Now That the Cold War Is Over, Who Is a Refugee?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Cristina García
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Communist State ◽  
Boat People ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 1 discusses American responses to refugee flows during the transitional period of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Fleeing a communist state had previously maximized one’s chances of admission to the United States, but as early as 1980, policymakers had questioned the logic of assuming that those fleeing communism had more legitimate needs for protection than other refugees. As government officials struggled to define a coherent refugee policy for the post–Cold War era, a wide range of domestic actors also tried to influence policy, advocating and lobbying on behalf of particular populations whose rights they felt had been ignored. The case studies in this chapter—the Soviet refuseniks, the Chinese university students, the Haitian and Cuban boat people—illustrate the changing political landscape both abroad and at home, as well as the importance of advocacy in eliciting responses from the Executive and Legislative branches of government.

The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Cristina Garcia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asylum Policy ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
The Cold War

This book examines refugee and asylum policy in the United States since the end of the Cold War. For over forty years, from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War had provided the ideological lens through which the United States had defined who a refugee was. Cold War concerns about national security and the political, economic, and military threat of communism had shaped the contours of refugee and asylum policy. In the post-Cold War era, the war on terrorism has become the new ideological lens through which the US government interprets who is worthy of admission as a refugee but the emphasis on national security is not the sole determinant of policy. A wide range of geopolitical and domestic interests, and an equally wide range of actors, influence how the United States responds to humanitarian crises abroad, and who the nation prioritizes for admission as refugees and asylees. This book examines these actors and interests, and the challenges of reconciling international humanitarian obligations with domestic concerns for national security. The case studies in each chapter examine the challenges of the post-Cold War era, and the actions taken by governmental and non-governmental actors in response to these challenges.

Worse Than a Monolith

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Burden Sharing ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Coercive Diplomacy ◽  
Regional Conflicts ◽  
Security Relations ◽  
Opposing Camp ◽  
The Cold War

In brute-force struggles for survival, such as the two world wars, disorganization and divisions within an enemy alliance are to one's own advantage. However, most international security politics involve coercive diplomacy and negotiations short of all-out war. This book demonstrates that when states are engaged in coercive diplomacy—combining threats and assurances to influence the behavior of real or potential adversaries—divisions, rivalries, and lack of coordination within the opposing camp often make it more difficult to prevent the onset of regional conflicts, to prevent existing conflicts from escalating, and to negotiate the end to those conflicts promptly. Focusing on relations between the Communist and anti-Communist alliances in Asia during the Cold War, the book explores how internal divisions and lack of cohesion in the two alliances complicated and undercut coercive diplomacy by sending confusing signals about strength, resolve, and intent. In the case of the Communist camp, internal mistrust and rivalries catalyzed the movement's aggressiveness in ways that we would not have expected from a more cohesive movement under Moscow's clear control. Reviewing newly available archival material, the book examines the instability in relations across the Asian Cold War divide, and sheds new light on the Korean and Vietnam wars. While recognizing clear differences between the Cold War and post-Cold War environments, the book investigates how efforts to adjust burden-sharing roles among the United States and its Asian security partners have complicated U.S. security relations with the People's Republic of China since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

1. Theories of US foreign policy

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Offensive Realism ◽  
Defensive Realism ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines some of the competing theories that have been advanced to explain U.S. foreign policy. In trying to explain the foreign policy of the United States, a number of competing theories have been developed by International Relations scholars. Some theories focus on the role of the international system in shaping American foreign policy while others argue that various domestic factors are the driving force. The chapter first considers some of the obstacles to constructing a theory of foreign policy before discussing some of the competing theories of American foreign policy, including defensive realism, offensive realism, liberalism, Marxism, neoclassical realism, and constructivism. The chapter proceeds by reviewing the theoretical debate over the origins of the Cold War and the debate over the most appropriate grand strategy that the United States should follow in the post-Cold War era.

The United States and the Soviet Union

2020 ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
Matthew Kroenig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Otto Von Bismarck ◽  
The Cold War

Otto von Bismarck famously said that “God has special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.” Divine providence may not have hurt, but it was America’s domestic political institutions that transformed a smattering of British colonies in North America into, first, an independent nation and, then, a global superpower with a network of allies and partners spanning six continents. The United States faced off against the Soviet Union for a half century during the Cold War. But Washington possessed the better institutions, and the stress of the competition caused Moscow’s political system to collapse altogether. In the post–Cold War period that followed, Washington deepened and expanded the Pax Americana, and spread unprecedented levels of global peace, prosperity, and freedom. For the first time since Ancient Rome, a single superpower so overawed any potential competitors that great power rivalry itself came to a temporary halt.

Clashes in the Assembly

2000 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Voeten
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
The United States ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Substantive Content ◽  
Single Dimension ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

I apply nominate scaling to analyze a database of Cold War and post–Cold War roll call votes in the United Nations General Assembly. I investigate the dimensionality and stability of global conflict as well as the substantive content of the voting alignments that have replaced the Cold War East-West dimension. I find that post–Cold War conflict in the UN General Assembly is mostly one-dimensional. This single dimension positions countries on a continuum that runs from a group of Western countries at one extreme to a “counterhegemonic” bloc of countries that frequently clashes with the West, and the United States in particular. Levels of democracy and wealth are important independent determinants of the voting behavior of states. The positions of countries along the single dimension are remarkably stable across time, issue area, and issue importance. Except for the Eastern European countries switching sides, they are very similar to the positions on the Cold War East-West dimension. Contrary to expectations, post–Cold War conflict shows little resemblance to Cold War North-South conflict.

US Interventions and Occupations in Latin America

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan McPherson
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
The United States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Good Neighbor ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Cold War

From 1800 to the present, US troops have intervened thousands of times in Latin America and have occupied its countries on dozens of occasions. Interventions were short-term and superficial, while occupations lasted longer and controlled local governments. The causes of these troop landings reflected the United States’ motivations as it expanded from a strong, large republic into first a continental and then an overseas empire at the expense of its smaller, weaker neighbors. Those motivations included colonial land hunger, cultural chauvinism, the exploitation of resources, the search for markets abroad, competition against other great powers, political reformism, global ideological struggle, and the perception that US domestic problems originated in Latin America. US troops undertook almost all these interventions and occupations, although private groups sometimes joined. The major periods were the expansion of the continental republic from 1811 to 1897, the war in Cuba and the apex of occupations (1898–1933), the Good Neighbor years (1934–1953), the Cold War (1954–1990), and the post-Cold War period (1991–2018 and ongoing). Scholars of these events have become increasingly critical and diverse, not only seeing them often as unnecessary brutal failures but also foregrounding extra-military aspects of these episodes, such as economics, race, and gender.

Diplomacy and War

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Weiner ◽  
Paul Sharp
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Order ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Military Diplomacy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Invasion Of Iraq

Scholars acknowledge that there is a close connection between diplomacy and war, but they disagree with regard to the character of this connection—what it is and what it ought to be. In general, diplomacy and war are assumed to be antagonistic and polar opposites. In contrast, the present diplomatic system is founded on the view that state interests may be pursued, international order maintained, and changes effected in it by both diplomacy and war as two faces of a single statecraft. To understand the relationships between diplomacy and war, we must look at the development of the contemporary state system and the evolution of warfare and diplomacy within it. In this context, one important claim is that the foundations of international organizations in general, and the League of Nations in particular, rest on a critique of modern (or “old”) diplomacy. For much of the Cold War, the intellectual currents favored the idea of avoiding nuclear war to gain advantage. In the post-Cold War era, the relationship between diplomacy and war remained essentially the same, with concepts such as “humanitarian intervention” and “military diplomacy” capturing the idea of a new international order. The shocks to the international system caused by events between the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have intensified the paradoxes of the relationship between diplomacy and war.

The new politics of voting alignments in the United Nations General Assembly

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 629-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soo Yeon Kim ◽  
Bruce Russett
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
New Politics ◽  
The North ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
Good Set ◽  
The Cold War

Voting patterns in the United National General Assembly provide an exceptionally good set of evidence for observing issues and alignments of states in international politics. We analyze those patterns in three post-cold war sessions of the General Assembly and compare them with the alignments and issues that characterized sessions during the cold war. We find new groups and alignments (with most of Eastern Europe now voting with rather than against West European positions) and a new prominence of long-term North-South issues as they now relate to questions of redefining “human security” in the post-cold war world. The predominant General Assembly division is between richer and poorer nations. Key correlates of voting with the North are wealth, democracy, and proportionately low levels of trade with the United States.

The United Nations and International Security in the New Millennium

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-541
Author(s):  
W. Andy Knight
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
International Security ◽  
Human Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractThe end of the Cold War opened a window of opportunity for the United Nations to play a greater role in international security than it was allowed to play in the midst of the ideological conflict between the United States and the former Soviet Union. However, the expected "peace dividend" never materialized in the post-Cold War period. Instead, a number of civil conflicts erupted and new threats to security, particularly to human security, emerged. This chapter critically examines the evolution of the UN's role in addressing international security problems since 1945, including global terrorism. It also outlines recent attempts by the world body, through extension of its reach beyond the territorial constraints of sovereignty, to build sustained peace through preventive measures and protect human security globally.

scholarly journals Challenging Empire

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-133
Author(s):  
Amr G. E. Sabet
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Core ◽  
Golden Opportunity

The idea for this book emerged from what the author perceives to be theextraordinary post-cold war circumstances associated with the Americanextremists’ push for empire. Its thesis is simple and straightforward:American unilateralism and militarism have spawned a global social movementagainst such eventualities, giving rise to a new kind of internationalism.The components of this internationalism are threefold: people and socialmovements, governments, and the United Nations (UN). Together, ratheroptimistically or perhaps wishfully, they have come to constitute a “secondsuperpower” capable of challenging this imperial drive (pp. 6 and 257).The book is divided into five chapters. The “Introduction” (chapter 1)presents the thesis and framework of the three-part internationalist perspective.Chapter 2 presents the global social movement as the core componentthat defies war and empire and that exhibits peoples’ power as the foundationof such defiance. The main argument here is that the events of September 11,2001, provided a golden opportunity for the George W. Bush administrationto manipulate and exploit the American people’s fears and shock. Fear,according to Bennis, undermines “not only independence of will, but the verycapacity to think” (p. 31). This was the means by which the neo-conservatives,hijacking state power, were able to carry the American people along,allowing for no serious questioning or opposition. Yet if the United States is ...

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