Environmental Security: Challenges for the United States and Russia

Author(s):  
Barbara Jancar-Webster ◽  
Vassily I. Sokolov
Author(s):  
Sanjay Pulipaka ◽  
Libni Garg

The international order today is characterised by power shift and increasing multipolarity. Countries such as India and Vietnam are working to consolidate the evolving multipolarity in the Indo-Pacific. The article maps the convergences in the Indian and Vietnamese foreign policy strategies and in their approaches to the Indo-Pacific. Both countries confront similar security challenges, such as creeping territorial aggression. Further, India and Vietnam are collaborating with the United States and Japan to maintain a favourable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. While Delhi and Hanoi agree on the need to reform the United Nations, there is still some distance to travel to find a common position on regional economic architectures. The India–Vietnam partnership demonstrates that nation-states will seek to define the structure of the international order and in this instance by increasing the intensity of multipolarity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Kim Cragin

This article explores the security challenges posed by foreign fighter returnees. It argues that—contrary to popular belief—most foreign fighters do not die on battlefields or travel from conflict to conflict. They return home. This means that law enforcement, intelligence, and other security officials should expect unprecedented numbers of returnees from Syria and Iraq should a ceasefire hold. The challenge posed by returnees is threefold: Recidivism rates are uncertain, law enforcement cannot manage the numbers of prospective returnees alone, and returnees from non-Western countries also pose a threat to the United States. Findings suggest that a global architecture should be put in place to mitigate the threats from foreign fighter returnees.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Wallis ◽  
Anna Powles

Abstract One of President Joseph Biden's foreign policy priorities is to ‘renew’ and ‘strengthen’ the United States' alliances, as they were perceived to have been ‘undermined’ during the Trump administration, which regularly expressed concern that allies were free-riding on the United States' military capability. Yet the broad range of threats states face in the contemporary context suggests that security assistance from allies no longer only—or even primarily—comes in the form of military capability. We consider whether there is a need to rethink understandings of how alliance relationships are managed, particularly how the goals—or strategic burdens—of alliances are understood, how allies contribute to those burdens, and how influence is exercised within alliances. We do this by analysing how the United States–Australia and Australia–New Zealand alliances operate in the Pacific islands. Our focus on the Pacific islands reflects the United States' perception that the region plays a ‘critical’ role in helping to ‘preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific region’. We conclude that these understandings need to be rethought, particularly in the Pacific islands, where meeting non-traditional security challenges such as economic, social and environmental issues, is important to advancing the United States, Australia and New Zealand's shared strategic goal of remaining the region's primary security partners and ensuring that no power hostile to their interests establishes a strategic foothold.


1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Claudia Sadowski-Smith

In April 1999, the simultaneous involvement of the United States in three apparently unrelated events illustrated important shifts in geopolitical realities. A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which prefigured dramatic geopolitical changes in the countries of the former “Evil Empire,” a US-dominated NATO not only bombed Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, but also continued its air strikes against Iraq. In the same month, NATO also approved a new Strategic Concept that identified the “uncontrolled movement of large numbers of people” as ample justification for military “crisis intervention” and thus officially recognized international migration and refugee flows as a new class of security challenges.


Author(s):  
Sebastian Schmidt

In the years around the Second World War, policymakers in the United States and Western Europe faced unique security challenges occasioned by the development of new technologies and the emergence of transnational ideological conflict. In coming to terms with these challenges, they developed the historically novel practice in which a state might maintain a long-term, peacetime military presence on the territory of another sovereign state without the subjugation of the latter. Such basing arrangements between substantive equals were previously unthinkable: under the inherited understanding of sovereignty, in which there was a tight linkage between military presence and territorial authority, such military presences could be understood only in terms of occupation or annexation. These “sovereign basing” practices, as I call them, are now central to many aspects of contemporary security politics. This book applies concepts derived from pragmatist thought to a historical study of the relations between the United States and its wartime allies to explain the origin of this phenomenon. A pragmatist lens draws attention to how the actors involved creatively recombined inherited practices in response to changes in the material and social context of action and thereby transformed the practice of sovereignty. The tools offered by pragmatism provide needed analytical leverage over the emergence of novelty and offer valuable insight into the dynamics of stability and change. The practice of sovereign basing, bound up as it is now with the constitution of interests and understanding of how states exercise power, is likely a durable feature of international politics.


2018 ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Mediel Hove ◽  

This article examines the origins of the ‘Islamic State’ or the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham or Levant (ISIS) in light of the contemporary political and security challenges posed by its diffusion of Islamic radicalism. The Arab Spring in 2011 ignited instability in Syria providing an operational base for the terrorist group to pursue its once abandoned Islamic state idea. Its growth and expansion has hitherto proved to be a threat not only to the Middle East but to international security given its thrust on world domination. It concludes that the United States of America’s activities in the Middle East were largely responsible for the rise of the Islamic State.


Author(s):  
Y. V. Sai Bharadwaj ◽  
Sai Bhageerath Y. V ◽  
Y.V.S.S.S.V. Prasada Rao

Cybercrime continues to surge without a slowdown in sight. The cyber security threat continues to worsen. In the first half of 2018, the number of cyber breaches soared over 140% from a year earlier, leading to 33 billion compromised data records worldwide. Cyber Security news such as Marriott hack in Nov 2018 is dominating headlines and becoming a serious headache for business leaders. Malicious outsiders sparked more than half of the 944 breaches and accounted for roughly 80% of stolen, compromised or lost records. Identity theft continues to lead data breach types, but financial access incidents are escalating in severity as well. The United States continues to be the favorite target, and data breaches at major US enterprises continue to grab the headlines. In 2018, the most notable breaches have occurred at Adidas, FedEx, Jason’s Deli, Macy’s, Under Armour, Nordstrom’s and the most popular Facebook. [1].


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-304
Author(s):  
Frederick Kliem

The rise of and increasing assertiveness by China presents a significant structural challenge in the Indo-Pacific region (IPR). In an effort to retain the status quo, a number of states have signed-up to the ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP). In support of FOIP, operational mechanisms have emerged—most importantly the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). The United States, Japan, Australia and India have come together in this informal format to exchange views on current security challenges and coordinate their strategic approaches. This article analyses both form and function of Quad and argues that both the diplomatic and military arrangements between Quad members are a direct response to ever-increasing Chinese assertiveness. Alongside a detailed empirical analysis of Quad, this paper addresses the question why Quad 2.0 will thrive although previous attempts at security networks failed. Balance of threat theory will illuminate why informal quasi-alliances vis-à-vis China are going to be the structural new normal for the IPR.


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