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This paper critically examines China's national security review regime of foreign investment and compares it with that of the United States. Over the years, China has gradually established a comprehensive legal framework for national security review of foreign investment. Recent efforts were made to refine the public enforcement mechanism of the review in tandem with a new "pre-establishment national treatment plus negative list" system under the 2020 Foreign Investment Law. The United States also enacted the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018 to enhance its national security review regime. By analyzing the law and practices of China and the United States, this paper finds that the national security review regimes of the two jurisdictions have functional convergences despite some formal divergences caused by diverse political-economy landscapes. Their functional convergences are highlighted by China's local practices, such as the de-facto national security screening in the name of anti-monopoly review. There are many factors affecting China's national security review regime for foreign investment, including the ongoing (and escalating) US-China competition (or conflict) at the international level and the evolution of state or party capitalism at the domestic level. These research findings will not only contribute to the existing comparative law scholarship but also benefit multinational enterprises that seek to enter Chinese and the US markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a messaging strategy to shift immigration preferences, arguing that if citizen attitudes in this issue-area build from several dimensions, then a positive message related to each dimension should move attitudes in a more favorable direction. It tests the first part using original survey data with directly comparable questions about whether immigration hurts/helps American culture/the economy/national security, providing evidence that all three dimensions currently support the preferences of voting-age citizens. It tests the second part by randomly presenting another sample with different messages about how labor immigration strengthens national security, creates new jobs, or enhances culture, finding that all three reduce anti-immigration attitudes with significant effects even within groups that are more opposed to immigration (namely, white Americans, those with less education, and partisan Republicans). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that in the wake of 9/11, the United States committed various extraterritorial human rights violations, that is, human rights violations against foreigners outside of its territory. What is less known is that the United States has gradually introduced safeguards that are, at least on paper, meant to prevent its counter-terrorism policies from causing harm to foreigners abroad or, at least, to mitigate such harm. Based on three case studies on the development of safeguards related to torture, targeted killing, and mass surveillance, we show that two mechanisms, coercion and strategic learning, deployed either on their own or in combination, can account for the development of such safeguards. By contrast, we found no evidence of a third mechanism, moral persuasion, having any direct effect. In other words, US policymakers opt to introduce such safeguards either when they face pressure from other states, courts, or civil society that makes immediate action necessary or when they anticipate that not introducing them will, at a later date, result in prohibitively high costs. We did not find evidence of US policymakers establishing safeguards because they deemed them morally appropriate. From this we conclude that, although the emerging norm that states have extraterritorial (and not just domestic) human rights obligations may not have been internalized by key US policymakers, it nevertheless has a regulative effect on them insofar as the fact that relevant others believe in the norm restricts their leeway and influences their cost–benefit calculations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use and exploration of outer space is, according to the Outer Space Treaty (OST), to be carried out for the benefit and interest of all parties. Outer space is critically important to the defence and national security interests of many nations, none more so than the United States. Over time, a significant space junk problem has emerged. There is growing recognition of this problem and reason to believe that it will only get worse if current activities continue. Space junk presents a threat to the national security interests and economic interests of spacefaring nations. Various solutions are being proposed and developed. This paper presents an economic perspective and, in a particular, a behavioural economics perspective, on the space junk and national security problem. As various potential technological solutions emerge, we are interested in the obstacles that may stand in the way of an optimal prioritisation of the alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers what the effects of a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 would have been if it had taken place on September 11th, 2021 instead of 2001. It examines the most important phenomena from the point of view of media and communication science, respectively, and presents four perspectives. Here, the authors make use, in a modified form, of the structure of the drama triangle from transactional analysis: victim, perpetrator, authorities/politics/media, rescuers to a certain extent, and the witnesses. They conclude that with approximately the same physical damage and somewhat smaller number of victims compared to 2001, the immediate media impact would probably be many times greater. This would also manifest itself in a broader portrayal of victimsʼ personal dramas, especially via social media, and the massive use of dronebased cameras. The perspective of the perpetrators would also probably be conveyed differently in the media today - both as the subject of reporting and also directly by the actors. Moreover, they would probably have to reckon with more rapid and targeted counterattacks on their personal and political environment. Authorities and rescue organizations would be called upon to communicate much more intensively, and witnesses/media consumers today would be - more than 20 years ago - not only recipients but part of the event, which leads to partly different consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Export controls are domestic trade restrictions placed on technologies that have been determined to be important to the national security concerns of a country. In recent years, the policy purpose for maintaining export control regulations have shifted, and how these new export control regulations would interact with new emerging technologies is something that should be analyzed and considered. The passage of the United States (US) Export Control Reform Act (ECRA) of 2018 and the proposed regulatory changes for the European Union's (EU) Council Regulation (EC) No. 428/2009 have shifted the focus of dual-use export controls so that the national security goals of these controls have broadened to include economic security and human rights concerns. This paper argues that the infusion of geoeconomics into US national security considerations and the proposed expansion to include human rights considerations into EU export control regulations are made mutually exclusive of each other and were not made to expand the reach of export controls in a unifying way. Rather, the purpose and structural change to export control regulations serves to create more regulatory barriers on the trade of emerging technology industries that would not only impact the US and the EU, but also their international trading partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]