SWJ Book Excerpt – “War Amongst the People: Critical Assessments” - Conclusion: War, the People, and Politics

SWJ Book Excerpt – “War Amongst the People: Critical Assessments” - Conclusion: War, the People, and Politics

Excerpt Provided by Kirstin Howgate, Director, Howgate Publishing Limited

“In a volume such as this discomfort is good, it generates debate and leads to change.”

-- General Sir Rupert Smith

War Amongst the People: Critical Assessments

Edited by David Brown, Donette Murray, Malte Riemann, Norma Rossi and Martin A. Smith, The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Published by Howgate Publishing, May 2019.

Conclusion

Norma Rossi and Malte Riemann

This volume treats ‘war amongst the people’ less as a fixed and established phenomenon and more like a conceptual prism through which contemporary intra-state conflicts can be read and questioned. As such, it considers it not as a monolithic ‘new type’ of war, but as a framework that can shed light on complex networks and dynamics and their context dependency. Taken together, the different contributions to this volume therefore provide not only new empirical insights on war amongst the people but, through this prism, encourage novel ways of seeing and assessing it. It is the aim of this conclusion to capture some of the implications that arise from the contributions across the four analytical lenses identified in the introduction – the conceptual, the practical, the legal and the domestic – and show how the contributions create shared themes across the four dimensions, thereby recomposing the prism. A key tenet that the prism illuminates is how politics and war overlap in war amongst the people, which will be considered in more depth in the final part of this conclusion.

Before examining the shared implications of the four dimensions, it is apposite to summarise briefly the key points of each dimension. In the first three chapters, Heuser, Raitasalo and Waterman engaged with the war amongst the people paradigm on a conceptual level. In her considerations on the phenomenon called ‘war’, Heuser stresses that this phenomenon is highly culture-dependent and therefore each war’s peculiarities and distinctive circumstances need to be fully appreciated. In broad agreement with Heuser’s claim that war is culture-dependent, Raitasalo’s contribution shows how Western states have reconceptualised ‘war’ and international security in the post-Cold War era, which leads to an increased focus on engaging in intra-state conflicts. This, he argues, not only made Western states neglect the traditional warfighting and deterrence capabilities of their armed forces, but also embroiled them in conflicts that are of little or no connection to their strategic security interests. In line with Heuser and Raitasalo, Waterman emphasises the complexity of war and how the understanding of this phenomenon displays difference over space and time. He develops this claim through a reading of how ‘the people’ are understood in war amongst the people, arguing that this has often been over-simplistic, thereby ignoring the complex relations, conflicts and variety of actors that make up the ‘people’.

The next three chapters departed from primarily conceptual analysis, focusing instead on the practical challenges emanating from contemporary conflicts. Specific consideration was given to the actors fighting such wars. Grespin and Holmes do so by dealing with the central question of how to train and educate the military to face the complexities of war amongst the people. In their analyses, both acknowledge the insufficiencies of tactical training if not combined with a more comprehensive approach that promotes strategic change for long-term sustainability and transformation. Moving away from regular forces, Rauta’s contribution considers the irregular elements in war amongst the people. He conceptualises irregular forces through the distinction between proxies and auxiliaries, demonstrating how a more multi-layered approach to understanding irregular forces is essential for developing a more effective strategy to fight in irregular conflicts.

Questions concerning the conceptualisation of actors in war amongst the people also lie at the heart of Melancon’s and Davies’ contributions on the legal dimensions. Originally designed for conventional interstate war, LOAC has been challenged to adapt to the growing intra-state nature of contemporary conflicts. Here, war amongst the people has raised a series of pressing legal questions. Two aspects are particularly salient: first, war amongst the people reveals a central legal dualism between those people who take part in conflict and those who do not. Ensuring this distinction is central not only to the legality of the conflict, but also to its legitimacy and political sustainability. Secondly, the rights of detainees raise key questions regarding the relationship between fighting wars amongst the people and respecting human rights. This speaks directly to the problem of which rights should apply, namely those specific to war or those pertaining to peace, as identified by Heuser in the first chapter.

In the final two chapters, Wilson and Bailey turn their attention to the ‘intervening’ state rather than the ‘intervened’ – thereby shedding light on an often overlooked, yet significant, aspect of war amongst the people – the domestic context of the intervening state. To elucidate their claims, they concentrate on the UK as a case study. In his chapter, Wilson examines variations in popular consent for different wars amongst the people (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, as appropriate, Syria). Bailey adopts a different perspective, investigating the impact of the war amongst the people paradigm on British Army doctrine. Although both contributions focus on very different topics, they illustrate and reiterate the importance of linking the objectives set by civilian authorities with the development of military strategy (Wilson) and military doctrine (Bailey).

Common Themes and Questions

Four common themes, and the questions they pose, not just in relation to the war amongst the people paradigm, but in thinking about war and military engagements more generally, emerge as a result of the analysis contained within this volume. The first theme relates to the concept of ‘the people’ and how this should be understood. How are they created, shaped and re-shaped by war? This resonates with the second theme: the question of knowledge. How can conflicts categorised as ‘war amongst the people’ be understood and analysed when these display an absence of constants and binaries, on which legal and military thinking has traditionally relied? For example, war amongst the people defies clear distinctions between dichotomies such as peace/war and combatant/non-combatant. The continued absence of these constants and binaries – despite the best efforts of the literature to revise and reconsider the concepts, as with this volume – points to issues related to the third theme: the difficulties in linking the tactical with the strategic object in war amongst the people. If wars amongst the people – as Smith reminds us – are ‘sub-strategic’, how can this strategic gap be overcome? How can a clear strategic policy be formulated if war amongst the people places the emphasis on the tactical over the strategic? Furthermore, how can success in the absence of strategy be achieved or, indeed, even be identified? The latter builds the framework for the last theme: the question of local and international legitimacy. The question of achieving and maintaining local and international legitimacy is a spectre that haunts this volume’s different contributions. What provides the veneer for legitimacy in war amongst the people? How can it be achieved and what are the constraining factors? The remainder of this chapter will unpack each of these themes in separate sections. The final section will then elaborate on how war amongst the people affects the relationship between war and politics, showing how these specific wars both disorder and unsettle politics and people, while simultaneously also transforming and generating them.

People Are Not Found, They Are Made

Following Barkawi and Brighton, ‘[w]hile destructive, war is a generative force like no other. It is of fundamental significance for politics, society and culture’.[i] As such, war is not only influenced by the social, economic, political and cultural context in which it takes place, but it also re-shapes, reproduces and changes these contexts. War therefore has a key function in actively generating and constituting the social realm and the people within it.[ii] This is not only valid for the space in which war physically takes place, but also for the societies, states and groups that intervene and potentially become enmeshed in such conflicts. While diverse in their outlook, the contributions to this volume demonstrate war’s generative power by showing how wars amongst the people are constituting the social and political realities of war. Indeed, as Heuser’s contribution shows, the very definition of the existence of a state of war is produced by the actors involved in it: ‘In the end it is a subjective and political decision and not an apolitical and objective evaluation of factors that determines whether one is or considers oneself to be “at war”’. Therefore, the knowledge about war is not independent or detached from the very act of war, as ‘knowledge about war is never fully exterior to an order war itself creates’.[iii] And here, like war, the people are never a neutral or static object, but always the product of distinct contexts, knowledges and relations. Waterman’s contribution makes this point clear. In Chapter 3 he shows how war amongst the people are not only the site of a war between and amongst pre-existing people(s), but also the very site of creation of such peoples. In other words, as most prominently pointed out by the ‘new wars’ school, the identity of separate peoples does not simply pre-date conflicts, but it is created by identity politics that are deployed during the conflict as a mobilising strategy.[iv] A key implication of this, according to Waterman, is the need to ‘connect theory to the politics of insurgency and COIN, exploring the processes of contestation, coercion, accommodation and bargaining that take place between counterinsurgents and these different socio-political groupings’.

The productive function of war amongst the people emerges most clearly from Holmes’ contribution. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s work, Holmes exposes how training and education to conduct war amongst the people is also a terrain of creation, negotiation and contestation of the values and norms that govern it. Referring to the productive power of the pre-deployment training space, Holmes argues that, not only is this space ‘a militarised field of power, but it is also a field of education wherein identities and roles (or subject positions) are constructed and negotiated during transfers of knowledge between educators and learners’. Holmes’ analysis of the training space shows that female peacekeepers are not passive receivers of UN training, but co-participants in the creation and interpretation of the normative framework, which they are asked to learn. This highlights an important aspect of war amongst the people, namely that the creative powers of war are not limited to affecting local peoples, but also form, transform and shape the external intervening forces. Indeed, as Wilson reminds us, war amongst the people are not only productive in ‘creating’ the people in theatre, but also create the people ‘at home’. Given the range of effects that war amongst the people can have on the domestic society of intervening states, these are critical when it comes to shaping political consent and people’s attitudes towards external interventions and conflict. In this, Wilson confirms Michael Dillon’s observations with regards to the ‘Liberal Way of War’: ‘War forms and transforms governmental institutions and practices as it does political rationalities and civic cultures’.[v] By treating war amongst the people as a prism for analysis, the contributions to this book expose how the very people that it claims to be conducted amongst are not found but rather made and reveals these conflicts to be fields of complex dynamics and practices that produce the social reality in which they are conducted.

Epistemology, Complexity and the Absence of Constants

That wars amongst the people actively construct the social reality in which they take place leads to a further theme that connects the contributions to this volume: the status of ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding’. In their different approaches to investigating war amongst the people, the chapters reveal a strong tension between, on the one hand, the exigencies of knowing and understanding war amongst the people and, on the other, that of practically finding ways to engage in them. Regarding the former, Heuser argues that, to understand war amongst the people, there is a need to break with the dualisms and binaries that dominate conventional understandings of conflict and, instead, embrace the culturally, contextually and historically ever-changing realities of war. In line with this, Waterman claims that easy categorisations are untenable. Studying the people(s) requires paying attention to the diverse, and, at times, opposing motivations, interests and identities that shape them. In the move from ‘war amongst the people’ to ‘war amongst the peoples’, he proposes an approach that defies the reification of the people in a uniformed and undifferentiated mass and instead requires embracing the complexity and context-specific character of each conflict and the people(s) involved.

Yet, sharp categorisations and binary oppositions are essential in military thinking and planning, a paradox that remains difficult to resolve. The most obvious example of this is the opposition drawn between ‘self’ and the ‘military other’, most commonly categorised as ‘the enemy’. As Christensen et al argue, within war amongst the people:

... similar oppositions are constantly being drawn, for instance between ‘friendly forces’ and ‘hostile forces’, and between civil and military domains. When faced with an enemy who blends and blurs with the population, such oppositions limit the understanding of the enemy as well of the local inhabitants, and thereby limit the potential for capturing the enemy and of winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population.[vi]

Melancon and Rauta’s chapters focus attention to this tension. While sharing with Heuser and Waterman the need to acknowledge the complexities of war amongst the people and the fallacies of binary categorisations, they also argue for the necessity of finding ways to (re)draw lines that allow nonetheless for clear distinctions in order to engage in war amongst the people on a more practical level. Indeed, in her chapter, Melancon re-constitutes a firmer binary distinction between combatant and non-combatant in order to obtain a more applicable definition of ‘Direct Participation in Hostilities’. In doing so, she encounters the first paradox outlined in Heuser’s chapter, namely that ‘much thinking and writing about war revolves around attempts to impose rules on what is the extreme of unruly behaviour’. Guided by a similar concern, Rauta tries to create distinct analytical definitions to recognise and distinguish between proxies and auxiliaries. He defines proxies as actors with autonomous strategic and political aims and auxiliaries as actors that display only a tactical military outlook on the conflict. Although Melancon and Rauta focus on very different aspects of war amongst the people, both share the concern that the practical demands of fighting wars amongst the people necessitate binary distinctions, such as those between combatants/non-combatants and proxies/auxiliaries. This is in opposition to Waterman’s and Heuser’s contributions, which argue that reinstating binaries and dualities is unhelpful in understanding war amongst the people. While in disagreement about the value of binary distinctions per se, the four authors accept that such a debate points at the paradoxical relationship between theory and practice, which makes engaging in war amongst the people so challenging.

The Link Between Strategy and Tactics

Different chapters of this volume show that Smith’s central concern for linking the tactical with the strategic is still an unresolved problematique in contemporary war amongst the people. As he remarked, ‘conflicts are sub-strategic; frequently only tactical, in effect’.[vii] Crucially, as Raitasalo, Rauta, Holmes and Grespin all show, the link between the tactical and the strategic is an epistemological as well as a practical necessity. In other words, while it is impossible to understand or fight a war amongst the people without integrating strategic thought into tactical decision-making, there still seems to be a strategic gap in the ways in which war amongst the people is understood. Raitasalo makes this point clearly in his analysis of the centrality of strategy – and lack thereof – in the decision-making process of Western states engaging in such conflicts. Holmes too highlights the limited effects of UN training programmes, which focus solely on the tactical level and lack an engagement with the strategic level. As she shows, tactical training offers quick fixes, but it does not correspond to the long-term and transformative aims that are required for sustainable success. For her part, Grespin warns against the temptation of finding quick and cheap fixes, by prioritising tactical-military training over a more strategic and holistic approach to nation-building, which she sees happening in the US government’s decision to significantly privatise such training efforts. Similarly, both Wilson and Bailey highlight the criticality of filling this strategic gap, to maintain public support and, even more importantly, to prepare armed forces for engagement in war amongst the people. In particular, Bailey shows this through the British Army’s attempts to adapt its doctrine to the changing strategic context shaped by war amongst the people, amongst other factors. His argument is in line with what Hutchings and Treverton have observed with regards to the implementation of strategy: ‘[s]trategy needs to start at the top’, but ‘any strategy is implemented by hundreds or thousands of lower-ranking officials’.[viii] This highlights the continued and important link between the tactical and the strategic.

While these contributions seem to agree on the necessity of filling the strategic gap in war amongst the people, they also reveal a point of potential disagreement: how should ‘our’ strategic aims be defined? Raitasalo, on the one hand, and Grespin and Holmes on the other, seem to point towards two different answers. Grespin sees nation-building as a central pillar of the long-term strategic approach to war amongst the people. Holmes similarly highlights the importance of long-term approaches, focusing on norm transformation in relation to gender inclusion and gender equality, which she considers to be a key component in the overall strategic approach to such interventions. Both, therefore put liberal democratic values at the centre of defining strategic goals. This is in line with what Rob Johnson has recently argued should be an integral part of Western strategic approaches to contemporary conflicts:

... the exercise of free speech; the refusal to accept that any person, in whatever high office, can be above the law; the protection of the citizen from arbitrary imprisonment; the right to be represented through parliamentary democracy; equality in opportunity; and the freedom of conscience, to name just a few of our most fundamental principles … these ideas have made liberal democracy a success.[ix]

Conversely, Raitasalo prioritises a strategic approach grounded in geopolitics and Realpolitik, in which the strategic outlook should adhere to the limited and clearly demarcated national interests of intervening state(s). His argument goes even further, questioning whether there should even be a focus on war amongst the people, both doctrinally and in terms of the allocation of intellectual and material resources, particularly if this comes at the expense of preparing for conventional warfare. Indeed, in a recent contribution to the National Interest, he argues that, through the focus on ‘counterterrorism, irregular warfare, counterinsurgency operations and military crisis management … much of the know-how and military ethos related to defense and deterrence have been lost’.[x] While a refocusing on conventional warfighting capabilities seems to resonate with strategy-makers in a climate of tensions between the US, China and Russia, Mary Kaldor warns that the failure to deal with intra-state wars could increase the likelihood of interstate war: ‘Of course, a return to old wars cannot be ruled out … But failure to deal with the “new wars” of the present might make that possibility more plausible’.[xi] The initially localised conflict in Syria that, as it progressed, drew both the US and Russia in, is a case in point. Syria therefore highlights that a perspective emphasising an either/or choice between a strategic outlook focusing on conventional warfare or war amongst the people ultimately poses a false choice, as it ignores the fact that the two can be and regularly are highly interconnected. This important debate is destined to continue, as disagreement concerning what should constitute strategic aims forms a significant aspect of a much wider issue, given that the constitution of strategic aims ultimately defines success.[xii] Indeed, recent campaigns have shown that the very meaning of success has frequently been unclear;[xiii] at times too narrowly focused on tactical encounters, at others too broad in scope, exemplified most vividly by the mantra of ‘democracy promotion’. This has direct consequences for the very possibilities of engaging in war amongst the people, as Wilson’s chapter reminds us. ‘Success sells’ in the sense that it is a vital element in sustaining domestic support for military interventions.

Local and International Legitimacy

Directly linked to the problem of success in war amongst the people is the problem of local legitimacy. While the ‘hearts and minds’ catchphrase is repeatedly evoked, the literature on small wars has begun to turn its attention to wider complexities concerning legitimacy. This recalibration has grown out of the dispelled notion that elections alone can build legitimacy. The facts on the ground in recent counterinsurgency operations have painfully demonstrated that a sole focus on elections, what Greene has labelled the ‘pathology’ of COIN, is not enough.[xiv] The contributions to this volume raise some critical points regarding this matter. Heuser’s call to abandon ‘the crass idea that peoples and cultures are interchangeable’ and therefore to acknowledge the culturally context-specific nature of wars amongst the people directly connects with the focus of recent counterinsurgency literature on the locally and culturally bounded nature of legitimacy.[xv] Additionally, the legal contributions to this volume point to the centrality of legality in building legitimacy within wars amongst the people. Melancon’s chapter shows that Direct Participation in Hostilities should be re-drawn to allow for a more nuanced and permissive targeting of specific actors in an attempt to match the current LOAC framework with the demands dictated by state practices. Here, according to Melancon, the problem lies not with the lack of international legislation on defining DPH, but with intervening states’ perception that this is not functional in fighting within wars amongst the people. This negatively affects the legitimacy of these legal frameworks. For the purpose of building local and international legitimacy, Melancon argues that it is important to modify this framework in ways which still limit collateral damage, while simultaneously being perceived as effective and applicable by the intervening state. Davies approaches the issue from a different standpoint, claiming that international legislation governing detention in NIACs is scarce: ‘The increase in the number of NIACs is inversely proportionate to the quantity of substantive international humanitarian law rules governing them’. In his analysis of which legislation is best suited for detainment practices in war amongst the people, Davies sheds light on another central issue concerning the problem of local and international legitimacy, namely the relationship between victory and the respect for international human rights. This raises the question of whether it is necessary to strike the right balance between both or whether these objectives are intrinsically linked and therefore mutually dependent. The answer to this question is connected to what the external actor ultimately wants to achieve: power or authority over the people in war amongst the people, as ‘[a]uthority … is a form of power – but power resting on recognition based on legitimacy, rather than on coercion or material incentives’.[xvi] Evidence from recent studies on counterinsurgency strongly point towards the advantages of authority over power. In the words of Gawthorpe, ‘counterinsurgency involves not just an attempt to bolster the legitimacy of an incumbent state, but … it is fundamentally a struggle between competing legitimacies’.[xvii] This is linked to Smith’s observation that wars amongst the people are contests over legitimacy in which the overall political objective of the conflicting parties is to win ‘the will of the people’.

Yet, capturing ‘the will of the people’ is not without its difficulties. First, the quest for local legitimacy forces an army to confront an extreme version of Heuser’s second paradox of war: ‘that during war, they may be called upon at different stages or in very short succession to fulfil utterly contradictory duties, from the infliction of extreme violence to extreme restraint’. This tension is also evident in Bailey’s examination of recent conflicts and their impact on doctrine. The doctrinal changes these lead to have often required armed forces to perform multiple and, at times, even contrasting functions. Second, attempts to find shortcuts to authority-building can have enormous limitations, as Grespin warns with regards to the focus of intervening states on the delivery of tactical training at the expense of a more holistic approach to state and nation-building. Third, Wilson’s analysis shows that the domestic context of the intervening state works like a quickly emptying hourglass in which the length of the conflict negatively affects public support. This makes long-term authority-building extremely difficult, but it is nevertheless extremely important with regards to both local and international legitimacy.

Politics and War in the ‘War amongst the People’

Taken together, the chapters in this volume constitute a professional practitioner and scholarly reflection on four facets that emanate from modern conflicts fought within and amongst populations: the conceptual, the practical, the legal and the domestic. In this, they offer novel perspectives on timely and important concerns that emerge from engaging with war amongst the people and expose four common themes and several critical questions.

Questions concerning the identity of actors, the absence of constants, the link between the tactical and the strategic, as well as the quest for local and international legitimacy, all revolve around the relationship between politics and war. A reflection on this aspect is of pressing concern, as recent wars amongst the people have painfully demonstrated that victory in battle has all too often not been translated into an overall strategic and political victory. Indeed, as Smith has suggested in his foreword to this volume, a key characteristic of war amongst the people is precisely the paradox that tactical victories on the battlefield do not necessarily correspond with strategic success at the political level. This is why ‘[y]ou can win every fight and lose the war’.[xviii]

The reason for this is found in the very character of war amongst the people, insofar as these do not respect the spatial and temporal configurations that regulate strategy-making in war. Following Andrew Carr, the very possibility for strategy depends on clear and well defined temporal and spatial dimensions, as ‘[s]trategy is action in space and time’.[xix] First, from a spatial dimension, strategy requires a clear distinction between the space of peace in which politics dominate and a space of war in which normal politics and law are suspended in the name of the exceptional laws of war and military action.[xx] Second, the temporal dimension requires the existence of a clear distinction between times of war and times of peace. In its most traditional form, these times were sanctioned respectively by declarations of war and the signing of peace treaties that terminated hostilities. Yet, wars amongst the people do not respect these spatial and temporal configurations. Rather than displaying a clear separation between times of war and times of peace, war amongst the people tends to be ‘persistent and protracted’[xxi] and the spatial boundaries between peace and war become blurred.[xxii] Indeed, the spaces in which war amongst the people takes place become affected by chronic insecurity and violence.[xxiii] The effect of this spatial and temporal fragmentation ultimately upsets the Clausewitzian relationship between politics and war. Following Clausewitz, war is the continuation of politics by other means, meaning that one (war) is functional to the other (politics).[xxiv] This implies that war is a function of politics and requires that the relationship between the two is regulated by a temporal sequencing: 1. politics – 2. war as a continuation of politics by other means – 3. peace and then the cycle (potentially) begins anew. Yet war amongst the people breaks both the temporal and spatial sequencing of war. The effect leads to social fragmentation, as Gawthorpe has observed: ‘The segmentation of physical space which accompanies irregular warfare is accompanied by a parallel segmentation of social, political, and economic space. This also leads to a segmentation of legitimacy dynamics.’[xxv] This is most clearly seen in the conflation of military and civilian spheres and the dissolving boundaries between combatants and non-combatants in war amongst the people. Without a clear separation between civilian and military spheres, nor a clear temporal separation between times of peace and times of war, the patterns of life and death overlap. As such, rather than one being the function of the other, war and politics overlap in the same space and most if not all of the time. In the Clausewitzian paradigm, a political decision leads to military action (hence a temporary suspension of politics), which subsequently has a political effect (i.e. a peace treaty). In war amongst the people, this sequencing is interrupted and military actions are already politics rather than the suspension of it. In other words, military operations do not have subsequent political and strategic effects, but, instead, these become, from the very beginning, political actions, which have immediate effects on the societies in which they are enacted. As Amanda Hester summarises Smith’s argument, ‘every action performed by every soldier, at every level, holds strategic significance’.[xxvi] Through this process the armed forces are placed at the centre of the political arena. Ultimately, this might lead to an inversion of the relationship between war and politics, in which war is no longer the continuation of politics by other means, but politics becomes the continuation of war by other means.[xxvii]

While the common themes and questions this volume exposed can be daunting, they are also what makes the continued examination of the war amongst the people paradigm a relevant and pressing issue. If read through the prism of the four lenses, the findings of this volume have profound implications at both the epistemological and practical level. First, they point to the constitutive character of these wars, both for those living inside the spaces of conflict and those intervening from the outside. Second, they reveal an essential relationship (albeit one filled with tensions) between the theory and practice of war amongst the people. Third, they show the centrality of working towards bridging the strategic gap in war amongst the people, while simultaneously exposing contrasting ways of defining strategic success. Finally, they link the possibility for strategic success to the practical needs to create local legitimacy, exposing it as an area in need of further investigation.

As Rupert Smith suggests in his foreword, a volume like this should leave those in charge of writing UK strategy and British military doctrine with a sense of discomfort, for, in spite of strong attempts to re-think the role and scope of the British Army in contemporary conflicts, the task requires an on-going critical re-evaluation and elaboration. This volume aims to provide a useful and timely contribution to this task by creating a productive dialogue between a range of different and interested parties.

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End Notes