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Failed states pose one of the deepest challenges to American national security and international peace and stability. Finding a comprehensive and effective solution to the challenges of terrorism, human rights violations, or poverty and economic development requires some understanding of how to restore failed states. The response of the United Slates and its allies has remained the same: to rebuild the institutions of state control, and, ~f lucky, to plant a working democracy and a market economy within existing stale borders. But many international law scholars remain openly dubious about the ability of states to rebuild-the problem is not failed states but the nation-state as the primary actor in international relations. This paper argues that both American and United Nations policy on the one hand, and the conventional academic wisdom on the other hand, are mistaken. Building a normal nation-state with full sovereignty on every territory in the world, without changing any borders, fails to understand why some states are failing in the first place. Viable states simply do not align with the borders recognized by the United Nations or created during the period of rapid decolonization in the decades after World War II. Academics who see in failed states the rise of alternatives to the nation-state have no practical solutions that do not depend on the political, economic, and military resources of strong nation-states. Without them, supranational governments, trusteeships, or nongovernmental organizations have shown little ability to fix failed states. This Article argues that powerful nations can help by performing the more modest role of promoting and guaranteeing power-sharing agreements between competing groups within failed states. It concludes by illustrating the thesis with the outcome of the surge in Iraq. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Surveillance is often used as a tool in resilience strategies towards the threat posed by terrorist attacks and other serious crime. "Resilience" is a contested term with varying and ambiguous meaning in governmental, business and social discourses, and it is not clear how it relates to other terms that characterise processes or states of being. Resilience is often assumed to have positive connotations, but critics view it with great suspicion, regarding it as a neoliberal governmental strategy. However, we argue that surveillance, introduced in the name of greater security, may itself erode social freedoms and public goods such as privacy, paradoxically requiring societal resilience, whether precautionary or in mitigation of the harms it causes to the public goods of free societies. This article develops new models and extends existing ones to describe resilience processes unfolding over time and in anticipation of, or in reaction to, adversities of different kinds and severity, and explores resilience both on the plane of abstract analysis and in the context of societal responses to mass surveillance. The article thus focuses upon surveillance as a special field for conceptual analysis and modelling of situations, and for evaluating contemporary developments in "surveillance societies". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given various challenges to national security in democracies, such as terrorism and political violence, a growing need for reconceptualization of the term “resilience” emerges. The interface between national security and resilience is rooted in individuals’ perceptions and attitudes toward institutions and leadership. Therefore, in this article, we suggest that political–psychological features form the basis of citizens’ perceived definitions of national resilience. By comparing national resilience definitions composed by citizens of two democratic countries facing national threats of war and terrorism, the United States and Israel, we found that perceived threats, optimism, and public attitudes such as patriotism and trust in governmental institutions, are the most frequent components of the perceived national resilience. On the basis of these results, a reconceptualization of the term “national resilience” is presented. This can lead to validation of how resilience is measured and provide grounds for further examination of this concept in other democratic countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]