Suchergebnisse

Paragraph 139 of the World Summit Outcome Document (WSOD) stipulates that the international community is prepared to respond on a 'case-by-case basis' in a 'timely and decisive manner' when 'national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations' from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But what constitutes a 'manifest failing'? Ten years on from the WSOD, it is evident that there is a large amount of ambiguity and inconsistency in how this term is interpreted and applied. This article highlights the confusion and complexity within the discourse prior to putting forward five policy prescriptions. In so doing, it argues that a more informed understanding of the concept will, primarily, rectify the problems of ambiguity and inconsistency and, secondarily, may help address fears of Great Power manipulation and assist in delegitimising misuse of the R2P.

This article aims to highlight the impact of strategic culture on Italian attitude to war and peace. The first section shows how both structural interpretations based on the influence of international variables and domestic models that neglect the cultural dimension offer no adequate explanations of Italy's military behaviour. The second section reviews the literature on strategic culture and its usefulness to explain the Italian case. The third section examines the characteristics of Italy's strategic culture through the period of the Republic, and the fourth examines the influence of ideational factors on its military behaviour abroad. In this section, a series of hypotheses derived from structural and cultural models are tested using data from the Correlates of War dataset. The conclusion provides a summary of the research findings that emerged from the empirical analysis.

Examining a range of policy areas in which the European Union (EU) acts externally – notably trade, development, climate change and foreign and security policy – this article considers the notion that the years since the mid-2000s have witnessed a decline in EU actorness/effectiveness. In evaluating EU performance, the article employs the interrelated concepts of presence, denoting EU status and influence; opportunity, denoting the external context of EU action; and capability, referring to EU policy processes and instruments, with particular reference to the impact of the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. It is contended that achievement of the increased capability envisaged by the Lisbon Treaty, together with resolution of the Eurozone crisis, with its deleterious effect upon the Union's presence, would not fully compensate for the loss of opportunity provided by the changing international structure.

Recent world politics displays two seemingly contradictory trends: on the one hand, the incidence of international and even civil war shows a very great decline, but on the other hand the US, and to a lesser extent Britain and France, have been involved in many military adventures since the end of the Cold War. The causes are numerous, but among them is the unipolar structure of world politics, which presents the US with different kinds of threats and new opportunities. Central also is the existence of a security community among the leading states. A number of forces and events could undermine it, but they seem unlikely to occur. Even in this better world, however, recessed violence will still play a significant role, and force, like other forms of power, is most potent and useful when it remains far in the background.

Despite a general acknowledgement that knowledge about identities is essential for understanding international relations, surprisingly little has been written about what actually activates one of a state's many identities and not another. More generally, the article suggests that situational relevance and commitment are of importance. More specifically, it is suggested that a policy area's legitimisation is a factor that may affect the commitment to a collective identity. The argument is illustrated by the case of 'Norden', as the inhabitants of Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden call their territory. The end of the Cold War and Sweden and Finland joining Denmark in the European Union (EU) put Nordic identity under severe stress in the beginning of the 1990s. As shown, this collective identity was intensely active in the case of the Nordic Passport Union, but less so in the case of environmental negotiations.

This article provides a critique of Waltz's work from the perspective of world history. It shows how Waltz's commitment to a highly parsimonious theoretical approach paradoxically both sets up the possibility of his theory being universally applicable, and undermines its prospects as a viable approach to understanding world history. Using the key concepts from Waltz's work — units, systems, structure, process — we show the detailed grounds on which his theory fails to apply to such large swathes of time and place, so that its claims to universality fall, even though it can usefully be applied to some times and places. We also show its shortcomings in relation to the essential historical task of periodization. We argue that international relations needs to engage more with world history, and that the task of doing so will fall to approaches other than Waltz's.

A framework for analysing policy transfer developed by David Dolowitz and David Marsh has begun to attract the attention of criminologists interested in understanding how crime policies travel. This article uses this framework to assist in tracing the genealogy of a style of local, geographically responsible `sector' policing which is currently being implemented by the South African Police Service. After locating sector policing as a distinctive approach within the broader tradition of community policing, the article considers the origins and development of geographically responsible policing in Great Britain and the United States before focusing on its adoption and adaptation in post-apartheid South Africa. Answers to the seven questions suggested by Dolowitz and Marsh's framework are then sought in an effort to understand more fully the genealogy of sector policing in South Africa and the role of international policy transfer in it.

In this article Professor Elshtain responds to the critiques offered by the symposium and, five years on from 11 September 2001 and three years on from the initial publication of Just War Against Terror, revisits her analysis of the moral issues facing America and the world in the context of the war on terror. She offers a stout defense of her original claim that the war on terror has presented America with many tough decisions to make, decisions regarding emergency ethics and the best way to carry on the struggle against global terrorism. Along the way, she expands upon her understanding of tragedy, her debt to Augustinian just war thought, and her conviction that America must assume some responsibility for the management of international peace and security. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2007.]

This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the ongoing 'transformation of war' debate in an age of globalisation. It suggests that careful scrutiny of recent Anglo-American campaigns, from Kosovo to Iraq, reveals a shared underlying concern: the management of globalised systemic risks. This implies an interesting continuity where one might expect discontinuity, given the different US administrations and strategic contexts involved. Policymakers, for instance, have consistently prioritised anticipatory proactive stances to avert probabilistic scenarios. Underpinning the analysis presented here is what sociologist Ulrich Beck terms the 'world risk society'. Social sciences, notably sociology, have fruitfully incorporated risk theories into their research agendas. International relations, however, has largely not done so in a concerted fashion, despite its cross-disciplinary nature. This article demonstrates that Beck's ideas in fact have great relevance to understanding the impetus, ethos and outcomes of contemporary war.

The diverse and complex ways in which individuals from one society now engage in the political affairs of individuals living in other societies have generated a wealth of academic and practitioner analysis. In ensuing debates, ethics of intervention have featured prominently. However, just war theory, traditionally a key frame for ethical analysis, plays a comparatively small part in contemporary discourse. This article thus examines how just war thinking can be used to guide current interventionist practice, and in particular how it can structure analysis of recourse to engagement. It begins by surveying recent debate. It then conceptualizes intervention by developing an eight-part typology. Next, it presents a six-part framework for ethical evaluation of recourse to intervention, drawn from just war theory but attuned to contemporary practice. It closes by briefly considering operationalization of the framework in the real world of international politics.

The Bush administration's foreign policy hitherto suffers from a neglect of diplomacy. It has emphasised a strategy that combines unilateral and re-militarising elements. Security is conceived of in terms of a gated community writ large. Diplomacy is downgraded to alliance-building (conveniently misnamed multilateralism) for a policy already decided. Other countries are sheer objects, not subjects, within US foreign policy. The conception of order in international society is stripped of substantial components of justice or legitimacy, to which the US would accept being subjected itself. In short, there is a tendency to repeat the US cold war strategy which reversed Clausewitz, that is, where politics becomes the prolongation of war with other means. The article consciously bases its critique mainly on realist writers, simply to show that the present US foreign policy is debatable even in realist terms.

Discusses relationships between climate change and atomic power; global warming, nuclear power problems, energy debate, and environmental issues.

This thesis asks why was only a maritime warning mission added to the binational North American Aerospace Defense Command's (NORAD) existing aerospace warning and control mandate and not other missions? There were other viable options that could have come from the fallout of 9/11 to improve security and defence of North America such as maritime surveillance, maritime control, not to mention land and the cyberspace domains. In the end, NORAD was assigned only maritime warning in 2006. Using the international relation theory of functionalism as a framework to understand Canada-US defence policy decisions and joint defence initiatives, the maritime warning mission addition can be partially explained but it is not sufficient. By investigating from the Cold War era when NORAD was established until the post 9/11 era when the command was eventually signed in perpetuity, this thesis argues that functionalism alone is insufficient. It is not just a functional logic and the need for specific functional-technical solutions that underscores the origins and continued existence of NORAD as a binational organization but also the unique nature of the Canadian brand of functionalism where the Canadian military, in reality, takes the lead in shaping security decisions that favour and prioritize US decisions. This investigation concludes maritime warning was adopted by NORAD because it was the least controversial and was acceptable to Canadian and US military "professionals" in NORAD. ; February 2022

How can we best analyze security subregions? The most commonly used theory of regional security in the discipline of international relations, the regional security complex theory, focuses on large regions, such as Europe, Asia, or the Middle East. It pays less attention to smaller regions within these. This is unfortunate, because the security dynamics of these subregions often are a result of more than their place in the larger region. At the same time, the security of subregions cannot be reduced to a function of the policies of the states comprising them either. In short, security subregions are a level of analysis in their own right, with their own material, ideational, economic, and political dynamics. To capture and understand this, we need an analytical framework that can be applied to security regions irrespective of where and when in time they occur. The aim of this article is to offer such an analytical framework that helps us theorize the forces forging regional security cooperation, by combining external push and pull forces with internal forces of pull and resistance. The utility of the framework is illustrated through the case of Nordic security cooperation. It allows for a systematic mapping of the driving forces behind it and the negative forces resisting it. The Nordic region thus becomes a meeting point between global and national forces, pushing and pulling in different directions, with Nordic Defense Cooperation being formed in the squeeze between them. ; publishedVersion