This article studies the hidden world of extraterritorial liaison officers, mid-level civil servants posted abroad whose agency influences UK visa implementation within a global framework. ...Specifically, we unpack their influential role in translating vague policy objectives into specific institutional justifications, norms, and practices, which bureaucrats apply when implementing visa decisions on location. ‘Risk’ knowledge production is crucial: they mobilise, broker and communicate so-called ‘immigration risks’ applied to specific foreign nationals across institutional levels and national boundaries. Liaison officers are intermediaries, ‘risk’ brokers, who: (a) interpret (and feedback on) the Home Office’s supposedly objective central ‘risk’ assessments; (b) construct ‘risk’ assessments based on local knowledge and intelligence to guide and legitimate street-level bureaucrats’ (consulate, airline) decisions; and (c) co-operate to a surprisingly high degree over ‘risk’ assessments with peers in Global North multi-state frameworks. Importantly, their interventions for the UK state effectively reinforces an unequal North–South global mobility regime. To examine how ally and target states are treated differently, we compare across France, USA, Thailand, Ghana, and Egypt. High state secrecy makes studying liaison officers difficult. Our original research applies document analysis of public policy statements, interventions via freedom of information requests, and interviews with twenty mid-level operational officers.
The struggle between Russia and Great Britain over Central Asia in the nineteenth century was the original "great game." But in the past quarter century, a new "great game" has emerged, pitting ...America against a newly aggressive Russia and a resource-hungry China, all struggling for influence over one of the volatile areas in the world: the long border region stretching from Iran through Pakistan to Kashmir. In Great Games, Local Rules, Alexander Cooley, one of America's most respected Central Asia experts, explores the dynamics of the new competition over the region since 9/11. All three great powers are pursuing important goals: basing rights for the US, access to natural resources for the Chinese, and increased political influence for the Russians. But Central Asian governments have proven themselves powerful forces in their own right, establishing local rules that serve to fend off foreign involvement, enrich themselves and reinforce their sovereign authority. Cooley's careful and surprising explanation of how small states interact with great powers in this vital region greatly advances our understanding of how world politics actually works in this contemporary era.
One of the distinctive elements of President Barack Obama's approach to counterterrorism has been his embrace of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, to target terrorist operatives abroad. The ...Obama administration has used drones in active theatres of war, such as Afghanistan, but it has also dramatically increased the number of drone attacks launched by the CIA in other countries, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The conventional wisdom on drone warfare holds that these weapons are highly effective in killing terrorist operatives and disabling terrorist organizations, while killing fewer civilians than other means of attack. This article argues that much of the existing debate on drones operates with an attenuated notion of effectiveness that discounts the political and strategic dynamics—such as the corrosion of the perceptions of competence and legitimacy of governments where drone strikes take place, growing anti-Americanism and fresh recruitment of militant networks—that reveal the costs of drone warfare. Focusing particularly on drone use in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the article suggests that the Obama administration's counterterrorism policy operates at cross-purposes because it provides a steady flow of arms and financial resources to build up governments whose legitimacy it systematically undermines by conducting unilateral strikes on their territory. It concludes that the US embrace of drone technology is a losing proposition over the long term as it will usher in a new arms race and lay the foundations for an international system that is increasingly violent, destabilized and polarized between those who have drones and those who are victims of them.
This paper presents complete design guidelines for a typical fractional-order Colpitts oscillator (FOCO) with a non-ideal op-amp. These guidelines include effects of op-amp non-idealities like, ...open-loop dc gain, unity gain frequency and output resistance, into the design. The relation among these non-idealities and the frequency of oscillation (
f
o
) are analytically established and an optimal configuration for FOCO is identified. The paper discusses multiple case studies on parametric variation, parameter sensitivities and oscillator stability. The proposed guidelines are validated with LTSpice simulations and practical experimentation along with step-by-step design examples. Practical results are compared with earlier reported FOCO which shows higher frequency and larger amplitude for the designed FOCO at a comparable THD. The proposed guidelines are generic in the sense that they are applicable for any order (including integer order), for any type of fractor realization technique, and also for any active element which has first-order behavioral model.
This article examines the propaganda put forth by the French during their invasion of Egypt between 1798 and 1801. The French occupation and control of Egypt was realized through two important ...elements, invasion/war (military control/hard power) and propaganda (textual control/soft power). Military and textual strategies should be viewed as not only complementary but also integral parts of each other. The French constantly and persistently issued proclamations from the first day of the invasion to the last moment. They primarily sought to set the stage for what they aimed with forthcoming propaganda. Their propaganda had political and religious aspects. The political propaganda was seemingly created in the context of the French rivalry with the Mamluks. The religious propaganda, on the other hand, was based on the claim that the French were the best friends of Egyptian Muslims, whom the French insistently tried to persuade. Their friendship with Muslims gradually developed to a point that some Frenchmen appeared to have converted to Islam. The propaganda apparatus in terms of its practice had visual and textual aspects that the French applied simultaneously. Opposite to what had been claimed, this paper asserts that their propaganda had absolutely nothing to do with the Enlightenment or the ideas of the French Revolution. This research also argues the primary impetus of the invasion to have been the global capitalist rivalry between the British and the French.
A Non-Event Cristóbal Bianchi G
Third text,
05/2020, Volume:
34, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article explores how the large-scale performance Bombing of Poems by the Chilean art collective Casagrande becomes a non-event after the rejection of its realisation in the sky of Dresden, ...Germany. Based on ethnographic methods and an engaged scholarship approach of the author, as well as primary and secondary sources, the article analyses how the poetics of the performance and its open-close condition unfolds a contested space with content yet to come. I argue that the Bombing of Poems transforms into the reverse of a military strategy that actualises the victimisation of the citizens and the urban space destroyed in the past. In this context, the conflict of dropping poems over Dresden rests in the performance as a space of remembrance of the air-bombardment, but also the more convoluted controversies lying behind the burning and destruction of the city in 1945.
The paper focuses on metaphorical representation of military activities of the US-led international coalition and of ISIL which are construed on the basis of systematic metaphors drawn from the ...combination of the PATH and FORCE image schemas. The corpus for the analysis consists of 30 political speeches delivered by American president Barack Obama in the period from 2014 to 2016 in which the speaker outlined the actions and military strategies against ISIL. Methodological procedure for the identification of systematic metaphors in the President's discourse followed the steps specified within Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) proposed by Pragglejaz Group 2007. MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1), 1-39. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926480709336752. The results from the analysis indicate that systematic metaphors drawn from the combination of the PATH and FORCE schemas were employed as a means for the manifestation of progress in the campaign against the organization and they presented power and intentions of both sides involved in the conflict in the area of the Middle East.
In the field of international relations, we tend to apply the premises of political realism to our understanding of transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) in the USA and Latin America. In this ...perspective, TCOs are regarded as autonomous state-like actors or insurgent groups seeking political and ideological domination over the nation-state. This view is reinforced by notions of the “weak” or “failed state” in which TCOs are seen to be mounting a successful challenge to nation-states for control over governance. I contend that this view reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of TCOs, which are disinclined toward political and ideological domination and inherently dependent upon the state for their functioning and survival. The state in turn receives certain benefits through what becomes a kind of partnership with TCOs, one which actually strengthens both at the expense of civil society. Whereas political realism features the use of the military as a chief strategy for dealing with TCOs, an alternative view, which acknowledges interdependence between the state and TCOs, highlights the importance of strengthening civil society and the democratic norm as a more effective strategy for weakening the power and influence of TCOs.
