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781. The Climate-Security Century: Three Climate Hotspots

Author:
Mark Nevitt
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Fletcher Security Review
Institution:
The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Abstract:
The climate-security century is here. With global temperatures rising, climate change is poised to massively destabilize the physical environment. This century may well be defined by our ability (or inability) to reduce our collective greenhouse gas emissions. We must also adapt and respond to climate change’s multivariate security impacts. From raging wildfires in Australia and California to melting ice sheets and permafrost in the Arctic, climate change acts as both a threat accelerant and a catalyst for conflict. Climate change is also unlike any other traditional security threat. It accelerates and exacerbates existing environmental stressors—such as sea level rise, extreme weather, drought, and food insecurity—leading to greater instability. Climate change impacts are already taking center stage this century, forcing us to think more broadly about climate change’s relationship with human security and national security. Complicating matters, climate-driven temperature increases do not rise in a neat, uniform fashion around the globe. The pace of climatic change unfolds unevenly and erratically. Some parts of the world—such as the Arctic—are warming at a rate two to three times faster than the rest of the world. Three specific climate-security “hotspots” foreshadow greater destabilization and serve as climate “canaries in a coal mine”—a sneak preview of our climate-destabilized future.
Topic:
Security, Climate Change, National Security, and Human Security
Political Geography:
Global Focus

782. Pandemic Preparedness: A Conversation with Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo (Interviewed by Dana Hatic)

Author:
Jennifer Nuzzo and Dana Hatic
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Fletcher Security Review
Institution:
The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Abstract:
Fletcher Security Review (FSR): Dr. Nuzzo, thank you for taking the time to speak with FSR today. I would love if you could give us a brief introduction and tell me about what your role has been like since the start of the pandemic. Jennifer Nuzzo (JN): I am an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I am also a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. I have been involved working on COVID-19 since the first news of an outbreak in China. I run a project called the Outbreak Observatory, which does operational research to improve outbreak responses. One of our activities is to publish a weekly blog, which we do to take stock of what is going on in the world and to try to learn about events—even if we are not actively doing research projects on them, just reminding people that things are happening all the time.
Topic:
Security, Interview, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

783. The UN Security Council: Stress Tested

Author:
David M Malone
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Fletcher Security Review
Institution:
The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Abstract:
After the United Nations’ (UN) 75th anniversary, it is easy today to forget that this most central and far-reaching of all multilateral organizations was born in very high hopes of its permanent relevancy in maintaining international peace and security. But by baking in a veto for each of the five victorious World War II powers—or deemed as such by the 1945 governments in Washington and London, the godparents of the UN Security Council—the seeds of its frequent spells of semiparalysis were sown, spells which have been intensifying for at least the past four years. Indeed, the council arguably operated at near-peak effectiveness only during the years between 1987 – 1994, when the Cold War was ending and then briefly, as of 1990, appeared to have ended. However, misjudgments in Washington over the extent to which Moscow’s alignment with the thinking of Western capitals could be taken for granted—an attitude bitterly resented at the time by the new Russian Federation—ended that brief spell.
Topic:
United Nations, History, Multilateralism, and UN Security Council
Political Geography:
Russia, Global Focus, and United States of America

784. Post-Covid Security Landscape: A Conversation with Raffaelo Pantucci

Author:
Raffaello Pantucci
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Fletcher Security Review
Institution:
The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Abstract:
Fletcher Security Review (FSR): Thank you for joining FSR today. To begin, what challenges do you believe countries or security practitioners will face in preventing terrorism or countering violent terrorism in a postCOVID-19 world? Raffaelo Pantucci (RP): There are going to be a lot of challenges. The difficulty with trying to make judgments about what is going to happen in a post-COVID world is that we are not in the post-COVID world yet. We are still in the midst of the pandemic, so a lot of this work and assumptions that we look into are based on assessments of what we think could happen. I think a number of things will happen. First, I think we are going to see real pressure on security forces’ resources. On the one hand, kinetic security forces—police and intelligence services—probably will not suffer too much. But the real dilemma will come with some of the upstream funding. Money is being used to try to stop people from being drawn to violent groups in the first place. Countering violent extremism projects will face immense challenges since it is very hard to understand and make direct causal links between the issues the programs are addressing and the ultimate threats. We are going to see a push on budgets and that will result in cuts for security forces. These will have an impact in different ways in different places. Unfortunately, terrorist threats are global. You can have a good grip on your threat matrix, but it has links across borders which are beyond your control. This creates a potential risk if a country you are connected to does not have a grip on their security and are under the same sort of budgetary pressures, then it is possible you will see a negative knockon effect.
Topic:
Security, Terrorism, Interview, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Global Focus

785. Grievance in Space and Time: The State, Militias, and the Irredentist Temptation

Author:
Bradford McGuinn
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Fletcher Security Review
Institution:
The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Abstract:
The armed militia is an emblem of political decay. With the weakening of institutions designed to regulate the ambitions and anxieties of those inhabiting a state, and with the erosion of a political culture meant to confer legitimacy upon the rituals of governance, martial energy once held to constitutional prescription in the service of impersonal public rule can be redirected toward private purpose. Dissenting factions within a governmental structure, groups seeking its overthrow, or militias fighting within society itself challenge the viability of states, stability in their regions, and international order. This essay will consider ways in which narratives of grievance play dangerously upon the triangular system of mutual obligation that ideally orders interaction between a state, society, and the military. In this configuration of civil-military relations, the state exercises a “legitimate monopoly” on the production of violence, binding militaries to civilian control. Acting as an acid upon the alloy of this triangle, allowing leakage of “privatized” violence, is a dissatisfaction with a configuration of geography, politics, and culture of such intensity that reality can be considered oppressive.
Topic:
Security, Armed Forces, State, and Militias
Political Geography:
Global Focus

786. The Interactions of International Relations: Racism, Colonialism, Producer-Centred Research

Author:
Deep K. Datta-Ray
Publication Date:
07-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace
Institution:
Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research
Abstract:
The racial hierarchy underscoring colonialism persists, organises core-periphery interactions and so undermines International Relations’ (IR’s) purpose of accounting and explaining to mitigate violence. Despite IR’s awareness of its colonialism, it reconstitutes in the hermeneutic’s deductive and inductive method via aphasia (calculated forgetting) about its heuristic: diplomacy. The result, analytic-violence or the core’s heuristic corrupting interaction with the periphery. Yet, its evasiveness testifies to a meaningfulness beyond IR’s hermeneutic. Irretrievably corrupted by its heuristic, IR’s hermeneutic is ejected for an altogether new hermeneutic: Producer-Centred Research (PCR). Eschewing deduction and induction, and so colonialism, PCR initiates with abduction or a problem arising from theory and practice to resolve it in terms of rationality because of its, and the problem’s, significance. Changing “rationality” to “rationalities” registers the core’s rationality as colonialism while preventing it from contaminating PCR’s collection and assessment of peripheral practices to determine if they cohere into another rationality. Moreover, treating peripheral practitioners authoritatively, as capable of rationalising themselves and thus equal to rationality, further protects PCR from aphasia. Verifying efficacy shows PCR’s decolonisation of the hermeneutic is not entirely replicated externally, amongst IR scholars. The core engages PCR, but it incites violence in the periphery which defends rationality and so is colonialism’s bastion, now.
Topic:
International Relations, Diplomacy, Colonialism, Eurocentrism, Racism, and Hermeneutics
Political Geography:
India and Global Focus

787. Tianxia (All-Under-Heaven): An Alternative System or a Rose by another Name?

Author:
Mehmet Şahin
Publication Date:
07-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace
Institution:
Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research
Abstract:
Tianxia is considered as an alternative institutionalization to govern the international system. It refers to world governance that is regulated by a world institution. Accordingly, a world institution plays the harmonizer role under this system. States, on the other hand, choose their economic models and the leader organizes the relations among different units. This paper thus argues that Tianxia is an alternative framework to Western-oriented IR theories. In that sense, this article aims to explore the similarities between the philosophical idea of Tianxia and Western-oriented IR Theory. More specifically, the article explores the issue from the international system perspective. The epistemological gaps and ontological similarities between the two frameworks will be demonstrated.
Topic:
International Relations, Governance, International Relations Theory, and International System
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Global Focus

788. Reputation Building as a Strategy for Terror Group Survival

Author:
Efe Tokdemir
Publication Date:
07-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace
Institution:
Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research
Abstract:
In this paper I investigate terror groups' survival. The fate of terrorists hinges heavily on the power the terror group derives from its reputation. The reputation, which depends on policies and actions the group takes within their constituency, determines the degree to which each group can find recruits, resources, and support for its cause. I contend that terror groups investing on positive or negative reputation within their constituency— the people they claim to represent==are likely to survive longer. Yet, I argue, building a positive reputation has a greater impact on a group’s staying power given that this attracts loyal and committed supporters. Conversely, groups with no clearly defined reputation-building policies undergo an organizational change. I find support for my expectations by testing my arguments over all domestic terror groups active between 1980 and 2011 using the RTG and GTD databases. The findings reveal that once a terrorist group is formed, it is exceedingly difficult to obliterate it so long as it follows a clear reputational strategy to achieve their goals.
Topic:
Terrorism, Non State Actors, Group Survival, and Reputation
Political Geography:
Global Focus

789. Thinking Beyond the Pandemic: Monetary Policy Challenges in the Medium- to Long-Term

Author:
Marek Dabrowski
Publication Date:
04-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Social and Economic Research - CASE
Abstract:
The economic characteristics of the COVID-19 crisis differ from those of previous crises. It is a combination of demand- and supply-side constraints which led to the formation of a monetary overhang that will be unfrozen once the pandemic ends. Monetary policy must take this effect into consideration, along with other pro-inflationary factors, in the post-pandemic era. It must also think in advance about how to avoid a policy trap coming from fiscal dominance. This paper is organized as follows: Chapter 2 deals with the economic characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the effectiveness of the monetary policy response measures undertaken. In Chapter 3, we analyse the monetary policy decisions of the ECB (and other major CBs for comparison) and their effectiveness in achieving the declared policy goals in the short term. Chapter 4 is devoted to an analysis of the policy challenges which may be faced by the ECB and other major CBs once the pandemic emergency comes to its end. Chapter 5 contains a summary and the conclusions of our analysis.
Topic:
Monetary Policy, Economic Growth, Trade, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Europe and Global Focus

790. PTSS Virtual Global Alumni Community of Interest Workshop: The Impact of the COVID–19 Pandemic on Terrorism and Counterterrorism

Author:
James K. Wither
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies
Abstract:
This paper presents the findings of a George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies (GCMC) Counterterrorism (CT) Virtual Global Alumni Community of Interest (COI) workshop held on January 20-21, 2021. The objectives of the workshop were as follows: Analyze the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on terrorism and CT nationally and internationally. Identify the extent to which the pandemic has created vulnerabilities that terrorists have been able to exploit to mount attacks and/or attract new recruits. Explore the extent to which the pandemic might make societies more vulnerable to terrorism and irregular warfare in the longer term and the reasons why this could happen. Formulate policy recommendations for the global counterterrorism community from the perspective of GCMC CT Alumni. The virtual workshop was structured around four panels, each with two alumni panelists with practical or academic expertise on the selected topics. GCMC CT faculty acted as panel moderators. The panels examined the impact of the pandemic on terrorist financing as well as terrorism and CT in the Middle East, the Americas, and the Sahel in Africa. Thirty selected global alumni took part in the workshop and raised additional questions and comments after the formal panel sessions. Initially, planning for the COI took place in spring 2020, when it was wrongly assumed that the worst of the pandemic would be over by 2021 and assessments of its impact would, therefore, be relatively conclusive. However, given the continued threat posed by COVID-19, with countries around the world still suffering from its impact, the assessments below must be regarded as interim. Therefore, the workshop made no specific policy recommendations. Marshall Center CT faculty members, along with their colleagues at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia–Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS), have researched the impact of the pandemic on terrorism since March 2020.1 The COI followed a survey of alumni on the impact of the pandemic on terrorism and CT conducted in October 2020.2 Over four hundred military and civilian counterterrorism practitioners responded to the survey from Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Unsurprisingly, many of the conclusions from the recent workshop are similar to impact statements in the earlier survey.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Terrorism, Military Strategy, Counter-terrorism, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Global Focus