Turkey’s EU accession bid has encouraged political actors in the EU Member States and institutions to consider which kind of organisation the EU is and should be. Opinion is divided between those who support a ‘civic’ identity for the EU, and those who argue that the EU needs a thicker ‘cultural’ identity.
It is seven years since a US led coalition invaded Iraq, deposing Saddam Hussein and becoming involved in a long, costly stabilization operation that is supposedly about to end soon with the withdrawal of US combat units. More than 4,700 coalition troops, 4,385 of them Americans, have died so far in this effort.
Secularism has long been the language of most public servants and many scholars in the Western world, enabling both groups to work and live as though religions were irrelevant to their respective fields. This perspective has meant that religious phenomena have been ignored or reduced to other categories such as civil society, humanitarianism or as part of a definition of “civilization.”
There is a growing critique of the hegemonic discourse on the ‘War on Terror’ against the backdrop of an overwhelming silence about the impacts of the global WOT on the non-Western and particularly the Muslim world. The new critique is based on: the dominance of ‘state-centric’ perspectives; the pre-eminence of ‘problem-solving’ approaches; and largely ahistorical accounts of terrorism.
The concept of security is changing. The critical approaches that have emerged to challenge traditional ones in recent decades have earned significant support. A definitive characteristic that binds these critical security schools is their rejection of realism. In security language, critical approaches agree that the state does not deserve the privilege of being the solitary referent object of security studies.
The role of the European powers was crucial in the making of the Middle East system not only because they were responsible for the incongruence of land partition after the Ottoman Empire and its consequent conflicts, but also because they established very important starting points for many trans-national phenomena by aiming to incorporate the area to the global capitalist system.
This paper will analyse how the concepts in Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society are influencing the War on Terror. Moreover, it will examine their practical enforcement, the way in which they pose serious threats to the international law system and how this contributes to the shaping a new domestic order in those states where they have being applied.
Ultimately for a State, the decision to employ a BDM complex does not stem solely from the desire to improve international stability. It instead comes from a desire to improve its own defensive and/or offensive capabilities. Stability has a severe effect on this, but it is up to the leadership of any such nation state to decide whether the costs that come from a destabilised environment outweigh the potential benefits such a capability could provide, both now and in the future.
Just over a year ago, Obama’s climate negotiator Todd Stern gave an important speech at a U.S. Climate Action Symposium. He’d been on the job for fewer than three weeks, but he nonetheless offered 10 fairly detailed principles that he said would underpin U.S. participation in the Copenhagen process.
This essay is concerned with possible Chinese motives for accepting, responding to, and reciprocating American overtures and relatively friendly diplomatic moves in the early 1970s. It suggests that strategic understandings of motives carry the greatest weight and the more persuasive argument.
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