Everyday security threats explores public perceptions of security threats in contemporary Britain, using data from extensive fieldwork and drawing on perspectives from International Relations, ...security studies and political psychology.
In the aftermath of a terrorist attack political stakes are high: legislators fear being seen as lenient or indifferent and often grant the executive broader authorities without thorough debate. The ...judiciary's role, too, is restricted: constitutional structure and cultural norms narrow the courts' ability to check the executive at all but the margins. The dominant 'Security or Freedom' framework for evaluating counterterrorist law thus fails to capture an important characteristic: increased executive power that shifts the balance between branches of government. This book re-calculates the cost of counterterrorist law to the United Kingdom and the United States, arguing that the damage caused is significantly greater than first appears. Donohue warns that the proliferation of biological and nuclear materials, together with willingness on the part of extremists to sacrifice themselves, may drive each country to take increasingly drastic measures with a resultant shift in the basic structure of both states.
For the last sixty years, American foreign and defense policymaking has been dominated by a network of institutions created by one piece of legislation--the 1947 National Security Act. This is the ...definitive study of the intense political and bureaucratic struggles that surrounded the passage and initial implementation of the law. Focusing on the critical years from 1937 to 1960, Douglas Stuart shows how disputes over the lessons of Pearl Harbor and World War II informed the debates that culminated in the legislation, and how the new national security agencies were subsequently transformed by battles over missions, budgets, and influence during the early cold war. Stuart provides an in-depth account of the fight over Truman's plan for unification of the armed services, demonstrating how this dispute colored debates about institutional reform. He traces the rise of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the transformation of the CIA, and the institutionalization of the National Security Council. He also illustrates how the development of this network of national security institutions resulted in the progressive marginalization of the State Department.
Is it possible to preserve national security through ethical policies? Richard Ned Lebow seeks to show that ethics are actually essential to the national interest. Recapturing the wisdom of classical ...realism through a close reading of the texts of Thucydides, Clausewitz and Hans Morgenthau, Lebow argues that, unlike many modern realists, classic realists saw close links between domestic and international politics, and between interests and ethics. Lebow uses this analysis to offer a powerful critique of post-Cold War American foreign policy. He also develops an ontological foundation for ethics and makes the case for an alternate ontology for social science based on Greek tragedy's understanding of life and politics. This is a topical and accessible book, written by a leading scholar in the field.
The Long Détente Bange, Oliver; Villaume, Poul
2017, 20170315, 2017-02-10
eBook
The present volume presents a collection of pieces of evidence, which—taken together—lead to an argument that goes against the grain of the established Cold War narrative. The argument is that a ...“long détente” existed between East and West from the 1950s to the 1980s, that it existed and lasted for good (economic, national security, societal) reasons, and that it had a profound impact on the eventual outcome of the conflict between East and West and the quintessentially peaceful framework in which this “endgame” was played.By offering new, Euro-centered narratives that include both West and East European perspectives, the combined contributions of this volume point to critical inconsistencies and inherent problems in the traditional U.S.-dominated narrative of the “Victory in the Cold War.” Yet, rather than aiming at replacing this understanding entirely, the argument of a “long détente” demonstrates that this superpower narrative can, and needs to be, augmented with the plentitude of European experiences and perceptions. After all, it was Europe—its peoples, societies, and states—that stood both at the ideological and military frontline of the conflict between East and West, and it was here that the struggle between liberalism and communism was eventually decided.
The End of Victory recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From ...1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war—how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy—a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Edward Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks—and ones involving military force run grave ones—though they can rarely be known with precision.
This book rethinks security theory from a feminist perspective – uniquely, it engages feminism, security, and strategic studies to provide a distinct feminist approach to security studies.
The volume ...explicitly works toward an opening up of security studies that would allow for feminist (and other) narratives to be recognized and taken seriously as security narratives. To make this possible, it presents a feminist reading of security studies that aims to invigorate the debate and radicalize critical security studies. Since feminism is a political project, and security studies are, at their base, about particular visions of the political and their attendant institutions, this is of necessity a political intervention. The book works through and beyond security studies to explore possible spaces where an opening of security, necessary to make way for feminist insights, can take place. While it develops and illustrates a feminist narrative approach to security, it is also intended as an intervention that challenges the politics of security and the meanings for security legitimized in existing practices.
This book provides develops a comprehensive framework for the emerging field of feminist security studies and will be of great interest to students and scholars of feminist IR, critical security studies, gender studies and IR and security studies in general.
' This book lucidly articulates a narrative feminist approach in critical security studies and offers a constructive research strategy for studying contextual security narratives.' -- Xymena Kuroswka , European Security
'.. an important theoretical contribution to debates over the politics and practices of security. Wibben offers the first full volume outlining the productive possibilities of integrating narratology and security studies and as such this book deserves to be taken seriously, read widely and cited often.' -- Laura J. Shepherd, International Feminist Journal of Politics
'Wibben’s book is a renewed wakeup call for security studies scholars caught in the epistemological and methodological traps of the field.’ -- Megan H. MacKenzie, Journal of Contemporary European Studies
'Given the sustained engagement with a narrative approach to IR, this book should be widely adopted in graduate International Relations, International Security and Gender studies courses, where stimulating research and innovative doctoral projects will likely be sparked by it.' - Maria Martin de Almagro, e-IR
Annick T.R. Wibben is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Studies as well as Chair of the interdisciplinary Bachelor Program in International Studies at the University of San Francisco (USF), USA. From 2001- 2005 she was the Co-Investigator of the Information Technology, War and Peace Project at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, USA.
Introduction 1. Feminist Interventions: The Politics of Identity 2. Challenging Meanings 3. Toward A Narrative Approach 4. Security As Narrative 5. Feminist Security Narratives. Conclusion: The Future of Feminist Security Studies
Though Britain and France have faced a similar threat from Islamist terrorism in the years following September 11 2001, they have often responded in different ways to the challenges it posed. This ...groundbreaking work offers the first in-depth comparative analysis of counterterrorist policies and operations in these two leading liberal democracies. Challenging the widely held view that the nature of a state's counterterrorist policies depends on the threat it is facing, Foley suggests that such an argument fails to explain why France has mounted more invasive police and intelligence operations against Islamist terrorism than Britain and created a more draconian anti-terrorist legal regime. Drawing on institutional and constructivist theories, he develops a novel theoretical framework that puts counterterrorism in its organisational, institutional and broader societal context. With particular appeal to students and specialists of International Relations and Security Studies, this book will engage readers in the central debates surrounding anti-terrorist policy.
At a time when many observers question the EU's ability to achieve integration of any significance, and indeed Europeans themselves appear disillusioned, Mai'a K. Davis Cross argues that the EU has ...made remarkable advances in security integration, in both its external and internal dimensions. Moreover, internal security integration-such as dealing with terrorism, immigration, cross-border crime, and drug and human trafficking-has made even greater progress with dismantling certain barriers that previously stood at the core of traditional state sovereignty.
Such unprecedented collaboration has become possible thanks to knowledge-based transnational networks, or "epistemic communities," of ambassadors, military generals, scientists, and other experts who supersede national governments in the diplomacy of security decision making and are making headway at remarkable speed by virtue of their shared expertise, common culture, professional norms, and frequent meetings. Cross brings together nearly 80 personal interviews and a host of recent government documents over the course of five separate case studies to provide a microsociological account of how governance really works in today's EU and what future role it is likely to play in the international environment.
"This is an ambitious work which deals not only with European security and defense but also has much to say about the policy-making process of the EU in general."-Ezra Suleiman, Princeton University
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