Outflanking missile defences: the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty,nuclear weapons and terrorism

Ian Bellany, an Emeritus Professor of Politics at Lancaster University, died in July 2011 at the age of 70, after a long and painful struggle with myelofibrosis, a rare and invariably terminal blood cancer. Between early 2009 and August 2010, under contract to Hurst & Co., he worked intermittently on a book about nuclear terrorism, which he provisionally entitled Before the Storm. The editor and I are grateful to Michael Dwyer at Hurst & Co. for releasing the draft. What is published here is an edited version of that draft. It may seem presumptuous to speak for Ian, but I am sure he would also have liked to thank the doctors and nurses of the NHS Morecambe Bay Universities Hospital Trust, whose skill, knowledge, and flair for improvisation kept him alive and writing for much longer than anyone expected. Alastair Bellany, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA.

In the past, terrorists have tended to eschew acts of extreme violence for fear of alienating those whom they wish to persuade and attract to their cause. The first to discard this philosophy was the Aum group in Japan, which sought to use anthrax and acquire a nuclear weapon. Since then, attitudes have changed, spurred on by the impact on public perception of the successful Al Qaeda 9/11 attack on New York and Washington. By crossing the line between moderation and extreme violence, terrorist groups retain one valuable capability: they are much less easily deterred and have few inhibitions. This article considers the three nuclear options open to terrorists – produce a radiological contaminant bomb; build a nuclear bomb; or steal or get given a nuclear device. It examines the possibilities and probabilities of each option and considers how the implementation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) provisions might impose some constraints on terrorists’ nuclear ambitions. By examining the doubtful nuclear security practices of different states and providing statistical evidence of an increase in levels of international terrorist violence, this article points to determined terrorists in time acquiring the means to acquire one or other variants of a nuclear weapon. It concludes that it is not a matter of “if” but “when.”     

Between the Cracks: Actor Fragmentation and Local Conflict Systems in the Libyan Civil War

Abstract

After nearly four years of civil war, Libya continues to be described as an ‘ungoverned space’ where the collapse of state institutions reignited tribal, political, religious and ideological tensions. These accounts, however, obscure Libya’s complex subnational governance, and the role of non-state armed groups in shaping the emerging political orders. By contrast, we contend that distinct subnational political orders have emerged in Libya since 2014 in which actors engage in state-making practices driven by local interests. Using empirical evidence to explore the activity of non-state armed groups during the Libyan civil conflict, we highlight that the local conflict environments in eastern, western and southern Libya provide specific incentives that shape the process of armed group splintering and patterns of violence. The findings demonstrate that claims to authority and notions of statehood extend far beyond the state whereby governance relations are negotiated between state and non-state actors. Conflict patterns, (in)stability and the prevailing political order are therefore conditional on the nature of the dominant actor, their strategies and modes of violence within their areas of influence. Through this analysis, the paper provides a more granular understanding of the local political dynamics that drive violence in Libya and civil wars more generally.     

Surrogate warfare: the art of war in the 21st century?

Airpower, drones and cyber-weapons are employed by states in conjunction with local armed non-state actors in an effort to coercively intervene in the crises of the twenty-first century. While the externalization of the burden of warfare is a return to pre-modern war, it is the change in the underlying socio-political relations between the state and its military agent that is a novel phenomenon in surrogate warfare. This article demonstrates that in a post-Westphalian era characterized by non-state violence, globalized conflicts, a prioritization of risk management in a mediatized environment, the state has to explore new ways to remain relevant as the primary communal security provider. Thereby, the organization of violence has departed from the employment of the state’s soldier as the primary bearer of the burden of warfare to a mode of war where technological and human surrogates enable the state to manage the risks of post-modern conflict remotely. In this article, we conceptually explore surrogate warfare as a socio-political phenomenon within the context of globalized, privatized, securitized and mediatized war.     

Understanding contemporary conflicts in Africa: a state of affairs and current knowledge

Understanding contemporary conflicts in Africa remains directly dependent on the approaches employed to decipher or interpret them. This article first examines the bias of conventional approaches (inherited from the Cold War) and then those of a series of supposedly “newer” approaches. Relying primarily on West African examples, it offers a brief overview of current knowledge, issues, and avenues for research, based on three apparent characteristics of a “new generation” of conflicts: the regionalization of wars, the privatization of violence and security, and the recourse to extreme forms of brutality. These three major trends bear witness to a rapid transformation of war and armed violence over the past 20 years, but they are not sufficient to establish a radical historical break between “old” and “new” conflicts in Africa. By concealing elements of continuity a priori, the most influential “new” approaches actually make it impossible to ponder their own limits. To that end, fashionability and struggles for influence within the Africanist field play a major role in perpetuating dominant, sensationalistic, or simplistic (and invariably incorrect) portrayals of African conflicts.     

Peace-building or structural violence? Deconstructing the aftermath of Nigeria/Cameroon boundary demarcation

ABSTRACT

There is a great conviction that the International Court of Justice’s ruling in 2002 on the Bakassi boundary dispute between Nigeria and Cameroon, and Nigeria’s decision to obey the ruling may have stopped a fierce inter-state war over the boundary. Indeed, many then ascribed to the whole boundary demarcation process as peacebuilding, disregarding the structural changes marked by the violence of forced migration. This article explores how the boundary delimitation has produced particular sorts of structural violence characterised by state neglect, loss of livelihoods and destitution. Thus, the article argues that although a full-blown war was avoided, the socio-economic conditions of the Nigerian populations on both sides of the border were not adequately considered and guaranteed as part of the peace-building agenda. It further argues that Nigeria, like many post-colonial states with the concentration of developments in major cities, neglects rural and border communities. Thus, the border communities accommodating the former Bakassi residents have further degenerated into ‘ill-governed’ spaces. This article uses structural violence as a framework to analyse the primary and secondary data to provide some deeper insights into the issues of violence being experienced by the local populations living on both sides of the demarcated border.     

The ligaments of counter-terrorism regime: sexual violence and the vicarious traumatisation of female non-governmental organisation workers: evidence from Nigeria

ABSTRACT

There is a dearth of studies on indirect victims of sexual violence in counter-terrorism efforts. Using Nigeria as a case study, this paper argues that global and state-level counter-terrorism policies have generally failed to account for the psychological effects of the engagement of female NGO workers in counter-terrorism operations or mitigating the effects of terrorism in conflict zones. Specifically, there has been an increase in sexual violence perpetrated by some members of the security agencies involved in counter-terrorism operations in North-eastern Nigeria. As a result, female NGO workers carry out Medicare, psychosocial counselling and advocacy for these victims. Female NGO workers become exposed to the trauma of victims of sexual violence, which affects their mental health and thus performances in counter-terrorism activities in the country. This altered their worldview on issues of safety even among secured locations or among the presence of security agents and reinforced feelings of powerlessness.     

Correlates of Perceived Insecurity: Evidence from Pakistan

This study explores the correlates of perceived insecurity among the households in Pakistan. For this purpose, data from the third round of Pakistan Panel Household Survey are merged with terrorist incidents taken from Global Terrorism Database. The results illustrate that objective risk, signified by violence in the district of residence, and victimization play an important role in the formation of perceived insecurity. Moreover, males and residents of rural areas feel more insecure than females and urban residents, respectively. Furthermore, spatial variation in violence indicates that terrorist attacks in the first-order contiguous districts (i.e. the immediate neighbors) are also associated with subjective insecurity. These are crucial findings because behavioral changes, such as perceived insecurity, could force the households to make suboptimal investment decisions. More importantly, since changes in behavioral parameters may be highly persistent, this study cautions that violence in Pakistan may have potentially long-term impacts on social welfare.     

The First Carlist War (1833–40), insurgency,Ramón Cabrera,and expeditionary warfare

ABSTRACT

The period 1833 to 1840 witnessed a brutal civil war in Spain waged between insurgent Carlists and the government Cristinos. The Carlists managed to secure reliable territorial control only over one part of Spain (upland Navarra and rural parts of the neighbouring Basque provinces). Although pockets of armed Carlism flourished elsewhere in Spain, especially in Catalonia, Aragón and Galicia, these insurgents were ineffective at coordinating actions. The Carlist court in the Basque country tried to break its strategic blockade by launching a series of expeditions into Cristino-held territory in the hope of destabilising the Madrid regime and consolidating distant insurrections. This article explains how and why these expeditions scored tactical victories but strategic failures. In particular it argues that Carlist raiding strategy was a failure, for its use of violence against real and imagined enemies in marginal and Cristino areas of control alienated civilian support.