Informing the Integration Debate with Recent Experience

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Minear
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Recent Experience ◽  
Local Perceptions ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Humanitarian Action ◽  
Political Conditionality ◽  
The Given ◽  
Oriented Research

The overriding challenge faced by policy-makers in the post–Cold War era is not, as many would have us believe, the achievement of integration of humanitarian action into the prevailing politico-military context. It is rather the protection of its independence. The debate, rather than focusing on fitting humanitarian action more snugly into the given political framework, should explore how to ensure the indispensable independence of humanitarian actors from that framework.The experience of the Humanitarianism and War Project, an action-oriented research and publications initiative studying humanitarian activities in post–Cold War conflicts, suggests the essential elements of such independence. They include structural protection for humanitarian action against political conditionality; more sensitivity to local perceptions regarding humanitarian actors and action; tighter discipline within the humanitarian sector by those providing assistance and protection; increased attention to the origins of aid resources and of the personnel administering them; greater participation and ownership by local institutions and leaders in crisis countries; and an agreed overarching political framework that gives higher priority to human security.

Continuity and Change in British Thinking about Nuclear Weapons

1994 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Croft
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Mind Set ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Constant Argument

For almost fifty years there has been constant argument between those who have supported the development and possession of nuclear weapons by Britain and those opposed to those policies. This article argues that there has been a continuity in the arguments made by policy-makers and their critics, both operating within an unchanging series of linked assumptions forming a paradigm or mind-set. This article sets out the character of the assumptions of the orthodox and alternative thinkers, as they are termed in the article, examining their coherence and differences, particularly during the cold war. It concludes by attempting to draw out some implications for the British security policy debate in the post-cold war period.

The PLA and Chinese National Security Policy: Leaderships, Structures, Processes

1996 ◽  
Vol 146 ◽  
pp. 360-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Swaine
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Major Power ◽  
The West ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
Chinese Case ◽  
Internal Change ◽  
Territorial Claims

China's rise as a major power constitutes one of the most significant strategic events of the post-Cold War period. Many policy-makers, strategists and scholars express significant concern over the implications of China's growing military and economic capabilities for the future security environment in Asia and beyond. Such concern derives in part from an anticipation of the systemic security problems that have historically accompanied the emergence of a new power. In the Chinese case, however, these anxieties are greatly compounded by the rapidity of internal change under way in China, the general lack of knowledge about Chinese strategic ambitions, the existence of many unresolved Chinese territorial claims, the intense suspicion and even hostility toward the West harboured by China's leadership, and China's internal political and social instabilities.

scholarly journals Safe areas for the protection of civilians. An overview of existing research and scholarship

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Hering
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Academic Engagement ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Geneva Conventions ◽  
Safe Area ◽  
Angela Merkel

Abstract Safe areas for the protection of civilians remain a possible instrument in the foreign policy-making toolbox. Lately, this was highlighted by calls for a safe area in Syria by German chancellor Angela Merkel and defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. Yet, the subsequent debates demonstrated that many policy-makers, pundits and scholars lack a detailed knowledge about the concept. They further showed that various different perspectives on the idea of safe areas exist. This article therefore provides a comprehensive and inclusive account of the academic engagement with the topic of safe areas. It demonstrates that some arguments focus on the (geo)political dynamics of safe areas, whereas others emphasise the potential to protect civilians. It further presents the legal codification of consent-based safe areas in the Geneva Conventions as well as debates about the legality of enforced, post-Cold War safe area cases. Regarding the research on displacement and safe areas, the majority tends to focus on the containment effects, although some highlight the capacity of safe areas as an alternative to flight. Overall, however, the article concludes that recent and conceptual academic engagement with safe areas remains rare and that a safe area perspective is missing in relevant current empirical cases. More research that contributes to the conceptual development of safe areas or to the assessment of current empirical examples, for instance in South Sudan, is necessary.

Shape-shifting NATO: humanitarian action and the Kosovo refugee crisis

2002 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jef Huysmans
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
European Security ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Additional Element ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Internally Displaced ◽  
Humanitarian Action ◽  
Humanitarian Agency ◽  
The Military

The article deals with NATO's intervention in Kosovo. Instead of focusing on the military and diplomatic interventions, the article looks at how NATO developed a humanitarian interest in providing assistance and protection to the Kosovo Albanian refugees. In the name of the refugees—and to a lesser extent, of internally displaced persons—NATO entered a humanitarian field and was partly transfigured into a humanitarian agency during the crisis in Kosovo. The political significance of NATO's humanitarianism was that its reputation for competence and its image of respectability and honour depended to an extent on how well it supported the international assistance to the Kosovo Albanians. The stakes were not limited to the immediate Kosovo context, however. The symbolic struggle for reputation and honour resonated directly in the political struggle for the conservation and transformation of the European security complex. The success of the humanitarian operation became an additional element of demonstrating the value of military capital for acquiring political authority in the definition and management of security problems in post-Cold War Europe.

OFIRA SELIKTAR, Failing the Crystal Ball Test: The Carter Administration and the Fundamentalist Revolution in Iran (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000). Pp. 266. $65.00 cloth.

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 648-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Goode
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Crystal Ball ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Future Policy ◽  
Extensive List ◽  
Ball Test

In Failing the Crystal Ball Test, Ofira Seliktar, a political scientist at Gratz College, seeks to account for the “policy and intelligence debacle” (p. x) associated with the pre-eminent crisis of the Carter years. It is her hope that by understanding what went wrong with policy toward Iran, future policy-makers will be able to reduce the risk of similar disasters elsewhere in the relatively unstable conditions of the post-Cold War world. To achieve her objective, she focuses on the three-year period from the beginning of 1977 to the seizure of the United States embassy in November 1979. Seliktar, whose previous work has centered on Israel, bases her study on the multi-volume series of American documents seized at the embassy and published in Iran during the 1980s. These materials cluster around the last several years of U.S.–Iranian relations prior to the takeover of the compound. In addition, she has relied on an extensive list of secondary works in English.

Tinkering with Failure (1991–2001)

Special Duty ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 134-161
Author(s):  
Richard J. Samuels
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Environment And Trade ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter provides a straightforward account of Japan's meek surrender to a decade of tentative, groping, half-measure post-Cold War intelligence reform. Like intelligence communities elsewhere, the Japanese intelligence community did not anticipate the end of the Cold War. The “East” and “West” were realigning and even finding common ground—and triumphalism reigned in the “free world.” Since the United States was now by default or by design the world's overwhelming military power, some Japanese policy makers felt less urgency to develop a new, comprehensive intelligence formula to cope with this new world order. The shift in the strategic environment and trade frictions with the United States gave greater purpose to the Japanese's determination to do more and better on their own, and several highly conspicuous intelligence failures would provide the necessary political impetus for change. Experimentation was possible and it was time for tinkering.

Failing States and Conflict

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Marten
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Terrorist Groups ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Global Operations ◽  
Failing States ◽  
Policy Problems

As a response to the new policy problems facing the international community after the end of the Cold War, the security studies literature on weak and failing states and their relationship to various forms of conflict emerged. Two sets of events caused policy makers to focus on state weakness as a threat to international security. The first wave of research was generated by the new United Nations (UN)-sponsored peace operations of the post-Cold War era. The second overlapping wave of research followed the al-Qaeda attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, and the resulting perception that non-state terrorist groups were likely to use failed or failing states as their base of global operations. There has been no agreement among researchers about how to define the concept or varieties of state failure. As such, it has not coalesced into something that could truly be called a scholarly research program. Nevertheless, a vibrant literature has emerged on the political economy of “ungoverned territories.” Warlords are actors who use a combination of force, charisma, and patronage to control small slices of territory inside of what is purportedly a sovereign state. They usually profit from organized criminal activities that threaten both the peace and the legal institutions of the state, but can be used to help weak states to survive and reconstitute themselves in wartime. Meanwhile, scholars argue whether states should necessarily be reconstructed after they fail, given that many failed states were unnatural and authoritarian postcolonial creations.

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