The market and the military profession: competition and change in the case of Sweden

The rise of private military and security companies (PMSCs) challenges our notion of military professionals. PMSCs bring new claims to professional status and legitimacy outside military institutions and represent an increasing diffusion of - and competition over - military and security expertise. In light of this development, understanding the formation of professional identities in military and private security organisations is as an important undertaking. This paper contributes to this endeavour by analysing professional self-images in the Swedish Armed Forces and how these relate to PMSCs. The study is based on data collected from official documents, semi-structured interviews and a small-scale survey among senior military officers. Focusing on military understandings of PMSCs and contractors, the analysis provides much-needed insight into relational aspects of professional identity formation outside the US context. Furthermore, it points to discrepancies in organisational and group levels in understandings of commercial security actors, and paves the way for future research.     

Neglected but affected: voices from the oil-producing regions of Ghana and Uganda

The ‘resource curse’ is the paradoxical theory frequently used to explain how a seemingly desirable asset, such as oil, can actually pervert an economy, erode governance, perpetuate conflict, and ruin local communities to the extent that it becomes a curse. New oil discoveries in western Ghana and western Uganda have raised concerns for the democratic prospects and future stability of these countries and their surrounding regions. Based on field interviews in these oil-producing regions, this report summarises how local communities have been affected thus far and their concerns for the future. The authors assess the extent to which each country is vulnerable to oil-induced instability, and identify groups or communities that would be most likely to perpetuate it. Lastly, it provides some assessment of the future trajectory of each country.     

The Bush War to Save the Rhino: Improving Counter-poaching Through Intelligence

The rhino is going extinct due to poaching at a rate which far outstrips current law enforcement or conservation efforts to halt their decline. A critical aspect of counter-poaching failures to date is an inaccurate view of the nature of poaching as a crime. Rather than demand-side efforts, attacking elusive smuggling networks or expensive technical solutions like drones, this article notes how a quasi-military tactical approach of ‘combat tracking’ offers the best way to protect the species. Based on wide ranging interviews and fieldwork across dozens of parks in southern Africa, it demonstrates how the current restricted range of the rhino, and the rarity of skilled poachers, makes a tactical solution the most effective to date.     

New Sources on the Role of Soviet Submarines in the Cuban Missile Crisis

Drawing on evidence collected from eyewitness interviews, new Russian secondary sources, as well as recently declassified documents from both sides, the author significantly widens the academic understanding of the maritime dimension of this gravest crisis of the Cold War. Most significant is her conclusion that Soviet commanders were led by complex and challenging tactical circumstances, including unreliable communications and malfunctioning equipment, which might have prompted them to contemplate a resort to tactical nuclear weapons on more than one occasion. Almost as disturbing is the revelation that US forces were not aware of this particular threat. This research reveals how a chain of inadvertent developments at sea could have precipitated global nuclear war, underlining the extreme danger of the crisis.     

Nuclear Fusion Power for Weapons Purposes

Fusion reactors have the potential to be used for military purposes. This article provides quantitative estimates about weapon-relevant materials produced in future commercial fusion reactors and discusses how suitable such materials are for use in nuclear weapons. Whether states will consider such use in the future will depend on specific regulatory, political, economic, and technical boundary conditions. Based on expert interviews and the political science literature, we identify three of these conditions that could determine whether fusion power will have a military dimension in the second half of this century: first, the technological trajectory of global energy policies; second, the management of a peaceful power transition between rising and declining powers; and third, the overall acceptance of the nuclear normative order. Finally, the article discusses a few regulatory options that could be implemented by the time fusion reactors reach technological maturity and become commercially available; such research on fusion reactor safeguards should start as early as possible and accompany the current research on experimental fusion reactors.     

Can security vetting be extended to include the detection of financial misconduct?

An analysis of the security vetting files of 19 employees within a South African national department who had been found guilty of financial misconduct in the last five years uncovered that the existing security vetting processes did not detect the financial misconduct of which these employees have been found guilty. This research sets out to establish whether security vetting can be extended to include the detection of financial misconduct within the department and, if so, how. Moreover, if security vetting can indeed be so extended, can it possibly enhance the management of fraud risk across all South African public sector departments? Qualitative interviews were conducted with 27 employees who are key to fraud risk management and security vetting within the researched department. During the interviews, the following five themes emerged: (1) the reasons why employees commit financial misconduct; (2) why it is not detected by the security vetting process; (3) the potential alignment of the security vetting process to facilitate the detection of financial misconduct; (4) the following through on security vetting findings; and (5) sharing these findings with the internal audit and risk management functions within state departments. These themes were probed and are reported on, establishing firstly that security vetting can indeed be extended to include the detection of financial misconduct within the researched department, and secondly that it can enhance the management of fraud risk across all South African public sector departments, given the specific mandate of the State Security Agency (SSA) and the national security vetting strategy.     

高校新教师专业成长个人状况的调查与思考

新教师阶段是教师专业成长的关键阶段,对教师个体和学校的可持续发展具有深远意义。本文采用实地观察、问卷访谈等研究方法,对某高校新教师的职业满意度、专业成长的动机、需要和自我意识等专业成长个人状况进行了调查,分析其发展现状和存在的问题,进而提出促进新教师专业成长的思考与建议。     

Chemical weapons and the Iran‐Iraq war: A case study in noncompliance

Policy makers and scholars have drawn improper lessons from the Ukrainian case of disarmament. Employing a content analysis of Ukrainian and Russian news sources, as well as a series of interviews with Ukrainian officials conducted by the author, this paper argues that Ukraine did not surrender its nuclear arsenal because it received compensation or faced financial and technical hurdles in securing effective command and control over the weapons. Instead, Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons due to a lack of demand for them. The historical interactions between Ukrainians and Russians led the majority of Ukrainian leaders to reject a conception of the Ukrainian national identity that cognitively perceived Russia as a security threat. Only with a proper understanding of this case study can the international community understand how the nonproliferation norm succeeded.     

Coordinating Covert Action: The Case of the Yemen Civil War and the South Arabian Insurgency

Focusing on British involvement in the 1960s Yemen Civil War, this article examines the centralised mechanisms developed in Whitehall to coordinate covert action interdepartmentally. It therefore sheds new light on London's security and intelligence machine and its input into clandestine operations. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews, it uncovers various important but secretive actors, which have been overlooked or misunderstood in the existing literature, and outlines their functions in the most detail yet available. In doing so, it considers how these bodies evolved in relation to competing threat assessments of the local situation and the impact they had on Britain's covert intervention in the theatre. This article assesses the utility of the system and argues that it provided an effective means to ensure that any covert action sanctioned was properly scrutinised so as to reduce risks and best meet national interests.     

Arming China: Major powers’ arms transfers to the People’s Republic of China

The rise of China has been fuelled by a massive military modernisation programme relying, in large part, on the acquisition of foreign military equipment. The question of how the world’s major powers define their arms transfer policies towards China is therefore crucially important. This article makes two original contributions. First, drawing on neoclassical realism, it proposes an explanatory framework integrating international and domestic factors to explain variations in major powers’ arms transfers. Second, based on a large body of elite interviews and diplomatic cables, it offers the first comprehensive comparison of American, British, French and Russian arms transfer policies towards China since the end of the Cold War.     

Belligerent beginnings: John F. Kennedy on the opening day of the Cuban missile crisis

This article – based on data that employs interviews conducted with British Army personnel – adopts a social theory of learning in order to examine how both formal and informal learning systems have affected organizational learning within the Army in relation to the counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan. It argues that while the Army has adopted new, or reformed existing, formal learning systems, these have not generated a reconceptualization of how to conduct counter-insurgency warfare. It, furthermore, argues that while informal learning systems have enabled units to improve their pre-deployment preparations, these have created adaptation traps that have acted as barriers to higher-level learning.     

关于加强战场抢修法规建设的思考

通过对外军战场抢修工作研究和法规建设的回顾,分析了战场抢修研究的重要意义,指出了我军战场抢修工作中亟待解决的问题,论述了加强我军战场抢修法规建设的必要性和紧迫性。根据我军战场抢修的长期实践,借鉴外军有益经验提出了我军战场抢修管理法规和技术法规体系的内容和要求。最后还就加强我军战场抢修法规建设应采取的措施提出了建议。     

石河子大学在读研究生余暇体育现状调查与分析

本文运用文献资料、问卷调查、数理统计和访谈等方法，旨在全面了解石河子大学在读研究生的余暇体育现状，探讨石河子大学在读研究生余暇体育的特点，以及对影响研究生余暇体育活动的因素进行调查分析，并提出针对性的建议，为石河子大学研究生余暇体育开展提供一定的参考依据。     

TERRORIST THREATS AND TRANSITIONAL DYNAMICS IN AN OVERLAPPING GENERATIONS MODEL

Previous research has shown that the duration of a civil war is in part a function of how it ends: in government victory, rebel victory, or negotiated settlement. We present a model of how protagonists in a civil war choose to stop fighting. Hypotheses derived from this theory relate the duration of a civil war to its outcome as well as characteristics of the civil war and the civil war nation. Findings from a competing risk model reveal that the effects of predictors on duration vary according to whether the conflict ended in government victory, rebel victory, or negotiated settlement.     

Is Britain a force for good? Investigating British citizens’ narrative understanding of war

It is commonly assumed in the foreign policy literature that narratives are uniquely persuasive and thus integral to obtaining public support for war. Yet, empirical research on “strategic narrative” is often vague on both the concept of narrative and how it persuades. Moreover, the stories publics use to interpret war are rarely examined. This paper offers a novel approach to studying “from the ground up” the war stories of individual British citizens. It examines public interpretations of war through emplotment: the way people select and link events to create a coherent story. Examining the wars people include and those they silence, it illustrates how a diverse range of citizens morally evaluates Britain’s military role, be it as a Force for Good, a Force for Ill or a country Learning from its Mistakes. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative methodological approach to studying how individual citizens understand war.     

Fragmented forces: The development of the Gambian military

This article provides a detailed look at the history of the Gambia Armed Forces (GAF), a military that has received very little academic attention within the study of African state security forces. It identifies key turning points in the GAF’s history, and highlights the vastly different roles the military played in the state under President Jawara (1965–94) and President Jammeh (1994–2017). Yet, it also highlights important similarities regarding internal patterns within the armed forces and shows the ways in which these continuities may challenge attempts to restructure the security sector. The article draws on archival research and interviews conducted with retired and active duty Gambian military personnel, government officials, and Gambian scholars.     

警卫人才学的探索与构想

目前，在警卫人才这一领域，还没有一门专门的科学进行研究。因此，应该把警卫人才选拔、评价等未知成果开发出来，开展对警卫人才问题的综合研究。警卫人才学是研究警卫人才发生、发展的全过程及其规律的科学，是社会客观需要和警卫战线建设实际需求的产物，是警卫学科中特有的一门学科。     

Twenty Years After Dayton: Bosnia-Herzegovina (Still) Stable and Explosive*

This paper examines how fragile Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is and whether it is indeed in danger of collapsing, as significant amount of academic literature often claims. The research finds that BiH is not in an immediate danger of collapse. BiH remains peaceful, despite the numerous challenges it faces. However, it comprises an alarming amount of causes of conflict that have been mitigated because both international actors and local elites benefit from the current status quo. Thus, BiH finds itself in a peaceful stalemate, which is likely to continue until a structural change occurs that triggers the outbreak of violent conflict.     

五家渠市初中教师校本培训现状研究

本研究通过问卷法和访谈法相结合的方式，调查了五家渠市初中教师校本培训的现状及存在问题。在此基础上，对反映出来的问题进行了原因分析，并根据当地实际情况，提出了完善该市初中教师校本培训的建议。     

知识建构课堂中的高阶思维发生路径研究

如何培养学生高阶思维能力是目前社会各界非常关注的问题。知识建构教学在促进"浅层学习"转向"深度学习"方面取得的研究,已经得到了国际学习科学领域的广泛认可,而对于如何促进学生高阶思维能力发展具体途径,还需要不断进行探索。研究以小学二年级科学课程为例,按照知识建构的课堂组织了教学设计过程。通过研究发现,知识建构的课堂通过培养学生发散思维能力、发现问题、解决问题的能力和综合能力,可以有效促进学生高阶思维能力的培养。