This volume covers the "middle" time period of the Syrian uprising, roughly from 2012 when Syria's peaceful protest began to mutate into a violent insurgency and civil war until roughly 2018 when the conflict took on features of a "frozen conflict". The middle period was important as one of key junctures or turning points when the struggle could have reached rather different outcomes. Non-violent protest failed to drive democratization and turned into violent insurrection but revolution from below also failed as did regime counter-insurgency, leaving protracted civil war the default outcome. Second, the consequences of civil war became evident with six themes: failing statehood coexisted with regime resilience; rebel governance emerged as a viable challenge to the regime; social forces were sharply polarized; external actors exacerbated internal divisions; a predatory war economy emerged; and intense violence led to massive displacement of the population. Taking an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that seeks to capture the full complexity of the phenomenon, this book contributes significantly to our understanding of the Syrian conflict, therefore it will be of interest to academics, students, journalists and policy-makers interested in the Syrian civil war.

This volume covers the "middle" time period of the Syrian uprising, roughly from 2012 when Syria's peaceful protest began to mutate into a violent insurgency and civil war until roughly 2018 when the conflict took on features of a "frozen conflict". The middle period was important as one of key junctures or turning points when the struggle could have reached rather different outcomes. Non-violent protest failed to drive democratization and turned into violent insurrection but revolution from below also failed as did regime counter-insurgency, leaving protracted civil war the default outcome. Second, the consequences of civil war became evident with six themes: failing statehood coexisted with regime resilience; rebel governance emerged as a viable challenge to the regime; social forces were sharply polarized; external actors exacerbated internal divisions; a predatory war economy emerged; and intense violence led to massive displacement of the population. Taking an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that seeks to capture the full complexity of the phenomenon, this book contributes significantly to our understanding of the Syrian conflict, therefore it will be of interest to academics, students, journalists and policy-makers interested in the Syrian civil war.

This volume explores India's role in the global governance architecture post-Cold War. It shows how, with a rise in India's capabilities, there is an expectation from its external interlocutors that New Delhi ought to play a larger global role. As Indian policymakers redefine their engagements in the global policy matrix, the chapters in the volume analyse India's role as a challenger and a stakeholder in world politics; its uneasy relationship with Western liberal democracies; and its role in shaping new structures of global governance. The volume focuses on a host of critical issues, including nuclear policy, climate action politics, India's bid for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, humanitarian interventions, trade governance, democracy promotion, India's engagement with other emerging powers in platforms such as the BRICS, the changing dynamics with its neighbours, and maritime governance. A timely reimagining of global politics, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics and international relations, climate change, military and strategic studies, economics, and South Asian studies.

This book seeks to elucidate the decisions of states that have chosen to acquire nuclear arms or inherited nuclear arsenals, and have either disarmed or elected to retain their warheads. It examines nuclear arms policy via an interconnected framework involving the eclectic use of national security based realism, economic interdependence liberalism, and nuclear weapons norms or morality based constructivism. Through the various chapters examining the nuclear munitions decisions of South Africa, Ukraine and North Korea, a case is built that a state's leadership decides whether to keep or give up "the Bomb" based on interlinked security, economic and norms governed motivations. Thereafter, frameworks evaluating the likelihood of nuclear proliferation and accessing the feasibility of disarmament are then applied to North Korea and used to examine recent Iranian nuclear negotiability. This book is an invaluable resource for international relations and security studies scholars, WMD analysts and post graduate or undergraduate candidates focusing on nuclear arms politics related courses

This book sheds new light on the emergence and fluctuation of Iran's connections with non-state entities in the Middle East. Iran's involvement with political-militant non-states has been at the heart of international and regional security policy for more than three decades. The author analyzes Iran's non-state foreign policy by focusing on specific geopolitical and geocultural threats and opportunities that pushed Tehran to build strategic ties with the Iraqi Kurds and the Lebanese Shia. This project will appeal to multiple audiences interested in geopolitics of the Middle East, Iran's foreign policy, and international relations.

More than twenty years after the peace agreement signed in Belfast on 10 April 1998, an assessment is overdue, particularly given the current political context in Northern Ireland. A serious political crisis led to the suspension of the regional institutions from January 2017 to January 2020, and the Brexit negotiations did not facilitate the search for a solution, especially as the confidence-and-supply agreement between the British Conservative Party and the DUP prevented London from acting as an honest broker between Sinn Fein and the DUP. At the same time, the issue of the Irish border created tensions between Dublin and London. This situation was compounded by the resurgence of rioting, mostly in Loyalist areas of Belfast and Derry/Londonderry, in April 2021, against the backdrop of Brexit's Northern Ireland Protocol and communal resentment. Emanating from a conference jointly organised at the University of Caen Normandy and La Rochelle University, this collection of essays - bringing together academic and independent scholars from various disciplines and nationalities - takes a critical look at the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, from the collaboration between Dublin and London to the new political configurations in Northern Ireland, as well as interfaith, cultural, social and economic developments. Divided into three main parts, it furnishes an opportunity to better understand the reasons for the apparent deterioration in inter-community understanding since 1998, but also to study the numerous initiatives that have sought to promote reconciliation, be it in the economy, the working environment, in the literary and artistic spheres, in schools or in the urban landscape.

This book explores the ways in which democracies can win counterinsurgencies when they implement a proper strategy. At a time when the USA is retrenching from two bungled foreign wars that involved deadly insurgent uprisings, this is a particularly important argument. Succumbing to the trauma of those engagements and drawing the wrong conclusions about counterinsurgency can only lead to further defeat in the future. Rather than assuming that counterinsurgency is ineffective, it is crucial to understand that a conventional response to an insurgent challenge is likely to fail. Counterinsurgency must be applied from the beginning, and if done properly can be highly effective, even when used by democratic regimes. In fact, because such regimes are often wealthier; have more experience at institution-building and functional governance; are more pluralistic in nature and therefore enjoy higher levels of legitimacy than do autocracies, democracies may have considerable advantages in counterinsurgency warfare. Rather than give up in despair, democracies should learn to leverage these advantages and implement them against future insurgencies.

This impressive work sheds light on the recent history of the UN Security Council (UNSC), examining how the penchant for UN-backed humanitarian intervention in the 1990s has given way to an impotent UNSC, unable to play a meaningful role in the war in Iraq. It examines the precepts that govern UNSC politics, including the sanctity of sovereign states, the norm of non-intervention and state interests. Designed for readers who are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the workings of the UNSC, the attitudes of its members towards the use of force and sovereignty, as well as understanding its limitations in international politics, this volume: * evaluates key issues such as the principle of consent, the use of force, intervention and sovereignty * provides a rich array of case studies to understand the challenges of consent-based peacekeeping * presents strong analytical consistency drawing on a wide variety of sources

This book explores and inquiries into the interrelation between normativity and Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) from a wide range of critical views. The volume draws together authors with very different positions and understandings of normativity and policy-implementations in relation to countering terrorism, to offer the reader a wide range of perspectives and views on this topic. As such, the book is aimed at interrogating the concept of normativity in CTS from a wide range of theoretical angles but also at incorporating within the CTS' agenda new debates and critiques. In its chapters, the book covers debates that go from more philosophical, theoretical, and ethical discussions to questions revolving around the importance and need of being policy-relevant for CTS scholars. All in all, this volume brings together chapters joining the debate on CTS' main theoretical tenants and the role of critical scholars in counter-terrorism and prevention policies. Covering a broad spectrum of approaches and perspectives, authors in this book give different answers to central questions such as: how can we rethink CTS? What is the role of the critical terrorism studies community in countering terrorism? The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism.

This Handbook brings together essays from an impressive group of well-established and emerging scholars from all around the world, to show the many different types of violence that have plagued Latin America since the pre-Colombian era, and how each has been seen and characterized in literature and other cultural mediums ever since. This ambitious collection analyzes texts from some of the region's most tumultuous time periods, beginning with early violence that was predominately tribal and ideological in nature; to colonial and decolonial violence between colonizers and the native population; through to the political violence we have seen in the postmodern period, marked by dictatorship, guerrilla warfare, neoliberalism, as well as representations of violence caused by drug trafficking and migration. The volume provides readers with literary examples from across the centuries, showing not only how widespread the violence has been, but crucially how it has shaped the region and evolved over time.

Humanitarian intervention is a many layered and complex concept. While moral society has an obligation to stop deliberate and persistent serious human rights abuse, the direct use of force remains a contentious option alongside other strategies employed by the international community. This study analyzes the various ethical positions, particularly consequentialism, welfare-utilitarianism and just war theory to unravel this intricate topic. Uniquely, the book goes beyond previous philosophical or ethical treatments of the subject to provide a more rounded and practical reflection on the lessons learned from the revival of humanitarian intervention as a tool of conflict resolution.

This book adopts an innovative historical approach to Terrorism, focusing on the weaknesses of terrorist states and organizations as reflected in the ideologies, methodologies and propaganda of Russian populist, National Socialist and Islamic Terrorism. Drawing upon multilingual primary sources, the book challenges the oft repeated claim that the Nazi regime and Islamic State produced propaganda of superior quality, instead arguing that the manipulation of information is the Achilles heel of terrorist organizations. It offers a critical examination of the fears of terrorists themselves, as opposed to the traditional focus on the fear instilled by terrorist organizations in governments and citizens. Taking a multidisciplinary approach and long-term history perspective, the book provides a method for exploring the minds of terrorists and the inner workings of their organizations and traces the evolution of terrorist thought and methodology across time and place. This is the ideal volume for researchers of Terrorism within the fields of History, Politics, Security Studies, Religious Studies and Legal Studies.

1. There have been very few research projects on victims of terrorism, so this book helps reset this balance. 2. Furthermore, this book engages with the philosophical and psychological literature on resilience and trauma, giving it a wider market.

Female Ex-Combatants, Empowerment, and Reintegration investigates the role of United Nations-led Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs in undermining female ex-combatants' empowerment. The participation of female combatants in conflict has increasingly been recognized in feminist literatures and in policies and programs concerned with reintegrating ex-combatants and building peace. This has illustrated that female ex-combatants often experience "empowerment" through their role as combatant; however, this empowerment is often lost upon reintegration. UN-led DDR plays an important role in the broader peacebuilding process, as it is one of the largest interventions and directly aims to reintegrate ex-combatants into civilian life. This book draws on extensive field research and interviews with female ex-combatants and DDR officials in Liberia and Nepal to develop a nuanced and comprehensive picture of female ex-combatants' empowerment and how this is undermined by DDR. Through reconceptualized frameworks of empowerment and an emancipatory peace, the book explores the pivotal role that DDR programs play in undermining female ex-combatants' empowerment. The author argues that this is detrimental to peacebuilding, because DDR officials and documentation narrate female ex-combatants in limited and gendered ways, which reproduces gendered inequalities and define how female ex-combatants should behave. This book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners working on gender, conflict, peace, security, and development.

This book presents an unprecedented qualitative research study on relational changes in mediation with a truly interdisciplinary outset, drawing on the literature on psychology, alternative dispute resolution and business. Mediation's potential to induce changes in parties' relationships as an advantage of the process is commonly mentioned in the literature. However, despite its being a key to reconciliation, relational changes in mediation has not yet been a topic of foundational and fine-grained qualitative enquiry. As the first study in the literature, this research uses in-depth interviews with mediation parties and the qualitative methodology of interpretative phenomenological analysis in order to explore participants' lived experiences. The phenomenological stance ensures a particularly rich data set and a nuanced interpretative analysis. This pioneering piece of research seeks to enter mediation parties' true experiences as closely as possible, moving beyond pre-existing theoretical, quantitative and large-scale qualitative explorations. The themes are discussed in the context of theory, research and practice. Therefore, this book advances knowledge about mediation both in theoretical and practical terms. Innovative conclusions and recommendations are provided for developing mediation practice, mediation training programmes, and further research.

This volume examines intelligence services since 1945 in their role as knowledge producers. Intelligence agencies are producers and providers of arcane information. However, little is known about the social, cultural and material dimensions of their knowledge production, processing and distribution. This volume starts from the assumption that during the Cold War, these core activities of information services underwent decisive changes, of which scientization and computerisation are essential. With a focus on the emerging alliances between intelligence agencies, science and (computer) technology, the chapters empirically explore these transformations and are characterised by innovative combinations of intelligence history with theoretical considerations from the history of science and technology and the history of knowledge. At the same time, the book challenges the bipolarity of Cold War history in general and of intelligence history in particular in favour of comparative and transnational perspectives. The focus is not only the Soviet Union and the United States, but also Poland, Turkey, the two German states and Brazil. This approach reveals surprising commonalities across systems: time and again, the expansion and use of intelligence knowledge came up against the limits that resulted from intelligence culture itself. The book enriches our global understanding of knowledge of the state and contributes to a historical framework for the past decade of debates about the societal consequences of intelligence data processing. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, science and technology studies, security studies and International Relations.

This book shows that political narratives can promote or thwart the prospects for international cooperation and are major factors in international negotiation processes in the 21st century. In a world that is experiencing waves of right-wing and left-wing populism, international cooperation has become increasingly difficult. This volume focuses on how the intersubjective identities of political parties and narratives shape their respective values, interests and negotiating behaviors and strategies. Through a series of comparative case studies, the book explains how and why narratives contribute to negotiation failure or deadlock in some circumstances and why, in others, they do not because a new narrative that garners public and political support has emerged through the process of negotiation. The book also examines how narratives interact with negotiation principles, and alter the bargaining range of a negotiation, including the ability to make concessions. This book will be of much interest to students of international negotiation, economics, security studies and international relations.

This book shows that political narratives can promote or thwart the prospects for international cooperation and are major factors in international negotiation processes in the 21st century. In a world that is experiencing waves of right-wing and left-wing populism, international cooperation has become increasingly difficult. This volume focuses on how the intersubjective identities of political parties and narratives shape their respective values, interests and negotiating behaviors and strategies. Through a series of comparative case studies, the book explains how and why narratives contribute to negotiation failure or deadlock in some circumstances and why, in others, they do not because a new narrative that garners public and political support has emerged through the process of negotiation. The book also examines how narratives interact with negotiation principles, and alter the bargaining range of a negotiation, including the ability to make concessions. This book will be of much interest to students of international negotiation, economics, security studies and international relations.

This book examines why the United States has introduced safeguards that are designed to prevent their counterterrorism policies from causing harm to non-US citizens beyond US territory. It investigates what made US policymakers take steps to "put the gloves back on" through five case studies on the emergence of such safeguards related to the right not to be tortured, the right not to be arbitrarily detained, the right to life (in connection with targeted killing operations), the right to seek asylum (in connection with refugee resettlement), and the right to privacy (in connection with foreign mass surveillance). The book exposes two mechanisms - coercion and strategic learning - which explain why the United States has introduced what the authors refer to as "extraterritorial human rights safeguards", thus demonstrating that the emerging norm that states have human rights obligations towards foreigners beyond their borders constrains policy choices. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of human rights, counterterrorism, US foreign policy, human rights law, and more broadly to political science and international relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at: http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Wang discusses the dynamics of Sino-US relations since 2008 and the implications for relations between Taiwan and both the United States and the People's Republic of China. Ever since China surpassed Japan to become the world's second largest economy, it has appeared to shift its policy shift from "biding our time" and a self-described "peaceful rise" toward increased assertiveness in regional and international affairs. This has only become more pronounced since the 19th Party National Congress in October 2017, when Xi Jinping reiterated his agenda for "the Chinese Dream." In contrast, the US's "Pivot to Asia" strategy has been widely perceived as unsuccessful. In its precarious political position between China and the United States, Taiwan is especially exposed to the fluctuations in policy and diplomatic relations between the two powers. The three bilateral relationships are intertwined, with policy changes and actions in any one of them affecting the other two. Wang emphasizes the "small power" and "disputed nation-state" perspective of Taiwan, over the "great power politics" of the United States and China. In doing so, he presents an analysis of how the changing dynamics of Sino-US relations and the great power transition in Asia have an impact on smaller stakeholders in the region. A valuable resource for scholars and policy-makers with a focus on Taiwan's position in Sino-US relations.

Survival, the IISS's bimonthly journal, challenges conventional wisdom and brings fresh, often controversial, perspectives on strategic issues of the moment. In this issue: * The Ukraine crisis: Robert Hunter argues that the most important requirement of successful US-led negotiations with Russia is that Moscow demonstrate that it is prepared to be a responsible international actor * Erin Sikorsky contends that climate change should have a larger role in the day-to-day national-security agendas of the United States and other countries * Stephan Fruhling and Andrew O'Neil warn that current US debates about no first use tend to underplay the broader alliance implications of any shift in US nuclear policy * Rahul Roy-Chaudhury and Kate Sullivan de Estrada assess that, given the 2021 US FONOP targeting India, Washington and New Delhi need to better manage their diverse positions on global governance, especially in the maritime domain * Nien-chung Chang-Liao warns that pragmatism in Chinese foreign policy is waning and considers why Chinese diplomats have become so aggressive And nine more thought-provoking pieces, as well as our regular Book Reviews and Noteworthy column. Editor: Dr Dana Allin Managing Editor: Jonathan Stevenson Associate Editor: Carolyn West Assistant Editor: Jessica Watson

This book examines change processes and the challenge of ambidexterity in military organizations. It discusses how military organizations can better adapt to the complex, and at times chaotic, environments they operate in by developing organizational ambidexterity. The authors identify various multiple tasks and functions of military organizations that require multi-dimensional and often contradictory operational, technological, cultural, and social skills. In analogy to the often-opposed functions performed by the right and left hand of the body, modern military organizations are no longer one-dimensional fighting machines, but characterized by a duality of tasks, such as fighting and peacekeeping which often make part and parcel of one and the same mission. The military is both a "hot" and a "cold" organization (a crisis management organization and a bureaucracy). As such, the book argues that these dualities are not necessarily opposed but can serve as complementary forces, like the yin and yang, to better the overall performance of these organizations. As a consequence, ambidextrous organizations excel at complex tasking and are adaptable to new challenges. Divided into four parts: 1) structures and networks; 2) cultural issues; 3) tasks and roles; 4) nations and allies, it appeals to scholars of military studies and organization studies as well as professionals working for governmental or military organizations.

This is a unique publication; though criminology is often interested in those who cause social harm, biographies are very rare (beyond some of the seminal text of the 1930s). This offers something new to the field, while still situating itself in contemporary debates on social harm and narrative criminology. The author had unparalleled access to his subject, and this biography is based on extensive interviews that took place over Skype. This book will find a wide market across criminology, sociology, critical security studies, international relations and those engaged with the arms industry.

Challenging the predominantly Euro-American approaches to the field, this volume brings together essays on a wide array of literary, filmic and journalistic responses to the decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Shifting the focus from so-called 9/11 literature to narratives of the war on terror, and from the transatlantic world to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, the Afghan-Pak border region, South Waziristan, Al-Andalus and Kenya, the book captures the multiple transnational reverberations of the discourses on terrorism, counter-terrorism and insurgency. These include, but are not restricted to, the realignment of geopolitical power relations; the formation of new terrorist networks (ISIS) and regional alliances (Iraq/Syria); the growing number of terrorist incidents in the West; the changing discourses on security and technologies of warfare; and the leveraging of fundamental constitutional principles. The essays featured in this volume draw upon, and critically engage with, the conceptual trajectories within American literary debates, postcolonial discourse and transatlantic literary criticism. Collectively, they move away from the trauma-centrism and residual US-centrism of early literary responses to 9/11 and the criticism thereon, while responding to postcolonial theory's call for a historical foregrounding of terrorism, insurgency and armed violence in the colonial-imperial power nexus. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

This book will raise awareness on emerging challenges of AIempowered cyber arms used in weapon systems and stockpiled in the global cyber arms race. Based on real life events, it provides a comprehensive analysis of cyber offensive and defensive landscape, analyses the cyber arms evolution from prank malicious codes into lethal weapons of mass destruction, reveals the scale of cyber offensive conflicts, explores cyber warfare mutation, warns about cyber arms race escalation and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for military purposes. It provides an expert insight into the current and future malicious and destructive use of the evolved cyber arms, AI and robotics, with emphasis on cyber threats to CBRNe and critical infrastructure. The book highlights international efforts in regulating the cyber environment, reviews the best practices of the leading cyber powers and their controversial approaches, recommends responsible state behaviour. It also proposes information security and cyber defence solutions and provides definitions for selected conflicting cyber terms. The disruptive potential of cyber tools merging with military weapons is examined from the technical point of view, as well as legal, ethical, and political perspectives.