8. Looking Outward: Beyond the National Security State

2009 ◽  
pp. 247-288
Author(s):  
María Cristina García

In response to the terrorist attacks of 1993 and 2001, the Clinton and Bush administrations restructured the immigration bureaucracy, placed it within the new Department of Homeland Security, and tried to convey to Americans a greater sense of safety. Refugees, especially those from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, suffered the consequences of the new national security state policies, and found it increasingly difficult to find refuge in the United States. In the post-9/11 era, refugee advocates became even more important to the admission of refugees, reminding Americans of their humanitarian obligations, especially to those refugees who came from areas of the world where US foreign policy had played a role in displacing populations.


2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-125
Author(s):  
John Whittier Treat

I begin my rejoinder to Timothy Brook and Michael Shin by reiterating the important question with which Brook ends his piece. “[W]hen Hamid Karzai's government falls in Afghanistan, or Nouri al-Maliki's does in Iraq, who then will be the nation's heroes and who the collaborators?” Questions such as this and other present-day conundrums (including the choices I make living in a national security state) were certainly on my mind when I began thinking about collaboration during the Second World War and particularly within the Japanese empire. The line between then and now is direct and short for me. Timothy Brook himself has been the target of an internet smear campaign assailing his work on Chinese collaboration for purportedly preparing an alibi for American mischief in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paramount among my own thoughts was always: what would I do, were I faced with the choices a Yi Kwang-su, a Liang Hongzhi or a Wang Jingwei was? It seems an irresistible reflex to me that we place ourselves in the position of those in the past who wagered and lost, and rehearse their calculations as our own: judgment of their decisions is as inevitable as it is necessary. The question is not if we will judge—to refuse risks our claims to moral agency—it is how. Timothy Brook, whether he once declined or now hesitates, indeed does make ethical judgments (he is on the record, for example, against advocating “collaboration as a morally positive or politically advisable course” [2008]), and indeed he should. That we have not come to similar conclusions only points to our missing consensus on a moral calculus, and not to the lack of an imperative to possess one.


Author(s):  
Benedict E. DeDominicis

Nuclear powers battle indirectly through competitive interference within the political systems of third actors in addition to targeting not only each other, but also their own national public opinion. Postwar global human rights norms developed to include national self-determination for all. Covert intervention became politically preferable domestically to avoid negative domestic political reactions to perceived imperialism. Covert intervention decreases political resistance and costs to the intervenor. The nature of social media content distribution makes propaganda and disinformation distribution very extensive at relatively very low cost. These trends and advantages furthered the stress on covert intervention and the formation of national security bureaucracies for engaging in it. Russian state agency internet-based covert intervention via social media in the 2016 US national elections demonstrated that the US is part of the politically globalizing postmodern world that it helped create after 1945. The surveillance capabilities of the national security state will be strengthened.


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