Nuclear Terrorism: Actor-based Threat Assessment

The assumption that policies reducing the proliferation of fissile materials will automatically reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism is fallacious. Even if moderately successful, anti-proliferation initiatives have a limited impact on the illegal flow of nuclear materials and are not likely to prevent the acquisition of nuclear materials by non-state actors. Current policies focus on the containment of fissile materials rather than on non-state-actors that may wish to acquire them. Concentrating principally on management, accounting, storage and transfer procedures, policy-makers seem to ignore the fact that the primary threat of nuclear terrorism stems not from the availability of the materials but from the potential willingness of some groups to acquire them. This article attempts to shift the focus of discussion from state-centric models of analysis to a threat or actor-based model of analysis. In doing so, the article seeks to identify risk factors, which in combination may indicate a willingness by non-state actors to acquire nuclear weapons. In addition it hopes to provide the basis for more effective threat assessments.     

The use of intelligence by insurgent groups: the North Vietnamese in the Second Indochina War as a case study

The need to define intelligence is understandable because the secrecy surrounding it can almost make it appear too amorphous to study. In most definitions, the authors not only attempt to define what intelligence is but also who does it. Until recently the focus has been on the state with occasional focus on sub-state actors such as law enforcement agencies. After 9/11 there was a shift from the study of inter-state intelligence to the use of intelligence against non-state actors such as Al Qaeda. The literature still treated these non-state actors as something to be acted upon rather than intelligence actors in their own right. By examining the North Vietnamese use of intelligence during the Second Indochina War this article takes a step to redress that oversight. This article will discuss the North Vietnamese use of intelligence in the context of definitions of intelligence and intelligence actors and will use John Gentry’s proposed model of violent non-state actor intelligence as its analytical framework.     

Counter-Subversion in Early Cold War Britain: The Official Committee on Communism (Home), the Information Research Department,and ‘State-Private Networks’

This article applies the concepts of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘state-private networks’ to early Cold War Britain to analyze the aims and methods of governmental and non-governmental counter-subversion and propaganda in the ‘Cultural Cold War’. Using recently declassified and underutilized files, the article explores the roles of the Official Committee on Communism (Home) and, more particularly, the Foreign Office Information Research Department. The Attlee and Churchill administrations of the late 1940s and early 1950s increasingly perceived the primary non-military threat of communism to Britain as part of Soviet-inspired transnational subversion of western European societies. This created a growing impetus for a symmetrical, transnational response through both domestic and foreign clandestine ‘indoctrination’ campaigns operating via influential non-state British institutions. Despite constitutional concerns still relevant today, in 1951 ministers endorsed the domestic component of this response as a fully-fledged strategy that would encourage greater state intervention in British society in the Cold War struggle for both liberty and security.     

当前非公经济发展面临的六个转折点

当前非公经济面临六大转折点:二次创业;新旧经营模式转换;人员新老更替;参与世界经济循环;经营竞争升级;增长模式转变。完成六大转折,对非公经济乃至我国经济的健康发展均有重要意义。     

Social Policy by Other Means from a Comparative Historical Perspective Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Belgium (1800 ‒1920)

ABSTRACT

While social policies in the past are “by other means” if compared to traditional welfare states, historians have successfully established that they were much more conventional in their own time. Moreover, welfare states are historically grown constructs often still containing many pre-existing elements of precisely such social policies by other means, for example non-state provision. Belgium is an excellent example. Historically both nineteenth-century poor relief and early twentieth-century social insurance were mixed private/public forms of provision and funding. Today the Belgian welfare state still retains fundamental aspects of non-state provision not usually associated with “conventional” welfare states in the core OECD.     

Citizenship agendas,urban governance and social housing in the Netherlands: an assemblage approach

This article combines recent conceptualizations of citizenship beyond the nation state with new perspectives on governance assemblages comprising both state and non-state actors. Focusing on Dutch social housing, this study explores how such governance assemblages produce agendas that attempt to shape citizenship. Employing an assemblage approach, this study first demonstrates how state and non-state actors amalgamate by providing a historical overview of the urban governance of social housing in the Netherlands. Second, taking account of the territory that the assemblage claims, it shows how underprivileged neighbourhoods become the spatial locus of these assemblages. Third, examining what this amalgam produces, the article shows how the assemblage imposes a citizenship agenda on the population of these neighbourhoods, distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens. Acknowledging that citizenship agendas are produced by a multifaceted amalgam of state and non-state actors, this article emphasizes the need for rigorous academic analysis of such governance assemblages.     

Between ballots and bullets: elections and citizenship in and beyond the nation-state

This article approaches electoral acts and performances as central sites for the negotiation of citizenship relations. I argue that, in order to understand how these relationships are shaped, we must attend to governmental actors beyond the nation-state, from trade unions to criminal organizations. Focusing on the case of Jamaica, I show how non-state actors have come to play a central role in hybrid forms of governance, shaping citizens' allegiances to multiple, overlapping political communities. How are campaigning and voting affected by such multiple allegiances? What new understandings of citizenship can we develop if we take the role of non-state actors in the electoral process seriously? I suggest that we should study elections as a site where citizenship – understood here in its broad sense of membership of a political community – can develop both within and beyond the nation-state.     

Disaster Resiliency of U.S. Local Governments: Insights to Strengthen Local Response and Recovery from the COVID-19 Pandemic

This research presents implications of the global pandemic for local government resiliency in the United States. The authors explore insights from local government officials and managers on the front lines of response and recovery efforts to the biological natural disaster. Findings from the latest nationwide survey of U.S. local governments regarding their preparedness for weather-related natural disasters also inform responses to the current crisis. Results indicate that local governments are innovating and taking strategic actions to fight the virus, even as COVID-19 has exposed social inequities that are exacerbated as the virus spreads. Survey findings of disaster readiness of local governments to weather-related disasters shows that small, resource-poor governments will not be able to respond well and social inequities will grow. Policy strategies at all levels of government must recognize and account for these inequities as threat of this virus subsides, to support stronger, more effective readiness for the next biological catastrophe.     

Small state diplomacy: Cambodia's foreign policy towards Vietnam

Cambodia's foreign policy behavior towards Vietnam can be characterized as using a strategy of ‘hedging’, whose nature is different from the one suggested in the existing literature. Such a strategy can be discerned from Cambodia's omni-directional policy responses, ranging from economic pragmatism, limited bandwagoning, binding engagement and soft-balancing. Furthermore, the case of Cambodia's foreign policy towards Vietnam suggests that non-state actors, such as the opposition party and the population (voters) play a significant role in shaping the state's foreign policy, even though it is formed under the authoritarian ruling party. This study also suggests that the foreign policy decisions of an authoritarian state are not solely shaped by the personal attributes of their leader.     

Revisiting Politicization: Political Advisers and Public Servants in Westminster Systems

In recent times much has been made of the threat some argue is posed by political advisers to the impartiality of the Westminster civil service. Drawing on survey of senior New Zealand civil servants, this article examines the degree to which political advisers are perceived as a threat to civil service neutrality and describes the form taken by that threat as variously perceived. On the evidence reported, it is suggested that traditional understandings of “politicization” need to be reconceptualized if they are to fully account for the nature of the relationship between political and civil service advisers. To existing conceptions of politicization, therefore, the article proposes adding another: “administrative politicization,” allowing for different gradations of politicization to be identified, and enabling a nuanced assessment of the nature and extent of a risk to civil service neutrality that, the data suggest, is not as great as is sometimes alleged.     

The International Legal Framework and Armed Groups

This article explores the contribution of the international legal framework to strategies for exercising leverage over and engaging with non-state armed groups. In addressing the framework’s relevance in meeting these challenges, it examines the tensions between hierarchy and reciprocity in international law; key normative developments in international human rights and international humanitarian laws, the issue of existing gaps in the protective framework envisaged by these two bodies of law, and the impact of their growing intersections; recent trends in the international arena that point toward the expansion, as well as restriction, of the normative space and their implications; and, in light of the opportunities/challenges identified, the international legal framework’s prospects for articulating credible engagement strategies with non-state armed groups.     

Repositioning urban bias: Non-state providers' use of spatialised networks in Bangladesh

Urban bias theory predicts urban areas of developing countries receive disproportionately more resources than rural areas due to their concentration of numerically large, politically important “vote banks.” This has not been the case in Bangladesh. This study finds that this variation occurs due to non-state providers (NSPs) changing the landscape of resource allocation. Operating on the premise that state control leads to more services in urban areas, urban bias fails to account for NSPs as critical service providers. Employing a grounded theory strategy to explore urban-rural dynamics in service provision and to build on urban bias theory, this research highlights interactions between state and non-state actors. It argues that spatialized political networks, networks of formal and informal leadership more difficult to access in urban areas, influence the locality of service provision. Though NSPs recognize increased need in urban areas of Bangladesh, their interventions in those areas remain peripheral due to differing structures of government accountability and differing levels of community acceptance facilitating these networks. The need for NSPs to adapt their activities to restrictive governance mechanisms reflects the changing space for NSPs in the context of semi-democratic regimes.     

Virtual Government: What Will Remain Inside the Public Sector?

Around the world, the public sector is changing in ways which challenge the Weberian or bureaucratic paradigm. If we are to comprehend these changes, we must abandon the binary model of public and private sectors and better understand the non-state public sector. Looking to historical and international examples, this article asks what has to remain inside the state. While acknowledging that there are significant drivers for reform, it argues that the size of government — large or small — should not be a matter of ideology.     

物种大灭绝是最大的环境风险

地球出现生命以来,生物物种数量动态增长,但随着人类活动的出现,生物物种灭绝速度逐渐加快。导致物种灭绝的直接原因,如生境丧失、物种联系被切断、环境污染、人为选择、滥采滥杀、全球升温、生物入侵等,正是人类的活动范围和力度的不断加大。作为优势物种的人类,在急速大规模地改变环境,使其他物种面临人的选择压力的同时,其自身也面临着适应性进化能力的严峻挑战。物种大灭绝和不可恢复性是人类面临的最大环境威胁。     

The Ideological Effects of Framing Threat on Immigration and Civil Liberties

Assuming that migration threat is multi-dimensional, this article seeks to investigate how various types of threats associated with immigration affect attitudes towards immigration and civil liberties. Through experimentation, the study unpacks the ??securitization of migration?? discourse by disaggregating the nature of immigration threat, and its impact on policy positions and ideological patterns at the individual level. Based on framing and attitudinal analysis, we argue that physical security in distinction from cultural insecurity is enough to generate important ideological variations stemming from strategic input (such as framing and issue-linkage). We expect then that as immigration shifts from a cultural to a physical threat, immigration issues may become more politically salient but less politicized and subject to consensus. Interestingly, however, the findings reveal that the effects of threat framing are not ubiquitous, and may be conditional upon ideology. Liberals were much more susceptible to the frames than were conservatives. Potential explanations for the ideological effects of framing, as well as their implications, are explored.     

Sustainable citizenship for a technological world: negotiating deliberative dialectics

Incorporating the notion of sustainability is the biggest challenge for citizenship in a technological era. Existing conceptions of citizenship have not been able to grapple with compounded ecological, economic, cultural, and moral threats facing modern technology-infused societies. Nor has increased public participation, engagement, and dialogue resolved polarized positions on issues such as what constitutes quality of life or what is meant by the integrity of nature. This paper draws on the scholarship of both sustainability and citizenship to propose a framework of sustainable citizenship that seeks to emphasize shared values through a deliberated clash of ideas. Such a framework involves a negotiation of the dialectics of rights and responsibilities, state and non-state, public and private, human and non-human nature, universal and particular, and democracy and capitalism. The paper illustrates how sustainable citizenship can be applied to deal with contentious political and policy issues of new and emerging technologies.     

Who participates in global environmental governance? Partial answers from international relations theory

An important current of research in international environmental affairsdeals with the roles of non-state actors in international environmentalgovernance. For many, the growing influence of non-state actors is a welcometrend because these actors, especially non-governmental organizations,facilitate environmental negotiations between states and perform keyinformation-gathering, dissemination, advocacy, and appraisal functions thatstates are either unwilling or unable to do. For the student of internationalrelations (IR), examining the roles and responsibilities of non-state actorsin global environmental affairs is a departure from the ordinary concern ofthat field – namely, the study of interstate behavior. But for the studyof global environmental problems, particularly those problems that aresimultaneously global and local, the investigator must map the influence ofan even broader assemblage of actors. Little is known about how local levelinstitutions or ordinary citizens fit into global environmental policyprocesses. Understanding what motivates public demands for globalenvironmental quality is an especially important research task, especially forthose pervasive environmental problems like global climate change and complexexhortations like sustainable development that require the attention andacquiescence of ordinary citizens.     

Non-state regional governance mechanism for economic security: the case of the ASEAN Peoples' Assembly

Abstract

In Asia, the evolving dynamics in the development of civil society on the one hand and the re-conceptualization of security beyond the traditional notions of state/military security on the other are not mutually exclusive. These dynamics are essentially linked by a common need to broaden both the subjects and the objects of security. This paper looks at the emerging transnational civil society organization called the ASEAN Peoples' Assembly (APA), established in 2000. In examining APA and locating it within emerging regional mechanisms for governance and security, the paper argues that APA can be a significant mechanism for governance since it provides the framework for the numerous civil society organizations in the region to engage with state and other non-state actors that are involved in defining security in Southeast Asia. Moreover, the genesis of APA offers salient developments that should not be missed in the study of civil society in this region.     

Between punishment and discipline: comparing strategies to control unauthorized immigration in the United States

Immigration scholars have noted the rise of a distinctive discourse concerning immigrants in the United States. The ‘immigrant threat’ discourse is said to portray immigrants as an existential threat to the country and contributes to highly restrictive enforcement policies. Through a close examination of national political debates concerning comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) (2005–2007), the paper shows that most politicians involved in this debate (from liberal Democrats to conservative Republicans) agreed with the basic assumptions of this general discourse. But the paper also identifies important variants on the ‘threat’ discourse and associated strategies. Hardline conservatives stressed that the essential ‘illegalness’ of immigrants posed a threat to the country. Protecting the nation state from this threat required policies to totally banish all undocumented immigrants from the country, irrespective of their ‘good’ conduct or exceptional circumstances. Moderate and liberal reform advocates agreed with the idea that undocumented immigrants posed a threat to the country. However, they believed that banishment alone could not address the threat. Instead they advocated a strategy of risk management whereby the population would be differentiated according to levels of risk (high to low priority) and policies of inclusion and exclusion would be adjusted accordingly. This would allow the government to incorporate low risk/priority immigrants while freeing government resources to target the ‘truly threatening’ groups (i.e., criminals, delinquents, homeless, repeat unauthorized entries, etc.). Thus, while both sides conceded that undocumented immigrants were a threat to the country, they developed important variants on the discourse and contrasting policy solutions to exert control over the population.     

Civil society and post-communist democratization: Facing a double challenge in post-Milošević Serbia

Abstract

Civil society literature attributes the weakness of post-communist civil society to the communist heritage. It is structurally weak, the argument goes, because post-communist citizens are averse to voluntary organizations and because of ethnic nationalism. This article goes beyond the heritage argument and contends that post-communist civil society is weakened by democratization itself. Post-communist democratizing states are fragmented structurally and ideologically, and lack a consensus on the liberal state as a provider of public goods and an inclusive citizenship. Simultaneously, the non-state sector in post-communism is expanding in both liberal and illiberal directions. While the liberal segments of the state respond to a liberal civil society, its illiberal segments reinforce an illiberal civil society. Consequently, ‘good’ civil society is forced to confront ideologically both the illiberal state and illiberal non-state groups, which limits its potential contribution to promoting good governance. The argument is illustrated by a study of civil society's transformation in post-Milo?evi? Serbia and the struggle by liberal civil society groups for acceptance of responsibility for Serbian war crimes committed in the wars of Yugoslavia's disintegration in the 1990s.