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This study investigated the potential for the development of dark tourism in Lebanon, a destination that has suffered multiple crises in recent years including conflicts and the world's largest non-nuclear explosion, which devastated a large section the country's capital city, Beirut. Research was carried out using desk audit, key informant interviews and archival research, which identified 21 potential dark tourism sites that could be incorporated into a new dark tourism product as part of the recovery of Lebanon as a tourism destination. Of these 21 sites, the majority were found in Beirut, suggesting that an urban dark tourism product may be the most suitable product to develop as the country emerges from crises. However, a number of barriers would need to be overcome in order for dark tourism to contribute to a form of phoenix tourism in the country, including the engagement of diverse stakeholders, the security of international tourists in the destination, and the ability of the public sector to invest in destination marketing in the post-crisis period.

The thesis of this commentary is that the institution of war could be abolished through a combination of constructive programmes and obstructive programmes. Good works alone won't end war. To transform dominator, warring cultures into egalitarian and nonwarring ones, constructive programmes are needed to prepare the way, to establish the groundwork for a new lifestyle. But, alone, they will not result in a paradigm shift on earth to a Gene Roddenberry‐style Star Trek future in which there is gender and racial equality, poverty has been eliminated and conflicts are resolved by the rule of law instead of through military force. Paradoxically, unless paired with the force of obstructive programmes, constructive programmes can enable dominator cultures to remain firmly in place. Moreover, to bring about a major social transformation, we will need leaders to unite men and women as full partners in shaping a massive cultural shift to a more egalitarian, just and nonwarring future.Can the people of Earth bring an end to the barbaric practice of war? Or is making war ‐ assembling armed groups that go forth to indiscriminately kill members of other groups ‐ something that evolution built into our biology, an inescapable, inevitable curse that at best can only be managed and mitigated?

This study aims to explore the role of rebel group legitimacy and ideology in durable peace (DP) following peace agreements to end civil wars. It builds on earlier research showing that justice and civil society involvement are critical in achieving DP. This study adds the impacts of rebel group activities and support on DP. Activities include service delivery and mobilization. Support is gauged with outcomes of presidential and parliamentary elections held following peace agreements.

Five data sets were used to measure the key variables: DP, inclusive commissions (IC), legitimacy symmetry (electoral outcomes), service delivery and ideological mobilization. A measure of rebel group integration in the political system was also constructed. Impacts of the integration, legitimacy and ideology variables were assessed with a hierarchical regression model (HRM). This study begins with a base model drawn from earlier research showing the key predictors were procedural justice (PJ) and IC. The authors ask about the extent to which the rebel group variables contribute additional variance to the prediction of DP.

The main contributors to the prediction of DP were PJ, IC and integration in the political system. None of the legitimacy or mobilization variables added significant variance to the prediction. Only one of the mobilization variables, forced recruitment, was significant. The decision to integrate into the political system following the agreement did not mediate the relationship between PJ in the negotiation process and DP. Results of a factor analysis showed that DP, PJ, IC and integration formed a cluster with strong loadings on the first factor.

The negative results for the legitimacy and mobilization variables may not be the last word on rebel group influences. Lack of support for the key hypotheses spurs attempts to discover other sources that contribute to the survival of rebel group actors in the political system and, in turn, to DP.

The issues raised by this study contribute to debates about ways to attain peaceful relations among competing groups following a civil war. It appears that attention to factors inside and around the negotiation process (PJ, ICs and conversion) may be more important than rebel group activities outside of these processes. The results call attention, in particular, to the important role played by political integration. From a policy perspective, it would be useful to develop levers for encouraging rebel groups to emerge as political actors in the post-agreement environment.

Developing measures of the symmetry of rebel group legitimacy and integration in the context of a comparative case study are the primary original contributions of this study. Furthermore, the mode of analysis (HRM) is novel in this literature. This approach builds on and extends the earlier research on factors influencing DP.

World War I is the pivot of twentieth century American history because it transformed the United States from a regional into a global power. As the fiftieth anniversary of World War II winds down, we remind ourselves of the first “Great War” and its continuing importance to American self‐conception and memory.

How did gays in the military go from being characterized as dangerous perverts threatening to the state, to victims being persecuted by the state, to potential heroes fighting on behalf of the state? What implications does this shift have for understanding the means by which the liberal state uses law to include the previously excluded? Offering a critical account of the inclusion of gays in the military, I argue that while the lifting of the ban can be seen as an important step in a classic civil rights narrative in which the liberal state gradually accommodates the excluded, pop culture allows us also to see state and minority group interest convergence as well as divergence, revealing the costs of inclusion.

Extending knowledge of the cultural shaping and variegating of white identity that occurs through the commercial diffusion of identity myths, we examine the reception of Southern identity myths promoted in the oppositional narratives of New South commercial media. We characterize oppositional narratives as texts which operate by eliciting an interpretive reading that devalues rather than supports the surface narrative, and explain the duplicitous text as one intended to seduce a dominant power, while empowering and bolstering identity of a marginalized group. After elaborating how oppositional discourse can serve to reinforce the identity frame constructed by regional media producers, we report on a study examining how urban and rural Southerners read and respond to this discourse. Our findings highlight mediators in the relationship between individuals’ oppositional readings and their alignment of identity in a manner responsive to it.

Giorgio Agamben has used the notion of the state of exception to describe the United States’ detention camps in Cuba. Agamben argues that the use of the state of exception in the U.S. can be traced back to President Lincoln's suspension of the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War. This paper suggests that this argument obscures more relevant legal and political precedents that can be found in U.S. territorial legal history. Moreover, while Agamben's argument obscures conceptual distinctions between a state of emergency and a state of exception, his argument also provides resources that can expose the limits of liberal interpretations of the relationship between the State, the citizen, and the law.

This paper investigates the impact of the development of capital markets on economic growth in Africa and reports a significant increase in real GDP per capita after stock exchanges are established. This paper also reveals that there are significant improvements in the level of private investments in the post stock market launch era. The results also indicate that stock markets play a complementary role to the banking sector by contributing to the availability of private credit. Although African capital markets are relatively less advanced when compared to capital markets on other continents (particularly in terms of technology, structure, and liquidity), we find that their establishment has been crucial in helping African countries catch up with the rest of the world.

Civil–military relations in contemporary Spain can be traced back to the Civil War period. After three years of bloody fratricide war the victory of the insurgent forces saw the Spanish Republic turned into an authoritarian regime (totalitarian at the beginning) with General Franco at its head. Franco's dictatorship was not a military dictatorship, but rather the dictatorship of a military officer who developed a three-pillar power base upon which he felt secure and whose three sides – the armed forces, the Church and the single fascist party FET-JONS – offered him complete control over society. During the almost 40 years that the authoritarian regime lasted, millions of Spanish men spent part of their lives as conscripts to military service under the orders of predominantly fascist officers and subject to the rule of an oppressive political power. It is not surprising, therefore, that in Spain the armed forces are regarded as one of the pillars of an authoritarian regime rather than, as is the case in other European countries, as those brave troops who defended democracy against fascism during the Second World War. Civil–military relations in Spain are therefore difficult, and to this day they bear the marks of dictatorship – this despite the fact that since the first governments of the democratic period attempts have been made to improve them.