans, East Timor, and other places around the world, Ignatieff raises the troubling possibility that virtual wars, so much easier to fight, could become the way superpowers impose their will in the century ahead.

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Contenido

Introduction
3
Improvising on the Brink
11
Balkan Physics
39
The War of Words A Dialogue on Intervention
71
The Virtual Commander
91
Justice and Revenge
115
Enemies and Friends
137
Virtual War
161
Notes
219
Farther Reading
227
Acknowledgments
235
Index
237
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Acerca del autor (2001)

Michael Ignatieff is the author of Isaiah Berlin, The Warrior’s Honor, and over fifteen other acclaimed books, including a memoir, The Russian Album and the Booker finalist novel Scar Tissue. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, and has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including Fresh Air and Fareed Zakariah GPS. Former head of Canada’s Liberal Party and director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School, he is currently the president of Central European University in Budapest.

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