Sweden and the issue of NATO membership: exploring a public opinion paradox

The past decade has seen substantial shifts in Swedish security policy and major change in the domestic debate about NATO. For the first time, all of the right-of-centre “alliance parties” are calling for a full NATO membership, and popular support for NATO has increased. Yet public opinion contains ambiguities and paradoxes that complicate the picture. At the same time as support for NATO has increased, the public is overwhelmingly for continued military non-alignment. Drawing on previous research, longitudinal data from national surveys, and other sources on defence and security issues, this article aims to increase our understanding of the development and change in Swedish public opinion on NATO. A key argument is that Erving Goffman’s theatre metaphor, combined with neo-institutional decoupling theory, to a large degree can help understand the public opinion paradox.     

A Cryptographic Escrow for Treaty Declarations and Step-by-Step Verification

The verification of arms-control and disarmament agreements requires states to provide declarations, including information on sensitive military sites and assets. There are important cases, however, in which negotiations of these agreements are impeded because states are reluctant to provide any such data, because of concerns about prematurely handing over militarily significant information. To address this challenge, we present a cryptographic escrow that allows a state to make a complete declaration of sites and assets at the outset and commit to its content, but only reveal the sensitive information therein sequentially. Combined with an inspection regime, our escrow allows for step-by-step verification of the correctness and completeness of the initial declaration so that the information release and inspections keep pace with parallel diplomatic and political processes. We apply this approach to the possible denuclearization of North Korea. Such approach can be applied, however, to any agreement requiring the sharing of sensitive information.     

On scheduling a single machine to minimize a piecewise linear objective function: A compact MIP formulation

We study the scheduling situation in which a set of jobs subjected to release dates and deadlines are to be performed on a single machine. The objective is to minimize a piecewise linear objective function ∑_jF_j where F_j(C_j) corresponds to the cost of the completion of job j at time C_j. This class of function is very large and thus interesting both from a theoretical and practical point of view: It can be used to model total (weighted) completion time, total (weighted) tardiness, earliness and tardiness, etc. We introduce a new Mixed Integer Program (MIP) based on time interval decomposition. Our MIP is closely related to the well‐known time‐indexed MIP formulation but uses much less variables and constraints. Experiments on academic benchmarks as well as on real‐life industrial problems show that our generic MIP formulation is efficient. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009     

The FARC’s militaristic blueprint

This article intends to explain the outstanding sequence of success and failure exhibited by the FARC, the main Colombian guerrilla since the 1980s. It claims that such sequence is unintelligible unless the adoption by the FARC of a militaristic organizational blueprint at its 1982 7^th Conference is taken into account. By building itself like an army, the FARC could boost its combat capacity, maintain its structural integrity, and develop powerful mechanisms that held the whole structure together. At the same time, the militarization of the FARC also entailed significant risks and costs like political isolation and high personnel turnover. After describing the militaristic blueprint, the article compares the FARC with other irregular forces that operated in the Colombian context – a comparison which is important to understand the specificity of the FARC trajectory, as well as the benefits and costs involved in it. The analysis highlights the critical role of organizational dimensions in the explanation of civil war outcomes, and suggests that at least for some problems organizational dynamics should be observed at a low level of granularity.     

Governance through brokerage: informal governance in post-civil war societies

There is currently a lack of knowledge about how elites rule post-civil war societies without strong state institutions. This paper argues that elites oftentimes overcome such institutional deficiencies by engaging in governance through brokerage. According to this perspective, elites outsource central state functions to influential broker figures. This is particularly true when dealing with war-affected groups that possess much violent agency. By functioning as social membranes, brokers can help elites and war-affected groups to redefine a new social contract. Liberia is employed as an example to illustrate the paper’s central arguments.     

Optimal search for a moving target with the option to wait

We investigate the problem in which an agent has to find an object that moves between two locations according to a discrete Markov process (Pollock, Operat Res 18 (1970) 883–903). At every period, the agent has three options: searching left, searching right, and waiting. We assume that waiting is costless whereas searching is costly. Moreover, when the agent searches the location that contains the object, he finds it with probability 1 (i.e. there is no overlooking). Waiting can be useful because it could induce a more favorable probability distribution over the two locations next period. We find an essentially unique (nearly) optimal strategy, and prove that it is characterized by two thresholds (as conjectured by Weber, J Appl Probab 23 (1986) 708–717). We show, moreover, that it can never be optimal to search the location with the lower probability of containing the object. The latter result is far from obvious and is in clear contrast with the example in Ross (1983) for the model without waiting. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

Disrupt and restraint: The evolution of cyber conflict and the implications for collective security

In the last decade, cyber conflict has become a main feature of international politics and a growing concern for strategic stability and collective security. Unfortunately, cyber conflict suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity about its impact on collective security and a lack of consensus among international actors on how to interpret it. This article proposes to understand cyber conflict as an evolving process driven by two factors: the way in which digital space is configured and the way in which tactical, organizational, strategic, and doctrinal characteristics related to cyber have been included in the field of national and international security. Both tend to encourage offensive behavior but also demonstrate features pointing to restraint.