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Establishing the Norm of Humanitarian Intervention in International Relations

  • Sarka Matejkova
International relations are presently in the midst of impressive change. Whether discussing traditional geopolitics, political and economic globalisation, international institutions, the rise of religious extremism, energy security, or enviro-politics, it is sure that the 21st century offers new challenges,...

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Pakistan at 61: An Assessment of Challenges and Opportunities

  • Abubakar Siddique
Sixty-one years after its independence in 1947, Pakistan still faces fundamental questions of identity, governance, state and nation-building. Despite being the only nuclear-armed Muslim country – raising Pakistan’s international political importance – more than one third of the Pakistani population...

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Water and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

  • Mohammed T. Obidallah
Economically, the Middle Eastern region is primarily agricultural, which is being practiced in an arid and desert-like environment. Water is a highly politicized and naturally scarce resource in the region, and there have always been conflicts over the ownership and use of water resources. Modern history...

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Between Militarism and Pacifism: Conscientious Objection and Draft Resistance in Israel

  • Yulia Zemlinskaya
The outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada in 2000 prompted many Israelis to object to Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories by refusing their reserve call-up or by resisting the draft. They have established and were active in four social movements (Yesh Gvul, Courage to Refuse, New Profile...

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Linking DDR and SSR in Post-conflict States: Agendas for Effective Security Sector Reintegration

  • Atsushi Yasutomi
According to the UN's Integrated Operational Guide to DDR Standards (IDDRS), DDR seeks to create security and stability in post-conflict environments, and to start recovery and development, by getting the former combatants to comprehensively disarm and providing them with opportunities for sustainable...

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The Conflicting Rebirth of Multipolarity in International Relations

  • Milos Balaban
The process of constructing a new multipolar world, which will probably take decades to complete and whose boundaries may only become clear by 2020, is just as important as the process which ended the Cold War some 20 years ago. The United States, as the only global superpower, is increasingly confronted...

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President Bush's Address to the Nation on U.S. Policy in Iraq: A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach

  • Ibrahim A. El-Hussari
The reasons for selecting this political speech are simple. Firstly, it was delivered in the wake of the latest U.S. Senate Elections, the result of which gave the Democrats a slim majority in Congress for the first time since the Presidential Election of 2000. Secondly, the over-all situation in...

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The Lisbon Treaty and the Future of EU Enlargement

  • Jana Hynkova-Dvoranova
Each institution entitled to decide by QMV has its decision-making principle tailor-made. The specific set-up is defined while forming (or re-forming) the given institution and it is determined by several factors. The latter may entail the function of the institution, its inner organisation set-up, statute,...

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The Adequacy of Aviation Security Laws and Airport Security

  • Gautam Acharya
The era of sustained controlled powered flight began little more than a hundred years ago. Since then the civil aviation industry has grown into a sector of immense importance. As flight trajectories and planes themselves took on a more complex character, airports too had to evolve to accommodate the...

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Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War of Images and Idea

  • Daniel Kimmage
  • Kathleen Ridolfo
Presented primarily in Arabic on an array of websites unknown to most Americans and Europeans, Iraqi insurgent media hover at the margins of mainstream reports in the form of a "claim of responsibility on an insurgent website" or a "video posted to a jihadist forum." Such marginal references fail to...

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The Role of Diasporas in Foreign Policy: The Case of Canada

  • Marketa Geislerova
Diasporas engage in a range of trans-national activities for political purposes. Forcefully dispersed or conflict-generated diasporas are more prone to be politically engaged than diasporas whose members have moved for economic reasons or in order to improve their standards of living. While some of these...

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Security Sector Reform (SSR) in Post-Conflict States: Challenges of Local Ownership

  • Atsushi Yasutomi
  • Jan Carmans
While the term Security Sector Reform has been widely used in the post-conflict peace-building context, further clarification is needed to reveal a larger significance. The OECD's Guidelines on Security System and Governance Reform defines security sector reform as; [it] includes all the actors, their...

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Humanitarian Arms Control, Symbiotic Functionalism and the Concept of Middlepowerhood

  • Nikola Hynek
This article arises from dissatisfaction with predominant accounts concerning changes in interactions between nongovernmental actors and governments in contemporary world politics, namely the image of a tension between so-called state-centric and transnational worlds. Specifically, it can be conceived...

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The Gratuitous Suicide by the Sons of Pride: On Honour and Wrath in Terrorist Attacks

  • Denis Madore
In the Western philosophic and literary tradition to be without home or country is a fate that both demands our loathing and pity. As Aristotle characterized it, a man born without a city is either a "beast or a god". Such beings Aristotle maintains, since they cannot properly be called human, have a...

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Israeli Security Doctrine between the Thirst for Exceptionalism and Demands for Normalcy

  • Shoghig Mikaelian
Israeli security has been invoked time and again to explain Israeli behavior and justify Israeli actions vis-à-vis neighboring states and peoples. Yet there have been few insights into the manner in which Israeli security doctrine3 has been formulated, the various factors that have shaped and influenced...

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EU Counterterrorism Policy and the 2004 Eastern Enlargement

  • Oldrich Bures
The European Union’s counterterrorism policy can be traced to the early 1970s, when the European Political Cooperation (EPC) came into being. The initial impetus for greater intergovernmental cooperation among Member States was the growth of terrorist incidents perpetrated by indigenous Western European...

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Conscription and European Security: A Theoretical First-Step

  • Mitchell A. Belfer
In the 18 year process of European reintegration, military conscription – as a feature of the European political scene – has largely vanished. The evaporation of sizeable, conscripted militaries reflects the widespread belief that conscription is a political, economic and military anachronism reminiscent...

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The Privatization of Peace: Private Military Firms, Conflict Resolution and the Future of NATO

  • Rouba Al-Fattal
The end of the Cold War marked the beginning of a new world order and an end of regional strategic patronage of superpowers. Withdrawing support to client regimes created a power void that prompted developing countries – which previously relied on major powers for their security and stability – to look...

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Demos and Ethnos: Dangerous Democratisation in Pre-Genocide Rwanda

  • Marie-Eve Desrosiers
The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a worldwide wave of democratisation. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, twenty-one states had, by 1990, embarked on a process to liberalise their political arena, leading to the ousting of eleven authoritarian leaders. The democratisation process in many...

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Humanitarian Intervention, Dirty Hands, and Deliberation

  • Charles A. Robinson
Let’s begin with a short exegesis of humanitarian intervention couched in terms of just war theory (JWT), in order to establish some practical and moral guidelines for the former. Of course, these criteria of action are meant as relatively specific and tight practical and moral constraints for the purposes...

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Search for a European Identity - Psycho-Sociological Perspective

  • Karel B. Muller
Many authors distinguish between collective and individual identity, or between the collective and individual dimensions of identity (e.g. Calhoun 1994, Taylor 1989). At first glance it seems quite obvious that European identity is a collective identity or a collective dimension of identity. On closer...

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EU Official Development Aid to the Palestinian Authority and the Rise of Hamas

  • Jaroslav Petrik
The economic situation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is to a large extent determined by its security condition. Given that a considerable part of Palestinians work on Israeli territory, the 2000 intifada followed by the closure of the borders, stringent checkpoint controls and eventually leading...

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The Political Cartoon and the Collapse of the Oslo Peace Process

  • Ilan Danjoux
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been challenging to researchers. The nature of the conflict appears, at times, to defy both the material interests and strategic rationality of the warring parties. The struggle has been described as possessing a primordial intensity, unpredictability and elusiveness...

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The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and Security in Post-Soviet Central Asia

  • Askhat Safiullin
Tracing the debate on the importance and influence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) on regional security integration in Central Asia, this work assesses the degree of its integration. It mainly addresses the interplay between individual state security needs, norms and identities. My proposed...

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