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Summary:

"How do armies fight and what makes them victorious on the modern battlefield? In Divided Armies, Jason Lyall challenges long-standing answers to this classic question by linking the fate of armies to their levels of inequality. Introducing the concept of military inequality, Lyall demonstrates how a state's prewar choices about the citizenship status of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups as second-class citizens, either by subjecting them to state-sanctioned discrimination or, worse, violence, undermines interethnic trust, fuels grievances, and leads victimized soldiers to subvert military authorities once war begins. The higher an army's inequality, Lyall finds, the greater its rates of desertion, side-switching, casualties, and use of coercion to force these soldiers to fight. In a sweeping historical investigation, Lyall draws on Project Mars, a new dataset of 250 conventional wars fought since 1800, to test this argument. Project Mars breaks with prior efforts by including overlooked non-Western wars while cataloguing new patterns of inequality and wartime conduct across hundreds of belligerents. Combining historical comparisons and statistical analysis, Lyall also marshals evidence from nine wars, ranging from the Eastern Fronts of World War I and II to less familiar wars in Africa and Central Asia, to illustrate inequality's effects. Sounding the alarm on the dangers of inequality, Divided Armies offers important lessons about battlefield performance over two centuries and for wars still to come."-- [Provided by publisher]

Table of Contents:

• Divided armies : a theory of battlefield performance in modern war
• The rise and fall of the Mahdi state : a natural experiment
• Lessons from Project Mars : quantitative tests of military inequality and battlefield performance since 1800
• Inequality and early modern war : the cases of Morocco and Kokand
• Forging armies from prisons of peoples : how inequality shaped Ottoman and Habsburg battlefield performance
• African world wars : Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo on the modern battlefield
• The battle of Moscow : microlevel evidence.

Author/Creator:

Lyall, Jason , author

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

Divided armies: inequality and battlefield performance in modern war [by Lyall, J.]

Related Series:

Princeton studies in international history and politics

Subjects:

Discrimination in the military — Case studies

Unit cohesion (Military science) — Case studies

Military readiness — Case studies

Military policy — Social aspects

Sociology, Military

Psychology, Military

Discrimination in the military

Unit cohesion (Military science)

Military readiness

Military policy

Genres:

Case studies

General Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 453-489) and index.

Physical Description:

xvii, 508 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Call Numbers:

UB416 .L93 2020

ISBNs:

9780691192437 (hardcover)
069119243X (hardcover)
9780691192444 (paperback)
0691192448 (paperback)

Library of Congress Control Numbers:

2019017537

OCLC Numbers:

1099689301