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Wilfred Wan

The contemporary nuclear landscape is rife with challenges. Stagnated progress in disarmament, widespread modernization plans, and emergent proliferation pathways are contributing to the risk of catastrophe. Meanwhile, global nuclear order appears more precarious than ever. 

This book makes a case for a regional reorientation of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, arguing that a more specialized, decentralized, and localized arrangement could more effectively address post-Cold War challenges. In the process, it develops a framework to analyze the conditions that would allow for more robust regional nuclear cooperation.?? 

Regional Pathways to Nuclear Nonproliferation includes a series of case studies, centering on Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. It provides a comprehensive overview of existing nuclear cooperation at the regional level, including in the context of nuclear-weapon-free zones. For each case, the book both analyzes the viability of a stronger regional nuclear order and considers the form such an order would likely take. 

What is the magnitude and character of the nuclear proliferation threat across different regions? What does the presence of institutions in economic, environmental, and human security domains suggest about the likelihood of addressing that threat? A better understanding of broader regional patterns may be the key to explaining the possibility of regional nuclear cooperation. It may also help identify means to effectuate the timing and scale of that cooperation, bolstering regional nuclear orders and, in turn, ensuring the viability of global nuclear order.

University of Georgia Press

Studies in Security and International Affairs Ser.

Regional Pathways to Nuclear Nonproliferation

Jeannette Money

Sarah P. Lockhart

Although international cooperation on migration is often promoted, scholars have been unable to arrive at a consensus about the extent of cooperation in the current system. Under what conditions does international cooperation on migration arise, and what shape does it take? These questions are important because migrants are often vulnerable to human rights abuses during their journeys as well as in the country of destination, and international cooperation represents one mechanism for reducing this vulnerability.

Jeannette Money and Sarah P. Lockhart ask these questions as they examine the patterns of migration flows during the post– World War II period, with particular attention to crises or shocks to the international system, as in the case of migration following the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Syria. Their analysis makes several important contributions to this debate. First, they explain how the broad pattern of migration in the contemporary era—generally from poorer, less stable countries to wealthier, more stable countries—fosters cooperation that is predominantly bilateral, when cooperation does in fact occur. Second, they argue that cooperation is unlikely under most circumstances, because countries of destination prefer the current system, which privileges their sovereignty over migration flows. Finally, they posit that cooperation may arise under three conditions: when the costs of maintaining the status quo increase, when countries of origin locate a venue where their numbers allow them to control the bargaining agenda, or when migrant flows tend toward reciprocity.

Migration Crises and the Structure of International Cooperation

Recent discoveries in psychology and neuroscience have improved our understanding of why our decision making processes fail to match standard social science assumptions about rationality. As researchers such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Richard Thaler have shown, people often depart in systematic ways from the predictions of the rational actor model of classic economic thought because of the influence of emotions, cognitive biases, an aversion to loss, and other strong motivations and values. These findings about the limits of rationality have formed the basis of behavioral economics, an approach that has attracted enormous attention in recent years.

This collection of essays applies the insights of behavioral economics to the study of nuclear weapons policy. Behavioral economics gives us a more accurate picture of how people think and, as a consequence, of how they make decisions about whether to acquire or use nuclear arms. Such decisions are made in real-world circumstances in which rational calculations about cost and benefit are intertwined with complicated emotions and subject to human limitations. 

Strategies for pursuing nuclear deterrence and nonproliferation should therefore, argue the contributors, account for these dynamics in a systematic way. The contributors to this collection examine how a behavioral approach might inform our understanding of topics such as deterrence, economic sanctions, the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and U. S. domestic debates about ballistic missile defense. The essays also take note of the limitations of a behavioral approach for dealing with situations in which even a single deviation from the predictions of any model can have dire consequences.

Behavioral Economics and Nuclear Weapons

Maia Carter Hallward

Charity Butcher

This study examines and compares the important work on global human rights advocacy done by religious NGOs and by secular NGOs. By studying the similarities in how such organizations understand their work, we can better consider not only how religious and secular NGOs might complement each other but also how they might collaborate and cooperate in the advancement of human rights. 

However, little research has attempted to compare these types of NGOs and their approaches. NGOs and Human Rights explores this comparison and identifies the key areas of overlap and divergence. In so doing, it lays the groundwork for better understanding how to capitalize on the strengths of religious groups, especially in addressing the world’s many human rights challenges. 

This book uses a new dataset of more than three hundred organizations affiliated with the United Nations Human Rights Council to compare the extent to which religious and secular NGOs differ in their framing, discussion, and operationalization of human rights work. 

Using both quantitative analysis of the extensive data collected by the authors and forty-seven in depth interviews conducted with members of human rights organizations in the sample, Charity Butcher and Maia Carter Hallward analyze these organizations’ approaches to questions of culture, development, women’s rights, children’s rights, and issues of peace and conflict.

NGOs and Human Rights: Comparing Faith-Based and Secular Approaches

Jana Tabak

However unthinkable child-soldiers may be within a generalized conception of childhood, they are not imaginary figures; rather, they are a constant in almost every armed conflict around the world. The participation of children in wars may question the idea of childhood as a "once-upon-a-time story with a happy and predictable ending," disrupting the (natural) idea of a protected and innocent childhood and also eliciting fear, uncertainty, revulsion, horror, and sorrow.

Using the perspectives of both childhood studies and critical approaches to international relations, Jana Tabak explores the constructions of child-soldiers as "children at risk" and, at the same time, risky children. More specifically, The Child and the World aims both to problematize the boundaries that articulate child-soldiers as necessarily deviant and pathological in relation to "normal" children and to show how these specific limits participate in the (re)production and promotion of a particular version of the international political order. In this sense, the focus of this work is not on investigating child-soldiers’ lives and experiences per se but on their presumed threatening feature as they depart from the protected territory of childhood, disquieting everyday international life.

The Child and the World: Child-Soldiers and the Claim for Progress

Mariam Bjarnesen

Despite peace agreements, demobilization, and reintegration processes, the end of war does not automatically or necessarily make combatants abandon their wartime rebel networks. In Liberia such structures have lingered long after the civil war came to an end in 2003. Weak formal security institutions with a history of predatory behavior have contributed to the creation of an environment where informal initiatives for security and protection are called upon. In fragile postwar settings, former soldiers can be used as intimidators but have paradoxically reemerged as security providers, challenging our understanding of both the setting and the actors beyond the sphere of war. 

Based on original interview material and findings from fieldwork, Repurposed Rebels follows former rebel soldiers from the time of civil war to 2013. These actors have reemerged as “recycled” warriors in times of regional wars and crisis and as vigilantes and informal security providers for economic and political purposes. Through these actors, Mariam Bjarnesen examines the relevance of postwar rebel networks and ex-combatant identity in contemporary Liberia, with an eye to understanding the underlying aims of demobilization when reintegration is challenged. Bjarnesen argues that these ex-combatants have succeeded in reintegrating themselves due to, not despite, the fact that they have not been truly demobilized.

Repurposed Rebels: Postwar Rebel Networks in Liberia

Tadeusz Kugler

Demographic changes directly affect political and socioeconomic dynamics. Whether they are the nationalities of migrating refugees, the percentage of women in the workforce, or aging as a phenomenon (population decline, age of marriage, number of children, or the resources of youth), demographics can change the political dynamics of a country, creating in some cases increased freedoms but also potentially causing conflict or civil war.

Power to the Population is a comprehensive guide to predicting and evaluating different possible futures for humanity. These differing scenarios are of particular importance to decision makers, and Tadeusz Kugler focuses on the optimism of what can be created by and for the population. 

The book investigates the dynamic relationship between political choices and changing populations. Kugler explores how government policies seemingly focused on localized power and economic development profoundly shape the demographic makeup on local and global scales. The demographic future of a population—not only regarding numbers but also in its diversity and how historically marginalized communities are undermined—is not merely about one place, time, or people. Demography has the potential to change the economic and political future of the world.

Power to the Population: The Political Consequences and Causes of Demographic Changes

Kareem El Damanhoury

Photographic Warfare explores the processes of visual contestation at work in the competing official media campaigns of state forces and militant, nonstate actors in the online environment. Islamist and far-right militant groups are increasingly weaponizing their visual media by displaying their actions—beheadings, trainings, fighting on the battlefield, services provision to locals, and so on— as spectacles that circulate around the globe to challenge statebased media messaging and policy agendas. In response, numerous states and coalitions have expanded their online media presence to counter such threats. 

Using the conflict between ISIS and the Egyptian state over the Sinai Peninsula as a case study, Kareem El Damanhoury introduces an analytical framework of visual contestation to guide future studies of competing visual media campaigns in the online environment. The proposed model provides a rubric for dissecting and understanding contemporary photographic warfare using visual framing, semiotic analysis, contextual interpretations, and comparative applications. Photographic Warfare further emphasizes the many situational factors that influence visual output and content, including militant attacks, counterterrorism operations, loss of leaders, and introduction of new groups into the battlefield.

Photographic Warfare: ISIS, Egypt, and the Online Battle for Sinai

Security studies, also known as international security studies, is an academic subfield within the wider discipline of international relations that examines organized violence, military conflict, and national security. Meant to serve as an introduction to the field of security studies, Contextualizing Security is a collection of original essays, primary source lectures, and previously published material in the overlapping fields of security studies, political science, sociology, journalism, and philosophy. It offers both graduate and undergraduate students a grasp on both foundational issues and more contemporary debates in security studies. 

Nineteen chapters cover security studies in the context of homeland security and liberty, U.S. foreign policy, lessons from the Cold War, science and technology policy, drones, cybersecurity, the War on Terror, migration, study-abroad programs, the surveillance state, Africa, and China. 

CONTRIBUTORS: Amelia Ayers, James E. Baker, Roy D. Blunt, Mark Boulton, Naji Bsisu, Robert E. Burnett, Daniel Egbe, Laila Farooq, Lisa Fein, Anna Holyan, Jeh C. Johnson, Richard Ledgett, David L. McDermott, James McRae, Amanda Murdie, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Scahill, Kristan Stoddart, Jeremy Brooke Straughn, J. R. Swanegan, and Kali Wright-Smith

Contextualizing Security: A Reader

Language is never just a means of communication. It terrorizes. And, especially in times of war, it has the ability to target civilians and generate fear as a means of producing specific political outcomes, most notably the passive and active acceptance of state violence itself. For this reason, the critical examination of language must be a central part of any effort to fight imperialism, militarism, demagoguery, racism, sexism, and other structures of injustice. Globalizing Collateral Language examines the discourse surrounding 9/11 and its entrenchment in global politics and culture. 

To interrogate this wartime lexicon of “collateral language,” editors John Collins and Somdeep Sen have assembled a volume of critical essays that explores the long shadow of America’s “War on Terror” discourse. They illuminate how this language has now found resonance across the globe and in political projects that have little to do with the “War on Terror.” Two decades after the attacks of September 11, 2001, this book calls on us to resist the tyranny of collateral language at a time when the need for such interventions in the public sphere is more urgent than ever.