Reconciling Realism: DPRK-ROK Co-operation and IR Implications
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.
European Powers and the Creation of the Middle Eastern State System
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.
World Risk Society and the Response to Terrorism
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.
Ballistic Missile Defence in the 21st Century
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.
Why was China Receptive to American Overtures during the Early 1970s?
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.
The Thorny Triangle: Cyber Conflict, Business and the Sino-American relationship in the Global System
The China-Google cyberconflict adds to the debate on the position of China in the world system, & creates insecurities about the ambitions, capabilities and hidden desires of the ‘next hegemon’. It brings together in one discussion a complex matrix of debates: global politics and world-system theorizing, global political economy and many more.
Europe: ‘What Kind of Thing Are You’?
This essay suggests that ‘Europe’ cannot be primarily identified in terms of shared histories, cultures, or even geographies. Consequently, attempts to define the EU supranational paradigm as a teleological institution have failed, no European grand narrative of ‘unity in history’ (or culture, or religion) exists, nor can it exist.
Capitalism and the Useful Nation State
Not so long ago, it was fashionable among apologists and many other commentators on contemporary capitalism to refer to the nation state as passé. Globalization of large corporations was enshrined as a mechanism enhancing efficiency far beyond what could be achieved within national boundaries. Not surprisingly these rosy assessments of capitalism’s prospects glossed over the problem of its inherent instability.
Threat Morphing in Cyberspace
Much has been written about cybercrime, cyberterrorism and cyberwarfare, but very little has been written about how, and why, these evolving threat categories differ from their real-world analogues. This is unfortunate, because the differences between the threat categories mean that the laws and strategies devised to deal with real-world threats are often ineffectual in dealing with cyber-mediated threats.
Why do Big Nations Lose Small Wars?
War, like football- two games that are commonly known yet rarely understood. Two games, too often reduced to playing rather than winning, scoring goals rather than attaining them. Precisely because football is so well-established and the game “commonly understood”, it is crucially relevant in understanding small wars (a match between professionals and amateurs)
