Through military lenses. Perception of security threats and jointness in the Italian Air Force

The article explores Italian Air Force (ITAF) officers’ perceptions of military transformation and of changes in the global security environment. While several studies have addressed the challenges faced by European armed forces in the last two decades, the methods used have been rather uniform, mostly relying on in-depth case studies through qualitative interviews and analysis of strategic documents and budgets. Using data from an original, and unique, survey conducted among ITAF captains (N = 286), this article focuses on servicemen’s attitudes towards the transformations of the global security environment and the changes occurring (and needed) within the Italian Air Force. After describing the “military view” on these topics, the article provides preliminary statistical evidence on the links between individual experiences, views, and change. The research aims to contribute to the broader debate on military transformation by adding a novel dimension of analysis and providing new insights on the micro-level aspects of learning.     

现代恐怖活动的形式特点及对策

警卫工作如何加强防范措施 ,以应对当前恐怖破坏活动不断发展变化的新形势 ,确保各项警卫任务的圆满完成 ,是警卫部队需要解决的重要课题。本文阐述了现代条件下恐怖活动的表现形式和特点 ,提出了警卫工作中反恐怖的对策。     

From control to parasitism

This article sets out to investigate the current paradoxical roles of border control agencies in order to contribute to the theoretical debate on border porosity and related security issues in West Africa. The colonial demarcation of African borders accounts for their porous nature initially, as borderland populations challenged the unjust scission of their cultural, economic, geographical and geopolitical spaces. However, new forms of porosity also evolved over time, masterminded by new actors. Drawing on the Ghana–Togo border case, and through interviews, observation and documentary analysis, this article argues that border control agencies are partly responsible for the current border porosity and attendant security problems as their jurisdiction has shifted to a multi-layered border parasitism. The article is not, however, an attack on border law enforcement agencies; rather it attempts to explore their roles in shielding the region, already exposed to terrorism and piracy, from further security threats.     

全球治理视角下奥巴马政府太空战略解读

作为重要的全球公域范围与全球治理对象之一,太空既面临着日益严峻的资源、环境与安全问题,又不断彰显着其极具地缘政治意义的战略地位,攸关国家利益与安全。自进入太空时代以来,争夺和维持太空领域的领先地位一直是美国不懈追求的目标。美国的经济、军事等国家实力越来越依赖太空,同时其太空资产的脆弱性也愈发凸显。面对新的国际国内形势与外空态势的复合挑战,奥巴马政府适时调整了美国的太空战略。文章以全球公域和全球治理为切入视角,在分析太空领域全球治理现状的基础上,从太空活动行为准则的制定、太空国际合作的深入、太空军备竞赛的规制三个层面解读奥巴马政府的新版太空战略,并探讨其深层次的动因与影响,进而为中国参与太空领域的全球治理提供有益的理论支撑与现实参考。     

上海世博会警卫工作无线通信指挥平台的构建与应用

在众多安全保卫工作中,无线通信联络是确保警卫指挥有条不紊的重要环节。结合上海警卫部队特点及警卫工作实际。对世博安保警卫工作无线通信指挥平台的构建与应用,进行了回顾和总结。同时,也对警卫工作信息化建设进一步发展的具体思路,提出一些新的观点和理念。     

Beyond the state: reconceptualising African security in the 21st century

Confronted with myriad security challenges, African states and the much-vaunted peace and security architecture of the African Union (AU) has proven not to be up to the challenge. Indeed, this is implicitly acknowledged by the AU itself if one considers the creation of such security structures as the African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), which exists outside its peace and security architecture. This paper argues for a radical rethink of security structures on the African continent – one in which state structures of security coexist with newer forms of security actors, including private military companies (PMCs), community movements and the business sector. Whilst this shift in security actors is already happening on the ground, policymakers need to embrace this new reality.     

Gender,feminism and food studies

Policy research and scholarship on food has rapidly increased in recent decades. The attention to ‘gender' within this work appears to signal important practical and academic efforts to mainstream gendered understandings of food consumption, distribution and production into expansive conceptualisations of human security. This article argues that the gender-related work on food has wide-ranging and often troubling political and theoretical foundations and implications. Often growing out of knowledge regimes for managing social crises and advancing neo-liberal solutions, much gender and food security work provides limited interventions into mainstream gender-blind work on the nexus of power struggles, food resources and globalisation. A careful analysis of knowledge production about gender and food is therefore crucial to understanding how and why feminist food studies often transcends and challenges dominant forms of scholarship and research on food security. This article's critical assessment of what food security studies in South Africa has entailed at the regional level and in global terms also focuses on the methodological and theoretical feminist interventions that can stimulate rigorous conceptual, research and practical attention to what has come to be understood as food sovereignty.     

From the ESS to the EU Global Strategy: external policy,internal purpose

Security strategies are important sites for narrating the EU into existence as a security actor. The unveiling of a new global strategy on foreign and security policy for the EU immediately post-Brexit could be conceived as a pledge to remain together as a Union for the purposes of contributing to global security in a particular way. This paper offers a brief stock-taking of the EU’s way of writing security from the European Security Strategy (2003) to the EU Global Strategy (2016). A concise exegesis of these documents exposes an interesting dynamic: as exercises in ordering the world, both strategic guidelines have turned out to be major exercises in ordering the self. The comparative snapshot shows the EU as increasingly anxious to prove its relevance for its own citizens, yet notably less confident about its actual convincingness as an ontological security framework for the EU’s constituent members over time.     

The Finger on the Button

Taiwan's international status is such that the country's ability to trade and to supply certain goods and technologies remains its primary means of practicing diplomacy and asserting international influence. U.S. pressure to conform to international nonproliferation standards has made the issue of export controls a troubling one for Taiwan. Limiting Taiwan's economic relations affects its ability to sustain itself economically and to maintain productive relations with other nations. On the other hand, as a recipient of U.S. high-technology transfers and security assurances, Taiwan cannot ignore the directives of the United States. The article focuses on this dilemma and how a shift in power to the Democratic Progressive Party is affecting Taiwan's choice between placing limitations on its global economic power or risking being cut off from U.S. technology and losing U.S. security assurances. In order to address this challenge properly, Taiwan will need to reassess its fundamental economic and security interests.     

Measuring Military Professionalism in Partner Nations: Guidance for Security Assistance Officials

The U.S. spends billions of dollars in its security cooperation program to develop “professional, accountable, and capable security forces” in other nations, part of a grand strategy to improve global stability and counter violent extremism. Despite its great investment in professionalizing foreign militaries, however, the U.S. has no functional definition of military professionalism – a term that until now has been considered too vague and multi-faceted to operationalize. In this article, the author seeks to remedy this oversight, drawing from twenty years of security cooperation fieldwork in Latin America and Africa, as well as a vigorous literature review, to define four important components of military professionalism: (1) formal military education and vocational training, (2) military subordination to elected civilian officials, (3) knowledge and practice of the law of armed conflict and human rights law, and (4) a clearly established program of professional military ethics. This article provides guidelines for U.S. and European officials who work with partner nations to develop more professional military forces and, in particular, for officials managing security assistance programs with developing countries.     

The coming multi-order world

The article shows that the current international system is changing towards a completely new form of international system, conceptualized as a multi-order system. The suggestion for a multi-order world stands in contrast to three current narratives about the future global order expressed through a multipolar narrative; a multi-partner narrative and a multi-culture narrative. The article demonstrates that although each narrative points to a plausible future, neither fully captures what lies ahead. Using English School concepts such as order, international society, international system and primary and secondary institutions, the article reveals a conception of the coming international system as a system consisting of several different ‘orders’ (or international societies) nested within an overall international system. In the coming ‘multi-order world’, the liberal order will continue, and may even be strengthened internally, but its global reach will be a thing of the past. Moreover, the challenge in a multi-order world will be to forge new forms of relationships between composite and diverse actors across complex lines of division and convergence. Scholars and policy-makers should note that the coming multi-order world will be radically different, requiring new thinking and new institutions and the acceptance of diversity in both power and principle.     

Local defence forces and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan: learning from the CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam

Some scholars would have us believe that the distinctions between military and policing roles, methods and objectives have become increasingly blurred by the security demands of a post-Cold War and post-11 September global and domestic order. This article explores the current state of the police–military divide through a conceptual and case study analysis. It concludes that, in this case, there is some conflation occurring at a macro-level as international and domestic affairs have become increasingly indistinct, but the article also demonstrates that the actual ethos and practice of these agencies still differs strongly. Most importantly, the article argues that this distinction is in fact a very useful one in planning for future peace support operations     

Preventing conflict upstream: impunity and illicit governance across Colombia’s borders

This article explores how transnational borderlands matter for conflict prevention and, in particular, so-called upstream engagement, which aims to reduce threats to global stability and security that arise from the world’s increasing interconnectedness. Accounting for transnational borderlands in vulnerable regions is crucial for conflict prevention as pursued by the defence and security sector because borderlands are catalysts of the negative side of global interconnectedness: they are business hubs for transnational organised crime, sites of retreat for conflict actors, and safe havens for terrorists. The border areas’ proneness to impunity and the ability of violent non-state actors to govern these spaces illicitly contribute to the emergence of these characteristics. I therefore argue that upstream conflict prevention needs to do two things to address these risks: first, to overcome a national security approach centred on the borderline and instead acknowledge transnational security dynamics in borderlands on both sides of the border; second, to overcome the state-centred governance lens to also consider governance exerted by non-state actors. The article draws on empirical data from a six-year study including over a year of fieldwork in and on Colombia’s borderlands.     

From small wars to counterinsurgency: C.W. Gwynn, ‘Imperial Policing’ and transformation of doctrine

ABSTRACT

The complicated problematic of Imperial Policing in many respects still comes down to the principle of minimum force, and much of what we consider an integral part of the modern doctrine of counterinsurgency, is perceived as by-product of post-1945 colonial experience. Charles Gwynn wrote about it in his still underestimated text-book on internal security, ‘Imperial Policing’. As a result, there is a lack of clear understanding how colonial (based on local experience) knowledge was transformed into the expert (universal, transferable) knowledge in confronting rebellions at the doctrinal level. This article examines the work of Gwynn as part of a transitional stage from the age of global empires to the age of nuclear superpowers within the context of internal security doctrine. Adaptation to the new realities during the interwar period and after the World War II – reconfiguration of the British army epistemological system in confronting insurgencies – was a hard process. In this sense, the question about transformation of colonial knowledge into expert knowledge onto the field of internal security is a part of a more general and sensitive question about transition from colonialism to the post-colonial age.     

SECURITY GOVERNANCE IN SOUTH AFRICA

In the ten years since the establishment of South Africa's first inclusive democratic government, an ambitious, extensive and systematic process of reform has been carried out in the governance of security. The process is widely regarded as having been successful and a model for other processes of ‘security sector reform’ in the context of transitions from authoritarian forms of governance to democratic ones.

That this been achieved with hardly a shot fired in anger is a remarkable achievement and a credit to visionary political leadership as well as organisational capacity, in other words to effective security governance.

At the same time, progress has been uneven and sometimes fragmentary, policy intentions and commitments have not always been translated into practice, the end results have not been to everyone's liking, and transformation has engendered its own pathologies. Thus several challenges remain in improving security governance.

This article provides a broad overview of the roles played by the various actors in the governance of the security sector, including the executive, parliament and civil society. It examines the main policy frameworks and touches on organisational transformation, because it is impossible to deal with governance in isolation from these issues. Policy processes and the frameworks they give rise to—in particular—are critical for effective governance. This article deals with the defence, safety and security and intelligence fields. A comprehensive overview would need to include the governance of criminal justice and foreign policy. The article does not seek to make an overall evaluation of governance, but to identify achievements, shortfalls and challenges.     

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons: how safe is safe enough? Transparency versus opacity

Due to expanding and increasing religious extremism and terrorism coupled with political instability in Pakistan, most western observers believe that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are not secure and could be taken over by terrorists. This would have adverse implications for the region and for global peace, especially for the security of USA and Europe. This article argues that this perception is based on a flawed understanding and knowledge of how Pakistan's command and control setup has evolved and operates. Pakistan's nuclear weapons are as safe as any other state's nuclear weapons. Pakistan has also been active in supporting and participating in global efforts to improve nuclear safety and security. Over the years, Pakistan has been quite open in sharing information regarding how it is improving its command and control system with western governments as well as scholars. This article argues that the steps Pakistan has taken to secure its nuclear weapons are adequate and that Pakistan would continue to further strengthen these measures; however, it is the expanding religious extremism, terrorism and anti-Americanism in the country which make the international perception of Pakistan extremely negative and then seep into the perception of Pakistan's nuclear weapons safety and security.     

Small world,big guns: globalization,interstate security networks and conventional weapons imports

With the burgeoning influence of emerging markets in Asia, a tectonic shift is taking place in the global security landscape. Asian states are concomitantly arming as their economic clout grows. In light of these developments, security analysts would benefit from a formal means of placing these arms acquisitions in a structural context. Are arms acquisitions on par with the expectations of Asian states, given their structural dispositions, or are recent acquisitions beyond anticipated levels? By using a dynamic panel regression of 187 states from 1950 to 2011, this research predicts arms import volume using the degree of interstate arms linkages, the size of a state's military, and its level of economic development. The technique offers analysts a formal means of distinguishing orthodox behavior in importing conventional weapons from extraneous security motivations. The article concludes by generating near-term forecasts of Asian arms imports and discussing the implications of the technique.     

Introduction: one-and-a-half cheers for the EU Global Strategy

EU High Representative Federica Mogherini presented her EU Global Strategy (EUGS) in June 2016. Encircled by security crises, it is difficult to think of something more important for Europe than collective action with the aim of weathering the storm. The EUGS, in this respect, seeks to define common ends and identify means. So what do we make of the EUGS? What does the EUGS tell us about the current role of the EU in global affairs? And how will the withdrawal of the UK from the EU affect foreign and security policy? As a way of introduction to the forum, this article notes that the EUGS focuses on the neighbourhood, puts the interests of European citizens first, identifies civilian means, and has created momentum on security policy. The key question, however, remains whether there is any interest in the EUGS beyond the foreign policy elites.     

Multilateral Counter-Insurgency Networks

Postmodern terrorism presents a significant challenge to global security and law enforcement institutions. Non-state actors operating across international borders, engaged in an apparent global insurgency of extremism that transects the traditional boundaries of crime and war, pose significant challenges to both intelligence and law enforcement agencies. These networked global insurgents blend political and religious fanaticism with criminal enterprises to challenge the rule of law and pose an epochal shift in the structures and relations among states. Negotiating this epochal shift requires traditional organs of national security (the diplomatic, military and intelligence services) to forge new partnerships with police and public safety organizations at the state and local (sub-national), as well as transnational levels. Significant operational, policy and cultural challenges must be overcome to forge an effective multi-lateral global network to counter global terrorism and insurgency.