There's something wrong at Magnolia Run. Twelve-year-old Claire Moran can feel it as soon as she arrives at her new home: a crumbling farmhouse in rural South Carolina. Claire has just lost her mother and has been shipped off to live with her only relative, Louise, an aunt she has never met. As Claire attempts to settle into a new life and new school, all she wants is to be normal and to avoid thinking about her mother. But soon frightening events start happening in the house. The door at the end of the hall bleeds, Claire hears whispers when she's alone, and she's losing large amounts of time. Then she learns that nearly everyone in town is talking about her aunt and their "haunted house." It seems the whole community knows more about her family than Claire does. Why had her mother moved so far away? Why had she never mentioned her sister? Who are these relatives Claire has never known? And what is really going on at Magnolia Run? As Claire digs into her family history, decades-old secrets begin to emerge. It's clear Magnolia Run is in danger, and Claire must untangle the mystery and save her aunt and their home before it's too late.
There's something wrong at Magnolia Run. Twelve-year-old Claire Moran can feel it as soon as she arrives at her new home: a crumbling farmhouse in rural South Carolina. Claire has just lost her mother and has been shipped off to live with her only relative, Louise, an aunt she has never met. As Claire attempts to settle into a new life and new school, all she wants is to be normal and to avoid thinking about her mother. But soon frightening events start happening in the house. The door at the end of the hall bleeds, Claire hears whispers when she's alone, and she's losing large amounts of time. Then she learns that nearly everyone in town is talking about her aunt and their "haunted house." It seems the whole community knows more about her family than Claire does. Why had her mother moved so far away? Why had she never mentioned her sister? Who are these relatives Claire has never known? And what is really going on at Magnolia Run? As Claire digs into her family history, decades-old secrets begin to emerge. It's clear Magnolia Run is in danger, and Claire must untangle the mystery and save her aunt and their home before it's too late.
Warlords are individuals who control small territories within weak states, using a combination of force and patronage. In this book, Kimberly Marten shows why and how warlords undermine state sovereignty. Unlike the feudal lords of a previous era, warlords today are not state-builders. Instead they collude with cost-conscious, corrupt, or frightened state officials to flout and undermine state capacity. They thrive on illegality, relying on private militias for support, and often provoke violent resentment from those who are cut out of their networks. Some act as middlemen for competing states, helping to hollow out their own states from within. Countries ranging from the United States to Russia have repeatedly chosen to ally with warlords, but Marten argues that to do so is a dangerous proposition. Drawing on interviews, documents, local press reports, and in-depth historical analysis, Marten examines warlordism in the Pakistani tribal areas during the twentieth century, in post-Soviet Georgia and the Russian republic of Chechnya, and among Sunni militias in the U.S.-supported Anbar Awakening and Sons of Iraq programs. In each case state leaders (some domestic and others foreign) created, tolerated, actively supported, undermined, or overthrew warlords and their militias. Marten draws lessons from these experiences to generate new arguments about the relationship between states, sovereignty, "local power brokers," and stability and security in the modern world.
Anarchy makes it easy for terrorists to set up shop. Yet the international community has been reluctant to commit the necessary resources to peacekeeping—with devastating results locally and around the globe. This daring new work argues that modern peacekeeping operations and military occupations bear a surprising resemblance to the imperialism practiced by liberal states a century ago. Motivated by a similar combination of self-interested and humanitarian goals, liberal democracies in both eras have wanted to maintain a presence on foreign territory in order to make themselves more secure, while sharing the benefits of their own cultures and societies. Yet both forms of intervention have inevitably been undercut by weak political will, inconsistent policy choices, and their status as a low priority on the agenda of military organizations. In more recent times, these problems are compounded by the need for multilateral cooperation—something even NATO finds difficult to achieve but is now necessary for legitimacy. Drawing lessons from this provocative comparison, Kimberly Zisk Marten argues that the West's attempts to remake foreign societies in their own image—even with the best of intentions—invariably fail. Focusing on operations in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor in the mid- to late 1990s, while touching on both post-war Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq, Enforcing the Peace compares these cases to the colonial activities of Great Britain, France, and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The book weaves together examples from these cases, using interviews Marten conducted with military officers and other peacekeeping officials at the UN, NATO, and elsewhere. Rather than trying to control political developments abroad, Marten proposes, a more sensible goal of foreign intervention is to restore basic security to unstable regions threatened by anarchy. The colonial experience shows that military organizations police effectively if political leaders prioritize the task, and the time has come to raise the importance of peacekeeping on the international agenda.
Kimberly Kagan ... [describes] the complete operational history of the surge from its inception to the end of 2007. Kagan's detailed analysis looks at the external players -- from al Qaeda in Iraq, and the Iranian-backed Special Groups, to the Jaysh al Mahdi -- and covers the day-to-day strategies, locations, tactics, organization, and responses to American actions"--Jacket.
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