Creating stability in the New Europe: The OSCE high commissioner on national minorities and the socialization of risky states

In “Protecting ‘The Prize': Oil and the U.S. National Interest,” Eugene Gholz and Daryl G. Press present an important counterargument to many common but overwrought worries about energy security. Yet they themselves go too far in the opposite direction. Gholz and Press argue that only three types of potential oil market disruptions could induce “particularly painful” adjustments and hence rise to the highest level: consolidation of a large fraction of Persian Gulf reserves under a single power, domestic instability in Saudi Arabia, and blockage of the Strait of Hormuz. I argue in this response that Gholz and Press confine the second and third scenarios too narrowly, and hence understate the security risks stemming from U.S. dependence on oil.     

Review Article Loyalist Assassinations and Police Collusion in Northern Ireland: An Extended Critique of Sean McPhilemy's The Committee

Since 1995 Dr. Brendan O'Shea, a former European Union Monitor, has been studying developments in the Balkans with his predictive article, Kosovo—Another Bosnia in the Making, awarded the Seamus Kelly Literary Award in Ireland. Nine years after NATO troops first deployed in Bosnia, and five years after KFOR commenced operations in Kosovo, he once again examines the overall situation in the region and is ill at ease with his findings.     

Expatriate Games: Interorganizational Coordination and International Counterterrorism

In America, Britain and Australia the threat of terrorism has been used to justify radical new legislation that gives police and intelligence agencies unprecedented powers to detain and question people believed to have information connected to terrorism. In this paper I explore the nature of the threat of non-state terrorism—threat to national security and the well-being of citizens. I argue that terrorism does not pose a threat sufficient to justify the kinds of counterterrorism legislation currently being enacted. Furthermore many of the current counterterrorism practices pose a greater threat to individual physical security and well-being than non-state terrorism. We should fear counterterrorism more than we fear terrorism.     

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.     

Betting on the Future with a Cloudy Crystal Ball? How Financial Theory Can Improve Revenue Forecasting and Budgets in the States

Accurately predicting revenue growth is nearly impossible. Predicting the peaks and valleys of the business cycle is even more hopeless. This matters because tax revenues are largely driven by economic growth. Volatile, unpredictable revenue growth causes all sorts of unpleasant responses on the part of governments, most commonly manic-depressive patterns of spending and taxing. Fortunately, modern financial economics gives us a set of tools that can be used to manage volatility. This article shows how such tools can be used to inform fiscal decision making. The focus here is state governments, but the analysis applies to all jurisdictions that face hard budget constraints and therefore must balance spending increases against revenue growth.