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This course provides a broad introduction to contemporary security studies in international relations. It examines the fundamental elements and factors underlying global and regional security. It surveys the major concepts, theories, and accumulated knowledge in the area of international security, through an exploration of a series of empirical cases. This course will also trace the evolution of security study as a sub-field in international relations and highlights the role and future of international and regional security institutions along with the security policies of key states.
This book discusses new approaches, other than traditional sovereign state-based governance, to manage border-spanning threats. Part 1, focusing on theory, first examines the existing approaches, and then the state transformation approach. It shows that transboundary security challenges are primarily governed by transforming state apparatuses and integrating them into multilevel, regional or global regulatory governance networks, and argues that actual modes of security governance express the contingent outcomes of conflict between socio-political coalitions struggling to define the appropriate scale and instruments of governance in a given issue-area. Part 2 presents three case studies- environmental degradation, pandemic disease and transnational crime.
This book examines the changes over the past 400 years in why countries intervene militarily as well as in the ways they have intervened. The book looks at three types of intervention: collecting debts, addressing humanitarian crises, and acting against states perceived as threats to international peace. It argues that it is the conventional understanding of the purposes for which states can and should use force that has altered, and explicates long-term trends- the steady erosion of force's normative value in international politics, the growing influence of equality norms in many aspects of global political life, and the increasing importance of law in intervention practices.
This book studies emerging non-traditional security challenges in Asia. These challenges include environmental degradation, illegal immigration, HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, transnational crime, poverty and underdevelopment. Through 11 essays, this study draws upon, modifies and operationalizes the concepts of securitization and desecuritisation, and brings together regional perspectives from across Asia- Bangladeshi, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, to examine how these challenges are perceived and managed. It contributes to the understanding of the processes of how and why these Non-Traditional Security issues emerge, and how they are defined and responded to by governments and non-state actors.
This book is devoted to the advancement of critical human security studies. Part 1 are engaged with critiques, regarding the original context and promise, framing within the security-development nexus, the emergence of a post-liberal subject, the limits of both conventional notions of culture underwriting human security and the concept of transculturality, and the emergence of a post-secular subject. Part 2 shifts to the mapping of other horizons, such as connecting human security to early humanitarian thought, seeing the incorporation of indigenous rights with human security as a colonizing project, rethinking the limits of the urban/modern in human security framing, etc. Part 3 probes three instances of global governing practices.
In this book, Mendes argues that the foundations of global governance, human rights and international law are undermined by a conflict or tragic flaw, where insistence on absolute conceptions of state sovereignty are pitted against universally accepted principles of justice and human rights resulting in destructive self-interest for both the state and the global community. The book explores how human rights and international law are applied in some of the critical institutions of global governance and in the operations of the global private sector, and how states, institutions and global civil society struggle to fight this tragic flaw.
