The Security of Panama and the Canal: Now and for the Future

1993 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 151-172
Author(s):  
Max G. Manwaring

The old certainties of the Cold War, and the conventional attrition-type war implicit in it, have gone. In their place we now have a world of dangerous uncertainty and ambiguity in which old concepts of security are no longer relevant. The present security and future of Panama and the Panama Canal after the year 2000 is a case in point.This article will take a look at the issue of Canal security within the context of the contemporary “new world disorder” and develop the argument for a new approach to deal with current and future challenges to Panamanian and international security interests.The bottom line is this: the security of Panama and the Panama Canal — or any other point of strategic interest, now and for the future — will not depend so much on conventional military strategies as it will depend on international and domestic policies that provide for political stability, economic progress, and social justice.

1973 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Kesselman

The term “political development” originated during the cold war. After World War II, the prevalent attitude in the United States toward the Third World resembled that toward Europe: Unless economic progress and political stability were encouraged by the United States, these areas would turn Communist. Underlying foreign aid was the sober calculation that communism would lose its appeal once men's bellies were full. Robert Packenham reports that when AID officials were asked in the mid-sixties how they viewed development, “one of the most common responses was, in effect, that political development is anti-Communist, pro-American political stability.”


Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.


Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
SANDRA VAN LOCHEM-VAN DER WEL ◽  
HENK VAN LOCHEM

Secretly watching the Russians. Cold War aircraft observation posts on existing buildings During the 1950s a network of aircraft observation post was built in The Netherlands, as a detection/observation system against low-flying hostile aircraft during the Cold War. Preferably, these were placed on highrise buildings. 134 of these 276 observation posts were built on existing buildings, on factories, mills, water towers, monasteries, government buildings and bunkers. Since their decommissioning in 1964-1968, many posts have been demolished. Approximately 37 posts on existing buildings remain, but mostly go unnoticed and many risk demolition in the future. These remaining aircraft observation posts are remarkable relics of our military heritage from the Cold War.


2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Slinko ◽  
Stanislav Bilyuga ◽  
Julia Zinkina ◽  
Andrey Korotayev

In this article, we re-analyze the hypothesis that the relationship between the type of political regime and its political instability forms an inverted U shape. Following this logic, consistent democracies and autocracies are more stable regimes, whereas intermediate regimes (anocracies) display the lowest levels of political stability. We re-test this hypothesis using a data set that has not been previously used for this purpose, finding sufficient evidence to support the hypothesis pertaining to the aforementioned U-shaped relationship. Our analysis is specifically focused on the symmetry of this U shape, whereby our findings suggest that the U-shaped relationship between regime types and sociopolitical destabilization is typically characterized by an asymmetry, with consistently authoritarian regimes being generally less stable than consolidated democracies. We also find that the character of this asymmetry can change with time. In particular, our re-analysis suggests that U-shaped relationship experienced significant changes after the end of the Cold War. Before the end of the Cold War (1946-1991), the asymmetry of inverted U-shaped relationship was much less pronounced—though during this period consistent authoritarian regimes were already less stable than consolidated democracies, this very difference was only marginally significant. In the period that follows the end of the Cold War (1992-2014), this asymmetry underwent a substantial change: Consolidated democracies became significantly more stable, whereas consolidated autocracies became significantly more unstable. As a result, the asymmetry of the U-shaped relationship has become much more pronounced. The article discusses a number of factors that could account for this change.


2019 ◽  
pp. 304-330
Author(s):  
Metodi Hadji-Janev

Many incidents in cyberspace and the response to those incidents by victim states prove that the cyber conflict is a reality. This new conflict is complex and poses serious challenges to national and international security. One way to protect the civilian populace is by deterring potential malicious actors (state and non-state) from exploiting cyberspace in a negative way. Given the changed reality and complexity that gravitates over the cyber conflict classical deterrence that have worked during the Cold War is not promising. The article argues that if the states are about to protect their civilians from the future cyber conflict by deterring potential attacker they need to change the approach to deterrence.


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