Suchergebnisse

US-led security architectures in the Asia-Pacific and Europe are experiencing pressure due to ongoing geostrategic transformation in these regions, most notably the rapid expansion of China's power, North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship and Russia's renewed aggressive adventurism. These readjustments have often been examined through the prism of changing balance of power between the US-led liberal international forces and revisionist powers aiming to alter the international order. Going beyond this analysis in the literature, this article sheds lights on the ways in which the USA has attempted and is attempting to reshape US-led alliances in the Asia-Pacific and Europe. The article finds that the US-led alliance systems and security partnerships will continue to evolve divergently due both to their different path-dependent identities and the different types of challenges they face regionally.

This article examines the patterns in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (North Korea's) use of hostile rhetoric in its internationally-directed messaging. The article first places North Korea's belligerent rhetoric in the context of that country's capacity to threaten the US and its Northeast Asian allies; indeed many analysts worry that Pyongyang's rhetoric represents a conflict escalation risk or even a casus belli. Following this, the article discusses the common explanations – irrationality/incompetence, lack of audience costs, inter alia – for why the North Korean regime employs such hostile rhetoric, and finds these explanations wrong or misleading. The main analysis section describes the results of a study of 10 years of English-language propaganda published by the KCNA (North Korea's state news agency). A multiple regression model is used to test the relationship between North Korea's hostile rhetoric and a set of independent variables. The statistical tests indicate a mixed correlation of North Korean rhetoric to the independent variables. One major finding is that there is no correlation between hostile North Korean rhetoric and the country's kinetic provocations. The conclusion discusses the role that North Korea's rhetoric plays within the country's larger adversarial relationship to the US, South Korea, and Japan. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

In this paper, I discuss EU and member state externalization of the handling of non-EU, irregular migration flows. Following a historical and theoretical Introduction, I address in section 'European Reactions to the Migration Flows Following the Arab Spring' the migration consequences of the 2011 North Africa revolutions, focusing particularly on how they provoked an EU migration policy crisis. Then, I show in section 'Migration Policy Development in the EU: Fortress Europe or Strategic Incoherence?' how this was an outcome of the ineffectualness and strategic incoherence of EU immigration policy. This is ironic because the EU is criticized-incorrectly, I claim-for having developed a well-oiled non-entree regime that skirts human/immigrant rights obligations by externalizing interdiction, detention, and processing of irregular migrants to countries with lower detention standards and higher human rights abuse rates. In section 'The Member States' Role in the Externalization of European Migration Policy', I demonstrate that when such externalization policies are enacted, they are less due to EU action and more a function of member state decisions. I show that EU periphery member states are responsible for the most problematic policies partially because constraints on EU-level policy making incentivize these member states to erect 'Fortress Europe' through their own devices. Adapted from the source document.

In this article, I discuss what motivated reasoning research tells us about the prospects for deliberative democracy. In section I, I introduce the results of several political psychology studies examining the problematic affective and cognitive processing of political information by individuals in nondeliberative, experimental environments. This is useful because these studies are often neglected in political philosophy literature. Section II has three stages. First, I sketch how the study results from section I question the practical viability of deliberative democracy. Second, I briefly present the results of three empirical studies of political deliberation that can be interpreted to counter the findings of the studies in section I. Third, I show why this is a misinterpretation and that the study results from section I mean that it is implausible that sites of political deliberation would naturally emerge from the wide public sphere and coalesce into institutionalized forms of the practice such that deliberative democracy can satisfy its raison d'être. Finally, in section III, I conclude that viable conceptions of deliberative democracy should be limited to narrower aims.