The Arctic

Author(s):  
Klaus Dodds ◽  
Mark Nuttall

As the threat of global climate change becomes a reality, many look to the Arctic Ocean to predict coming environmental phenomena. There, the consequences of Earth's warming trend are most immediately observable in the multi-year and perennial ice that has begun to melt, which threatens ice-dependent microorganisms and, eventually, will disrupt all of Arctic life. In The Arctic: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Klaus Dodds and Mark Nuttall offer a concise introduction to the circumpolar North, focusing on its peoples, environment, resource development, conservation, and politics to provide critical information about how changes there can and will affect our entire globe and all of its inhabitants. Dodds and Nuttall shed light on how the Arctic's importance has grown over time, the region's role during the Cold War, indigenous communities and their history, and the past and future of the Arctic's governance, among other crucial topics. The Arctic is an essential primer for those seeking information about one of the most important regions in the world today.

Born in 1945, the United Nations (UN) came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book's claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume includes chapters on the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states.


Author(s):  
Marc Trachtenberg

What makes for war or for a stable international system? Are there general principles that should govern foreign policy? This book explores how historical work can throw light on these questions. The essays in this book deal with specific problems—with such matters as nuclear strategy and U.S.–European relations. But the book's main goal is to show how in practice a certain type of scholarly work can be done. The book demonstrates how, in studying international politics, the conceptual and empirical sides of the analysis can be made to connect with each other, and how historical, theoretical, and even policy issues can be tied together in an intellectually respectable way. These essays address a wide variety of topics, from theoretical and policy issues, such as the question of preventive war and the problem of international order, to more historical subjects—for example, American policy on Eastern Europe in 1945 and Franco-American relations during the Nixon–Pompidou period. But in each case, the aim is to show how a theoretical perspective can be brought to bear on the analysis of historical issues, and how historical analysis can shed light on basic conceptual problems.


Author(s):  
Moeed Yusuf

This book is the first to theorize third party mediation in crises between regional nuclear powers. Its relevance flows from two of the most significant international developments since the end of the Cold War: the emergence of regional nuclear rivalries; and the shift from the Cold War’s bipolar context to today’s unipolar international setting. Moving away from the traditional bilateral deterrence models, the book conceptualizes crisis behavior as “brokered bargaining”: a three-way bargaining framework where the regional rivals and the ‘third party’ seek to influence each other to behave in line with their crisis objectives and in so doing, affect each other’s crisis behavior. The book tests brokered bargaining theory by examining U.S.-led crisis management in South Asia, analyzing three major crises between India and Pakistan: the Kargil conflict, 1999; the 2001-02 nuclear standoff; and the Mumbai crisis, 2008. The case studies find strong evidence of behavior predicted by the brokered bargaining framework. They also shed light on several risks of misperceptions and inadvertence due to the challenges inherent in signaling to multiple audiences simultaneously. Traditional explanations rooted in bilateral deterrence models do not account for these, leaving a void with serious practical consequences, which the introduction of brokered bargaining seeks to fill. The book’s findings also offer lessons for crises on the Korean peninsula, between China and India, and between potential nuclear rivals in the Middle East.


Author(s):  
Alex J. Bellamy

Until recently, East Asia was a boiling pot of massacre and blood-letting. Yet, almost unnoticed by the wider world, it has achieved relative peace over the past three decades.1 At the height of the Cold War, East Asia accounted for around 80 percent of the world’s mass atrocities. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, it accounted for less than 5 percent....


Author(s):  
Patricia Pelley

This chapter demonstrates how the process of decolonization and the ensuing separation of Vietnam into a northern and southern state as part of the Cold War in Asia led to different types of history-writing. In both Vietnamese regimes, the writing of history had to serve the state, and in both countries historians emphasized its political function. Whereas North Vietnam located itself in an East Asian and Marxist context, historians of South Vietnam positioned it within a Southeast Asian setting and took a determinedly anti-communist position. After 1986—over a decade after reunification—with past tensions now relaxed, the past could be revaluated more openly under a reformist Vietnamese government that now also permitted much greater interaction with foreign historians.


MRS Bulletin ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 340-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siegfried S. Hecker

Raj et al. describe the promise of nuclear energy as a sustainable, affordable, and carbon-free source available this century on a scale that can help meet the world's growing need for energy and help slow the pace of global climate change. However, the factor of millions gain in energy release from nuclear fssion compared to all conventional energy sources that tap the energy of electrons (Figure 1) has also been used to create explosives of unprecedented lethality and, hence, poses a serious challenge to the expansion of nuclear energy worldwide. Although the end of the cold war has eliminated the threat of annihilating humanity, the likelihood of a devastating nuclear attack has increased as more nations, subnational groups, and terrorists seek to acquire nuclear weapons.


2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiyoung Song

AbstractFor the past decade, the author has examined North Korean primary public documents and concludes that there have been changes of identities and ideas in the public discourse of human rights in the DPRK: from strong post-colonialism to Marxism-Leninism, from there to the creation of Juche as the state ideology and finally 'our style' socialism. This paper explains the background to Kim Jong Il's 'our style' human rights in North Korea: his broader framework, 'our style' socialism, with its two supporting ideational mechanisms, named 'virtuous politics' and 'military-first politics'. It analyses how some of these characteristics have disappeared while others have been reinforced over time. Marxism has significantly withered away since the end of the Cold War, and communism was finally deleted from the latest 2009 amended Socialist Constitution, whereas the concept of sovereignty has been strengthened and the language of duties has been actively employed by the authority almost as a relapse to the feudal Confucian tradition. The paper also includes some first-hand accounts from North Korean defectors interviewed in South Korea in October–December 2008. They show the perception of ordinary North Koreans on the ideas of human rights.


Author(s):  
O. V. Aleksandrov

This article is devoted to a problem of security of the Arctic region. The author portrays the contemporary state of the Arctic region, indicates changes which happened in the region after the end of "the cold war", analyzes the role which regional and non-regional institutions can play in the security protection of the Arctic, and also focuses attention on the Russian approach to a problem of security of the Arctic.


2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 531-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell A. Orenstein

Europe is again a divided continent. When it comes to governance, political economy, or values, two contrasting poles have emerged: one Western, liberal, and democratic, another Eastern, statist, and autocratic. The dividing line between them has become ever sharper, threatening to separate Europe into two distinct worlds. This new divide in Europe arises from a clash between two geopolitical concepts for the continent: One is the Western project of a “Europe whole and free,” an enlarging zone of economic cooperation, political interdependency, and democratic values. The other is the Russian project of a “Eurasian Union” to rival the European Union. This article shows how these two sides of Europe have grown further apart in their conceptions of the European space, their values, governance, and economic models. It explores the reasons for the belated Western responses to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s program to divide Europe. The Russo-Georgian war was a turning point, but the West took a long time to recognize the full implications of Putin’s policy. The current confrontation between Russia and the West is not exactly like the Cold War. Russia’s position is weaker. And the battle will be fought out primarily with economic instruments. However, it is clear that this conflict places Central and Eastern Europe back on the front lines of a divided Europe, raising any number of demons from the past.


Author(s):  
Andrea Mariuzzo

This chapter explains the importance of the values of freedom and democracy in the Cold War struggle between Italian Communists and anti-Communists. As soon as Cold War tensions broke down the ‘national unity’ of anti-fascist forces, both fronts claimed to be the exclusive representatives of ‘true’ democracy, and compared their competitor with the defeated fascist enemy. The Socialist-Communist alliance acquired the programme of ‘progressive’ (or ‘people’s’) democracy inspired by the experiments in Central-Eastern Europe, and made it the base for its opposition to the supposed Christian-Democratic ‘restoration’ of a new ‘reactionary clerical fascism’, along with the defense of the guarantees for parliamentary opposition established by the republican Constitution of 1948. The anti-Communist front, on its side, found strong unifying motifs in the description of Soviet dictatorship and the ‘sovietization’ of the countries occupied by the Red Army filtered beyond the Iron Curtain, and in their comparison with ‘totalitarian’ experiences lived by Italians in the past years.


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