China's Naval Ambitions in the Indian Ocean

This article argues that an increasingly sea-power-minded China will neither shelter passively in coastal waters, nor throw itself into competition with the United States in the Pacific Ocean. Rather, Beijing will direct its energies toward South and Southeast Asia, where supplies of oil, natural gas, and other commodities critical to China's economic development must pass. There China will encounter an equally sea-power-minded India that enjoys marked geostrategic advantages. Beijing will likely content itself with ‘soft power’ diplomacy in these regions until it can settle the dispute with Taiwan, freeing up resources for maritime endeavors farther from China's coasts.     

Interagency Coordination: The Other Side of CIMIC

All governments wrestle with the challenge of interagency coordination. Improving civil-military coordination, at the national level as well as in the field, can be a useful step in designing a more effective defense decision-making process. National-level organisations do not cooperate easily, but young military and civilian personnel with CIMIC experience can begin to open stovepipes. If vertically organized governments are ever to deal effectively with horizontally organized threats, they must become populated by those who have witnessed the power of horizontal thinking. CIMIC operations thus prepare future `bureaucrats' to create government networks capable of managing the triple threat of terrorism, insurgency and organized crime     

A1 Qaeda and the radical Islamic challenge to western strategy

The September 11 global crisis prompted by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon raises major questions concerning the nature and trajectory of terrorism in the post-Cold War global order. Hitherto, terrorism has been largely debated by analysts at the level of nation states. Terrorist and insurgent movements have also been largely anchored in nationalist and ethnic power bases even when they have sought to mobilise a transnational ideological appeal on religious or class grounds. There have been a few exceptions to this pattern such as the alliance between the German Baader-Meinhof group and the Japanese Red Army Faction, but even such international alliances as this did not, until at least the 1980s, presage anything like a global terrorist network necessitating a global strategic response. This study examines terrorism and global strategic responses.     

The March of the Lord's Resistance Army: Greed or Grievance in Northern Uganda?

This article addresses the form and nature of an insurgency in Northern Uganda that has been active since the mid-1980s. The insurgency movement itself grew out of an internal breakdown in security lasting over several years, during which ethnicity played a critical part in defining access to power and resources within Uganda. The recent explosion of literature relating to conflict inside Sub-Saharan Africa outlines several different analytical approaches to violence. One of the most recent and influential has been that of examining greed rather than grievance as the main driver behind conflict. This articl looks at the evolution of warfare in Northern Uganda over 15 years and puts the argument that greed and grievance are not mutually exclusive in this situation and it is the interaction between the two that provides the impetus for continued violence.