This exceptional volume examines international security issues by way of case studies of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Each of these raises significant issues concerning the use of force between states and the role of the United Nations in maintaining international peace and security. Alex Conte examines international terrorism and the intervention in Afghanistan, including the controversial policy of pre-emptive strikes in the war on terror, and discusses the role adopted by the United Nations in the political and economic reconstruction of states subjected to conflict. Analyzing events in Iraq since 1990, he assesses the legality of the current war and leads to an examination of the role of the UN in maintaining peace and security and possible options for reform and accountability. The study will be a valuable guide for all those keen to understand the use of international law and the United Nations in the first two major conflicts of the 21st century and their implications for the future role of the United Nations.

Recently, a wall was built in eastern Germany. Made of steel and cement blocks, topped with razor barbed wire, and reinforced with video monitors and movement sensors, this wall was not put up to protect a prison or a military base, but rather to guard a three-day meeting of the finance ministers of the Group of Eight (G8). The wall manifested a level of security that is increasingly commonplace at meetings regarding the global economy. The authors of Shutting Down the Streets have directly observed and participated in more than 20 mass actions against global in North America and Europe, beginning with the watershed 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle and including the 2007 G8 protests in Heiligendamm. Shutting Down the Streets is the first book to conceptualize the social control of dissent in the era of alterglobalization. Based on direct observation of more than 20 global summits, the book demonstrates that social control is not only global, but also preemptive, and that it relegates dissent to the realm of criminality. The charge is insurrection, but the accused have no weapons. The authors document in detail how social control forecloses the spaces through which social movements nurture the development of dissent and effect disruptive challenges.

Written during the Northern Ireland peace process and just before the Good Friday Agreement, The Politics of Antagonism sets out to answer questions such as why successive British Governments failed to reach a power-sharing settlement in Northern Ireland and what progress has been made with the Anglo-Irish Agreement. O'Leary and McGarry assess these topics in the light of past historical and social-science scholarship, in interviews of key politicians, and in an examination of political violence since 1969. The result is a book which points to feasible strategies for a democratic settlement in the Northern Ireland question and which allows today's scholars and students to analyse approaches to Northern Ireland from the perspective of the recent past.

This examination of al-Qaeda's decline since the 9/11 attacks focuses on the terror organization's mutation and fragmentation. It looks at its partnership with the local and regional jihadist networks that played a pivotal role in the Madrid, London, and Fort Hood attacks, arguing that, although initially successful, such alliances actually unraveled following both anti-terror policies and a growing rejection of violent jihadism in the Muslim world. Challenging conventional theories about al-Qaeda and homegrown terrorism, the book claims that jihadist attacks are now organized by overlapping international and regional networks that have become frustrated in their inability to enforce regime change and their ideological goals. The discussion spans the war on terror, analyzing major post 9/11 attacks, the failed jihadist struggle in Iraq, al-Qaeda's affiliates, and the organization's future prospects after the death of Osama Bin Laden and the Arab Spring. This assessment of the future of the jihadist struggle against Muslim governments and homegrown Islamic terrorism in the West will be an invaluable resource to anyone studying terrorism and Islamic extremism.

A comprehensive overview of counterterrorism that examines key aspects of the fight against terrorism, including intelligence, law enforcement, the military, financial and criminal activity, ethics, and social media. Recent terrorist actions in the United States and abroad make it clear that the subject of counterterrorism is as vital and as timely as ever. Edited by a leading authority on terrorism and security studies, this compendium offers a wide-ranging look at the most vital aspects of counterterrorism, from diplomacy and military action to the investigation and interdiction of terrorist finances. Following an introduction, chapters offer insightful discussions of strategy, policy, tactical, and operational dimensions of counterterrorism. An interdisciplinary team of expert contributors examine a wide range of topics, including "lone wolf" and homegrown terrorists, intelligence cooperation, social media, community policing, terrorism finance, and the shadow economy. Case studies from Europe, Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, and the United States provide clear, practical examples of effective-and sometimes not so effective-approaches to combating terrorism. The volume will serve as a central textbook for professional development courses, workshops, and academic degree programs on terrorism, counterterrorism, and security studies. Analyzes critical themes and issues related to the fight against terrorism Provides an ideal guide for students and other readers who are new to the study of counterterrorism and national and international security Brings together contributors from academia, the military, law enforcement, government and intelligence agencies, and think tanks Includes case studies that illustrate key concepts used in successfully combating terrorism

Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is an homage to a constellation of women writers, feminists, and creators whose voices draw a map of our current global political-environmental crisis and the interlinked massive violence, enabled by the denigration of life and human relationships. In a world, in which ""a woman's voice"" exists in bodies called in to occupy important positions in corporations, government, cultural and academic institutions, to work in factories, to join the army, but whose bodies are systematically rendered vulnerable by gender violence and by the double burden imposed on us to perform both productive and reproductive labor, I ask what is the task of thought and form in contemporary feminist situated knowledge? Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures is a collection of essays rethinking feminist issues in the current context of the production of redundant populations, the omnipresence of the technosphere and environmental devastation, toxic relationships, toxic nationalisms, and more. These reflections and dialogues are an urgent attempt to resist the present in the company of the voices of women like bell hooks, Sarah Ahmed, Leslie Jamison, Lina Meruane, Leanne Simpson, Chris Kraus, AlaIde Foppa, Lorena Wolffer, Sayak Valencia, Pip Day, Veronica GonzAlez, Eimear McBride, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Poniatowska, Susan Sontag, Margaret Randall, Simone Weil, Arundhati Roy, Marta Lamas, Paul B. Preciado, Dawn Paley, Raquel GutiErrez, etc. Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures continues the discussion on how to undo misogyny and dismantle heteropatriarchy's sublimating and denigrating tricks against women, which are intrinsically linked to colonialism and violence against the Earth.

In recent years there has been much interest in collective memory and commemoration. It is often assumed that when nations celebrate a historic day, they put aside the divisions of the present to recall the past in a spirit of unity. As Billig and Marinho show, this does not apply to the Portuguese parliament's annual celebration of 25 April 1974, the day when the dictatorship, established by Salazar and continued by Caetano, was finally overthrown. Most speakers at the ceremony say little about the actual events of the day itself; and in their speeches they continue with the partisan politics of the present as combatively as ever. To understand this, the authors examine in detail how the members of parliament do politics within the ceremony of remembrance; how they engage in remembering and forgetting the great day; how they use the low rhetoric of manipulation and point-scoring, as well as high-minded political rhetoric. The book stresses that the members of the audience contribute to the meaning of the ceremony by their partisan displays of approval and disapproval. Throughout, the authors demonstrate that, to uncover the deeper meanings of political rhetoric, it is necessary to take note of significant absences. The Politics and Rhetoric of Commemoration illustrates how an in-depth case-study can be invaluable for understanding wider processes. The authors are not content just to uncover unnoticed features of the Portuguese celebration. They use the particular example to provide original insights about the rhetoric of celebrating and the politics of remembering, as well as throwing new light onto the nature of party political discourse.

Reconceptualizing Security in the Americas in the Twenty-First Century illustrates the various security concerns in the Americas in the twenty-first century. It presents the work of a number of prolific scholars and analysts in the region. The book offers new theoretical and analytical perspectives. Within the Americas, we find a number of important issues security issues. Most important are the threats that supersede borders: drug trafficking, migration, health, and environmental. These threats change our understanding of security and the state and regional process of neutralizing or correcting these threats. This volume evaluates these threats within contemporary security discourse.

From 1789 onwards there sprang up a fervent revolutionary cult of Rousseau, and at each stage in the subsequent unfolding of the drama of the Revolution historians have seen Rousseau's influence at work. Mrs McDonald seeks in this study to trace the development of the cult and to define the nature of the influence by means of a detailed survey of the appeals made to the authority of Rousseau in books, pamphlets and accounts of speeches put forth by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary writers between 1762 and 1791, and she reaches conclusions more complex than those which have been commonly accepted. She is able to show that most of the writers on the revolutionary side who invoked Rousseau's name did so in order to put forward their own views and used arguments that were often in direct contradiction with those which he had formulated; the Social Contract was not widely read in these years, and those revolutionaries who did actually study it were often critical of what they found there. By contrast, the most careful analysis of Rousseau's political theory is to be found in the pamphlets written by aristocratic critics of the Revolution in protest against the misuse to which his name had been put.

In discussions about people power or nonviolent action, most people will immediately think of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, a few will recall the end of the Marcos regime in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, and some others will remember or have heard of the Prague Spring nearly two decades earlier. Moreover, for most activists and others involved in peace action and movements for social change, there will be little knowledge of the theories of nonviolent action and still less of the huge number of actions taken in so many countries and in such different circumstances across the world. Even recent events across the Middle East are rarely put in a broader historical context. Although the focus of this book is on post-1945 movements, the opening section provides a wide-ranging introduction to the history and theoretical bases of nonviolent action, and reflects the most recent contributions to the literature, citing key reference works.

Soldier Magazine's Book of the Month Fascinating... Incredibly dangerous. The Times Gripping. Adrenalin fuelled true-life account with all the makings of a military thriller. The action unfolds like a Le Carre novel. Soldier Magazine 'Jihad isn't a war. It's an objective. An aberration. If there are young women with children, lost boys... If they are trapped in that hell and we can get them out, don't we have a duty to do so? Every person we can bring back is living proof that Islamic State is a failure.' Ex-British Army soldier John Carney was running a close protection operation for oil executives in Iraq when the family of a young Dutch woman asked him to extract her from the collapsing 'Islamic State' in Syria. Hearing first-hand about the naive young girls, many from the West, who'd been tricked, sexually abused and enslaved by ISIS, he knew only one thing - he had to get them out of that living hell. This is the incredible true story of how - armed with AK-47s and 9mm Glocks - Carney launched a daring, dangerous and deadly operation to free as many of them as he could. From 2016 to 2019, he led his small band of committed Kurdish freedom fighters into the heart of the Syrian lead storm. Backed by humanitarian NGOs, and feeding intel to MI6, Carney and his men went behind enemy lines to deliver the women and their children to the authorities, to deradicalization programmes and fair trials. Carney, a born soldier, was moved to action by the women's terrifying stories. He and his men risked their lives daily, not always making it safely home... Gripping, shocking and thought-provoking, Operation Jihadi Bride tackles the complex issue of the jihadi brides head on - an essential read for our troubled times.

Today more than ever, the line between national security and cyber security is becoming increasingly erased. As recent attacks on US infrastructure show (for example, the oil pipeline hack of 2021), nontraditional threats ranging from hacking for the purposes of extracting ransom to terrorist communications online are emerging as central to national threat assessment. In an innovative fashion that allows for the comparison of approaches to this nexus in the developed and developing countries his volume brings together European and African experts offering an in-depth analysis of the relationship between national and cyber security. The individual chapters theorize the current and future implications of global digitalization; a cogent discussion of the threats French military and security forces face in terms of cyber security failures from within; and an exploration of the relationship between cyber security and national security in the volatile Nigerian context.

This is a study of how the information age in modern warfare coexists with the persistent appeal of nuclear weapons and its impact on crisis management. In today's information age, the coexistence of nuclear weapons with advanced conventional weapons and information-based concepts of warfare is a military contradiction. Nuclear deterrence was initially predicated on geopolitical, military, and technical assumptions. These were based on Cold War politics, rational deterrence theory, the concept of mutual vulnerability, and the fact that information and technology diffusion were limited. Today, however, far from being obsolete, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction have not only survived, but have become weapons for states that face security threats, including perceived threats of nuclear blackmail, or expectation of conflicts. This study focuses on this unplanned coexistence of two distinct arts of war, including the possibility that states like the U.S. may be held hostage to nuclear blackmail by "outlier" regimes or terrorists, such as North Korea. It shows that restricting nuclear proliferation should still be on the agenda of policymakers, and calls for a revitalized global non-proliferation regime. This unique survey by a leading expert will appeal to anyone interested in arms control, nuclear proliferation, and defense policy.

Stefano Dall’Aglio sheds new light on the notorious Florentine Lorenzino de’ Medici (also known as Lorenzaccio) and on two of the most infamous assassinations of Italian Renaissance history. In 1537 Lorenzino changed the course of history by murdering Alessandro de’ Medici, first duke of Florence, and paving the way for the accession of the new duke, Cosimo I. In 1548 Lorenzino was killed in Venice in revenge for the assassination he had committed. Basing his work on extensive research in the historical archives of Florence and Simancas, Dall’Aglio reconstructs the events surrounding these murders and involving the Medici, their loyalists, the Florentine republican exiles, and some of the most powerful sovereigns of the time. The first publication in a century, and the first work in English, to examine the life of Lorenzino de’ Medici, this fascinating revisionist history is as gripping as a detective novel, as Dall’Aglio unravels a 500-year-old mystery, revealing that behind the bloody death of the duke’s assassin there was the Emperor Charles V.

This cohesive set of case studies collects scholarly research, policy evaluation, and field experience to explain how terrorist groups have developed into criminal enterprises. Terrorist groups have evolved from orthodox global insurgents funded by rogue sponsors into nimble and profitable transnational criminal enterprises whose motivations are not always evident. This volume seeks to explain how and why terrorist groups are often now criminal enterprises through 12 case studies of terrorist criminal enterprises written by authors who have derived their expertise on terrorism and/or organized crime from diverse sources. Terrorist groups have been chosen from different regions to provide the global coverage. Chapters describe and analyze the actors, actions, problems, and collaborations of specific terrorist criminal enterprises. Other elements discussed include links to such facilitating conditions as political culture, corruption, history, economy, and issues of governance. This work advances scholarship in the field of counterterrorism by expanding the understanding of these terrorist groups as entities not driven purely by ideology but rather by the criminal enterprises with which they often coincide. Provides a global comparison of major terrorist groups and their engagement in organized crime Provides in-depth analysis of regional terrorist and criminal groups Incorporates authors' expertise on regional terrorist groups and organized crime Acknowledges a variety of opinions and perspectives

Pakistan is host to the largest concentration of jihadist groups in the world. Since the 1980s, the Pakistani state has been accused of sponsoring local jihadist groups and sending Pakistani volunteers to support them. This book is based on almost 114 interviews, conducted mainly in Urdu and Pashto, from within Al-Qaeda and affiliated jihadist groups. It examines the relationship between the Pakistani security agencies and Al-Qaeda, and how they both became entangled and used by the local jihadists they were themselves trying to exploit. The interviews paint a picture of the shifting strategies and priorities of the different jihadi groups in the early 21st century, covering their ideological objectives, their agreements and disagreements over tactics, as well as pressure from rival militant groups and internal factionalism. The book is the most in-depth study of jihadism in Pakistan, and Antonio Giustozzi highlights the strategies global jihadists deployed after 9/11 and how Al-Qaeda tried to manage the largest jihadist group in Pakistan, the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The book also covers other key issues in South Asian security, such as the impact of Islamic State on Al Qaeda's power after 2014, why Al-Qaeda continue to back the TTP, and what is happening with the groups focused on taking jihad to Kashmir and India.