人类遗产与家园生态

遗产作为一种特殊的“财产”,与人类有着脱不了的干系。对它的认识、理解与解释构成了一系列复杂、多样和变迁的结构关系。理解这些关系对于真正了解遗产和对遗产的有效保护至关重要。在现代大规模群众旅游的活动中,各类遗产都面临着人类新的认识和选择,而这些认识和选择表现出对人类自我家园的重新“建构”。同时,这一切也与中国政府所制定的“和谐社会”和“可持续性发展”战略有着直接的关系。     

Class war-on-terror: counterterrorism,accumulation, crisis

This article discusses US counterterrorism from a class perspective. It sees counterterrorism as a state policy with differential effects on different social classes. In doing so, the article starts to address a lacuna in critical studies of counterterrorism, which tend to be rather structural and formal, thus ignoring the pertinence of counterterrorism to the field of social dynamics. To partly rectify this blind spot by addressing some class implications of counterterrorism, the article examines the effects of counterterrorism policy on capital accumulation and its social conditions. It notes that counterterrorism has different implications along class-lines: for dominant capital, it signifies appropriation of public money and direct participation in political decisions; for everyone else, it means material dispossession and political exclusion. Given that counterterrorism was developed between two crises of neoliberalism, the article distinguishes between economic crises, which tend to benefit capitalism, and political crises, which can be destructive, and suggests that counterterrorism is partly a restructuring of the neoliberal state so that it can manage recurring economic crises, while preventing their evolution into political ones.     

Preferences,Knowledge, and Citizen Probability Assessments of the Terrorism Risk of Nuclear Power

How does the American public assess risk when it comes to national security issues? This paper addresses this question by analyzing variation in citizen probability assessments of the terrorism risk of nuclear power plants. Drawing on the literature on how motivated reasoning, selective information processing, and domain‐specific knowledge influence public opinion, we argue that heterogeneous issue preferences and knowledge of nuclear energy and homeland security have important explanatory power. Using original data from a unique 2009 national survey in the United States, we show that Americans are divided in their probability assessments of the terrorism risk of nuclear power plants. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, individuals who support using nuclear power to meet rising energy demands, who are generally less concerned with terrorism, or who are more knowledgeable about terrorism and nuclear security tend to provide lower assessments of the likelihood that nuclear power plants increase terrorist attacks, and vice versa. The findings have implications for the literature on public opinion, risk assessment, energy policy and planning, and homeland security.     

A Stone’s Throw from the Metropolis: Re-Examining Small-Agency Homeland Security Practices

Police agencies nationwide have enhanced their homeland security preparedness capacity since the 9/11 attacks. Evidence suggests that departments have not uniformly adopted measures to prepare for and respond to critical incidents. Rather, larger agencies are more likely than their smaller peers to take such steps. Small agencies do not constitute a homogenous group; some experience geographic isolation while others are near major metropolitan areas. Unclear is whether small agencies (25 or fewer full-time sworn personnel), those that are commonly found to be less prepared, benefit from proximity to large-agency peers. This study examined whether physical and relational proximity to large departments contributed to homeland security preparedness in over 300 small departments. A structural equation model revealed that interactions with large agencies facilitated preparedness but physical proximity had no direct effect. Increasing geographic isolation from large-agency peers indirectly affected preparedness by stifling the level of inter-department interactions.     

No exceptions: authoritarian statism. Agamben,Poulantzas and homeland security

This article outlines and compares two different ways of making sense of counterterrorism and the configuration of political power in its context. Against the backdrop of US homeland security, it first outlines Agamben’s thesis on the permanent state of exception. Despite its resonance with key aspects of homeland security, this thesis is found to be analytically limited and theoretically brittle. To overcome its shortcomings and provide a better understanding of contemporary organisation of political power, a strategic-relational approach is suggested, derived from Poulantzas’s state theory.     

Coming to Terms with Separatist Insurgencies

Although insurgencies may begin their rebellions with expressed desires for outcomes unacceptable to opposing governments, the desired insurgent outcomes sometimes undergo modification, creating conditions that can make governments more amenable to external mediation. In certain separatist conflicts, the likelihood of external mediation increases when the political redefinition of the state insisted upon by the insurgents undergoes a revision, from secession to self‐determination, understood as a variant of autonomy. In the same vein, although it may not happen concurrently, insurgent movements become more amenable to external mediation if and when opposing governments revise the preferred conflict outcome from a military defeat of the insurgents to a containment of the movement. These two developments can serve as objective referents helping external parties to identify a ripe moment in the conflict and initiate mediation. But the implementation of an agreement ending separatist conflict may not occur if the government fails to submit the proposed territorial bounds of autonomy to prior review by constituents. Potential spoilers among government constituents should be identified and recruited to participate in the negotiations so that the likelihood of agreement rejection is reduced. In some states, however, the legal mechanisms and political opportunities for constituents to act as spoilers do not exist.     

Predicting Peril or the Peril of Prediction? Assessing the Risk of CBRN Terrorism

Since the mid-1990s, academic and policy communities have debated the risk posed by terrorist use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons. Three major schools of thought in the debate have emerged: the optimists, the pessimists, and the pragmatists. Although these three schools of thought draw on the same limited universe of data on CBRN terrorism, they arrive at strikingly different conclusions. Given the highly subjective process of CBRN terrorism risk assessment, this article analyzes the influence of mental shortcuts (called heuristics) and the systemic errors they create (called biases) on the risk assessment process. This article identifies and provides illustrative examples of a range of heuristics and biases that lead to the underestimation of risks, the overestimation of risks and, most importantly, those that degrade the quality of the debate about the level of risk. While these types of biases are commonly seen as affecting the public's perception of risk, such biases can also be found in risk assessments by experts. The article concludes with recommendations for improving the CBRN risk assessment process.     

美国选举安全问题:以2016年和2020年总统大选为例

2016年美国总统大选暴露了长期存在于该国选举体系中的风险,"选举安全"迅速成为当代美国国家安全与国土安全领域的重要议题。美国选举安全涉及网络安全、社会安全、政治安全与军事安全,体现出"复合安全问题"的特质。美国联邦与各州政府试图从降低关键基础设施风险、重建选民信任、减少部门壁垒以及填补机制缺失四个层面入手,系统性化解存在于选举系统的各类安全威胁。2020年美国大选期间,原有选举安全风险得到一定程度的缓解,但美国国家安全体制及文化与其选举安全体系的运行逻辑之间仍存在多层矛盾,特别是美国选举体系的产业市场与创新之间的矛盾、国家安全与"言论自由"之间的矛盾、"全政府"与"地方权"之间的矛盾、"网络自由"与"网络主权"之间的矛盾。这些矛盾会长期存在,将使利益攸关方不断发生龃龉,阻碍相关政策深入推进,最终导致美国在选举安全治理上将一直面临难以克服的困境。     

Nation,nature, purity: extreme-right biodiversity in Germany

ABSTRACT

In this article, Forchtner investigates the construction of an ‘ideal’, extreme-right, ecologically sensitive subject. A concern for the natural environment is in no way new to the extreme right, and has long been part of its ideological make-up. In particular, claims that the laws of nature are applicable to the social world and that a community is embedded in an ecosystem have long been features of a right-wing ecological imaginary. Through an analysis of all the articles on a paradigmatic ecological issue, biodiversity, published in Germany’s exemplary extreme-right magazine preoccupied with ecology, Umwelt & Aktiv (Environment & Active), this cultural imaginary is reconstructed. Included in it as key themes are human responsibility for environmental degradation, the ecological value of flora and fauna, and criticism of modernity’s levelling tendencies (both biologically and culturally). Taking responsibility for the community’s Heimat (homeland) is, consequently, a crucial element for this subject: a subject who aims for purity, order and the stability of ecosystems.     

浅析宗教对国家安全和社会稳定的双重功能

宗教是世界范围内一种十分复杂的社会历史现象.宗教对国家安全和社会稳定的影响具有双重功能,其正负功能相互对应.一方面,我们要肯定宗教维护国家安全和社会稳定所起的积极作用;另一方面,我们也必须注意到宗教在一定的历史条件下对国家安全和社会稳定所起的破坏作用.