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7041. Defending America: Redefining the Conceptual Borders of Homeland Defense

Author:
Anthony H. Cordesman
Publication Date:
09-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
Abstract:
There is a wide spectrum of potential threats to the American homeland that do not involve the threat of overt attacks by states using long-range missiles or conventional military forces. Such threats include covert attacks by state actors, state use of proxies, independent terrorist and extremist attacks by foreign groups or individuals, and independent terrorist and extremist attacks by residents of the US. These threats are currently limited in scope and frequency. No pattern of actual attacks on US territory has yet emerged that provides a clear basis for predicting how serious any given form of attack will be in the future, what means of attack will be used, or how lethal new forms of attack will be if they are successful.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism, and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Political Geography:
United States and America

7042. Managing the Global Nuclear Materials Threat: Policy Recommendations

Author:
Sam Nunn and Robert E. Ebel
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
Abstract:
Despite the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons continue to pose the most devastating security threat to Americans. Although the risk of a nuclear war destroying civilization has virtually disappeared, the risk that a single nuclear weapon might be used to destroy a major city has increased, particularly given the erosion of control over nuclear material with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nothing could be more central to international security than ensuring that the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons do not fall into the hands of terrorists or proliferant states. Effective controls over nuclear warheads and the nuclear materials needed to make them are essential to the future of the entire global effort to reduce nuclear arms and stem their spread. At the same time, ensuring protection of public health and the environment in the management of all nuclear materials—from nuclear weapons to nuclear wastes—remains a critical priority. Appropriate management of both safety and security worldwide will be essential to maintaining nuclear fission as an expandable option for supplying the world's greenhouse-constrained energy needs in the twenty-first century.
Topic:
Security, Energy Policy, Nuclear Weapons, and Science and Technology
Political Geography:
United States and Soviet Union

7043. The Strategic Implications of Terrorism

Author:
Paul Wilkinson
Publication Date:
06-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, St. Andrews University, Scotland
Abstract:
Terrorism is a special form of political violence. It is not a philosophy or a political movement. Terrorism is a weapon or method which has been used throughout history by both states and sub-state organisations for a whole variety of political causes or purposes.
Topic:
Security, Economics, Politics, and Terrorism

7044. Coexistence, Consensus, Competition, Conflict: Interservice Contestation

Author:
Varun Sahni
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
Abstract:
This paper explores one of the lesser-researched aspects of Latin American military politics, namely, relations among the three military services - army, navy and air force. This is done through a study of the Argentine Navy and its relations with the Army and Air Force of that country. The analysis proceeds in three stages. First, the article classifies issue-areas on the basis of four variables: resource and/or prestige implications, symbolic and/or functional importance, zero-sum contestation, and iterative contestations. Second, the article suggests a four-fold typology of inter-service contestation - coexistence, consensus, competition, and conflict - that is closely linked to the nature of the issue-area. Finally, the validity of the typology is tested through the study of four cases: naval management of the National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA); naval domination of national policy on Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, the South Atlantic and Beagle Channel islands and Antarctica; the annual inter-service competition over the military budget; and the long-standing rivalry between the Nave and Air Force over military aviation. The four cases studied demonstrate that the taxonomy proposed in this article more than adequately classifies and explains the patterns of inter-service contestation in Argentina, thereby raising questions about its applicability to other military-dominated polities.
Topic:
Conflict Prevention, Security, and Politics
Political Geography:
Argentina, South America, and Latin America

7045. Pruebas Nucleares en el Sur de Asia: Las Razones y las Repercusiones

Author:
Varun Sahni
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
Abstract:
On May 11, 1998, India conducted three underground nuclear tests, followed by two more 48 hours later. Two weeks later, Pakistan responded with six nuclear tests of its own. The purpose of this document is to analyze the reasons behind the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests as well as their innumerable implications. To facilitate analysis, the study is divided into two parts. In the first, the reasons that propelled the governments of India and Pakistan to a posture of overt nuclearization are analyzed. In both cases, the nuclear tests were the result of diverse factors, ranging from security concerns to domestic political calculations to considerations of international prestige. In the second part of the document the impact of the Indian and Pakistani actions are analyzed on four well-defined levels: internal, bilateral, regional and global.
Topic:
International Relations, Security, and Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Middle East, and India

7046. Three and a Half Centuries of the Westphalian State System

Author:
Varun Sahni
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
Abstract:
This short paper studies how the international system has evolved over the last 350 years through an identification of its most important features. The paper has a pedagogic rather than research orientation, and is divided into three sections. The first section analyzes the most significant features of international relations from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the Second World War. It demonstrates how, over the centuries, the evolution of alliances and the rise of a peace norm transformed a war system into a peace system, thereby mitigating the basic systemic condition of anarchy on the salient structural characteristics of the sovereign state system. The second section studies international relations during the Cold War, with the focus on the strategic, economic, ideological and cultural factors that defined the international system during that period. The third section of the paper analyzes international relations since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The various developments and trends that are leading to systemic change are examined. Despite the sundry challenges posed to the state by non-state actors, the rise of new issue-areas and sub-systemic supranational integration, the sovereign state and the Westphalian system is expected to endure.
Topic:
International Relations, Security, Development, and Sovereignty
Political Geography:
Berlin and Westphalia

7047. Security Risks and Instabilities in Southeastern Europe: Recommended Strategies to the EU in the Process of Differentiated Integration of the Region by the Union

Author:
Plamen Pantev
Publication Date:
11-2000
Content Type:
Case Study
Institution:
Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS)
Abstract:
The chain of events and developments in Southeastern Europe during the 1990s provoked increasingly sophisticated political reactions, political approaches and longer-term strategies towards the region on the part of the EU. The firm requirement for ethnic tolerance and respect of human rights constitutes one end of the range of EU positions concerning Southeastern Europe. The gradual beginning of the process of integration of some countries from the region in the Union constitutes the other end. At the end of the 1990s, these positions gravitated towards two principles – regionality and conditionality. These principles are partly overlapping and mutually reinforcing, but to some extent also contradictory. The institutional arrangements of these two principles by the EU are identified with the Stability Pact (July 1999) for the principle of regionality, on the one hand, and with the accession negotiations and the Stabilisation and Association Process for the principle of conditionality, on the other hand.
Topic:
Security, European Union, Regional Integration, and Risk
Political Geography:
Europe and Southeast Europe

7048. The Emergence of a New Geopolitical Region in Eurasia: The Volga-Urals Region and its Implications for Bulgarian Foreign and Security Policy

Author:
Nicolay Pavlov and Plamen Pantev
Publication Date:
12-2000
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS)
Abstract:
The application of geopolitical methodological instruments to the study of Bulgarian foreign and security policy issues has two fundamental causes: first, for many decades this has been a neglected intellectual instrument of international political research – for political and ideological reasons – and, second, the end of the Cold War necessitated an improvement of the conceptual and the analytical tools of security studies in Europe and the world. The traditional approach of ISIS to search ways of improving the security situation by conceptualizing events and processes in a novel way has focused the efforts of its researchers on security problems that cover a broad strategic zone: the Balkans – the Black Sea – the Transcaucasus – the Caspian Sea. Continued cooling – for more than ten years –of bilateral Bulgarian-Russian relations is conceived as one of the problems of this broader strategic and systemically linked zone. The geopolitical and geostrategic model – imposed on Bulgaria by the Cold War divide, the country’s membership in the Warsaw Pact and the thorough domination by the USSR – ended and was replaced by a different reality. The geopolitical projection of the ideological and socio-economic divide was no longer an applicable paradigm. At the same time the balance of power and the geostrategic approaches of understanding the evolving international environment proved to be inadequate after the end of the 1980s of the 20th Century. Russian, and to a lesser extent Bulgarian, politicians lost the orientation and the perspective of the bilateral links. This led to a dramatic diminishing of the meaning of bilateral relations in the general foreign-political engagements of the two countries. Bulgaria had undertaken a clear orientation to market economy, democracy and rule of law – a philosophic course, which logically prioritized the attraction of the European Union as the efficient integration nucleus of Europe, and of NATO – the symbol of stability and guaranteed prosperity in the broader Euro-Atlantic space. Though NATO was no longer perceived in the Cold War antagonistic pattern by Russia, and the very substance of the Alliance intensively adapted to the post-Cold War realities, Bulgaria’s political and security choice of joining the Euro-Atlantic community of developed democratic nations was negatively assessed by the Russian elite.
Topic:
Security, Foreign Policy, Regional Cooperation, and Geopolitics
Political Geography:
Europe, Eurasia, Eastern Europe, and Bulgaria

7049. Information Management in the Field of Security Policy in SEE -- 1st Workshop of the Study Group: "Crisis Management in South East Europe"

Author:
Tufik Burnazovic, Athanasios E. Drougos, Gustav E. Gustenau, Wolf Oschlies, Dragan Simic, Avgustina Tzvetkova, Biljana Vankovska, and Vladimir Šaponja
Publication Date:
05-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Austrian National Defence Academy
Abstract:
Secessionist conflicts have become a major feature of the European political landscape in the 1990s. International response to them has varied from full-scale military intervention to half-hearted mediation, generally providing for freezing of most active hostilities and for addressing most urgent humanitarian needs. Europe in the 1990s saw more “peace” operations on its soil than any other region in the world, but still was not able to find satisfactory answers. Kosovo is a tragic illustration of that and the deployment of NATO troops after a massive use of airpower still lacks the framework of a political plan and appears very tentative and opportunistic. Several specifically European factors define the perspective of a possible new wave of secessionist conflicts in the region.
Topic:
Security, NATO, International Cooperation, and Regional Cooperation
Political Geography:
Europe and Balkans

7050. A Security and Stability in Northern Europe – A Threat Assesment

Author:
Jochen Prantl
Publication Date:
04-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA)
Abstract:
The accession of Finland and Sweden as well as the ongoing enlargement process, which offers the perspective of EU membership to the Baltic States, has put the question of security and stability in Northern Europe on the Agenda of the European Union.
Topic:
Security and Development
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Finland, Asia, and Sweden