The Cyber Pearl Harbor

The article describes the incentives that would motivate an opponent to incorporate a surprise cyber attack into a conventional operation to defeat US deterrent strategies by presenting the United States with a fait accompli. In describing this ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’, the article explores the organizational and intelligence constraints that make it difficult to respond to the prospect of a combined cyber surprise attack and conventional operation. The article suggests that a cyber surprise attack will not occur in a political or strategic vacuum. Instead, weak opponents will use it to achieve objectives that could not be attained if US and allied forces were fully alerted.     

The Cambusters: The Conservative European Union Referendum Rebellion of October 2011

The backbench rebellion that hit the Coalition government in October 2011 was one of the largest Commons revolts of the postwar era, on any issue. But it was not just its size that was noteworthy. This article outlines ten points about the origins of the vote, its timing, its composition, and the nature of the divisions it revealed. Facilitated by recent procedural innovations in the Commons, the rebellion was both evidence of a longer‐term rise in dissent amongst MPs of all parties, as well as other medium‐and short‐term factors within the Conservative party. It leaves the Prime Minister caught in an impossible triangle, attempting to satisfy his pro‐European Liberal Democrat partners in the Coalition, while keeping his Euro‐sceptic rebels happy, and yet retaining enough credibility in European capitals to negotiate successfully.     

普遍主义的梦幻与历史主义的反叛——马克思恩格斯对近代人权观的解构

人权普遍主义的神话肇始于近代自然法理论的理性主义,它与现实之间的鸿沟引发了马克思主义的历史主义反叛,导致“人权理想国”的解构。     

Cyber insurance and private governance: The enforcement power of markets

In the last half decade, cyber insurance has emerged as a multi-billion-dollar industry with the authority to set and enforce standards of security behavior. Although cybersecurity has become a concern of national policymakers, insurers appear to have supplanted the state to play an influential role in governing some aspects of client behavior. This paper explores private governance by cyber insurance firms and evaluates two competing explanations for its emergence – either that the private sector advanced to set and enforce cybersecurity standards for financial gain, or that the state retreated from its responsibility to regulate and private sector actors filled the gap only as necessary. To find an answer between these explanations, this article develops a single outcome case study of the American cyber insurance industry. Following a theoretical introduction to private governance and its manifestation through insurance, the article examines the insurance process and its application in cybersecurity, the key role of standards, and the mechanism of enforcing those standards. The article concludes by identifying key elements of this market-based enforcement and discussing implications for crafting effective private governance in other domains and public policy.     

Globalization and Social Movement Resistance: The Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas,Mexico

The rebellion launched by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1994 in Chiapas, Mexico is best understood not as a guerrilla struggle for state power, but rather a social movement resisting the dominant mode of globalization being imposed from above. Examining the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of globalization as a set of contested processes, this case study of resistance shows how the Zapatistas have contested power in spheres above and below the nation-state, appealing to global networks and universal rights, but also to local practices and identities. Globalization can paradoxically open new political space for contestation as it ruptures existing patterns of relations between state and civil society. This movement points to an important alternative strategy of "globalization from below," based on the radically democratic demand for autonomy, defined as the right to choose the forms of interaction with forces that are reorganizing on a global scale.     

The Postcapitalist Transition: Policy Implications for the Left

The postcapitalism thesis asserts that open source and collaborative non-profit organisations represent a new, non-market sector in which the profit motive and monetary exchange no longer drive economic activity; in Marxist political economy terms, they are a new means for suppressing the law of value . Information technology has produced four systemic dysfunctions, limiting capitalism’s ability to function as a complex adaptive system: the zero marginal cost effect, the tendency to delink work from wages, positive network effects, and information asymmetries. In response, in addition to the traditional remedies of social democracy for a stagnant neoliberal economic model, left parties must adopt a programme of transition: aggressively breaking up technological monopolies; promoting universal basic income and basic service solutions; outlawing rent-seeking business models; and promoting data democracy.     

The Birth and Rebirth of the Liberal Democrats

This article tells the story of the Liberal Democrats from the final days of the Liberal/SDP Alliance to the general election of 1992. Drawing on the author's roles as an MP and as chair of the party's communications operations, it examines the factors that contributed to the party's troubled birth in 1988, and gives an insider's view on how the party survived to grow in the years after 1990. Key issues include the branding of the party and the development of its policy of paying for improvements to education through increasing income tax. It also lays stress on the importance of the party's activist base and its central campaigns expertise in not only surviving in local elections, but also in securing key by-election victories.     

From Birth to Death: The Life of the Standards Board for England

Organizations wax and wane, and some cease to exist altogether. The Standards Board for England was abolished after a 10‐year life. Created to regulate the ethical behavior of local politicians in England, the ethics of politics was undermined by the politics of ethics. This article analyzes the life of the Standards Board initially through the lens of a life‐cycle approach to organizations but finds that a problem‐cluster approach provides a sharper picture. Over its lifetime, the Standards Board faced a number of crises; its failure to resolve these crises and an unfavorable political climate led to its demise.     

The Strange Birth of Middle England

This article investigates the political meanings of a now ubiquitous media term 'middle England'. It explores its origins in the historical idea of the middle classes as politically moderate, beleaguered and put-upon; and more recently in a neo-conservative, anti-elitist populism, which aims to short-circuit traditional political processes and speak directly to a nominally homogeneous, but actually carefully targeted, 'people'. It argues that the concept of 'middle England' reached full political maturity in the 1990s when increasingly slick party machines began to articulate and exploit these ideas through private polling and focus groups which concentrated on crucial swing voters. 'Middle England' is a product of the increasingly close, but fractious, relationship between these party machines and influential tabloid newspapers, particularly the Daily Mail .     

Cyber operations and useful fools: the approach of Russian hybrid intelligence

This article argues that Russian intelligence has achieved recent success in influencing democratic elections and referenda by combining the traditional Human Intelligence (HUMINT) discipline of manipulating useful fools with cutting edge cyber tactics, including hacking, phishing, social engineering, and weaponizing purloined information. This essay further argues that this synthesis yields greater effects than the sum of its parts. Given its potency, democracies and NATO members should expect to confront this type of threat more often. The 2016 American presidential election is used as a case study to conceptualize Russian hybrid intelligence, a new term reminiscent of Soviet ‘complex active measures’ and updated for the twenty-first century.