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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations
As the world moves further into the Information Age and the ensuing increased levels of globalization, the ability to harness all of the elements of national power in an integrated, coordinated, and synchronized manner will be even more critical for the United States to successfully defend itself. Gerstein argues that the United States as a nation is largely unprepared to reap the full benefits of the Information Age and unable to address an increasing threat level because its methods, procedures, and ways of thinking remain anchored to the Industrial Age that is rapidly being left behind. To understand and adapt to this emerging environment, the United States must re-examine the development and the implementation of national security strategy. Gerstein examines the history of U.S. national security strategy, and he analyzes the results and conclusions of several capstone documents, including the National Security Strategy of the United States (2002), the Homeland Security Strategy of the United States (2002), the Commission of National Security/21st Century, and the 9/11 Commission Report. After evaluating the execution of U.S. national security strategy, Gerstein maintains that U.S. efforts today are more heavily weighted to the use of "hard power"--political, military, and intelligence resources--for achieving strategic goals and objectives. A strategy that incorporates more fully the elements of national power, including "soft power" such as economic, social, cultural, and informational capabilities will better serve the interests of the nation. In addition, Gerstein proposes a new way of looking at strategy. Typically, strategy has been defined as the linking of ways and means toachieve ends while mitigating risk. In the future, we must factor environment into any discussion.
How do our everyday actions shape and transform the world economy? This volume of original essays argues that current scholarship in international political economy (IPE) is too highly focused on powerful states and large international institutions. The contributors examine specific forms of ???everyday??? actions to demonstrate how small-scale actors and their decisions can shape the global economy. They analyse a range of seemingly ordinary or subordinate actors, including peasants, working classes and trade unions, lower-middle and middle classes, female migrant labourers and Eastern diasporas, and examine how they have agency in transforming their political and economic environments. This book offers a novel way of thinking about everyday forms of change across a range of topical issues including globalisation, international finance, trade, taxation, consumerism, labour rights and regimes. It will appeal to students and scholars of politics, international relations, political economy and sociology.
Language Policy beyond the State invites readers to (re-)consider the ways language policy is constituted, taken up, and researched if we look within and past the state. Contributors to this edited volume draw attention to language policy as always in the making, focusing on agency, on-the-ground practices, and ideologies. The chapters of the book reveal how simultaneous, and at times contradicting, language policies exist within a state and explore the complex roles played by families, businesses, educational institutions, and media in generating and appropriating these policies. By moving away from language policy analysis concerned primarily with how official state policies address well-defined language problems, some of the contributions of the volume highlight how the problems themselves can be ideological artifacts or are discursively constructed in language ideological debates that are provoked by changes in the geopolitical situation in the region. Using qualitative and descriptive research, the book uses Estonia as a setting to examine the ways historic and contemporary populations navigate language policies in both local and transnational spaces. As a whole, the collection speaks eloquently and powerfully to current efforts to understand and map the ways multiple institutions and individuals-not just the state-play an active role in forming and taking up language policies.
This work puts certain aspects of Britain's relationship with the EU under the microscope, examining the evidence for Britain's reputation as an "awkward partner". It focuses on the policy of successive Conservative governments, asking why the Conservative Party of this period, electorally one of the most successful political parties in the 20th century, eventually tore itself apart over Europe. Isolating key events such as the signing of the Single European Act, the decision to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1990 and the ratification of the Treaty on European Union including a commitment to complete Stages One and Two of the Single Currency, Buller analyzes the motivations of the Conservative government in acting as they did. He argues that far from being a "semi-detached" partner, British economic policy was increasingly "Europeanised" in this period.
Celik examines how the easing of the East-West tensions, the end of the Cold War, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union affects Turkey's foreign policy. During the Cold War, Ankara's role as a front-line state in containing Soviet expansionism had greatly influenced its foreign policy orientation as well as its foreign policy behavior. As such, changes in the structure of the international system were bound to alter the ways in which Turkey interacted with other states in the post-Cold War world. An examination of Turkish foreign policy, however, shows a high degree of continuity and stability. While Turkey's security environment has improved significantly during the 1990s, political and military considerations continue to drive Ankara's behavior. Furthermore, despite shifts in foreign policy behavior--such as closer relations with the former Soviet republics, active involvement in the Persian Gulf War, and military alliance with Israel--there have been no major alterations in foreign policy orientation. Turkey remains staunchly pro-western and the United States continues to be its most important ally. The post-Cold War era, however, also has brought an element of uncertainty to Turkish foreign policy and raises questions about its direction for the future.
This edited book explores the multi-layered relationships between public diplomacy and intensified uncertainties stemming from transnational political trends. It is the latest wave of political uncertainty that provides the background as well as yields evidence scrutinised by authors contributing to this book. The book argues that due to a state of perpetual crises, the simultaneity of diplomatic tensions and new digital modalities of power, international politics increasingly resembles a networked set of hyper-realities. Embracing multi-polar competition, superpowers such as Russia flex their muscles over their neighbours; celebrated 'success stories' of democratisation - Hungary, Poland and Czechia - move towards illiberal governance; old players of international politics such as Britain and America re-claim "greatness", while other states, like China, adapt expansionist foreign policy goals. The contributors to this book consider the different ways in which transnational political trends and digitalisation breed uncertainty and shape the practice of public diplomacy.
The European Union affects the lives of Europeans in many and varied ways, yet, in spite of its reach, it often appears a constrained political system - struggling for internal consensus, reliant on the agreement of national governments, and hampered by the scepticism of electorates. These issues have become even more acute in the wake of the global economic and eurozone crises. This new text provides a concise and up-to-date introduction to the nature of the European Union, giving an account of its evolution and structure that makes sense of its current challenges. The text analyses the EU's institutional structure and decision-making procedures, and highlights the manifold conflicts as well as the sophisticated mechanisms for consensus-building among the core institutions. It explains the ways in which the EU differs from other forms of political order, and how this leads to political processes that are characterized by cooperation and conflict. In providing this context, the author invites readers to a critical assessment of the functioning of the European Union, and of the implications of this for its democratic legitimacy and future prospects.
This book will offer a unique approach to the Year of Intelligence, the sixteen-month period between January 1975 and April 1976 that saw the innermost secrets of various US intelligence agencies laid bare before the world. After allegations of intelligence abuses were made in the press, Congress investigated and revealed numerous cases of unwarranted and unconstitutional activity conducted by a number of intelligence agencies. Chief among the investigations was the Senate enquiry, popularly known as the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho. This study's objective is to examine the relationship between national security policy and public opinion using extensive archival evidence, including previously unidentified indicators of public opinion. This monograph makes an important contribution to the historiography of the Church Committee, of public opinion, and of national security policy. The research contributes to the debate on the effectiveness of the Church Committee by challenging the conclusions within the established historiography of the limited impact of the committee's quest for reform. Furthermore, it widens the very limited scholarship that engages with public opinion's effect on national security policy. And the project also indicates to policymakers the lessons that can be learnt from the case study, principally, that public opinion is a vital ingredient in the decision making process of successful national security policy.
This book analyses the evolving engagement of the United States and Cuba, along with the impact of this relationship on Cuba-CARICOM relations and the Caribbean. Through a Caribbean perspective, the chapters discuss the implications of the U.S.-Cuba relationship economically, institutionally and developmentally. Based on the findings of their research, the authors provide policy recommendations to CARICOM on potential areas for enhancing relations between CARICOM and Cuba, drawing on fieldwork and interviews with policymakers, academics, non-governmental organizations, and regional experts.
This timely 2 volume edited collection looks at the extent and nature of global jihad, focusing on the often-exoticised hinterlands of jihad beyond the traditionally viewed Middle Eastern 'centre'. As ISIS loses its footing in Syria and Iraq and al-Qaeda regroups this comprehensive account will be a key work in the on-going battle to better understand the dynamics of the jihads global reality. Critically examining the global reach of the jihad in these peripheries has the potential to tell us much about patterns of both local mobilisation, and local rejection of a grander centrally themed and administered jihad. Has the periphery been receptive to an exported jihad from the centre or does the local rooted cosmopolitanism of the jihad in the periphery suggest a more complex glocal relationship? These questions and challenges are more pertinent than ever as the likes of ISIS and many commentators, attempt to globally rebrand the jihad and as the centre reasserts its claims to the exotic periphery. Edited by Tom Smith (Portsmouth), Kirsten E. Schulze (LSE) and Hussein Solomon (UFS) the two volumes critically examine the various claims of connections between jihadist terrorism in the 'periphery', remote Islamist insurgencies of the 'periphery' and the global jihad. Each volume draws on experts in each of the geographies in question. The global nature of the jihad is too often taken for granted; yet the extent of the glocal connections deserve focused investigation. Without such inquiry we risk a reductive understanding of the global jihad, further fostering Orientalist and Eurocentric attitudes towards local conflicts and remote violence in the periphery. This book will therefore draw attention to those who overlook and undermine the distinct and rich particularities of the often-contradictory and cosmopolitan global jihad. In many of the peripheries, particularly those with intensive large-scale insurgencies, there is extensive international military alliance. The Bush doctrine to 'fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here' certainly looks to be alive and well in places like Somalia, the Philippines and Niger amongst many others. Crucially we must ask - is such reasoning sound - is the threat global and if so in what way? Furthermore - is action in the peripheries under the guise of combating the global jihad overlooking the local issues and threatening to make a wider threat where it was otherwise contained? Diagnosing nations or regions as 'breeding grounds' or 'sanctuaries' of global jihad carries the spectre of having to chose sides in a battle of civilisations, which looms over a number of developing nations reliant on good western relations.
This important volume examines the vast potential of--and critical need for--cooperation among the neighboring states of the Pacific Rim. From economic and security matters to cultural and environmental concerns, the Pacific Century will require increased cross-border education, communication, and cooperation, which can be enhanced by regional organizations and agreements. This work offers a compilation of new thinking from international political, business, and academic leaders on the challenges facing the Pacific Rim in the next century, and proposes the emerging Pacific community as a model for global cooperation.
R. William Johnstone served on the transportation security staff of the 9/11 Commission, and wrote this book to build upon and supplement the Commission's work. In its pages, he explains the aviation security system failure on 9/11, uses that as a means for evaluating post-9/11 transportation security efforts, and proposes remedies to continued shortcomings. 9/11 and the Future of Transportation Security is based on information originally provided to the 9/11 Commission, augmented by unpublished reports and a wealth of other material that has come to light since the issuance of the Commission's own report in July 2004. Part One analyzes the aviation security system's history and institutions to explain why the system failed on 9/11. Part Two looks at what has been done in aviation and transportation security since 9/11, including the Commission's recommendations and the congressional response to them. Finally and most significantly, Part Three outlines a suggested approach for improving current U.S. transportation security. It begins with fundamental policy questions that must be answered if we are to optimize transportation security efforts, and concludes with both underlying principles for action and specific recommendations.
Providing a detailed examination of climate negotiations records since the 1990s, this book shows that, in addition to agreeing on climate policy frameworks, the negotiations process is of crucial importance to success. Shedding light on the dynamics of international climate policymaking, its respective chapters explore key milestones such as the Kyoto Protocol, Marrakech Accords, Cancun Agreement and Doha Framework. The book identifies a minimum of three conditions that need to be fulfilled for successful climate negotiations: the negotiations need to reflect the fact that climate change calls for global solutions; the negotiation process must be flexible, including multiple trajectories and several small steps; and decisive tactical maneuvers need to be made, as much can depend on, for example, personalities and the negotiating atmosphere. With regard to the design of an international climate policy regime, the main challenge presented has been the inability to agree on globally supported greenhouse gas emission reduction measures. The book offers an excellent source of information for researchers, policymakers and advisors alike.
Oswald argues that European security autonomy will lead to a more balanced transatlantic partnership, even though American military might will remain far superior. As U.S. leaders indicate a willingness to disengage from their former European protectorate, the Europeanization of Europe's own security needs-their ability to take care of their own crises-will proceed apace. An understanding of this process is key to an American foreign policy that recognizes Europe as a strategic actor in its own right, an indispensable ally with its own military and nonmilitary instruments of crisis management. At the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the postcommunist transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, the U.S.-led NATO alliance found itself without its erstwhile primary enemy. While NATO found new purpose as guarantor of stability for an increasing membership and crisis manager in Southeast Europe, the alliance's expansion also advanced its transformation from a collective defense organization into a security community. While NATO was redefining itself, the European Union created the institutional and political prerequisites for a European security and defense policy. In his analysis of Europe's emancipation from security dependence on the United States, Oswald expects the economic strength of the European bloc to translate into responsibility for regional security. Yet this is not to say that the EU is emerging as the primary challenger to U.S. hegemony. Instead, Oswald argues, European security autonomy will lead to a more balanced transatlantic partnership, even though American military might will remain far superior. As U.S. leaders indicate a willingness to disengage from their former European protectorate, the Europeanization of Europe's own security needs-their ability to take care of their own crises-will proceed apace. An understanding of this process is key to an American foreign policy that recognizes Europe as a strategic actor in its own right, an indispensable ally with its own military and nonmilitary instruments of crisis management.
Relations between Japan and the European Union rarely hit the headlines. And yet, based upon decades of incremental developments, their bilateral partnership has come to cover a wide range of activities. This book traces the history of that mutual interaction and assesses how Japan and the EU together have the potential to offer joint solutions to the problems of the 21st century.
Perfect for promoting student debate, and critical thinking, and ideal for use by Model UN clubs, this ready-reference guide provides information and critical examinations of the 50 most important issues debated in UN history. Since the inception of the UN in 1945, its member nations have hotly debated the most incendiary global political issues, from human rights and Cold War conflicts to many regional and local clashes, most recently in Kosovo. The 50 entries are organized in chronological order based on their first appearance on the UN agenda. Each entry consists of four narrative sections: the significance of the issue; the historical, social and economic background of the issue; the history of the UN debate and intervention on the issue and the positions of various nations; and the outcome of the debate. Each entry concludes with a list of suggested further reading. More than fifty photos accompany the text. Among the issues debated are those of UN peacekeeping efforts around the globe; issues of concern to Third World countries; the nuclear arms race; regional conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America; human rights; world population growth; the environment; laws of the sea; issues of food; the status of women; and racism. Cross-references will help the user to locate related topics. A timeline of events in the history of the UN, a bibliographic essay, a glossary, and a number of appendices including lists of UN world years, UN peacekeeping operations, Secretaries General of the UN and Presidents of the UN General Assembly add reference value to the work.
This innovative new text focuses on the politics of international security: how and why issues are interpreted as threats to international security and how such threats are managed. After a brief introduction to the field and its major theories and approaches, the core chapters systematically analyze the major issues on the contemporary international security agenda. Each is examined according to a common framework that brings out the nature of the threat and the responses open to policy makers. From war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, through environmental and economic crises, to epidemics, cyber-war and piracy, the twenty-first century world seems beset by a daunting range of international security problems. At the same time, the academic study of security has become more fragmented and contested than ever before as new actors, issues and theories increasingly challenge traditional concepts and approaches. This new edition has been heavily revised to discuss for the failings of the Obama admiration and its strategic partners on a number of different security issues, and the constant, evolving instances of turmoil the world has experienced since, whilst providing the skills students need to conduct their own research of international security issues occurring outside of this text, and for issues yet to occur. Cyber security, the 'Arab Spring' revolutions, the Ebola outbreak, and the refugee crisis are just some examples of the plethora of subjects that Smith analyses within this text. This textbook is an essential for those studying international security, whether at undergraduate or postgraduate level as part of a degree in international relations, politics, and other social sciences more generally. New to this Edition: - Chapter on cyber security - Up-to-date issues and field coverage - New 'mini-case studies' in each chapter - Updated analytical/pedagogical framework Pioneering framework for students to apply theory and empirical evidence correctly to tackle analytical and comparative tasks concerning both traditional and non-traditional security issues
Subjugate or Exterminate! is an authoritative first-hand account of the Russo-Chechen conflict by a Chechen leader who played a central role in all the main events. Akhmed Zakayev rose rapidly from an actor of Shakespearean roles to Commander of the Western Group for the Defense of Ichkeria, and later served as Deputy Prime Minister of Chechnya and, in exile, as Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (ChRI). It describes how the Kremlin set about discrediting and destroying a democratic government by interacting with criminal gangs and fomenting Islamist forces to split the Chechen independence movement in a perverse reversal of the "War on Terror." Akhmed Zakayev's memoir begins with a historical survey of the fraught relations between the Chechens and the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, up to the collapse of the USSR. The advent of Gorbachev's Perestroika raised hopes that independence might enable Chechnya to end centuries of oppression and exploitation. Russia's first war against Chechnya (1994-1996), initially conceived by the military as a way of disguising the large-scale theft and embezzlement of funds from illegal sales of Soviet armaments during the withdrawal from East Germany, ended in humiliating defeat for Russia. Thereafter, Russia set about subverting the democratically elected government of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria by instigating the gruesome murder of Western humanitarian aid workers and business partners, and by financing criminal gangs and anti-democratic Islamist groups that the ChRI police were unable to subdue. Interference by nationals of countries in the Middle East caused further disruption. In August 1999, Russia launched a brutal second war in Chechnya, on grounds widely believed to be fabricated and characterized by widespread war crimes. The West did not intervene. This is an eyewitness account of the dangers faced by the Chechen leaders as they tried to resist and negotiate with a treacherous opponent. It ends in the year 2000, with Vladimir Putin's election as Russia's president.
The Cold War began almost immediately after the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazis in Europe. As images of the Nazis' atrocities became part of American culture's common store, the evil of their old enemy, beyond the Nazis as a wartime opponent, became increasingly important. As America tried to describe the danger represented by the spread of Communism, it fell back on descriptions of Nazism to make the threat plain through comparison. At the heart of the tensions of that era lay the inconsistency of using one kind of evil to describe another. The book addresses this tension in regards to McCarthyism, campaigns to educate the public about Communism, attempts to raise support for wars in Asia, and the rhetoric of civil rights. Each of these political arenas is examined through their use of Nazi analogies in popular, political, and literary culture. The Nazi Card is an invaluable look at the way comparisons to Nazis are used in American culture, the history of those comparisons, and the repercussions of establishing a political definition of evil.
While there has been a flood of scholarly efforts to extend, adapt, and revise Foucault's exploration of the emergence and operations of neoliberalism, the study of foreign policy has remained steeped in the analysis of partisanship, institutions, policies, and personality and their influence on various issue areas, toward particular countries, or specific presidential doctrines. This book brings the political rationality of neoliberalism to bear on U.S. foreign policy in two distinct ways. First, it challenges, complicates, and revises the numerous interpretations of U.S. nationalism that posit a homologous relationship between "1898" and contemporary nationalism, instead arguing that alterations in the operations of capitalism and its correlative forms of governance have produced a differently formatted nationalism, which in turn has produced different operations of U.S. hegemony in the twenty-first century that markedly depart from earlier eras. Second, this book argues for a new timeline-one that starts with the Carter-Reagan era and the crisis of capitalism-ultimately encouraging us to think beyond particular presidencies, wars, bureaucratic politics, and policies in order to train our sights on how long-term and sustained shifts in the economy and attendant government practices have emerged to produce new myths of exceptionalism that more fully cohere with the neoliberal foundations of the U.S. nation-state.
"Silent Capitulations: The Kemalist Republic Under Assault" brings to life the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Turkish political life. It paints an uncompromising picture of a regime determined to appease European skeptics of Turkish adhesion to the European Union by capitulating to their demands on all fronts. Turkey's inability to unite its eastern and western parts is attributed to the dominance of an oligarchy of feudal lords, tribal chiefs, big business, and a ruling class who all masquerade as if they are part of a functioning democracy. Suffering from the ravages of tribal conformity and tainted by corruption and cronyism, the society is showing signs of an astonishing degree of deterioration. When municipal governments are a relic of the past and taxation is a tangle of dysfunctional measures, when justice is crippled by archaic arrangements and a web of vested interests control corporations-the nation is indeed under attack. Using arguments developed through the use of events and anecdotes, author Sedat Sami offers a deep examination of the Turkish social and political scene as well as a dramatic account of the Islamist onslaught against the Kemalist Republic.
The 'Liberal World Order' (LWO) is today in crisis. But what explains this crisis? Whereas its critics see it as the unmasking of Western hypocrisy, its longstanding proponents argue it is under threat by competing illiberal projects. This book takes a different stance: neither internal hypocrisy, nor external attacks explain the decline of the LWO - a deviation from its original lane does. Emerged as a project aiming to harmonize state sovereignty and the market, through the promotion of liberal democracy domestically, and free trade and economic cooperation internationally, the LWO was hijacked in the 1980s: market forces overshadowed democratic forces, thus disfiguring the LWO into a Neoliberal Global Order. The book advocates for a revival of its original intellectual premises, that in the aftermath of World War II marked the zenith of political modernity.
Yevgeni Vladimirovich Brik and James Douglas Finley Morrison were central figures in what was considered one of the most important Cold War operations in the West at the time. Their story, which involves espionage, intelligence tradecraft, intelligence service penetrations, double agent scenarios, and betrayal, is a piece of Cold War intelligence history that has never been fully told. Yevgeni Brik was a KGB deep cover illegal who had been dispatched to Canada in 1951. He settled in Verdun, Quebec. He eventually became the KGB Illegal Resident where he had responsibility for running a number of agents, one of whom was working on the CF-105, Avro Arrow. In 1953, he fell in love with a married Canadian woman to whom he revealed his true identity. She persuaded him to turn himself in, which resulted in his becoming a double agent, working for Canada. He was later betrayed by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer, James Morrison, who sought money from the KGB to pay his debts. Brik was consequently lured back to Moscow in 1955, where he was arrested, and interrogated. Convicted of treason, a traitor's fate awaited him, predictable, grim and final. Incredibly, he reappeared at a British Embassy as an old man in 1992, seeking Canada's help. He was exfiltrated by a joint Canadian / British intelligence team which was headed by Donald Mahar. He was debriefed by Mahar for several months when they returned to Canada.
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