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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came to symbolise the dawn of a
new era of openness and connectivity. Yet today, the world is ever
more divided, demarcated and — quite literally fortified. We are
living in a guarded age. Â Why and how has this happened?
Where will it take us? In this book, David Betz explores the
expansion of fortified physical infrastructure at every level of
the global political economy. In cities, where security is
increasingly ‘designed in’ to public buildings and spaces as
they are reshaped to mitigate mass terror attacks. Within
corporations, who are burying their electronic assets in deep
underground caverns and behind the leaded walls of ex-nuclear war
bunkers against a range of threats and feared contingencies. In
many urban areas, where the default condition of civil life is
walled, gated, watched, and guarded. Year after year hundreds of
miles of linear obstacles—walls, ditches, and watchtowers—are
added to national borders. Practically everywhere you look there
are signs of innovative fortification, often designed to be
overlooked. The Guarded Age reveals the barriers which
most have observed but few - until reading this book - have truly
seen.
This book examines how civil-military relations have been
transformed in Russia, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine since the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1991. It shows
how these countries have worked to reform their obsolete armed
forces, and bring them into line with the new economic and
strategic realities of the post-Cold War world, with new
bureaucratic structures in which civilians play the key
policy-making roles, and with strengthened democratic political
institutions which have the right to oversee the armed forces.
This book examines how civil-military relations have been
transformed in Russia, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine since the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1991. It shows
how these countries have worked to reform their obsolete armed
forces, and bring them into line with the new economic and
strategic realities of the post-Cold War world, with new
bureaucratic structures in which civilians play the key
policy-making roles, and with strengthened democratic political
institutions which have the right to oversee the armed forces.
This study explores the complex military issues that are raised by
the transition to post-communist rule with particular reference to
Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and the new members of NATO. All faced
similar problems yet their responses, it emerges, were surprisingly
diverse.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came to symbolise the dawn of a
new era of openness and connectivity. Yet today, the world is ever
more divided, demarcated and — quite literally fortified. We are
living in a guarded age. Â Why and how has this happened?
Where will it take us? In this book, David Betz explores the
expansion of fortified physical infrastructure at every level of
the global political economy. In cities, where security is
increasingly ‘designed in’ to public buildings and spaces as
they are reshaped to mitigate mass terror attacks. Within
corporations, who are burying their electronic assets in deep
underground caverns and behind the leaded walls of ex-nuclear war
bunkers against a range of threats and feared contingencies. In
many urban areas, where the default condition of civil life is
walled, gated, watched, and guarded. Year after year hundreds of
miles of linear obstacles—walls, ditches, and watchtowers—are
added to national borders. Practically everywhere you look there
are signs of innovative fortification, often designed to be
overlooked. The Guarded Age reveals the barriers which
most have observed but few - until reading this book - have truly
seen.
The burgeoning of global connectivity in recent decades is without
historical parallel and the 'wiring up' of the world continues
apace, even in the poorest regions. Flux and ever-quickening change
are the leitmotifs of the 'information age' across a swathe of
human enterprise from industry and commerce through to politics and
social relations. This is no less the case for the patterns of war,
where change has been disorientating for soldiers and statesmen
whose confidence in the old, the traditional, and the known has
been shaken. David Betz's book explains the huge and disruptive
implications of connectivity for the practice of warfare. The
tactical ingenuity of opponents to confound or drop below the
thresh- old of sophisticated weapons systems means war remains the
realm of chance and probability. Increasingly, though, the
conflicts of our time are less contests of arms than wars of hearts
and minds conducted on a mass scale through multimedia
communications networks. The most pernicious challengers to the
status quo are not states but ever more powerful non-state actors.
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