Search

History has placed the stamp of approval on the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret history of the Vietnam War. If WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange is another Daniel Ellsberg, then it is possible the website's disclosures will be viewed over time as similarly in the public interest. A classroom discussion on the release of secret diplomatic cables by the WikiLeaks website can lead to important questions about the First Amendment, the Espionage Act, and press treatment of national security secrets.

This paper examines how international education (IE), as an important tool of public diplomacy (PD) and soft power (SP), faces unique challenges as issues of national security (NS) become more prominent in this era of new geopolitics. It presents a model to understand the relationship between PD, SP and NS and then applies this model to a comparative study. The contrasting histories, approaches and perspectives of IE as it operates as a component of foreign policy and at the nexus of PD, SP and NS in both the U.S. and Canada are analysed. The paper concludes with three challenges faced by IE in the contemporary context: first, the diminishing role of the university as a distinct and valued non-state actor; second, the weakening of foreign policy as an outward looking, distinctly international investment; and third, the problem with choosing isolation over engagement as a strategy.

The author comments on Australia's Defense White Paper entitled "Defending Australia in the Asia-Pacific Century: Force 2030," which was released in May 2009. It is suggested that Australia's new defense policy was created in response to the rapid speed of globalization and increasing economic interdependence, as well as the declining power of the U.S. The author also argues that the policy document is beset with contradictions and there are no details of immediate challenges.

This paper explores the way education and conflict have become entangled during the post-9/11 "war on terror" response to "radical Islam" at home and abroad. The paper charts the complex ways that education has been deployed to serve Western military and security objectives in multiple locations in the global south and how these strategies have now returned to the "West" in the form of "countering violent extremism" interventions. Drawing on Foucault's concept of the "boomerang effect" I will explore whether and how education techniques and strategies deployed abroad in pursuit of imperial interests return to the West and are deployed to monitor, control and suppress marginalised communities in a form of "internal colonialism". Finally, the paper brings the two sections together in the Findings to explore commonalities and divergences.

This paper critically considers the notion of educational policy transfer by addressing the roles of significant actors, based on an analysis of educational reforms made during the Soviet and US military occupation in the two Koreas. Using evidence from the Korean cases, the paper challenges the state-centric, linear, and static views of educational policy transfer, and proposes a new conceptualisation which involves multiple actors from different levels including international, domestic, and individual players. While the educational reforms in the two Koreas were developed by the Soviet and US military in order to maximise their long-term security interests in the Korean peninsula, the key actors who implemented the reforms were Korean policy-makers, who had been appointed to key positions of the educational administrations through the bureaucratic politics between the military authorities and the Korean polity. Thus, specific programmes and policies for implementation of the reforms depended on the Korean policy-makers' understanding and interpretations of the different ideologies of the Soviet Union and the USA.

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]

The main threats to world order are terrorist and extremist activities. On the world stage, countries unite into a coalition with the aim to increase the efficiency of the fight against terrorism. At the local level, the terrorist threat is fought by the security services. In order to prevent global human victims, which may arise as a result of terrorist attacks, the government is taking a number of normative legal acts, which prevent the activities of militants. The main problem that arises in the preparation of the law is the lack of a clear understanding of what the "terrorism" and "extremism" are. Therefore, in this paper, a complete analysis of these terms will be made on the basis of normative legal acts of some countries such as the USA, Russia, Kazakhstan, and scientists specialized in the subject. Research of the terms "extremism" and "terrorism" has shown that these concepts are different, but at the same time interconnected. This relationship is expressed in the fact that terrorism is a continuation of extremism, its next step. The disengagement of these concepts will allow the legislator to create more specific laws, that will cover the entire field of criminal activities.

The focus of this paper is on US language policy statements that govern the priorities for teaching languages other than English in public schools and the language ideologies implied by specific management moves by the federal government to regulate language education, starting with the Bilingual Education Act (BEA) of 1968. Following introductory comments on language ideology, rhetorical positioning, and claims-making, this paper provides an overview of language diversity in the USA as the context for examining four major policy statements by the federal government up through the present: (1) the "BEA of 1968"; (2) "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB), which replaced the BEA when it became law in 2002; (3) the "National Security Language Initiative of 2006"; and (4) the current proposal from President Barack Obama's administration, titled "A Blueprint for Reform", which--if enacted--will replace "NCLB". The next section provides an overview of European Union (EU) language policy in recent years to highlight the sharp contrast between the EU and US approaches. This paper closes with a comparison of the EU and US approaches, with emphasis on how the EU approach could be instructive for US policy-makers. (Contains 1 table and 3 notes.)

Little research has examined public diplomacy as a comparative education issue, particularly regarding social-psychological, economic and political fears or personal and national insecurities. This paper discusses American public diplomacy as a mostly Cold War strategy adapted to post-9/11 national security interests, fears and desires. It further explores differences, similarities, and debates in Canadian media, policy documents and academia, in response to American political, economic and military pressures or demands for a "North American" (i.e. joint American-Canadian) security approach. From a critical pedagogy perspective the paper argues that modern public diplomacy has been a dubious, pseudo-educational, fear-mongering concept nurtured by academics, politicians and military leaders as part of an American foreign policy, military security and propaganda strategy. The paper further shows that post-9/11 Canada, problematically, adapted its own public diplomacy policies to serve American interests. Further research is needed to examine more closely public diplomacy's impacts on Canadian education. (Contains 1 note.)

The attacks of terror carried out on September 11, 2001 gave rise to waves of hate-fueled violence across the country. It has been argued that the attacks and the subsequent, current context of war have resulted in a heightened sense of American intolerance. They have led to discernable shifts in how certain minorities are perceived and treated in the United States. Since the attacks, an alarming number of Arab, Iranian, and other Muslim Americans have been targeted and hurt, becoming victims of a vicious brand of "patriotism." The FBI reports that the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes filed has spiked from 28 in the year 2000, to 481 in 2001--representing a seventeen-fold increase. Backlash continues to take on the form of verbal taunting, airport profiling, and even physical violence. The group hardest hit by hate crimes post 9-11 has been the South Asian Americans. Today, young desi Americans find themselves--perhaps for the first time--in the shaky, undesirable position of standing out for the "wrong" reasons. Listening to reports of hate crimes directed at South Asian and Muslim Americans after the events of September 11th, they must now contend with the understanding that their position in this country is more tenuous than they perhaps realized. In this paper, the author discusses what growing up during a time of rising confusion and xenophobia has meant for the children of Indian immigrants. (Contains 24 endnotes.)

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 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.

Drawing on data collected in South Korea, Jordan and the USA, this paper examines the degree to which security concerns impact the schooling of North Korean refugees in South Korea and Iraqi refugees in Jordan. Operating from a framework examining the intersection of migration and securitisation, the authors find that accounts of negative images of and identity concealment among North Korean students present the most compelling linkages to a larger phenomenon of societal securitisation. At the same time, South Korean perceptions of North Koreans' level of preparedness for working in a capitalist society present the most compelling linkages to economic securitisation. With respect to Christian Iraqi refugees in Jordan, plausible connections can be drawn between societal security and an Iraqi identity generally. With respect to economic concerns in Jordan, measures taken to restrict Iraqi integration into the labour force can be seen as security actions.

This paper examines ideologies of American study abroad in politically and culturally "non-Western" countries. Drawing from the theory of orientalism (Said, 1978), we analyze how American public discourse on study abroad for learners of Mandarin and Arabic manifests an orientalist thinking, and how such macro discourse both produces multilingual subjects (Kramsch, 2010) and considerable tensions with the micro discourses of these subjects. Our findings show that despite linguistic and cultural differences between China and the Arab world, the two contexts are imagined together as the political "East" in American public rhetoric. The two languages are also assumed to be crucial to the somewhat contradictory goals of "bridge-building" and "national defense." These imaginings provide students a mode of identity construction, but they are also contested in students' everyday experience. Using these findings, we argue that the discursive links between the two study abroad destinations result from a geopolitically situated American gaze, a view that obscures differences between the two destinations, the goals of individual language learners, and the locals they interact with when abroad.

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.

Growing polarization among the US electorate has in recent years attracted considerable attention from academic and non-academic observers. This paper examines some of the ways in which polarization affects US foreign and security policy in the post-Trump era. In particular, the paper offers an account of why bipartisan agreement over the so-called "rise of China" has prevailed in the face of powerful trends towards increased polarization, while domestic opinions over US aid to Ukraine have become much more contested. Drawing on a constructivist understanding of foreign policy as performative of a certain vision of the domestic self, this paper shows how US aid to Ukraine has become entangled with competing visions of the US, while domestic opinions of China have remained stable. While such a constructivist understanding does not necessarily challenge rationalist accounts, it is helpful in unravelling the link between national identity, domestic polarization, and foreign policy. [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 Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, told "Time" magazine recently that America is in "an economic war" with the world and "the importance of investing in long-term research for winning that war hasn't been understood". This article argues that such comments are not just metaphorical or unfortunate word choices, but instead reveal deep truths about the role of American universities globally. The fact that people such as Birgeneau, as head of a "world class" university, line up so readily behind US nationalism and militarism has serious implications for how we need to understand higher education not just in America but worldwide.

Though the impact of the cold war on the civil rights movement continued long after the desegregation crisis in Little Rock, the timing of the events in Arkansas, particularly the events at Central High School, constituted a unique moment in the history of the cold war. Up until the fall of 1957, the Soviet Union had been perceived as less advanced than and technologically inferior to the United States. The launch of Sputnik into space was a wake-up call, resulting in one of the most historic pieces of education legislation in American history, the 1958 National Defense Education Act. In addition, the United States had maintained a diplomatic lead that was severely compromised by Orval Faubus's decision to challenge the authority of the federal government to desegregate public schools in Arkansas. Little Rock and Sputnik changed everything. The only enigma that remains is the motivation of Faubus. Faubus's actions have been analyzed as a case study in political opportunism, a failure who found out what worked. Faubus was a racist because it was a smart career choice in the American South in the 1950s, particularly once "Brown v. Board of Education" assigned students the role of solving prejudices that preceded them. The events at Central High School as a case study of the cold war politics of school desegregation demonstrate how fear may be used to position various interest groups against one another to preserve power. (Contains 41 notes.)

The article focuses on the growth of the military capabilities of China. The author looks into the comprehensive force modernization program of China, as well as the possible implications of China's military capabilities to the national security and national interests of the U.S. He states that it is important for the U.S. to cooperate bilaterally with China, because China is an important factor in international relations. He also talks about the modernization of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA).

This paper describes a pedagogical technique employed for an interdisciplinary course on Cold War America. Students had to "become" a fictional person and discuss how political and social changes during the Cold War era would have impacted that person. By doing a semester-long project that required primary source research, this "quasi-experiential" technique helped students gain a greater appreciation for Cold War culture and a more thorough understanding of the major political events of the era. (Contains 1 table and 4 notes.)

After September 11, 2001, the Bush administration initiated large-scale electronic surveillance within the United States to gather intelligence to protect citizens from terrorists. Media commentary, public reaction, and classroom practices regarding this program have tended toward either-or positions: either for presidential power and national security or for judicial intervention and civil liberty. No one has proposed that at issue is a political question for Congress and the president to resolve themselves. The authors argue that congressional oversight, more than judicial review, is needed to ensure that the president, in seeking to protect the country, does not abuse executive power and jeopardize essential liberties. Teachers should emphasize separation of powers instead of checks and balances. The authors suggest related approaches for planning lessons about striking the balance between security and liberty. (Contains 4 resources.)

The outrage over revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison has faded from public discourse, but a number of questions remain unanswered. This paper criticizes official rationalizations offered for the abuse. We make the case that these abuses are systemic, resulting from dehumanization of the enemy and the long reliance on and refinement of torture by the United States national security agencies. We also consider the spread of torture in the current war "on terror," and we call on sociologists to become involved in the study of torture and prisoner abuse.

This essay explores the intersection of US Empire on HIV/AIDS policies and the politics of "gifting." It does so from an analysis of several key US initiatives: the Project for a New American Century, the US National Security Strategy, and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. History provides numerous examples where US international aid places expectations on the recipient with enormous consequences accrued to the giver--the contemporary time is no exception. Gifting, an especially powerful tool of US hegemony, is a means of social control, reflects power relations, and socialises the receiver by transmitting a set of expectations and values which bolster US ideology. US foreign policies, including those related to HIV/AIDS and HIV/AIDS education, are directly influenced by these three initiatives which are woven together to construct a new "American internationalism." (Contains 2 notes.)