Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
(In)Security and the Production of International Relations
This book provides a framework for analysing the interplay between securitisation and foreign affairs, reconnecting critical security studies with traditional IR concerns about interstate relations. What happens to foreign policymaking when actors, things or processes are presented as threats? This book explains state behaviour on the basis of a reflexive framework of insecurity politics, and argues that governments act on the knowledge of international danger available in their societies, but that such knowledge is organised by markedly varying ideas of who threatens whom and how. The book develops this argument and illustrates it by means of various European case studies. Moving across Eur...
Salvatore Vitale - How to Secure a Country
Switzerland is well-known as one of the safest countries on earth and as a prime example of efficiency and efficacy. One of the central reasons that such a country exists is the development of a culture based on protection, which is supported by the presence and production of national security. When in 2014 Swiss people voted in favour of a federal popular initiative against massive immigration, Salvatore Vitale, an immigrant living in Switzerland felt the need to research this phenomenon in order to comprehend where the motives for this constant need for security originate and how they became part of Swiss culture. In How to Secure a Country Vitale explores this country s national security ...
The Global Village Myth
Porter challenges the powerful ideology of "Globalism" that is widely subscribed to by the US national security community. Globalism entails visions of a perilous shrunken world in which security interests are interconnected almost without limit, exposing even powerful states to instant war. Globalism does not just describe the world, but prescribes expansive strategies to deal with it, portraying a fragile globe that the superpower must continually tame into order. Porter argues that this vision of the world has resulted in the US undertaking too many unnecessary military adventures and dangerous strategic overstretch. Distance and geography should be some of the factors that help the US separate the important from the unimportant in international relations. The US should also recognize that, despite the latest technologies, projecting power over great distances still incurs frictions and costs that set real limits on American power. Reviving an appreciation of distance and geography would lead to a more sensible and sustainable grand strategy.
Private Actors and Security Governance
The privatization of security understood as both the top-down decision to outsource military and security-related tasks to private firms and the bottom-up activities of armed non-state actors such as rebel opposition groups, insurgents, militias, and warlord factions has implications for the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Both top-down and bottom-up privatization have significant consequences for effective, democratically accountable security sector governance as well as on opportunities for security sector reform across a range of different reform contexts. This volume situates security privatization within a broader policy framework, considers several relevant national and regional contexts, and analyzes different modes of regulation and control relating to a phenomenon with deep historical roots but also strong links to more recent trends of globalization and transnationalization. Alan Bryden is deputy head of research at the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF). Marina Caparini is senior research fellow at the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF).
Securing Health
This book offers a critical inquiry into the framing of health and disease as a security issue. In particular, the book examines what happens in the United Nations when the ostensibly ‘low’ politics of global health meet the ‘high’ politics of security, and when the logic of security comes to shape global health initiatives. It offers a critical re-assessment of efforts in the United Nations system to position HIV as a security threat with the hope that this would attract greater attention and resources for the global HIV response. The book advances securitization theory by presenting a new framework for studying HIV as a policy process, uniting several theoretical strands into a sin...
Biopolitics, Governmentality and Humanitarianism
This book critically analyses the changing role and nature of post-Cold War humanitarianism, using Foucault's theories of biopolitics and governmentality. It offers a compelling and insightful interpretation of the policies and practices associated with ‘new humanitarianism in general, as well as of the dynamics of two specific international assistance efforts: the post-2001 conflict-related assistance effort in Afghanistan and the post-2000 Chernobyl-related assistance effort in Belarus. The central argument of the book is that ‘new’ humanitarianism represents a dominant regime of humanitarian governing informed by globalising neoliberalism and is reliant on a complex set of biopoliti...
“I Made Mistakes”
Reconsiders Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's decisions during the Vietnam War, exposing doubts and questions.
Imagining World Politics
This book offers a non-Western feminist perspective on world politics and international relations. Creative, innovative, and challenging, it seeks completely to transform contemporary Eurocentric and masculinist IR by re-presenting it in non-Western, non-masculinist, and non-academic terms. Drawing on Daoist dialectics, the stories of Sihar and Shenya aim to redress such hegemonic imbalance by completing the IR story. To the yang of power politics, this book offers a yin of fairy-tale. (Both are equally fantastical but to different purposes.) To the yang of binary categories like Self vs Other, West vs Rest, hypermasculinity vs hyperfemininity, Sihar and Shenya show their yin complementariti...
Ethical Security Studies
At a time of grave ethical failure in global security affairs, this is the first book to bring together emerging theoretical debates on ethics and ethical reasoning within security studies. In this volume, working from a diverse range of perspectives—poststructuralism, liberalism, feminism, just war, securitization, and critical theory—leading scholars in the field of security studies consider the potential for ethical visions of security, and lay the ground for a new field: "ethical security studies". These ethical ‘visions’ of security engage directly with the meaning and value of security and security practice, and consider four key questions: • Who, or what, should be secured? ...
