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While almost a decade old, Ted Hopf's observation that the democratic peace is an observation in search of a theory still has some validity. In particular, the mechanisms behind the observed lack of war between democracies are poorly understood, making it difficult for scholars to provide a compelling explanation. While there has been some innovative work, particularly with respect to learning and the ability of an increasing number of democracies to cement democratic norms, Müller and Wolff note that normative and structural explanations are monadic explanations for a dyadic phenomenon. Underappreciated in the existing work is the role of identity and the importance this has for driving the democratic peace. With a focus on developing a dyadic democratic peace mechanism and using a case study approach, this paper utilizes the Copenhagen School's securitization framework to examine how identity plays out in the U.S. response to the Indian and Iranian nuclear programs. It finds that in fact identity does play a significant role in how security policy is constructed. The potential implications of this finding, particularly on policy, are significant. If the democratic peace does rely on identity to trigger the constraining norms that limit the escalation of conflict to violence, it is unlikely the democratic peace can be spread by force and it is possible that states nominally democratic can be excluded from the community of democracies if their behavior or significant other aspects of their perceived identity are at variance with the accepted democratic identity standard. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the words of human rights scholar David Forsythe, George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy incorporated “moral impulses as long as they did not prove inconvenient to expediential concerns,” (1995:126). In short, analysts have argued that human rights was approached pragmatically during the first Bush presidency, subordinated in realist fashion to broader strategic concerns and the considerations of post-Cold War power politics. But what of the son? By contrast, the presidency of George W. Bush has seemed to feature a shifting stance on the question of balancing human rights concerns and national security interests. As a candidate and in the first months of his presidency, George W. Bush largely echoed his father’s realist and pragmatic approach. For example, while committed to the promotion of political openness and economic growth abroad, on the question of humanitarian interventions, the initial position of the Bush team was to shun such operations unless larger regional or strategic interests were at stake. Yet by 2006 the Bush administration had embraced an apparent liberal interventionist stance toward the promotion of human rights, declaring in National Security Strategy 2006 that “… the United States seeks to extend freedom across the globe by leading an international effort to end tyranny and to promote effective democracy,” (2006:2). In this paper I will compare the approach to human rights and national security policy during the two Bush presidencies, identifying and accounting for key areas of similarity and difference. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the post Cold War era and accelerating after 9/11, Canada adopted a more aggresive militaristic role in order to secure a more intimate and ultimately rewarding position beside the US as a subdominant player in the expanding New World Order - a states system Wood evocatively labels the Empire of Capital. In this paper, I theorize the more aggressive militaristic role of the Canadian state within this Empire of Capital. First, I examine geopolitical and economic rationales for the war in Afghanistan. Second, I examine ideologies of race, class, and gender undergirding the militarism of the empire. Third, I examine how the Bush and R2P doctrines instituionalize and legitimize empire. Finally, I examine the mythology that Canada is a peaceful state. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces how Canada's engagement with failed and fragile states has been shaped by shifts in the relative power and influence of Canada's foreign affairs and defence departments. The paper argues that, despite the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade's (DFAIT) rhetorical commitment to benevolent norms for intervention in fragile and failed states, Canada's approach to these states has been co-opted and recast by the Department of National Defence (DND), which is using the discourse of failed and fragile states to promote a Canadian participation in the war on terror, justify increased defence spending, and bolster the case for the maintenance and deployment of combat-capable armed forces. In its 2005 International Policy Statement (IPS), the Canadian government declared that "Among the greatest contemporary security threats are those resulting from a large number of fragile and poorly governed states." Meant to unify Canada's future diplomatic, development, and defence activities under a single set of policy objectives, the IPS's focus on fragile and failed states represented a rare instance of rhetorical harmony between the DFAIT and DND. By expressing their shared commitment to address failed and fragile states, the two departments appeared to have bridged their recognized disagreements over the direction of Canadian international affairs. In practice, however, this has not led to unified policies or a harmonious approach to the problem. The consensus, if ever there really was one, has failed. Current bureaucratic relations and policies reflect the defence department's ascendancy. Due to the Canadian government's current focus on the war on terror, rebuilding the Canadian Armed Forces, and strengthening relations with the United States, DND's reading of the fragile and failed state problematic has dominated and supplanted DFAIT's. Though DFAIT and the public pronouncements of the defence department still emphasize an approach to failed and fragile states that reflects benevolent norms, these declarations have been reduced to 'window dressing'. Due to the Canadian government's current focus on the war on terror, rebuilding the Canadian Armed Forces, and strengthening relations with the United States, DND's reading of the fragile and failed state problematic has dominated and supplanted DFAIT's. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current U.S. security strategy contains several relevant elements, and some of them are new. At the inter-American level, the most important issue is whether security will override indefinitely other important issues of U.S.-Latin American relations. The end of the Cold War radically changed the global panorama and gave rise to the emergence of new actors and issues on the international agenda that are currently challenging the scenario of the world order. Terrorism, drug trafficking, and the fight against organized crime are some of the big problems to be tackled. September 11 produced a rigorous review of U.S. security doctrine, giving rise to preemptive action and homeland security, which demonstrate how the United States concentrated on implementing unilateral policies by adopting a strategy towards guaranteeing security "vis-à-vis everyone and despite everyone." The future of Latin America in U.S. national security plans, at least in the short term, was relegated to a back burner, just as multilateralism became the mechanism par excellence for solving conflicts in the international arena. In the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, the United States returned to a vertical unilateralism, with extraordinary implications for international security. The U.S. also relatively abandoned some of the regions allegedly of importance, such as Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests the hypothesis that ordinary people favor punishing badly behaved foreign actors to make them "pay" for their crimes, rather than purely to protect national security interests. In an online survey administered to a random national sample of U.S. citizens, individual differences in retributive principles predicted support for punishing transgressor states, but only when human casualties were explicitly mentioned. Retributiveness also predicted support for the torture of terrorist detainees. These relationships controlled for partisanship, ideology, humanitarian and security values, and beliefs about the efficacy of force. Retributiveness was not related to support for torture or for punishing international transgressions among political sophisticates, for whom beliefs about deterrence were more salient than among less politically aware citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. government often creates ad hoc advisory commissions on national security issues. Recent examples include the 9/11 Commission and Iraq Study Group. Yet few scholars have examined the impact of commissions. I argue that commissions can help increase support for a presidential, congressional, or partisan agenda, and can help policymakers overcome collective action problems by providing a focal point for debate. I test hypotheses about the sources of commission influence with an original data set of 39 national security commissions that reported between 1981 and 2005. I find that commissions are likely to have greater impact when they are established after a national security disaster or scandal—a finding that challenges the conventional view that such commissions only perform symbolic damage control. I also find that the recommendations of presidential commissions are adopted more often than those of agency or statutory commissions, and that, absent a crisis, commissions addressing highly salient issues are not more likely than those addressing less salient issues to influence policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is climate change a valid national security issue for the United States? Even taking a narrow definition of national security issues-threats to a state's core values for which it would be willing to go to war or use force, one can identify a number of ways in which climate change already constitutes a national security issue to which security specialists in the United States should pay attention. In part 1, I explore the definitional terrain of "environmental security" by offering an account of "national security" and "grand strategy" that accords with traditional conceptions of security. I also identify criteria by which climate change could constitute a threat to national security and the U.S. in particular. In parts 2-4, I assess whether the potential effects of climate change constitute national security threats for the United States. In part 2, I examine the directs effects of climate change on the territorial United States, including abrupt climate change and extreme weather events. In part 3, I discuss the effects of climate change on the extraterritorial interests of the U.S. including the links between extreme weather events and violent conflict, natural disasters and humanitarian intervention, and, finally, climate change and soft power. The final section explores the security externalities of energy and climate change, looking at the links between oil dependence, terrorism, and climate change as well as the proliferation problems associated nuclear power as a remedy for climate change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the levels of military force implemented by the United States when initiating a militarized interstate dispute. The militarized record shows variation in the initial level of force and this level of force directly affects the outcome of the dispute. In light of the relationship between the initial level of force and the dispute outcome, the issue is why the United States would choose to substitute levels of force in a dispute. Based on the previous research, the United States acts differently than other states when initiating a dispute in the sense that domestic factors are expected to have the greatest influence on the level of force; however, this has not been tested on the initial level of military force (Meernik 2000; Mitchell and Moore 2002). Using a model that consists of state level variables and a combined model that incorporates system level variables, the empirical results provide some evidence for this theory as well as the effect that system level variables have on the initial level of military force used by the United States when initiating a dispute. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cold War shows us that the only kind of policy which will protect our interests against terrorism is one that also protects our values. Security policies focusing too much on expressions of risk. and not enough on the underlying threat, make a bad situation worse. Instead, US anti-terrorism policy should keep the high ground, for only moral policies can truly be expedient, like the Marshall Plan. This paper shows that in the present situation, the moral and the expedient are one, and thus we need not accept the paradox of sacrificing our values in order to protect them. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for congressional assertion or lack thereof in national security policy after World War II? The author argues assertion is a function of the degree of congressional access to critical intelligence. Two case studies have been chosen to illuminate this poorly theorized issue area: The covert CIA operation in Angola which Congress shut down in 1975 and the 2002 Resolution authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq. Furthermore, this paper seeks to test the waters for a more encompassing theory of Congress and national security policy that looks at presidential prestige and its consequences for the legislative-executive power-ratio in foreign and defense policy. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 revealed to many Americans the unsettling truth that national power does not necessarily produce security--that the United States’ technological sophistication and dependence on global trade made it simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable. As it was shaped by U.S. political leaders, this sudden, shocking consciousness of insecurity led to a profound change in U.S. political culture, as international terrorism quickly came to occupy a place in the American psyche akin to the monolithic global threats of the Soviet and Nazi eras. The social context created by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s framing of the new reality facing American foreign policy are critical variables in understanding the course of American foreign relations since then. From the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration presented a clear, coherent vision of the world in its public pronouncements, constructing an image of reality which defined the identity of the United States, its enemies, and the rest of the world in ways which served to enable subsequent foreign policy. Realist analyses which describe the evolution of U.S. foreign policy in this era in terms of material capabilities and interests alone are not sufficient in understanding the process. Constructivist perspectives which acknowledge the role of ideology and identity construction in the years since 9/11 era are necessary for a full understanding of this change. This paper will assert that a set of core assumptions were the critical ingredients in the Bush administration’s construction of the post-9/11 world: that the promotion of democracy and peace were central goals of American identity and foreign policy; that America itself was profoundly vulnerable to extant but invisible threats, both internationally and domestically; that the world was divided into two camps, loosely defined as “civilization” versus “terrorism” or barbarism; that individuals and groups in the “terrorist” camp were irrational and, by virtue of their rejection of civilized norms, not fully human; that opposition to terrorism and undemocratic governments was a continuation of the United States historic opposition to fascism and other forms of totalitarianism; and that other states which ought to be in the U.S. camp might or might recognize their duty to defend freedom, imposing a moral obligation on the United States to act whether or not international consensus could be reached. The Bush administration’s successful assertion of this vision of reality created the political environment which allowed post-9/11 American foreign policy in general, and the war in Iraq in particular, to be carried out. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is climate change a valid national security issue for the United States? Even taking a narrow definition of national security, there are clearly ways in which climate change already constitutes a national security concern for the United States. This article evaluates a number of these potential linkages including the directs effects of climate change on the territorial United States, the effects of climate change on the country's extraterritorial interests, and the security externalities of energy and climate change. I offer an account of Ònational securityÓ that is consistent with conventional understandings of security but that also leaves room for environmental harms. In so doing, I also identify criteria by which climate change could constitute a threat to national security. While some of these linkages--the risks from rising sea levels--may have been over-dramatized by enthusiastic advocates, other examples--such as the risks of extreme weather events both to the homeland and to America's strategic interests overseas--may be more likely to cause security problems for the United States in the short- to medium-run. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do hegemonic states create followers and supporters? I argue that Washington can use trade agreements to deliberately promote shifts in the societal distribution of power in a target country. I term this process the second face of security since it entails a less direct and more nuanced method of creating security. Specifically, trade agreements can strengthen the political and economic power of outward oriented internationalists in foreign states (while inward oriented nationalists will be weakened economically and politically). These domestic winners will then apply pressure on the government to support their preferred grand strategy. The long-term consequence can be the alteration in the foreign state's economic and political institutions. Thus, by strengthening the transnational links to moderate members, Washington can temper another's national and international policies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do states create security? The US faces just such quandary today, a hegemon actively engaged in critical regions of the world. Foreign policy analysis might suggest why the US chooses the course of action it does, while security studies might describe the current security dilemmas in a region, but there remains a gap between the articulation of a policy and the production of international security. This project aims to bridge this gap by offering an account of the process through which foreign policy decisions and agreements come to define a regional security regime. I will first discuss the theoretical sources of the gap between unit and system level approaches that produced the quandary articulated above. Next, I will examine the FPA approach to foreign policy, criticizing its exclusive focus on decision-making. Then, I will offer an analytical lens to bridge this gap. This new lens builds on constructivist insights that security regimes are sets of rules. By studying foreign policy as a process that adds implementation to the insights of FPA, it becomes possible to study the production of rules and the creation of a new security regime. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]