Military occupation in the context of Non-lethal weapon

Annexation, in international law, is the forcible acquisition and assertion of legal title over one state's territory by another state, usually following military occupation of the territory. In current international law, it is generally held to be an illegal act. Annexation is a unilateral act where territory is seized and held by one state, as distinct from the complete conquest of another country, and differs from cession, in which territory is given or sold through treaty.

Annexation can be legitimized if generally recognized by other states and international bodies.

The entirety of Germany was occupied and administered by the Allies of World War II, from the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945 to the establishment of West Germany on 23 May 1949. Unlike occupied Japan, Nazi Germany was stripped of its sovereignty and its government was entirely dissolved. After Germany formally surrendered on Tuesday, 8 May 1945, the four countries representing the Allies (the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France) asserted joint authority and sovereignty through the Allied Control Council (ACC).

Germany after the war was a devastated country – roughly 80 percent of its infrastructure was in need of repair or reconstruction – which helped the idea that Germany was entering a new phase of history ("zero hour"). At first, Allied-occupied Germany was defined as all territories of Germany before the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria. The Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945 defined the new eastern German border by giving Poland and the Soviet Union all regions of Germany east of the Oder–Neisse line (eastern parts of Pomerania, Neumark, Posen-West Prussia, East-Prussia and most of Silesia) and divided the remaining "Germany as a whole" into four occupation zones, each administered by one of the Allies.

Japan was occupied and administered by the Allies of World War II from the surrender of the Empire of Japan on September 2, 1945, at the war's end until the Treaty of San Francisco took effect on April 28, 1952. The occupation, led by the American military with support from the British Commonwealth and under the supervision of the Far Eastern Commission, involved a total of nearly one million Allied soldiers. The occupation was overseen by the US General Douglas MacArthur, who was appointed Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers by the US president Harry S. Truman; MacArthur was succeeded as supreme commander by General Matthew Ridgway in 1951. Unlike in the occupations of Germany and Austria, the Soviet Union had little to no influence in Japan, declining to participate because it did not want to place Soviet troops under MacArthur's direct command.

This foreign presence marks the only time in the history of Japan that it has been occupied by a foreign power. However, unlike in Germany, the Allies never assumed direct control over Japan's civil administration. In the immediate aftermath of Japan's military surrender, the country's government continued to formally operate under the provisions of the Meiji Constitution.

A military government is any government that is administered by a military, whether or not this government is legal under the laws of the jurisdiction at issue or by an occupying power. It is usually administered by military personnel.

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About two-thirds of Western Sahara, a UN-designated non-self-governing territory in the Maghreb, has been occupied by Morocco since 1975 amid the Western Sahara War. It was illegally annexed by Morocco in two stages in 1976 and 1979. The occupied territories are administered as integral parts of Morocco, and state-sponsored settlement programs exist to relocate Moroccans to Western Sahara.

Laayoune or El Aaiún (Arabic: العيون, al-ʕuyūn [alʕujuːn], Hassaniyya: [ˈləʕjuːn] , lit. 'The Springs') is the largest city of the disputed territory of Western Sahara, with a population of 271,344 in 2023. The city is the de jure capital of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, though it is under de facto Moroccan administration as occupied territory. The modern city is thought to have been founded by the Spanish captain Antonio de Oro in 1938. From 1958, it became the administrative capital of the Spanish Sahara, administered by the Governor General of Spanish West Africa.

In 2023, Laayoune is the capital of the Laâyoune-Sakia El Hamra region administered by Morocco, it is still under the supervision of MINURSO, a UN mission.

Northern Cyprus, officially the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), is a de facto state comprising the northern third of the island of Cyprus. It is recognised only by Turkey, with the international community considering it territory of the Republic of Cyprus under Turkish military occupation. It extends from Cape Apostolos Andreas (the tip of the Karpass Peninsula) in the northeast to Morphou Bay in the northwest, with Cape Kormakitis at its westernmost point and the Kokkina exclave west of the mainland. A buffer zone controlled by the UN forms a barrier between both sides of the island and runs through Nicosia, the island's largest city and the capital of both sides.

After gaining independence from the United Kingdom in 1960, Cyprus was dominated by intercommunal violence between the island's Greek and Turkish populations. Greek Cypriots favoured enosis (union with Greece), while Turkish Cypriots favoured taksim (partition of the island). A coup d'état in 1974, performed as part of the Greek military junta's attempt to annex the island, prompted Turkey to invade Cyprus and capture the northern third of the island. This resulted in the eviction of much of the north's Greek Cypriot population and the flight of Turkish Cypriots from the south; the Turkish-occupied north unilaterally declared independence in 1983. UN Security Council Resolution 541 rejected the declaration as illegal and urged UN members not to recognise it. Attempts to resolve the Cyprus problem have been unsuccessful; Northern Cyprus and Turkey favour a two-state solution, while the Republic of Cyprus, the EU, and the UN favour a federalised Cyprus.

The Sudanese Greeks, or Greeks in Sudan, are ethnic Greeks from modern-day Sudan; they are small in number (estimated at around 150 in 2015), but still a very prominent community in the country. Historically, this diverse group has played a significant role in the political, economic, cultural, and sporting life of Sudan, as they have been one of the few European immigrant communities of considerable size and economic power.

Following cultural exchanges in ancient and medieval times, a few hundred Greeks – mostly military officers and traders – settled in the six decades after the 1820 Egyptian-Turkish conquest of what became modern Sudan. About one hundred of them stayed, either forcedly or deliberately, when the Ottoman occupiers were defeated by the local Mahdist forces in 1885. With the establishment of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1898, Greek merchants, administrators and artisans de facto became the stalwarts of the British-dominated colonial regime. By the time Sudan gained independence in 1956, their numbers had increased to around 6,000-7,000, but soon afterwards decreased, especially after the nationalisation of many businesses in 1969 and the introduction of Sharia law in 1983.

A rump state is the remnant of a once much larger state that was reduced in the wake of annexation, occupation, secession, decolonization, a successful coup d'état or revolution on part of its former territory. In the last case, a government stops short of going into exile because it controls parts of its remaining territories.

Operation Weserübung (German: Unternehmen Weserübung [ˈveːzɐˌʔyːbʊŋ], transl. Operation Weser Exercise, 9 April – 10 June 1940) was the invasion of Denmark and Norway by Nazi Germany during World War II. It was the opening operation of the Norwegian Campaign.

In the early morning of 9 April 1940 (Wesertag, "Weser Day"), German forces occupied Denmark and invaded Norway, ostensibly as a preventive manoeuvre against a planned Anglo-French occupation of Norway known as Plan R 4, which developed as a response to a German invasion of Norwegian territory. After the rapid occupation of Denmark, in which the Danish military was ordered to stand down as Denmark's government did not declare war with Germany, German envoys informed the governments of Denmark and Norway that Germany's forces had come to protect both countries against Anglo-French attacks. Significant differences in geography, location and climate between the two nations made the actual military operations very dissimilar.

The occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany during the Second World War began on 9 April 1940 after Operation Weserübung. Conventional armed resistance to the German invasion ended on 10 June 1940, and Nazi Germany controlled Norway until the capitulation of German forces in Europe on 8 May 1945. Throughout this period, a pro-German government named Den nasjonale regjering ('the National Government') ruled Norway, while the Norwegian king Haakon VII and the prewar government escaped to London, where they formed a government in exile. Civil rule was effectively assumed by the Reichskommissariat Norwegen (Reich Commissariat of Norway), which acted in collaboration with the pro-German puppet government. This period of military occupation is, in Norway, referred to as the "war years", "occupation period" or simply "the war".

In war, an open city is a settlement which has announced it has abandoned all defensive efforts, generally in the event of the imminent capture of the city to avoid destruction. Once a city has declared itself open, the opposing military will be expected under international law to peacefully occupy the city rather than destroy it.

The concept of an open city emerged during World War I, where cities were declared demilitarized in an attempt to avoid destruction. Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions forbids the attacking party to "attack, by any means whatsoever, non-defended localities". The intent is to protect the city's civilians and cultural landmarks from a battle which may be futile.

The Russian-occupied territories refers to Russia's military occupations with a number of other post-Soviet states since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. These disputes are primarily an aspect of the post-Soviet conflicts, and have led to some countries losing parts of their sovereign territory to what a large portion of the international community designates as a Russian military occupation, regardless of what their status is in Russian law.

German-occupied Europe, or Nazi-occupied Europe, refers to the sovereign countries of Europe which were wholly or partly militarily occupied and civil-occupied, including puppet states, by the Wehrmacht (armed forces) and the government of Nazi Germany at various times between 1939 and 1945, during World War II, administered by the Nazi regime, under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler.

The Wehrmacht occupied European territory:

The ongoing military occupation of Ukraine's Kherson Oblast (Russian: Херсонская область, romanized: Khersonskaya oblast) by Russian forces began on 24 February 2022, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine from Crimea. It was administrated under a Russian-controlled military-civilian administration until 30 September 2022, when the Russian government declared it had annexed the territory. Since then it administers it as an internationally unrecognized federal subject of Russia.

Russia captured the city of Kherson on 1 March 2022. Kherson was the only regional capital that Russia has managed to capture in the invasion, though the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk had been controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014. Most of the rest of Kherson Oblast fell to Russian forces in the early months of the invasion.

In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who shape the culture of that society—the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm. As the universal dominant ideology, the ruling-class worldview misrepresents the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, and that it perpetuates social conditions that benefit every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.When the social control is carried out by another society, it is known as cultural imperialism.

In philosophy and in sociology, the denotations and the connotations of term cultural hegemony derive from the Ancient Greek word hegemonia (ἡγεμονία), which indicates the leadership and the régime of the hegemon. In political science, hegemony is the geopolitical dominance exercised by an empire, the hegemon (leader state) that rules the subordinate states of the empire by the threat of intervention, an implied means of power, rather than by threat of direct rule—military invasion, occupation, and territorial annexation.

The Soviet invasion of Poland was a military conflict by the Soviet Union without a formal declaration of war. On 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, 16 days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west. Subsequent military operations lasted for the following 20 days and ended on 6 October 1939 with the two-way division and annexation of the entire territory of the Second Polish Republic by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This division is sometimes called the Fourth Partition of Poland. The Soviet (as well as German) invasion of Poland was indirectly indicated in the "secret protocol" of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed on 23 August 1939, which divided Poland into "spheres of influence" of the two powers. German and Soviet cooperation in the invasion of Poland has been described as co-belligerence.

The Red Army, which vastly outnumbered the Polish defenders, achieved its targets, encountering only limited resistance. Some 320,000 Poles were made prisoners of war. The campaign of mass persecution in the newly acquired areas began immediately. In November 1939 the Soviet government annexed the entire Polish territory under its control. Some 13.5 million Polish citizens who fell under the military occupation were made Soviet subjects following show elections conducted by the NKVD secret police in an atmosphere of terror, the results of which were used to legitimise the use of force. A Soviet campaign of political murders and other forms of repression, targeting Polish figures of authority such as military officers, police, and priests, began with a wave of arrests and summary executions. The Soviet NKVD sent hundreds of thousands of people from eastern Poland to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union in four major waves of deportation between 1939 and 1941.Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland until the summer of 1941 when Germany terminated its earlier pact with the Soviet Union and invaded the Soviet Union under the code name Operation Barbarossa. The area was under German occupation until the Red Army reconquered it in the summer of 1944. An agreement at the Yalta Conference permitted the Soviet Union to annex territories close to the Curzon Line (which almost coincided with all of their Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact portion of the Second Polish Republic), compensating the Polish People's Republic with the greater southern part of East Prussia and territories east of the Oder–Neisse line. The Soviet Union appended the annexed territories to the Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republics.

The military occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany began with the German annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, continued with the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and by the end of 1944 extended to all parts of Czechoslovakia.

Following the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 and the Munich Agreement in September of that same year, Adolf Hitler annexed the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia on 1 October, giving Germany control of the extensive Czechoslovak border fortifications in this area. The incorporation of the Sudetenland into Germany left the rest of Czechoslovakia ("Rest-Tschechei" ) with a largely indefensible northwestern border. Also a Polish-majority borderland region of Trans-Olza which was annexed by Czechoslovakia in 1919, was occupied and annexed by Poland following the two-decade long territorial dispute. Finally the First Vienna Award gave to Hungary the southern territories of Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia, mostly inhabited by Hungarians.