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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 article was written at the request of the Secretary of Defense Task Force on DoD Nuclear Weapons Management. While this analysis suggests that certain types of terrorists can be deterred from certain types of attacks, it is less optimistic about the use of nuclear weapons in a terrorist deterrent strategy. A broad approach to deterrence may be effective against certain types of terrorist groups and attacks, making it crucially important to disaggregate the terrorist threat when setting policy. The article goes on to address two types of terrorist groups with a “global reach” that pose a serious threat to the United States: non-state actors driven by doctrines permitting catastrophic attacks and state-sponsored groups capable of carrying out catastrophic attacks. The analysis reveals a number of previously unappreciated tradeoffs and paradoxes associated with the deterrence of terrorists. [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]

The article focuses on the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) that has decided to bar submissions to edit and publish manuscripts from countries under the United States trade embargo. The institute says the ban, which falls hardest on scientists from Iran, is necessary to protect national security. As a result, AIAA pulled 24 Iranian-authored submissions from its seven journals and cancelled presentations by Iranian researchers scheduled to attend an AIAA-sponsored fluid dynamics conference in Toronto. The conference, held between June 6, 2005 and June 9, 2005, was subsequently exempted from the ban after protests by Iranian attendees who had already finalized their travel plans. In December, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control clarified that publications did not need the government's permission to edit and print papers from anywhere in the world. The suit cited a 1988 legal amendment that exempts information from trade embargoes.

The article discusses an approval by a U.S. government advisory panel, which included members of the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), to publish the results of two controversial studies regarding laboratory-created versions of the H5N1 avian influenza virus. Reportedly the studies, which were conducted independently by research teams in the Netherlands and the U.S., contained information that the NSABB deemed too dangerous to U.S. national security to publish. Factors that led to a reconsideration to publish the findings are discussed, including a misunderstanding of the original manuscript's intent and brevity, a recognition of the study's usefulness for H5N1 surveillance, and concerns about adequate regulation of dual-use research.

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 Trump administration's allegations that some imports are a threat to America's national security have received wide publicity during 2017-20. But the administration was undertaking a more quiet U.S. policy shift on the export side in the same time frame. Addressing the national security threat presented by exports posed different economic and institutional challenges from those associated with import policy, including the acknowledgment that export controls for legitimate national security reasons can be the first-best policy to address the problem at its source. Yet, export controls could also be misused as a beggar-thy-neighbor policy to redistribute economic wellbeing across countries, even from one ally to another. This paper describes how U.S. export control policy evolved over 2017-20, as well as the international institutions--first the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, then the Wassenaar Arrangement--historically tasked with multilateralizing U.S. export restrictions used to protect national security. With the potential for U.S. export control policy to brush up more frequently against World Trade Organization (WTO) rules designed to limit the use of export restrictions, the paper also highlights new challenges for the WTO's system of resolving trade disputes. Overall, a U.S. failure to strike the right balance for its export control policy would result in it being ineffective at addressing national security risks, costly for the economy, and problematic for trade and diplomatic relations. [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]

Most countries put significant amounts of time and effort in writing and issuing high-level policy documents. These are supposed to guide subsequent national defence efforts. But do they? And how do countries even try to ensure that they do? This paper reports on a benchmarking effort of how a few "best of breed" small- to medium-sized defence organisations (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) deal with these issues. We find that most countries fail to link goals to resources and pay limited attention to specific and rigorous ex-ante or post-hoc evaluation, even when compared to their own national government-wide provisions. We do, however, observe a (modest) trend towards putting more specific goals and metrics in these documents that can be - and in a few rare cases were - tracked. The paper identifies 42 concrete policy "nuggets" - both "do's and don'ts" - that should be of interest to most defence policy planning/analysis communities. It ends with two recommendations that are in line with recent broader (non-defence) scholarship on the policy formulation-policy implementation gap: to put more rigorous emphasis on implementation (especially on achieving desired policy effects), but to do so increasingly in more experiential ("design") ways, rather than in industrial-age bureaucratic ones ("PPBS"-systems). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principles and formalities of modern U.S. Defence planning stem from the 1960s and have largely served well. This paper, however, is about the special challenges that arise when major changes have been needed, some even transformational in character. It discusses how changing realities, independent studies and analysis, events, leaders, and political processes have led to changes not easily instigated within normal processes. Several examples are discussed for the period 1976-2016. Today, the United States and allies again face major challenges that require major military changes. Those have not yet been decided, much less accomplished. The paper draws on lessons from earlier periods to identify obstacles to and mechanisms for change. The last section focuses on defence analysis, which has sometimes been an obstacle but can be part of the solution. The paper urges a new ethic for analysis and the analysts who perform it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Security League was an elite private lobbying group in the World War I preparedness movement in the United States. Its educational wing was a group consisting mostly of college professors called the Committee on Patriotism through Education, which sought to use education to promote a militaristic brand of patriotism. This paper adds to our knowledge of the geopolitics of the period by critically reviewing the Committee's propaganda efforts, as organized into its Patriotism through Education Series. More importantly, this paper theorizes this propaganda by engaging with two literatures that seldom cross paths: emerging interest in intimacy-geopolitics and Gramsci's concept of war of position. Intimacy-geopolitics is used to highlight the performative edge of war propaganda, as it directs desire and affect to toward geopolitical visions which accord with elite visions of the good life. Intimacy-geopolitics as an analytical framework helps connect affect and war in a way that avoids scalar hierarchies of violence. The Committee deliberately sought to direct emotion toward militaristic ends, and saw teachers as foot soldiers in that effort. Understanding how war propaganda works through affect, that is, how it positions country as an object of affection, also qualifies and dovetails with an understanding of war propaganda as elemental to the Gramscian war of position. Quite apart from accusations of war-profiteering, elite manipulation of desire and affect toward the war effort also worked to obfuscate class interest in favor of gender and other social roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 9/11, the American policy towards Africa has been strongly influenced by national security interests and in particular by the fight against international terrorism and Islamic radicalisation. Traditionally, the American Africa policy has been the result of bureaucratic policymaking with the Pentagon and the State Department playing prominent roles. The paper argues that in the current century, evangelical Christian lobby groups have gained increasing influence on policymaking on Africa. Because policymaking has been influenced by a number of different actors, the American Africa policy may appear incoherent and ambiguous if judged narrowly on the expectation that it only aims to take care of US national security concerns and economic self-interests. The paper concludes that Africa was important to the United States during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama because of the combination of strong security interests and strong domestic lobby groups that have pressured to place Africa on the US foreign policy agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Homeland security and defense are common themes in superhero films. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is formed by more than twenty films made over the course of a decade (2008-2019), during the government of three different Presidents of the United States. In this paper we analyze the diminishing representation of real defense forces in the MCU films. How the interference of the superhero is used as a narrative excuse to suggest a lack of or deficiencies in the law concerning freedom and defense is also studied, as well as how the films make a metaphorical discourse about the historical reality after September 11th. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, US policy in Azerbaijan has gone through several important shifts in the areas of energy, security and democracy promotion. How can we make sense of these decisive shifts in the orientation of US policy? In this paper, I identify major shifts in US policy in Azerbaijan based on relative weight given to energy, security and democracy issues. I divide US policy into four different time periods: 1994 to 2001, 2001 to 2007, 2007 to 2015 and 2015 to present. I analyze the changes that took place in US policy in the dimensions of energy, security and democracy. Then, I provide plausible explanations that can account for shifts in US policy. To do so, I utilize foreign policy analysis theory that focuses on domestic and international parameters that bring major foreign policy shifts. My explanation is not monocausal, and focuses on several factors that have influenced US policy in Azerbaijan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does one design and sustain interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaboration to improve intelligence results for twenty-first century security threats? This paper will analyse five past and present initiatives designed to create interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral collaboration within different agencies of the US Intelligence Community (IC). We will discuss key features of each effort, their successes and challenges, identify common themes and, propose which collaborative model might be most advantageous for a particular type of project based on project constraints. In so doing, we provide direction for IC leaders seeking to improve academia–industry–intelligence partnerships for future planning on intelligence-funded collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the evolution of Sino-Japanese rivalry in the security sphere concentrating on the Chinese perspective, and placing it within the wider context of complex interstate rivalry between China, Japan and the United States. From a theoretical viewpoint, this research contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry from multiparty perspective, which has been overlooked in existing research. China–Japan–US complex interstate rivalry includes elements of positional, spatial and ideological rivalry simultaneously. When rivalries mix two or more rivalry types, they become more difficult to resolve. The two broad trends of China's military build-up and deepening US–Japan alliance evolve in tandem intensifying rivalry dynamics and increasing positional elements of rivalry. There are many indications on various levels that for China, controlling Japan's international ambitions has become less important and more attention is paid to ways in which Japan helps the United States in reaching its objectives in Asia through their alliance agreement. The cases analysed to display complex interstate rivalry include the Taiwan question, territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas, and the North Korean nuclear issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the security dynamics underlying the use of drones and their impact on security subjects – individuals and groups that are the ultimate recipients of specific security policies, regardless of whether these have beneficial effects on them. Using Mark Duffield’s distinction between the insured Global North and the non-insured Global South, this paper discusses how drones generate a radical dissociation between the intervener and the intervened that ultimately produces new security environments at the margins of the international system. These new security environments are defined by the articulation between space, technologies and bodies: bodies of invisible subjects; bodies that are uninsurable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The scale of lethal violence in Mexico seen in the past decade has been a pressing concern for both Mexican and US officials, including law enforcement organizations, intelligence agencies, and policy makers. With much of the homicides being a result of the trafficking of illegal drugs, it has been suggested that the homicides in Mexico follow seasonal patterns tied to the drug trade, specifically to the cultivation of heroin. In this paper, conventional econometric time series methods are applied to test this hypothesis. Results demonstrate that not only do the drug-related homicides in Mexico display evidence of seasonality, but also that seasonality appears empirically related to the heroin trade. The paper makes the larger argument that time series and other statistical methods are an untapped resource that can complement standard intelligence analysis to support defensible judgments based on the scientific method of inquiry. However, a fuller integration of statistics and traditional analysis would require sufficient support structures be developed to encourage and promote such analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multiple documents from the White House, Congress, and from within the Department of Defense describe the imperative to work with allies and partners toward long-term advancement of the U.S. and partners' interests. These same documents also often stress the importance of the cyberspace as a warfighting domain and a U.S. and international interest. However, there is no clear strategy or methodology today that explicitly links the building of partner capacity within the cyber domain. This paper serves as a primer for discussion on how to bridge cyber operations and partner capacity by proposing a concept of Cyber Engagement Teams (CETs). CETs would seeks to expand on current Foreign Internal Defense (FID), Security Force Assistance (SFA) or other cooperation and engagement apparatuses. Taking advantage of similar successes and lessons learned over the many decades by those units engaging in FID, SFA, and other security cooperation mechanisms, the U.S. has an opportunity establish a cadre of functional cyber experts to complement the traditional and existing engagement models. These forward deployed CETs would work with and train U.S. allies in areas of network operations, cyber security, and even offensive cyber operations while at the same time providing a viable mechanism to hold the adversary's target networks and systems at risk. By working with indigenous forces, CETs would situate U.S. and friendly forces and capabilities in a better position to counter Anti-Access Area Denial (A2AD) threats, to hold adversary command and control (C2) networks at risk by working "by, with, and through" friendly nations, and would develop lasting relationships. CETs are a logical tool to contend with cyber adversaries through friendly engagement, collective security, and partnering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Asia has always been regarded as a significant area for the security interests of the United States. In view of the U.S. threat perceptions in Asia, the American policy makers were constantly motivated to construct a stable security system in the region. The U.S. security programme in South Asia actually is predominantly exerted on United States-Pakistan -India triangular relationship. Given its strategic perspective in the area, the U.S. policy is found transferred. During the Cold War days, the U.S. interests were attached with Pakistan. Thus Pakistan was regarded as the „America's most allied ally in Asia." With the end of Cold War, the U.S. policy underwent a tremendous change that subsequently picked India as a potential counterweight to China and called it a „natural partner." Eventually, the U.S.-Pakistan relations had been in a depressing setting. However, in the post 9/11 period, the two countries came closer and collaborated in war against terrorism. But this single-issue alliance could not engulf the differences between the partners. This paper attempts to trace the US security policy and its maneuvering in South Asia during and after the Cold War periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA) provides the US government with additional tools and information to promote the rights of religious minorities around the world. In addition to mandating annual reporting by the State Department, the law created an independent watchdog agency to monitor religious freedom around the world and provides the president with additional sanctioning powers for states that abuse religious minorities. Little is known, however, about the extent of American knowledge of and support for these policies. Most studies to date have focused on the influence of religious affiliation (using the tri-partite schema of "believing," "belonging," and "behaving") on respondent preferences for discrete US policies. This paper investigates the contours of American public opinion regarding international religious freedom, relying on original data from the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. The data suggest that many respondents are unaware of the law, but among those who are knowledgeable of the scope of IRFA, support for international religious freedom remains strong. The data also indicate that US respondents who believe USChina competition is among the most important national security concerns are among those most likely to believe that IRFA policies strengthen US national security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using van Dijk's critical discourse analysis, this paper attempts to analyse the ways in which the Islamic Republic of Iran is constructed as a security threat in US congressional hearings. The article is based on the case of the two-day congressional hearing on post-JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) held by the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, on 24-25 May 2016. The session was presumably held to examine 'sanctions relief' provided to Iran; however, the study reveals that through the use of discursive tools such as lexical style and argumentation, Iran is framed and evaluated as a security threat to (1) the US; (2) US allies, specifically Israel; and (3) the international community. This construction reflects the established political and ideological stereotypes and also orientalist clichés which have led to Otherisation and vilification of Iran. Therefore, by representing Iran as an 'irrational', 'radical' and 'barbaric' entity, the US discrimination against Iran through sanctions and other unilateral political decisions is legitimised and justified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper fills a literature gap by investigating the strategic interactions between an attacker and a defender with a multi-period multi-target game. At each period, the defender allocates a limited amount of defensive resources over multiple targets, and the attacker assigns some attack probabilities to those targets. We consider four scenarios where the defender could be either myopic or long-sighted, and the defense could be carried over to future periods or not. Our analyses characterize the defender's optimal allocations in these four scenarios and develop a n algorithm to identify the optimal allocations. We find that increases in defense carryover could lead to less allocation to defended targets from the second period at equilibrium, and lead to defending more targets. To gather empirical evidence regarding one key function of the model - success probability of attack, we conduct statistical analysis based on datasets from Global Terrorism Database, which is provided by National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grant allocations from FY 2004 to FY 2012. We conclude that in general, effects of defense resources on reducing success probability of attack are mixed due to scarcity of terrorism data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colleges and universities that educate aspiring homeland security professionals are duty-bound to supply a national workforce that is capable and adequately prepared to meet the National Preparedness Goal. It is perhaps not an exaggeration to suggest that developing a qualified homeland security (HLS) workforce could be considered a matter of national security. Indeed, an appropriately educated workforce is not only (at least implicit) part of the current FEMA National Preparedness Goal, it was identified as a national security imperative as early as 2001 by the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. A baseline set of education standards for homeland security education would, at the very least, ensure that academic programs would consistently graduate a workforce that has a common set of competencies aligned to the needs of both public and private sector actors engaged in domestic and national security. In turn, employers and students alike would better understand not only what homeland security is, but what HLS graduates can do. Many mature disciplines ultimately use education standards to not only define themselves, but to sanctify and protect their professional boundaries. Nutritionists, for example, are professionals protected by registration, and licensure (as well as certification in some cases). Yet to become a registered dietician, one needs to graduate from an accredited academic degree program, the basis of which is compliance to a set of education (i.e., accreditation) standards assessed by an external organization. In the same way, and to advance the HLS profession, it makes sense to think that HLS practitioners should have educational backgrounds (like doctors or lawyers) that share some common set of educational competencies. To date, we observe that higher education's response as to how to best educate students to enter the homeland security enterprise has been to consider homeland security as a meta-discipline, or a discipline of disciplines. As such, homeland security curricula tend to include faculty, courses and student learning outcomes from a variety of other disciplines such as law, business, management, political science, international relations, emergency management, etc. Second, we note that academic homeland security education is still largely characterized as an emergent discipline. That is, the core theory of what is and is not "homeland security" remains under-developed. Indeed, it is accurate to characterize homeland security more as a "practice discipline" such as medicine, nursing or law (each of which, by the way, shares the characteristic of being meta-disciplines), albeit a practice with a growing literature and experience basis as well as a theoretical basis. This project leveraged the collective expertise of subject matter experts over roughly a 3-year period to emulate the structure and approach used by these better-established disciplines and create a consensus set of HLS education standards. Created were nine knowledge domains and a set of competencies (aka knowledge, skills and abilities as student learning outcomes) per domain. Taken together, such a set of knowledge domains and competencies (the minimum set of skills, knowledge, and abilities students of homeland security acquire academically) would describe the professional boundaries of the homeland security discipline. A major remaining challenge is how best to conceptualize and implement a system that integrates a set of competencies into all academic HLS programs nationwide. The paper tackles this issue by proposing a system of "voluntary academic accountability" from all academic institutions that offers a bona fide peer review of undergraduate level homeland security programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of an assault on the critical infrastructure of the United States is often referred to as a ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’. This implies that such an attack would come as a surprise. By 2016, however, few could claim to be surprised by such an event. This paper explains how the Clinton administration addressed cybersecurity in the 1990s as computers became an everyday item. With the benefits of this era, however, came potentially devastating implications for national security as the Clinton administration was required to confront a form of politically motivated violence unlike any that had been seen before Cyberterrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the changes affected by the National Security Council paper 68 or NSC 68, which assessed the political-military strategy of the United States under the administration of President Harry Truman. Restoration of American military power; Rationale for US national security for much of the Cold War; US Army's balanced-force approach; Arguments for a new military structure.

This paper examines the recent broadening of the US military’s overseas mission into what it calls ‘full spectrum operations’ and critiques how it is being enabled by what I term ‘full spectrum law’. The paper explores the important doctrinal shifts that took place in the US military from 2005, when it declared for the first time a commitment to ‘stability operations’ as a military responsibility equal in status to offense and deterrence. This, I argue, has reinforced an already dominant US national security discourse in which military and economic security interests are firmly bound. In particular, it has given the US military a broader role in the ‘correction’ of underdevelopment and the securitization of the legal and economic modalities necessary for a functioning neoliberal global economy. The paper reflects on the US military’s blending of security and development concerns and reveals how its legal framing of stability operations draws upon a ‘notional legal spectrum’ that allows for the securitization of the most broadly understood ‘instability’ and sanctions the interminable use of the US military in global interventions in an era ubiquitously cited as one of ‘persistent conflict’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the historical formation of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in the United States and argues that programme emergence depended on the ability of policy entrepreneurs to link the economic concerns of agricultural production with the ideational concern of national security. Using a historical institutionalist framework this paper stresses the critical juncture of the Second World War and the positive feedback loop created between agricultural industries and schools to understand the emergence of the NSLP. In addition, it stresses the role of frames in policy-making and focuses on the use by policy entrepreneurs of a security frame whereby child malnutrition was cast as a national security issue. The policy window of war gave policy entrepreneurs the chance to use the politically and culturally resonant frame of security, in the contexts of agricultural subsidies, to push for the creation of this programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PAPER FORMULATES A POSSIBLE, FORESEEABLE AMERICAN STRATEGY FOR DEALING WITH RUSSIA AS A CONSEQUENCE OF ITS ACTIONS IN UKRAINIAN CRISIS. THE STRATEGY WILL ASSESS THE STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENT, STATE THE US INTERESTS REGARDING RUSSIA, THREATS AND OPPORTUNITIES TO THESE AND THE DERIVED GOALS AND OBJECTIVES NEEDED TO BE ACCOMPLISHED. THIS FUNDAMENTAL SECURITY PAPER TRIES TO ACCOMMODATE GOALS AND OBJECTIVES DERIVED FROM PRESERVING AND DEFENDING THE US'S NATIONAL INTERESTS WITH THE MEANS AND RESOURCES EXISTED OR TO BE BUILT ACKNOWLEDGING THAT, IN THE PRESENT, DUE TO THE WAR IN EASTERN UKRAINE AND RUSSIAN SUPPORT FOR SEPARATISTS, NOT ONLY EUROPEAN SECURITY IS DEEPLY PERTURBED BUT, TOGETHER WITH THE LACK OF TRUST BETWEEN THE GREAT POWERS IN MAINTAINING THE WORLD STATUS-QUO, THE WHOLE INTERNATIONAL ORDER IS AT STAKE AND THE SPECTER OF A CATASTROPHIC WAR IS BECOMING CLOSE. THIS PERSPECTIVE IN THE NUCLEAR ERA BEING TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE, ANY EFFORT, INCLUDING A THEORETIC ONE, TO INDUCE ANOTHER OPTION FOR RELEASING THE INTERNATIONAL TENSION, I THINK, IS WELCOMED. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the critical role played by the US immigrant detention and deportation apparatus in the construction of contemporary imaginaries of homeland security. I argue that the detention system works performatively by substantiating a paradoxical relationship between security and insecurity for system employees. Through research conducted in Ecuador with detained migrants' families and deported migrants, I scrutinize the behavior of detention personnel and the experiences of detainees. Data illustrate how the US detention system becomes an integral part of the governmental apparatus behind homeland security imaginaries. First, employees are disciplined through the constant repetition of narratives in which immigrants are immoral and untrustworthy. Second, the detention system is structured in such a way as to require employees to perceive detainees as sources of insecurity, through inconsistent policies, conditions of detention, and high volume and mobility of detainees. Consequently, I contend, employees' interactions with detainees play an important and under-recognized role in performing homeland security imaginaries by perpetuating and reinforcing negative tropes of immigrants as criminalized, dangerous outsiders. The paper contributes to understanding ways in which multiple and overlapping governmentalities work recursively in the country's immigration apparatus, as well as shedding light on the typically opaque detention and deportation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. electrical grid, the largest and most complex man-made system in the world, is highly vulnerable to three types of external threats: 1) natural disasters, 2) intentional physical attacks, and 3) cyber-attacks. The technical community has recommended hardening the grid to make it more resilient to attack by using distributed generation and microgrids. Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems are an ideal distributed generation technology to provide power for such microgrids. However, both the deployment velocity and the policy of how to implement such technical solutions have been given far less attention than would be normally considered adequate for a national security risk. To address this threat, this paper reviews the technical and economic viability of utilizing defense contracting for the beginning of a national transition to distributed generation in the U.S. First, the technical scale of electrical demand and the solar PV system necessary is analyzed in detail to meet the first level of strategic importance: the U.S. military. The results found that about 17 GW of PV would be needed to fortify the U.S. military domestically. The current domestic geographic deployment of microgrid installations in the critical U.S. defense infrastructure were reviewed and compared to historical grid failures and existing and planned PV installations to mitigate that risk. The results showed a minimal number of military bases have introduced solar PV systems, leaving large parts of the Department of Defense electrical infrastructure vulnerable to attack. To rectify this situation, the technical skills of the top 20 U.S. defense contractors is reviewed and analyzed for a potential contracting transition to grid fortification. Overall the results indicate that a fortified U.S. military grid made up of PV-powered microgrids is technically feasible, within current contractors skill sets and economically viable. Policy recommendations are made to accelerate U.S. military grid fortification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2010, WikiLeaks released over a quarter of a million US State Department diplomatic cables to the world’s media, exposing private communications between diplomatic officials at US embassies across the globe and the State Department at Washington, DC. This study analyzes the WikiLeaks controversy through institutional views of the US news media. Our analysis of 83 newspaper editorials found four prominent themes in US newspaper discourse: (1) The contrast between the “discretion and maturity” of traditional journalism and the rash actions of WikiLeaks; (2) The need for “old media” in a new media landscape; (3) The tension between the public’s right to know and national security; and (4) The invocation of the Pentagon Papers as a way of drawing clear lines of difference between journalism’s past and its possible future. Our findings indicate ongoing tension between “old” and “new” media at a time when definitions of journalism are increasingly diffuse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds upon feminist critiques of security interventions in the name of ‘protecting women’ to link United States municipal policing practices for intimate partner violence with global security interventions. Policing intervention into intimate partner violence emerged in the last twenty-five years; however as I argue, these policing practices are situated within narrow conceptions of masculinist security that often fail to address victims' multiple security needs. While not dismissing the importance of arresting intimate partner violence abusers, this paper examines the ways that policing can create additional and different embodied fears and insecurities for victims. Using the tools of emotional geopolitics, this paper traces victims’ fears following the arrest of their abuser to understand the temporal and spatial moments of fear in relation to security interventions. This methodological approach examines the limitations of masculinist protection while reimagining security to consider the emotional security needs and fears of those being protected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper critically assesses the CIA's drone programme and proposes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is driving an increasingly “dronified” US national security strategy. The paper suggests that large-scale ground wars are being eclipsed by fleets of weaponised drones capable of targeted killings across the planet. Evidence for this shift is found in key security documents that mobilise an amorphous conflict against vaguely defined al-Qa'ida “affiliates”. This process is legitimised through the White House's presentation of drone warfare as a bureaucratic conflict managed by a “disposition matrix”. These official narratives are challenged by the voices of people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What I term the Predator Empire names the biopolitical power that digitises, catalogues, and eliminates threatening “patterns of life” across a widening battlespace. This permanent war is enabled by a topological spatial power that folds the distant environments of the affiliate into the surveillance machinery of the Homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Congress mandated the Department of Homeland Security to regulate chemical facilities with the goal of increasing security at these facilities to prevent future terrorist attacks. In 2007, DHS issued an interim rule known as the chemical facility anti-terrorism standards (CFATS). This paper takes a look at CFATS 5 years after implementation and discusses the achievements and the challenges confronting this important piece of legislation. In addition, this paper poses several questions and discusses some CFATS issues and concerns that have far-reaching implications for CFATS stakeholders, homeland security, and emergency management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recovery of the Camp Century deep ice core in 1966 – the first ice core to reach all the way through a polar ice sheet to bedrock – marked a shift from an era of United States military dominated glaciological research in Greenland to an era of climate oriented research on the island. This paper aims to provide an understanding of this shift. I show that the Camp Century ice core was at the heart of a complex blend of environmental, military and scientific interests. By deconstructing these interests, I ultimately show that the island of Greenland underwent two reimaginings during the early Cold War. First, the island was reimagined as part of the US Cold War military sphere: driven by the need to secure the North American continent, the US established a hegemonic military colonization of Greenland. In the second reimagining of the island, environmental geography led the way: the scientific results of the Camp Century ice core and political concern about climatic change converged in the early 1970s to build Greenland into a unique location for pursuing research on climate questions. This paper adds to the literature by contextualizing the Camp Century ice core at the interface between the history of science, environmental history and Cold War history, and thereby illuminating Greenland as a dual geopolitical entity and environmental space. By highlighting the interaction of climatic change, geophysical sciences and national security narratives, it responds to recent historiographic calls to unite a set of narratives which, too often, talk past one another. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In her various roles as First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton has long maintained that the subjugation of women poses a national security threat to the United States. Clinton's proposition has come to be termed the "Hillary Doctrine." Yet does this principle receive support from the empirical record? In this paper, we offer a test of the Hillary Doctrine by analyzing if more anti-American terrorism emanates from countries that restrict women's rights than from countries that are not gender restrictive. Using a time series, cross-national analysis of 156 countries from the period 1981 to 2005, our negative binomial models offer strong support for the Hillary Doctrine and suggest that the promotion of women's rights may well enhance the national security of the United States with respect to terrorism. These results are robust to a wide range of changes to the empirical research design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Armed Forces & Society issue is on women in the contemporary armed forces in the United States and other nations to include the South African National Defense Force and the Australian Defense Force. This issue contains a collection of nine papers, each reviewing a current aspect of women serving in the military since the post–Vietnam War Era. There are also two review essays of Megan Mackenzie’s book, Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth That Women Can’t Fight. An overview of changing laws and the expanding role of women in the military is provided in this introduction, as well as summaries of the nine articles, and comments on the two book reviews mentioned above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper covers issues of Russia's national security in the Arctic as viewed from the military perspective. It examines the trends in the development of a reliable defense system for this country. It postulates the importance of greater defense capacity in the Russian Arctic, as nATO relentlessly builds up its military forces next to Russian borders, and the US military infrastructure continues to develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the recent evolution of North American economic and security relations within the context of broader debates in international political economy (IPE) concerning globalization and its effects on the state in the international system. Borrowing from David Lake's discussion of hierarchical sovereignty, this paper argues that efforts to meld security to economics in an integrated North American market devoid of institutions have made sovereignty more hierarchical. It presents an approach to looking at North American integration, which can assist in understanding recent developments that are suggestive of new areas of research and policy development for both practitioners and theoreticians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Guantánamo Bay detention camp is a quintessential structure of the US national security state and contemporary Empire. For such imperial formations to proceed as if they are 'normal' requires solidarity from various publics. This paper explores what it means to refuse such solidarity through an ethnographic examination of Witness Against Torture (WAT), a group of US citizens enacting solidarity with the men detained at Guantánamo. WAT's tactical repertoire intervenes in three ways. The Guantánamo prison is not supposed to be seen, but WAT travels there to expose state secrets and the administration's myth of transparency. The prisoners are not supposed to be heard, but WAT publicly amplifies their testimonies through affectively potent street performances. Indefinite detention and torture are meant to remain distant, but WAT links the plight of detainees to that of Black communities in the US interior. Through these acts, WAT simultaneously reveals and contests the culture of erasure and radical divisiveness upon which the US national security state depends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model where national security is an argument in the agent’s utility function and the government chooses optimally the level of military spending to maximize social welfare. National defense depends on military expenditure and on the strategic environment reflecting a potential hostile external threat. We use aggregate data on consumption, investment, and military spending for the US economy to estimate the parameters of the model. Estimation results suggest that consumption and national defense are complements and that military spending variability is mainly explained by external threat shocks although it also depends on the macroeconomic conditions. We compute impulse response functions of the main macroeconomic variables to several shocks: a total factor productivity shock, a defense technology shock, and a strategic environment shock. Surprisingly, we find that the optimal response to an increase in the external threat (a worsening in the strategic environment) will rise output by reducing consumption and increasing investment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over a decade after September 11, American citizens are still asking themselves: 'how much safer are we today?' This question is also pertinent for scholars seeking to understand the post- September 11 homeland security reforms. This paper, drawing on the public administration literature and using Don Kettl's 'contingent coordination' framework, sets out to discuss how well these efforts have addressed the central coordination challenges posed by homeland security. In doing so, it makes two contributions: one methodological (e.g., operationalizing the contingent coordination framework) and one empirical (e.g., assessing the effectiveness of post-9/11 homeland security reforms). The paper concludes with an overall assessment of how to find ways to further strengthen the capacity of the US homeland security system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Border and immigration enforcement has been central to post-9/11 national security efforts, resulting in unprecedented resource allocations at and beyond the physical borders of the USA. This paper brings together feminist and postcolonial examinations of post-9/11 military interventions with examinations of US–Mexico border enforcement to examine a relatively unexplored aspect of US border enforcement policy—state-based ‘humanitarian’ efforts to reduce undocumented migrant deaths associated with unauthorized entry. Based on a discursive analysis of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) press releases, CBP and Border Patrol videos and public statements, industry publications, state policies and congressional hearing transcripts, this paper examines the way in which ‘humanitarian’ objectives (i.e. reducing migrant deaths) have been integrated into US border enforcement discourse and policy. In particular, I draw on feminist and postcolonial theory to examine the gendered and racialized discursive maneuvers through which undocumented migrants are transformed from potential ‘terrorist threats’ or ‘criminals’ into ‘vulnerable victims’ deserving of assistance. I argue that gender and race are key to producing politically powerful and legible discourses of rescue and vulnerability and draw into question a contingent politics of life predicated on ideologies of gender, race and nation. In doing so, I bring a feminist postcolonial analytic framework to understandings of US–Mexico border enforcement efforts in order to query how gendered and racialized rescue narratives are key to justifying violent state projects that re-assert hegemonic power relations in the post-9/11 world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a key academic support of US geopolitics overseas, which I term the 'military-strategic studies complex'. The paper begins by outlining the development of Strategic Studies in the US since the early 1980s. It then uses the example of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments to work through a discussion of the palpable agency of the military-strategic studies complex in advancing a dual military-economic securitization strategy for what it calls the contemporary American 'leasehold empire'. This strategy is focused especially on the Persian Gulf and involves both an enduring US military presence and long-term neoliberal designs for the region. Finally, consideration is given to alternative military-strategic visions before attention is turned to the task of Geography in countering US geopolitical and geoeconomic scriptings of the Middle East, all expedited under a vernacular of 'national security'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines why genocide persists within the world. The author uses a phrase that was created to condemn the genocide that took place during the Jewish Holocaust to illustrate how allegedly trite anti-genocide rhetoric has become. The paper examines the U.S. National Security Strategy Paper, which was drafted during the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama. It pledges that the nation will strive to prevent mass atrocities and genocide, yet the author attests that this is an empty promise. U.S. humanitarian assistance efforts intended to aid places such as the Darfur region in Sudan are criticized.

To many observers Japanese decision-making is an enigma that defies conventional analysis. Neither the traditional rational actor model of decision-making, nor alternative pluralist models proposed for the analysis of Western democracies fit the Japanese case. As a result Japanese security policy decision-making is described as ‘reactive’ or even non-existent. Likewise, the anomaly of Japanese decision-making is ultimately predicted to be resolved through a process of ‘normalization’ whereby Japanese policy formation evolves into a form that does fit these models. However, this paper contends that the fact that Japan’s security decision-making does not fit commonly-used models is due rather to the limitations of those models. Japan’s security policy, like that of all states, is gradually evolving, but this does not mean that it is about to become just like the West. This paper addresses how a conjuncture of external factors and internal factors has stimulated important changes in Japanese security policy-making which are frequently missed or misinterpreted by observers. In order to understand Japanese security policy-making, and to chart its future course, a refined cybernetic approach is introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the relations between affect and military and security geographies. It argues that recent work on spaces of affect and emotion should be supplemented by research on how affects are known, rendered actionable and intervened on. The paper exemplifies such a focus through an example of the targeting of amorphous collective affects - specifically morale and popular support - in the 'effects based' airpower that has been so central to the US led 'war on terror'. Damaging or destroying morale has come to promise victory over a networked enemy. Yet morale is assumed to be distributed throughout life. As such, morale disappears as a definite, determinate, thing in itself. It cannot be fixed and located. Consequently, all of life is made into a potential target. To intervene on morale, airpower must create environments that will bring death and create life. The means for doing so are providential and catastrophic biopolitical 'effects', of which 'shock' and 'awe' are but the most high profile cases. Through the example of how morale is targeted, the paper shows how certain forms of power work by being both inside and outside the aleatory, indeterminate, dynamics of affective life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]