On September 16, 2007, the issue of private military firms exploded out of the dry confines of academic debate and into the public consciousness as bright, bloody pictures blanketed the newspapers and television networks that had long ignored the subject. Seventeen Iraqis had been violently killed and more than twenty others wounded while they went about their business in Nisour Square, in the heart of Baghdad’s once fashionable Mansour District.
Fundamental problems, both structural and political, continue to characterise the EU-NATO relationship as one of ‘contending coalitions’. Yet, recent shifts in the attitudes of major actors coupled with success in simultaneous operations suggest there is potential for a ‘strategic partnership’ to emerge.
This paper will show that the implementation of ballistic missile defence systems is a threat to international peace and security. It will examine of the concept of ballistic missile defence, the cases for and against its implementation and the current realities that are of consideration and its role in international peace and security.
This essay determines the effect of National Missile Defence (NMD) is primarily destabilising. However this has to be put in the wider context of relations between the US, China and Russia – for the destabilising effect of NMD is very much characterised by how it is used and what kind of policy it is a part of.
This first introduces nuclear deterrence during the Cold War before considering nuclear proliferation and nuclear deterrence more broadly. It then examines state methods of responding to transnational terrorism, and finally explores further issues in contemporary international security challenging the centrality of deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age.
Terrorism in the Islamic Maghreb (lit. “the West”) has been given relatively little attention in the post-9/11 era, in spite of a new journalistic and academic obsession with terrorism spanning nearly a decade. Terrorism in North Africa has been relegated to secondary importance, overshadowed by terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Occupied Territories. Terror in the Maghreb is nonetheless on the rise, and has been shown to have intimate links with violence in other regions of the Islamic world such as Iraq.
Peace processes are very often lengthy and difficult, many cease-fires negotiated to end civil wars often result in a return to violence, sometimes worse than before. This essay will examine the role of those actors who ‘actively seek to hinder, delay, or undermine conflict settlement’ for a range of reasons and through a variety of methods.
There was never sufficient political will for an independent European security identity to be pursued in the early years of the Cold War. European states actively put their trust in the United States to act as guarantor for the continent.
The subject of this essay asks how the issue of nuclear non-use lends itself to constructivist understandings, namely to the interpretation of ongoing processes of social interaction determined by shared ideas.
In recent years, the United States has been quietly increasing its presence in West Africa with a variety of declared humanitarian interests. Discussion as to the ‘true’ motivations vary, from the need to shore up its role as global hegemon in the face of Chinese advances, to attempts to neutralise the territory as a base camp or staging ground for terrorists, to the need for new desire for US goods. The most pragmatic of the ‘true’ motivations offered is the need to secure oil supplies.
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