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This paper addresses attitudes around the projection of the EU among Latin American elites, namely the determinants of support for a Free Trade Agreement between the two regions and the trustworthiness of the EU government. We take as data elite surveys conducted in 15 Latin American countries (2014–2019) and consider sociodemographics, ideology, support for democracy, views of foreign powers, exports to the EU, and electoral democracy. Results show that ideology and support for democracy are key determinants of support for an interregional FTA, and that the trustworthiness of governments in the US, China, and Spain covary with attitudes toward the EU. The latter (trust in the government in Spain) proves to be the main driver and, furthermore, its impact is conditional on the economic strength (observed as exports) of the EU: wherever the EU is not a strong economic actor in Latin America, trust in the Spanish government does nothing but improve the image of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which factors influence bilateral counterterrorism (CT) cooperation between EU Member States? Although scholars have studied European CT, the question still needs to be answered. This paper addresses the issue by introducing a new theoretical framework that combines CT and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) literature. As citizens' threat perception increases, governments are pressed to act. Overall, centrist cabinets tend to rely more on cooperation agreements; likewise, pushed by threat perception, left-wing executives also recourse to international cooperation. I tested this framework on a newly collected dataset, which comprehends bilateral CT agreements signed among EU Members from 2002 to 2017. As such, this paper fosters studies on EU CT, focusing on a less debated issue: bilateral cooperation between EU Member States. The results support the initial hypotheses, disclosing a robust influence of threat perception and cabinet ideology on the number of bilateral CT agreements signed. Furthermore, they show that the perception of the threat is more influential on cooperation than the actual impact of terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the impact of European Union (EU) funds on corruption in the EU ex-communist countries by following a panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. The panel includes 10 former EU communist countries, over 2007–2019. The key findings reveal that an improvement in the EU funds paid and their rate of absorption can reduce the level of corruption in the long-run in the recipient EU ex-communist countries. This is due to better monitoring of EU funds paid compared with national resources, and a more efficient and fairer channel of EU funds absorption. In parallel with the EU funds, corruption can be controlled in certain conditions by the degree of economic development, size of government, level of democratisation and religiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on Euroscepticism tends to portray parties opposing European integration or criticising the European Union (EU) as a family of Eurosceptic parties (either hard or soft). Recent literature, however, offers empirical evidence on the ambivalence and diversity of the EU critique. What is still unclear are the reasons behind the chameleonic nature of Euroscepticism and the implications that this may have for the EU critique and the changes proposed about EU policy or institutions. The present article addresses this question exploring the role of EU crises to capture the changing nature of Euroscepticism and suggests that it is related to contextual pressures on the political debate around the EU. The paper develops this argument and illustrates it through the analysis of the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, covering the EU crises of the last decade, including the recent period of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine invasion. Drawing on a corpus of party manifestos and speeches between 2013 and 2022, this study shows that there are three main frames used by the party to criticise the EU. It also concludes that these frames involve distinct political implications for the EU critique and the alternative proposals presented by the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), despite being regarded as the most developed integration project in the post-Soviet area, has faced different hurdles in acquiring international recognition. Especially, the EU, the EAEU's Significant Other, has been reluctant to formally recognize it, in spite of close ties with EAEU member states as well as of its own self-image as a supporter of regional integrations. This paper focuses on this puzzle and examines how the EU has been discursively explaining its non-recognition of the EAEU at the institutional level. Based on the analysis of EU-articulated narratives since 2010, the paper reveals three dominant representations of the EAEU in the EU discourse: (1) Russia's geopolitical project; (2) a protectionist union; and (3) a dysfunctional union. These narratives have been used by Brussels to create the EAEU's image as a threatening Other, thus justifying why the EU cannot formally recognize the EAEU and officially engage with it. The paper also identifies five different stages of the EU's discursive representation of the EAEU since 2010, when its tone and content varied. The paper concludes that such non-recognition from the Significant Other still limits the EAEU's international agency despite its increasing interest in cooperation with non-Western actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has fruitfully investigated the effect of international organization (IO) approval on public support for military intervention. Following Jentleson and Britton [Bruce W. Jentleson and Rebecca L. Britton, "Still Pretty Prudent: Post-Cold War American Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force," Journal of Conflict Resolution 42, no. 4 (1998): 395–417], scholars argue that IO approval does not increase already high public support for "foreign policy restraint" (FPR) operations intended to coerce "aggressively threatening" opponents, including terrorists. We challenge this argument, focusing on public support for contributing to military coalitions. The public may wonder whether leaders are sincere when they frame a coalition military operation as having FPR objectives; this may lead the public to put a premium on multilateral validation. We also question the common argument that UN Security Council approval necessarily has a greater positive effect on public support for intervention than approval from regional IOs. Approval from broad-based regional IOs, such as the African Union (AU), may be just as consequential. Data from survey experiments that we conducted in three countries confirm our principal hypotheses: (1) IO approval consistently increases public support for contributing to military coalitions even in counterterrorism cases and (2) the UN and AU approval effects are of comparable magnitude. These findings expand our theoretical understanding of the conditions under which IO approval can increase public support for military intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post–Cold War environment has ushered in an era of threats from terrorism, organized crime, and their intersections giving rise to the growing literature on the so-called crime–terror nexus. This article takes stock of this literature, assesses its accomplishments and limitations, and considers ways to deepen it conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. To challenge assumptions informing the crime–terror studies and suggest avenues for future research, the article draws on ideas from the scholarship on political economies of violence. These insights are used to probe the (1) non-state actors that form the crime–terror nexus, (2) conditions under which the nexus is likely to emerge, and (3) varied effects of criminal–terrorist intersections. The article emphasizes the ties of criminal and terrorist groups to local politics, society, and economy, and relationships of competition, rather than cooperation, which often characterize these ties. The conditions under which these groups operate cannot be understood without considering the role of the state in criminal–terrorist constellations. The structure of resource economies influences both the preferences of terrorist groups for crime and the consequences of terrorist–criminal convergence, which are also mediated by state participation in crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overlapping of a series of events in the region has brought the Sahel under the spotlight of many European countries. It has been argued that the peculiar transnational nature of many terrorist groups of the area represents a concrete threat to European security. France, specifically, has led and encouraged a series of European initiatives, which aim to stabilize the region, calling for different degrees of counterterrorism cooperation with its European allies. Many European countries, such as Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, or Italy, have indeed increased their engagement in the area. Yet, not only a variety of new actors are now involved in the response to terrorism, but European cooperation among key actors is also developing along political-strategic, organizational, and procedural dimensions largely unexplored by the existing literature. This paper specifically accounts for the different multilevel configurations of European counterterrorism cooperation in the Sahel between 2012 and 2018. More specifically, the aim of this contribution is twofold. First, theoretically, through the concept of "patchwork" the paper proposes a conceptual framework able to investigate and analyze the apparently confusing multidimensional and multi-actor European cooperation in counterterrorism. Second, it empirically researches and analyzes the types of cooperation and the actors that fulfil key strategic positions in the patchwork. Overall, this paper provides a first complete account of the universe of European actors involved in the region and the types of cooperative patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consistently low credit-taking rates, 16 percent in 2016 (Global Terrorism Database), continue to challenge the understanding of terrorism as "propaganda of the deed" twenty years after researchers initially pointed out the conundrum. While providing an overview and evaluation of the limited existing literature on credit-taking, this paper draws attention to three core problems in the current literature on terrorist credit-taking, which may have led the low credit-taking rates to appear more puzzling than is due. First, the available explanations struggle to find corroboration when empirically tested and many also show theoretical shortcomings with strong unspoken assumptions and unclear predictions of credit-taking behavior. Second, data structure and data availability unnecessarily narrow our academic understanding of credit-taking. Finally, theories focused on group characteristics such as religious motivation or state sponsorship suffer from severe issues of sample bias due to unintended selection on the dependent variable. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research less prone to the problematic issues identified in the article. A re-orientation toward a less restrictive and more fine-grained understanding of credit-taking is advised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, the author argues that cyber war does not pose the existential threat to humanity that nuclear weapons do. Still, some experts have called for cyber arms control negotiations and formal treaties. Differences in cultural norms and verification difficulties make such treaties hard to negotiate. International talks and cooperation might, however, develop rough rules of the road—analogous to those developed for nuclear weapons early in the Cold War—that can limit cyber conflict. The most promising early areas for international cyber cooperation are probably not bilateral conflicts but problems posed by third parties such as criminals and terrorists. It is likely, the author contends, that major governments will eventually give higher priority to cooperation that works against the insecurity created by non-state actors with cyber weaponry. But the world is far from such a response at this stage of cyber development, just as the major powers did not begin such cooperation on nuclear weapons until the third decade of the nuclear era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The massive expansion and evolution of United States security cooperation under the auspices of the 'war on terror' remains overlooked in the counterterrorism and interventions literature. The Sahel provides a useful region in which to explore the constitutive effects of such cooperation and its evolution because the US has always pursued an 'economy of force' mission there. In this article, I focus mainly on the constitutive effects of US indirect military intervention in the Sahel after 9/11, and subsequent more direct military intervention following the outbreak of civil war in Mali. The indirect intervention by the United States to build the capacity of local forces in Mali, where jihadists were based, failed because of the dissonant relationship between the two countries. This led the United States to intervene more directly in the region, including through its cooperation with and support for French and Nigerien forces. The nature of this more direct military intervention was also informed by evolving US experiences working by, with and through partner forces in other parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the Russian intervention in the Libyan and Syrian conflicts which is characterized by series of successes but has trapped Russia in the messy politics of civil-war-torn nations. Topics discussed include a background of the Russian and Iranian involvement in the Syrian conflict, Russia's rapprochement with the U.S. under the banner of anti-terrorism, and limits of Russian engagement in Syria and Libya.

This article discusses the state of U.S. international security strategy given the 2003 Iraq war, globalization, and international law. The impacts of globalization and increasingly protracted conflicts such as the Iraq War on the U.S. military's strategic reliance on technologically established overwhelming force are described. Legal issues surrounding counterterrorist actions and the use of space technology in military interventions are noted. Nuclear security and the lack of transparency in accounting for nuclear weapons around the world are noted.

The article discusses how U.S. President Donald Trump administration's reset the national security balance back toward emerging peers or near-peers that is perhaps a reflection of how the world has shifted from the immediate terrorist attacks of September 2001 terrorist attack view. Topics discussed include review and reform of American national security; and provisions of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA).

India and Pakistan have tempered their rivalry over the years by negotiating many bilateral confidence-building measures (CBMs), but the current patchwork of agreements cannot prevent an act of cross-border terrorism from triggering a major militarised crisis. To help mitigate this shortfall, this article advocates a new conceptual approach towards confidence building that identifies two categories of agreements – negative and positive. Negative CBMs oblige inaction; they can be defined as promises to eschew provocative behaviour, so as to prevent miscalculation and accidental war. Most prominent Indo-Pakistani CBMs fall under this category – examples include agreements on non-attack of nuclear facilities and non-violation of airspace. Positive CBMs, by contrast, oblige action; they entail tangible engagement and cooperation in the military, diplomatic, or economic domains. Examples might include counter-piracy cooperation and the expansion of people-to-people contacts. This article argues that positive CBMs invite reciprocity and are a plausible tool for promoting bilateral goodwill, reducing mistrust, and insulating Indo-Pakistani relations from shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2016, militants who were allegedly backed by Pakistan attacked an Indian Army camp in Uri. The government in New Delhi was facing important regional elections. It faced intense public pressure to muster a military response. Such a response, however, ran the risk of triggering a nuclear exchange. Ten days after the Uri attack, India reported that it had carried out 'surgical strikes' on terrorist training camps in Pakistan-controlled territory. The paper examines this specific episode in India–Pakistan deterrence dynamics, focusing on the nomenclature 'surgical strikes'. The paper argues that the choice of the term itself is new and worthy of investigation. Using qualitative content analysis of the official announcement of the operation, it identifies specific rhetorical moves by the Indian government that framed the response as a surgical strike. The paper also considers other statements in the media by high-ranking political and military leaders regarding the strikes, and the reception of these statements by the Indian audience, by Pakistan, and by the international community. The concluding section sounds a note of caution about future iterations of so-called surgical strikes. While the term 'surgical strike' can be useful in some circumstances, it produces destabilising outcomes in others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological development throughout the past fifty years has created a world in which information can be communicated across the globe in no time at all. International law enforcement tools like mutual legal assistance (MLA), on the other hand, have not changed with nearly the same pace. Unfortunately, criminal activity rarely stops at international borders, necessitating international cooperation for any sort of effective enforcement. As this Note will discuss, the problems attendant in the current mutual legal assistance scheme, such as extensive delay and incompatibility with electronic data, have led to global tension over extraterritorial action and conflict between regulatory bodies. These developments are most stark in the context of international financial crime, particularly that which is used to finance terrorist organizations. In order to keep pace with these organizations, the process needs to be streamlined and adjusted to handle large amounts of personal and financial data. Such reform to the mutual legal assistance system is an essential component of combatting money laundering and disrupting global terrorist networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quality of social science inquiry examining terrorism, insurgency, and nonviolent civil resistance has progressed rapidly in recent years. One reason for this advancement is the emergence of new datasets and the subsequent application of quantitative methods to the analysis of asymmetric political conflict between states and nonstate actors. Despite rapid development within the research paradigm, the use of new data has coincided with several methodological and conceptual challenges. This inquiry employs insights from qualitative social science methodology and organizational sociology to highlight and propose solutions to three shortcomings found in recent quantitative analyses of asymmetric conflict. The first problem arises from scholars' proclivity to ask research questions based on easily accessible categories of data rather than on theoretically significant puzzles in the literature. The second pitfall concerns limitations and "conceptual stretching" associated with static, nominal variables constructed to enable statistical inference. Finally, the third class of research obstacles arises from selection bias caused by underreporting of data. Each of these methodological problems potentially undermines theoretical claims made in recent work on insurgent organizations, terrorism, civil war, and nonviolent resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines German and American responses to international terrorism from the end of the cold war to today. While terrorism was not a priority for much the 1990s, the 9/11 attacks generated a long list of domestic counterterrorism measures in both countries. In the international realm, the German government ended up participating in many US initiatives designed to hunt down al-Qaeda operatives and prevent them from launching another attack inside the United States. However, German support was often secret and cooperation in the context of the ‘war on terrorism’ was considered controversial at home. When comparing German and US counterterrorism approaches, the paper takes a unique approach by analysing how parliamentary and presidential government structures affected responses in terms of content and scope. The comparative analysis illustrates various similarities between German and US decision-making processes and argues that checks and balances continue to balance executive power gains in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the use of a model of counterterrorism of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) to fight the terrorist group al-Shabaab. The union is acknowledged for leading a role in combating the terrorist group, building the new Somali state's security forces, and facilitating humanitarian assistance. The complexity of the model is attributed to coordination and cooperation between several international organizations and other partners. Also identified are the limitations of the mission, including the struggle to establish a positive reputation among Somalis.

Since January 2003, the European Union (EU) has launched over 30 civilian and military crisis management missions under the Common Security and Defence Policy. These missions have involved the participation of both EU member states and third states. In order to help facilitate the participation of third states in these missions, the EU established the Framework Partnership Agreements on crisis management, setting out the legal framework for third-state participation. In April 2015, Australia became the seventeenth country to sign such an agreement with the EU. This agreement reflects both the common interest and values shared by Australia and the EU and the extent to which EU-Australia relations have evolved and deepened over the years. In addition, the increased engagement and socialisation of Australian military and civilian personnel with individual EU member states through their participation in such operations as the International Security Assistance Force operation in Afghanistan, led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Combined Maritime Force have further facilitated opportunities for security cooperation at the EU level. Shared concerns and interests on counterterrorism, counter-piracy, instability and capacity-building have also opened up opportunities for increased cooperation between the EU and Australia. This article assesses the significance of the Framework Partnership Agreements on crisis management for EU-Australia relations within the area of security cooperation, and examines future prospects for cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks critically at the new global youth, peace and security agenda, that has been marked by the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2250 in December 2015. It argues that this agenda needs to be situated within the broader context of the securitisation of development, and that the increasing interest in youth as a security subject and actor is shaped by three overlapping sets of global security concerns: the concept of the youth bulge is a euphemism for the problem of growing surplus populations worldwide; the ideal of youth as peacebuilders is a model for eliciting youth support for the current global social and economic order; and the spectre of globally networked youth being radicalised by extremist groups has legitimated joint state and private sector projects that are taking an increasingly active role intervening in the online lives of young people around the world. The article draws on an analysis of a collection of core documents that form the heart of the global youth and security agenda; and it argues for the need for greater critical reflexivity in considering the growing attention being paid to youth as a social category in global development and policy discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the state of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda and discusses if it will remain a long-term threat following a change in strategy and surviving international efforts to dismantle its operations. He discusses counterterrorism efforts that have effectively destroyed ISIS and explains how al-Qaeda can use that example to avoid eradication through a jihadist approach that does not kill Muslims, is more moderate in enforcing Shari'a law, and recognizes tribal leadership in the Middle East.

We investigate how externalities and cooperation affect nations’ efforts to counter transnational terrorism activities. Our model captures three factors whose interplay determines counterterrorism (CT) efforts and terrorist activity: the size of the spillover effect, the degree of internalization of the externality, and whether nations’ CT efforts have an asymmetric or symmetric effect on the security of other nations. In our symmetric model, preemptive CT efforts and terrorist activities decrease with the size of the externality regardless of the degree of cooperation between nations. In our asymmetric model, as the externality of the “smaller” nation increases, the “larger” nations reduce their efforts, and the smaller nation reacts by increasing its own efforts. We also investigate coalition stability and show that (a) in the preemptive case, the full coalition is not stable and partial coalitions are stable for sufficiently small externalities; and (b) in the defensive, symmetric case, only the full coalition is stable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrorism is a huge public hazard of the international community. Alliances of terrorist organizations may cause more serious threat to national security and world peace. Understanding alliances between global terrorist organizations will facilitate more effective anti-terrorism collaboration between governments. Based on publicly available data, this study constructed a alliance network between terrorist organizations and analyzed the alliance relationships with link prediction. We proposed a novel index based on optimal weighted fusion of six similarity indices, in which the optimal weight is calculated by genetic algorithm. Our experimental results showed that this algorithm could achieve better results on the networks than other algorithms. Using this method, we successfully digged out 21 real terrorist organizations alliance from current data. Our experiment shows that this approach used for terrorist organizations alliance mining is effective and this study is expected to benefit the form of a more powerful anti-terrorism strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political geography has an established tradition of engaging with religiously-driven geopolitik . However, despite the remarkable growth in professed atheist beliefs in recent decades and the popular expression of an imagined geopolitical binary between secular/atheist and religious societies, the geopolitics of irreligion have received almost no attention among academic practitioners. This paper outlines the core tenets of ‘New Atheist’ philosophy, before addressing how its key representatives have taken positions on the ‘Global War on Terror.’ In particular, we critically interrogate the works of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens and identify a belligerent geopolitical imagination which posits a civilizational clash between an existentially-threatened secular, liberal West with responsibility to use extraordinary violence to protect itself and the world from a backwards oriental Islam. The paper concludes with four possible explanations for the paradox that the New Atheist critique of religion for being violent acts itself as a geopolitical incitement to violence. In so doing, we seek to navigate debates about the nature and purpose of critical geopolitical research given that the historical, intellectual and political contexts in which it was formed have changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article urges for action to stop terrorist organizations like "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)" from further committing any more crimes against humanity. Topics discussed include need of global efforts to prevent and punish these acts of horror against the human people; crimes against humanity in the context of ISIS's violations of fundamental human rights of the Assyrian people; and applicable international legal norms against ISIS.

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]

Fifteen years since joining the US-led anti-terrorism coalition, Pakistan’s response to the challenges of terroristic violence and extremist indoctrination and propaganda remain military-centric and kinetic. Since August 2016, after a brief lull, Pakistan has experienced a resurgence of terrorist activity and violence that has struck all of its provinces and placed its capital on high alert. The re-escalation in the level of terrorist violence began with the August 8, 2016, attacks in Quetta, which left over 70 dead and more than 100 injured. The lack of response from the provincial and federal governments to this carnage, led the Supreme Court of Pakistan to exercise its authority under Article 184(3) of the Constitution and establish an Inquiry Commission to examine the state of the investigation and report on the challenges faced in the struggle against terrorism and extremism. This inquiry assumed the form and substance of an audit of the performance of Pakistan’s institutions and exposed the link between the country’s crisis of governance and its incoherent response to terrorism and extremism at all levels of government. The implications of the inquiry report are both broad and deep, and reveal that Pakistan’s trajectory remains that of civilian administrative breakdown and institutional exhaustion. This indicates that Pakistan’s civilian-military balance continues to shift in structural terms in favour of the latter and that beneath a veneer of constitutional democracy, the arbitrary, unwise, and inefficient, exercise of power by the political class continues to hollow out the country’s administrative institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author argues that international community should learn from and integrate past experience in thinking about how best to respond to pressing present-day international challenges such as Islamic state with prudent lawyers. Topics discussed include general quality of prudence has long been loosely associated with lawyers; need of contributions to international strategy by lawyers; and absence generations of the lawyerly prudent type.

The United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operation in Mali (MINUSMA) has become among the deadliest in UN history, suffering from attacks by violent extremists and terrorists. There are strong calls to give UN peacekeeping operations more robust mandates and equip them with the necessary capabilities, guidelines and training to be able to take on limited stabilisation and counter-terrorism tasks. This article conceptually develops UN counter-terrorism operations as a heuristic device, and compares this with the mandate and practices of MINUSMA. It examines the related implications of this development, and concludes that while there may be good practical as well as short-term political reasons for moving in this direction, the shift towards UN counter-terrorism operations will undermine the UN’s international legitimacy, its role as an impartial conflict arbiter, and its tools in the peace and security toolbox more broadly, such as UN peacekeeping operations and special political missions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses aspects of U.S.-Russia foreign relations and American exceptionalism under U.S. President Donald Trump administration. It looks at former president Ronald Reagan's affirmation of American exceptionalism and denunciation of Soviet leaders. Also discussed is the opportunity for the U.S. and Russia to work together against international terrorism, drug trafficking and nuclear proliferation.

Foreign investors generally refrain from entering countries with high political risks. As an often seen type of political risk, terrorism may deter foreign investors by creating an unsafe investment environment. This paper explores whether terrorism reduces foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and argues that foreign investors adjust their information by observing whether the host country has the capability to deal with terrorism. Foreign aid from the United States used specifically for counterterrorism is an effective signal of a recipient's counterterrorism potential. Using two commonly used terrorism data sets and drawing upon a timeseries cross-sectional data analysis, this paper finds that while terrorism can be an obstacle to FDI inflows, countries that receive more counterterrorism aid are less vulnerable to this adverse effect. It also shows that conflict-tied aid mitigates the negative effect of terrorism on FDI because it sends a similar signal to foreign investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author discusses the approach of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to deal with the international terrorism and terrorist organization Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Topics discussed include NATO has adopted a counterterrorism stance that uses military capabilities indirectly against terrorism, Article 51 of the U.N. Charter authorized by the United Nations Security Council and use of force against a state or international non-state actor.

Forty years ago, development aid programmes in the 'Third World', if colonial in thrust and often imperial in economic purpose, were at least usually recognisably different from war, conflict and internal repression. And the respective roles of metropolitan governmental departments and private companies, national governments and international NGOs were clearly delineated. But today, with neoliberalism breaking down the distinctions between the public and private, the war on terror conflating risk into security and pushing towards a pre-emptive geopolitics, the shape of development is changing. Innovation in areas such as border control and transportation systems, still marketed as development, are better analysed in terms of biopolitics (as conceptualised by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and others). Using this framework and that of pre-emptive securitisation the author unpicks some of the 'aid' programmes of one German agency -- the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and South Africa over the last fifteen years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the test cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, this study illustrates how alliances work to mitigate the conflicting frames that party structure and media access provide in the Global War on Terror, which leads to more cohesiveness in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)–led coalition in Afghanistan as opposed to the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. The approach utilized here extends the theory on alliance capability and uncertainty by arguing that alliances reduce uncertainty among member states on a strategic objective. This is particularly relevant when examining asymmetric, limited conflicts, where party structures and media access can work to disseminate conflicting frames to a domestic populace, who then can pressure their leader to withdraw from a coalition. The implications of these findings lend support to the continued relevance of NATO in the twenty-first-century security arena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines international corporation on anti-terrorism legislation. It reports that governments around the world implemented draconian security legislation and restrictive immigration policies which significantly curtailed civil liberties and procedural rights. It discusses the international legal response to terrorism.

The article examines the accountability of special operations forces ('SOF) in counterterrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Topics discussed include role of SOF in contemporary counterterrorism and counter-insurgency operations; method of maintaining counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations; and Australian, Canadian, British and American special operations.

The article examines the anti-terrorism legislation in Southeast Asia. It reports that governments around the world implemented draconian security legislation and restrictive immigration policies which significantly curtailed civil liberties and procedural rights to prevent the extremist ideology of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ('ISIS) . It discusses the international legal response to terrorism.

The article explores the Afghanistan government's failure to prevent illegal drug trade and its impact to the international countries programs against terrorism. Topics include the specific governmental policies on drug prohibition, the impacts on international drug-interdiction policies with international programs on counterterrorism and nation building and the connection between anti-drug efforts of the Afghanistan government with counterterrorism policies.