Suchergebnisse

Chapter 1: Introduction and Analytic Framework -- Part I: War on Paper -- Chapter 2: Ethics in Governance: Pandemic Response as a Vital Interest -- Chapter 3: The Ethics of Response to Plague on Distant Shores -- Chapter 4: The Ethics of Practices in Pandemic Response -- Part II: Friction -- Chapter 5: The Need/Failure to Prepare and Prevent -- Chapter 6: The Need/Failure to Anticipate and Pre-empt -- Chapter 7: The Need/Failure to React, Adequately Prioritise and Persevere -- Chapter 8: The Need/Failure to Honestly Account and Take Responsibility -- Chapter 9: Lessons, Recommendations, Conclusion.

This edited volume empirically maps and theorises NATO-ISAF's contribution to peacebuilding and reconstruction in Afghanistan. The book provides a contextual framework of the NATO participation in Afghanistan; it offers an outline of the security situation in Afghanistan and discusses geopolitical, historical, and military factors that are related to it. It argues that a general underlying factor is that although the stated goals of the Afghanistan mission may be similarly formulated across the ISAF coalition, that are a great number of differences in the nature of coalition members' political calculations, and share of the burden, and that this induces a dynamic of alliance politics that state actors attempt to either mitigate, navigate, or exploit - depending on their interests and views. The book asks why there are differences in countries' share of the burden; how they manifest in different approaches; and how the actual performance of different members of the coalition ought to be assessed. It argues that understanding this offers clues as to what does not work in current state-building efforts, beyond individual countries' experiences and the more general critique of statebuilding philosophy and practice. This book answers key questions through a series of case studies which together form a comparative study of national contributions to the multilateral mission in Afghanistan. In so doing, it provides a uniquely sensitive analysis that can help explain coalition contributions from various countries. It will be of great interest to students of Afghanistan, Asian politics, peacebuilding, statebuilding, war and conflict studies, IR and Security Studies generally.

Hydropolitics, established as the "study of conflict and cooperation between states over (predominantly riverine) water resources that transcend international borders" (Elhance, 1999: 3), is a discourse that often serves to empower states – as the owners of waters – above other actors. Departing from this point, and taking a critical perspective on the subject, combined with an interest in the spatial aspects and spatial dynamics of security issues, we shed light on a 'virtual vertical' aspect of riverine hydropolitics. Hydropolitics is often framed, through a binary and distorted representation of empirical reality, as upstream-downstream state relations. In this article we challenge the presumed straightforward validity of this upstream-downstream framework in universal terms as well as in a case study of Hungary, to draw attention to the arbitrary tendency to construct downstream identities as a feature of hydropolitical security complexes (HSCs). We find that whether or not this is the motive behind the desire to project a downstream identity, per implication of its discursive enactment, governments as well as societies may be insufficiently sensitive to their 'upstream' responsibilities arising from the relativity of what is, respectively, upstream and downstream along a river.

The article focuses on Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries' experiences related to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, three non-European theatres of Western military operations, in predominantly Muslim lands, in the decade between 2001 and 2011. CEE countries readily became involved in two of these foreign missions (Afghanistan and Iraq) because of their deep ties to Western politico-economic structures, without direct security interests compelling them to do so, but not without normative convictions regarding what were seen by them as virtues of the two missions. In Libya, however, they were reluctant to join the Western intervention. In light of this, the article is interested in examining how political elites within the region relate to the generally constrained security policy agency that they have. A key argument advanced is that such agency may be located in how external hegemony is mediated in elite discourses of threat and legitimacy construction. This as well as the three case studies outlined in the article show that the seeming changes in CEE countries' behaviour in fact boil down to a simple set of rules guiding their behaviour. Having identified this "algorithm" as an implicit pattern of CEE foreign policy behaviour, originating in the intra-alliance security dilemma within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the article formulates its conclusions about the alliance policy of these countries largely within a neorealist framework.