National Security, Public Opinion And Regime Asymmetry: A Six-country Study

National Security, Public Opinion And Regime Asymmetry: A Six-country Study
Author: Tun-jen Cheng
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2017-05-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9813206969

New conventional wisdom posits that the public in democracies is inattentive but not really ignorant nor easily swayed, and indeed quite consistent and thoughtful when it comes to national security and foreign policy issues.This volume builds on such a claim to study the attributes and impacts of public opinion on foreign and national security policy in six democracies: Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, Ukraine, Finland and West Germany. These countries face acute and sustained national security challenges posed by stronger authoritarian regimes close by, namely China, North Korea, the Arab nations, Russia and the Soviet Union. Given potential existential threats to their democracies, the public is typically tuned in, and in sorting out their policy stands, is mindful that the fundamental values of identity, sovereignty and prosperity may be jeopardized. Public opinion can indeed constrain statecraft here in these democracies ensnared in asymmetric dyads.Many have studied public opinion and national security in democracies, but few have studied national security strategy of weak powers confronting great powers. This volume is the first attempt to examine this topic. The approach here is a comparative rather than country-specific study combining qualitative and quantitative research methods to enrich our understanding of the complexity and intrigues of the interplay between public opinion and national security under the condition of regime asymmetry. The wealth of data and careful examination of various issues from different theoretical approaches makes this volume an essential guide for courses and research in comparative foreign policy, international relations and democratic processes.

Neutral Europe and the Creation of the Nonproliferation Regime

Neutral Europe and the Creation of the Nonproliferation Regime
Author: Pascal Lottaz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2023-11-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 100099810X

Lottaz, Iwama, and their contributors investigate the role of neutral and nonaligned European states during the negotiations for the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Focusing on the years from the Irish Resolution of 1958 until the treaty’s opening for signatures ten years later, the nine chapters written by area experts highlight the processes and reasons for the political and diplomatic actions the neutrals took, and how those impacted the multilateral treaty negotiations. The book reveals new aspects of the dynamics that lead to this most consequential multilateral breakthrough of the Cold War. In part one, three chapters analyze the international system from a bird’s eye perspective, discussing neutrality, nonalignment, and the nuclear order. The second part features six detailed case studies on the politics and diplomacy of Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, and Yugoslavia. Overall, this study suggests that despite the volatile and dangerous nature of the early Cold War, the balance of the strategic environment enabled actors that were not part of one or the other alliance system to play a role in the interlocking global politics that finally created the nuclear regime that defines international relations until today. A valuable resource for scholars of nonproliferation, the Cold War, neutrality, nonalignment, and area studies.

Trust in International Relations

Trust in International Relations
Author: Hiski Haukkala
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2018-04-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351807838

Trust is a core concept in International Relations (IR), representing a key ingredient in state relations. It was only relatively recently that IR scholars began to probe what trust really is, how it can be studied, and how it affects state relations. In the process three distinct ways of theorising trust in IR have emerged: trust as a rational choice calculation, as a social phenomenon or as a psychological dimension. Trust in International Relations explores trust through these different lenses using case studies to analyse the relative strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. The case studies cover relations between: United States and India ASEAN and Southeast Asian countries Finland and Sweden USA and Egypt The European Union and Russia Turkey’s relations with the West This book provides insights with real-world relevance in the fields of crisis and conflict management, and will be of great interest for students and scholars of IR, security studies and development studies who are looking to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how different theories of trust can be used in different situations.

Protests, Pandemic, and Security Predicaments

Protests, Pandemic, and Security Predicaments
Author: Wei-chin Lee
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2023-06-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 303133776X

This book examines how Asian countries have responded to urgent challenges against a backdrop of climactic political developments, as well as the effects of issue linkage in policy making. Chapters are arranged according to localities but interlinked through their thematic and critical analyses. The section on Hong Kong focuses on the theme of protests, highlighting its intersection with identity and generational shifts in addition to legal, political and economic changes before and after the adoption of Hong Kong National Security Law. The section examining Taiwan’s policies discusses electoral calculations, identity reconstruction, cross-Strait stalemate and alliance maneuvers within USA-China-Taiwan triangular international relations, providing an overview of its domestic and external policies. Through their analysis, the authors here determine that China has emphasized the prerogatives of history, culture and territorial sovereignty in its dealings with the Hong Kong protests and Taiwan, and that cross-Strait analysis must be deliberated and ultimately determined within the USA-China-Taiwan triangular framework. In the final section, authors examine the USA’s role and policy in dealing with both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Hegemonic power transition has been a primary concern in both countries with the USA’s hegemonic status facing daunting challenges from China, increasingly perceived as an ascending revisionist power waiting to overtake the USA in the future.

The European Neutrals and NATO

The European Neutrals and NATO
Author: Andrew Cottey
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2017-12-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137595248

This book provides the first detailed comparative analysis of the unusual partnership between the main European neutral states and NATO. Neutrality and alliance membership are fundamentally incompatible, but through the vehicle of NATO’s post-Cold War partnerships the European neutral states and NATO have found a way to bridge this gap and cooperate with one another. Based on case studies of Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland written by leading experts, this book explores the detail of each country’s relationship with NATO, the factors shaping those relationships and whether any of these states are likely to abandon neutrality and join NATO. The book also contributes to broader work on foreign policy by exploring different explanations of the European neutral states’ foreign and security policy choices. This book will be of interest to scholars of the European neutral states, NATO and European security, as well as to those interested in understanding the dynamics behind states foreign policy choices.

Global Trends 2040

Global Trends 2040
Author: National Intelligence Council
Publisher: Cosimo Reports
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2021-03
Genre:
ISBN: 9781646794973

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Life after Dictatorship

Life after Dictatorship
Author: James Loxton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2018-09-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108426670

Launches a new research agenda on one of the most common but overlooked features of the democratization experience worldwide: authoritarian successor parties.

Neutral Beyond the Cold

Neutral Beyond the Cold
Author: Pascal Lottaz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2022-06-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1666901679

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the wars in Yugoslavia radically changed the security environment in Europe and Central Asia. Some predictions assumed the emerging unipolarity of the liberal world order would end neutrality policies in East and West, but, as this volume shows, this was not the case. While some traditional Cold War neutrals like Sweden and Finland have been edging closer to security alignment with western institutions, there are others like Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, and Malta that remained committed to their traditional nonaligned foreign policy approaches. More importantly, there are areas of Eurasia that developed new forms of neutrality policies, most of them only noticed on the margins of academic discourse. This is the first book to systematically explore this “new neutralism” of the Post-Cold War. In part one, the book analyzes contemporary neutrality discourse on several levels like international organizations (UN, ASEAN), diplomacy, and academic theory. Part two discusses neutrality-related policy developments in Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. Together, the 15 chapters show how on this vast, connected landmass references to neutrality have remained a staple of international politics.

Ukraine in the crosshairs of geopolitical power play

Ukraine in the crosshairs of geopolitical power play
Author: Peter W. Schulze
Publisher: Campus Verlag
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2020-10-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3593445700

Der bewaffnete Konflikt zwischen Russland und der Ukraine, der 2022 eskalierte, hat eine lange Vorgeschichte. 2014 begannen die Kampfhandlungen zwischen von Russland unterstützten Milizen, regulären russischen und ukrainischen Truppen sowie Freiwilligenmilizen besonders in den ostukrainischen, von prorussischen Separatisten kontrollierten Gebieten Donezk und Luhansk. Waffenstillstände, vereinbart im Protokoll von Minsk und in dem im Normandie-Prozess verhandelten Minsker Abkommen, blieben brüchig, setzten aber Hoffnungssignale. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes beleuchten diese Ereignisse und suchen die Zielvorstellungen, aber auch die Grenzlinien der russischen, der ukrainischen und der europäischen Politik aufzuzeigen. Sie erörtern insbesondere, ob und wie sich der externe Einfluss mäßigend auf die lokalen Akteure ausgewirkt hat, mit welchen geopolitischen Faktoren der Konfikt zusammenhängt, und wie es gelingen kann, die Lösung des Konflikts mit dem Versuch zu verbinden, Fragen einer gesamteuropäischen Friedens- und Sicherheitsordnung neu anzugehen.

The NSA Report

The NSA Report
Author: President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, The
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2014-03-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400851270

The official report that has shaped the international debate about NSA surveillance "We cannot discount the risk, in light of the lessons of our own history, that at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking. Americans must never make the mistake of wholly 'trusting' our public officials."—The NSA Report This is the official report that is helping shape the international debate about the unprecedented surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. Commissioned by President Obama following disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, and written by a preeminent group of intelligence and legal experts, the report examines the extent of NSA programs and calls for dozens of urgent and practical reforms. The result is a blueprint showing how the government can reaffirm its commitment to privacy and civil liberties—without compromising national security.