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31. A Movement Between Parliamentary Politics and the Pathway to Violence and Terrorism: Germany’s Radical Right Narratives and Counter-narratives

Author:
Maximilian Kreter
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Hedayah
Abstract:
This country report, written by Maximilian Kreter, is one of the outputs of the CARR-Hedayah Radical Right Counter Narratives Project, a year-long project under the STRIVE Global Program at Hedayah funded by the European Union and implemented by the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). The overall project creates one of the first comprehensive online toolkits for practitioners and civil society engaged in radical right extremist counter narrative campaigns. It uses online research to map narratives in nine countries and regions, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand, Norway, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States. It also proposes counter narratives for these countries and regions and advises on how to conduct such campaigns in an effective manner.
Topic:
Civil Society, Far Right, Radical Right, Civil Society Organizations, and Countering Violent Extremism
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, Ukraine, Canada, Norway, Germany, Hungary, Australia, and New Zealand

32. Radical Right Narratives and Norwegian Counter-narratives in the Decade of Utøya and Bærum Solo-actor Attacks

Author:
Mette Wiggen
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Hedayah
Abstract:
This country report, written by Dr. Mette Wiggen, is one of the outputs of the CARR-Hedayah Radical Right Counter Narratives Project, a year-long project under the STRIVE Global Program at Hedayah funded by the European Union and implemented by the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). The overall project creates one of the first comprehensive online toolkits for practitioners and civil society engaged in radical right extremist counter narrative campaigns. It uses online research to map narratives in nine countries and regions, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand, Norway, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States. It also proposes counter narratives for these countries and regions and advises on how to conduct such campaigns in an effective manner.
Topic:
Civil Society, Terrorism, Violent Extremism, Counter-terrorism, Political Extremism, Civil Society Organizations, and Countering Violent Extremism
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, Ukraine, Canada, Norway, Germany, Hungary, Australia, and New Zealand

33. Amidst Anti-COVID Protests, Far-Right Extremists Are Using a New Symbol: An All-Black American Flag

Author:
Grace Vaule
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
TRAC: Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium
Abstract:
Currently, amidst a backdrop of COVID-related vaccine and mask mandates, far-right extremists in the United States are using another symbol: the all-black American flag.
Topic:
Terrorism, Violent Extremism, COVID-19, Political Extremism, and Countering Violent Extremism
Political Geography:
United States

34. AUKUS Security Pact: Setting the Rivalry with China in the Indo-Pacific

Author:
Krševan Antun Dujmović
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Institute for Development and International Relations (IRMO)
Abstract:
The announcement of the trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, known by the acronym AUKUS, intended to enhance cooperation between the three countries in the Indo- Pacific region in defense and security, has sent shockwaves throughout the world, especially the UK for the Royal Navy of Australia. The nuclear fueled submarines will be armed by conventional weapons, the number of acquired vessels will be at least eight, and as a typically Australian request, part of the vessels will be constructed in Australia’s naval shipyards. So far, the US, the UK, Russia, China, France in China and Europe. The key element of the AUKUS pact, signed on 15th September 2021, is the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines from the US and and India are the only six countries that have commissioned nuclear-powered submarines. Furthermore, before signing the AUKUS pact, the UK was the only country in the world with which the US was sharing the nuclear propulsion technology, under the Mutual Defense Agreement signed back in 1958. The supply of Australia with British and American nuclear-powered attack submarines, as the most delicate part of the AUKUS pact, attracted by far the most of media attention and provoked China’s aggressive reaction. Even more, the three nations security pact, which is in principal intended to bring “enhanced trilateral security partnership for the 21st century”, has made Beijing particularly worried as China fears that this triple alliance is pointed directly against it. The three countries intend to step up their cooperation in the security and defense sector, and apart from cooperation in industrial production of new military equipment, AUKUS also envisages a broad cooperation in the fields where the three countries feel particularly threatened by China’s staggering growth, and they include cyber security, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
Topic:
Security, International Cooperation, Alliance, Conflict, and Rivalry
Political Geography:
United States, China, United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, Australia, North America, and Indo-Pacific

35. China's Civil Nuclear Sector: Plowshares to Swords?

Author:
Henry D. Sokolski
Publication Date:
03-2021
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Nonproliferation Policy Education Center
Abstract:
Although much has been said about the fusion of China’s civilian and military sectors, no detailed, unclassified analysis has been done of how Beijing’s “peaceful” nuclear efforts might be exploited to make more nuclear warheads. Even the U.S. Department of Energy’s own explanations of the export restrictions it imposed on “advanced” nuclear exports to China failed to discuss this. This volume is dedicated to clarifying just what the connection could be. Much of it focuses on China’s advanced fast breeder reactor program and its related plutonium recycling efforts. As explained in this volume’s first chapter, “How Many Nuclear Warheads China Might Acquire by 2030,” the least burdensome way for China to achieve nuclear weapons parity with the United States is simply to use the weaponsgrade plutonium that its planned “peaceful” fast breeder reactor and reprocessing programs will produce to make primaries for the two-stage thermonuclear weapons designs they already have perfected. By exploiting this weapons plutonium and the highly enriched uranium and tritium that China can easily access or make, Beijing by 2030 could conservatively assemble an arsenal of 1,270 warheads (nearly as many as the US currently has deployed on its intercontinental missiles).
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation, Nuclear Weapons, Science and Technology, Military Affairs, Nonproliferation, Missile Defense, Denuclearization, and Nuclear Energy
Political Geography:
United States and China

36. New Frontiers for Security Cooperation with Seoul and Tokyo

Author:
Henry D. Sokolski
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Nonproliferation Policy Education Center
Abstract:
With a new Democratic administration, Washington is almost certain to moderate its demands that Japan and South Korea pay more for American forces on their soil. This should ease tensions with Seoul to Tokyo. To strengthen security relations with Japan and South Korea, though, more will be required. Rather than simply increase their conventional military deployments, Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo will need to collaborate in new ways to enhance allied security. This will entail working more closely on new military frontiers, such as enhancing allied command of outer and cyber space as well as in underwater warfare. Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo will also want to carve out new functional areas of cooperation to make existing energy sources more secure, communications more reliable, data sharing easier and safer, and allied economic assistance to developing nations in strategic zones more effective. Enhanced collaboration in each of these areas has begun but is not yet locked in or fully institutionalized. It should be. Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo need one another to deal with China and North Korea. Yet, how each currently strategically views Beijing and Pyongyang differs. Nor is America’s preferred military approach to deterring Chinese and North Korean adventurism — by preventing Beijing and Pyongyang from projecting military strikes against their neighbors — all that easy to achieve. Adding new, more tractable items to America’s Asian security alliance agenda won’t immediately eliminate these misalignments. But it will strengthen the security ties they have as liberal democracies — bonds Beijing and Pyongyang are straining to fray.
Topic:
International Cooperation, Nuclear Weapons, Science and Technology, International Security, Military Affairs, Cyberspace, and Nuclear Energy
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, China, and South Korea

37. A Roundtable on Lauren Turek, To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations

Author:
Andrew Preston, Darren Dochuk, Christopher Cannon Jones, Kelly J. Shannon, Vanessa Walker, and Lauren F. Turek
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR)
Abstract:
Historians of the United States and the world are getting religion, and our understanding of American foreign relations is becoming more rounded and more comprehensive as a result. Religion provides much of the ideological fuel that drives America forward in the world, which is the usual approach historians have taken in examining the religious influence on diplomacy; it has also sometimes provided the actual nuts-and-bolts of diplomacy, intelligence, and military strategy.1 But historians have not always been able to blend these two approaches. Lauren Turek’s To Bring the Good News to All Nations is thus a landmark because it is both a study of cultural ideology and foreign policy. In tying the two together in clear and compelling ways, based on extensive digging in various archives, Turek sheds a huge amount of new light on America’s mission in the last two decades of the Cold War and beyond. Turek uses the concept of “evangelical internationalism” to explore the worldview of American Protestants who were both theologically and politically conservative, and how they came to wield enough power that they were able to help shape U.S. foreign policy from the 1970s into the twenty-first century. As the formerly dominant liberal Protestants faded in numbers and authority, and as the nation was gripped by the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, evangelicals became the vanguard of a new era in American Christianity. Evangelicals replaced liberal Protestants abroad, too, as the mainline churches mostly abandoned the mission field. The effects on U.S. foreign relations were lasting and profound.
Topic:
International Relations, Religion, International Affairs, History, Culture, Book Review, Christianity, and Diplomatic History
Political Geography:
United States and Global Focus

38. A Roundtable on Seth Jacobs, Rogue Diplomats: The Proud Tradition of Disobedience in American Foreign Policy

Author:
Dustin Walcher, Lindsay M. Chervinsky, James F. Siekmeier, Kathryn C. Statler, Brian Etheridge, and Seth Jacobs
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR)
Abstract:
Seth Jacobs can write. Rogue Diplomats is a book that specialists and educated general readers will enjoy, and the reviewers agree with my assessment. It is, in Kathryn Statler’s words, “an absolute page-turner.” Lindsay Chervinsky writes that it “… is a serious diplomatic history that contributes to our understanding of the field and U.S. history, but is also fun – a quality that isn’t always associated with historical scholarship, but should be welcome.” Brian Etheredge finds that Jacobs’ “vignettes are beautifully told,” and that he “has an eye for the telling quote and writes with a verve and sense of irony that captivates.” He is “a master storyteller at the top of his game.” In sum, Jacobs elucidates important episodes of U.S. diplomacy and entertains in the process. That alone is a substantial accomplishment.
Topic:
Diplomacy, History, Diplomatic History, and Dissent
Political Geography:
United States

39. A Roundtable on Christopher Dietrich, A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations

Author:
Thomas W. Zeiler, Grant Madsen, Lauren F. Turek, and Christopher Dietrich
Publication Date:
04-2021
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR)
Abstract:
When David Anderson, acting as a conduit for editors at the Journal of American History, approached me at a SHAFR meeting in 2007 to write a state-of- the-field essay, I accepted, in part because we were sitting in a bar where I was happily consuming. The offer came with a responsibility to the field. I was serving as an editor of our journal, Diplomatic History, as well as the editor of the digitized version of our bibliography, American Foreign Relations Since 1600: A Guide to the Literature. Because these positions allowed me to survey our vibrant field, accepting the offer seemed natural. And I was honored to be asked to represent us. Did I mention we were drinking? I’m sure that Chris Dietrich accepted the invitation to oversee this next-gen pioneering Companion volume from Peter Coveney, a long-time editorial guru and booster of our field at Wiley-Blackwell, for similar reasons. This, even though there were times when, surrounded by books and articles and reviews that piled up to my shoulders in my office (yes, I read in paper, mostly), I whined, cursed, and, on occasion, wept about the amount of sources. What kept me going was not only how much I learned about the field, including an appreciation for great scholarship written through traditional and new approaches, but both the constancy and transformations over the years, much of it due to pressure from beyond SHAFR that prompted internal reflections. Vigorous debate, searing critiques, sensitive adaptation, and bold adoption of theory and methods had wrought a revolution in the field of U.S. diplomatic history, a moniker itself deemed outmoded.
Topic:
International Relations, Foreign Policy, History, and Diplomatic History
Political Geography:
United States and Global Focus

40. A Roundtable on Michael Kimmage, The Abandonment of the West

Author:
Christopher McKnight Nichols, Heather Marie Stur, Brad Simpson, Andy Rotter, and Michael Kimmage
Publication Date:
04-2021
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR)
Abstract:
The title of this book evokes numerous Donald Trump tweets, statements, and threats over the past five years. It also raises questions: was Trump pro-West or not, and how does his administration and its policies compare to those of his predecessors? Trumpism and the related, inchoate policies of “America First” were firmly positioned against the organizational structures and assumptions of the so-called liberal international order, or rules-based order. Trump’s targets ranged from NATO to the World Health Organization (WHO). From his speech at Trump Tower announcing his run for office to statements we heard during his efforts to contest the results of the 2020 election, Trump promulgated racist, particularist claims about which peoples and groups counted (white ones), which immigrants should be allowed in (northern European) and which should be banned (Muslims, those from “shithole” countries), and what wider heritages they fit into or “good genes” they were blessed with.
Topic:
International Cooperation, Liberal Order, Donald Trump, Anti-Westernism, Rivalry, Clash of Civilizations, and America First
Political Geography:
United States and Global Focus