Why not preempt?: an analysis of the impact of legal and normative constraints on the use of anticipatory military activities

The 2002 National Security Strategy for the United States focused American strategic policy around the use, or potential use, of preemptive/preventive strikes, particularly as a counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism tool. While preemption and prevention are not new strategies, they have never been highlighted to such a degree as is currently the case. These activities have been studied in the context of international security, using elements such as spiral models and offense-defense theory. This study seeks to examine if other elements, specifically international law and normative issues, such as just war tradition, contribute to our understanding of the use, or non-use, of preventive or preemptive actions by states. Using both logistic regression and comparative case studies, numerous hypotheses were tested to determine if the legal and normative elements influenced or constrained states vis-à-vis the use of anticipatory military activities within the context of international crises. The statistical results indicate that the limitations on the use of anticipatory military activities found in international law and the just war tradition do not have a significant impact on the likelihood that these actions will be used by states. The case studies, however, seem to indicate that the legal and normative elements do have some influence on leaders with respect to the use of anticipatory military activities

Future directions of postcolonial studies

A discussion of new directions in postcolonial studies mainly with reference to essays in the co-edited volume, Rerouting the Postcolonial ed. Janet Wilson, Sarah Lawson Welsh and Cristine Sandru (Routledge, 2010), which covers terror and the postcolonial (with reference to The Reluctant Fudnamentalist by Mohsin Hamid), the Arab Spring, the turn to the utopian, and global imaginaries. The talk also takes some directions from the expanded categories of the postcolonial found in the second edition of the Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft et al (Routledge, 2006

Expertise and (In)Security: Lessons from Prison and Probation Contexts on Counter-terrorism, Trust, and Citizenship

With the revelations that many ISIS recruits are ex-offenders (Cottee 2016), prison and probation settings are on the frontline of counter-terrorism practice. The latest policy developments in Europe on managing radicalization and convicted terrorist-offenders in prison and post-release settings show some perhaps surprising recommendations: those built on a foundation of seeking to build trust, to recognize human dignity and equality, and a broader vision to reform offenders as citizens (Council of Europe 2016; United Nations 2016; Williams 2017).Data collection was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [Ref #: ES/L003120/1]. The writing of this article was generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a post-doctoral fellowship [Award Number 756-2014-0647] and the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge

Cybersecurity: mapping the ethical terrain

This edited collection examines the ethical trade-offs involved in cybersecurity: between security and privacy; individual rights and the good of a society; and between the types of burdens placed on particular groups in order to protect others. Foreword Governments and society are increasingly reliant on cyber systems. Yet the more reliant we are upon cyber systems, the more vulnerable we are to serious harm should these systems be attacked or used in an attack. This problem of reliance and vulnerability is driving a concern with securing cyberspace. For example, a ‘cybersecurity’ team now forms part of the US Secret Service. Its job is to respond to cyber-attacks in specific environments such as elevators in a building that hosts politically vulnerable individuals, for example, state representatives. Cybersecurity aims to protect cyberinfrastructure from cyber-attacks; the concerning aspect of the threat from cyber-attack is the potential for serious harm that damage to cyber-infrastructure presents to resources and people. These types of threats to cybersecurity might simply target information and communication systems: a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on a government website does not harm a website in any direct way, but prevents its normal use by stifling the ability of users to connect to the site. Alternatively, cyber-attacks might disrupt physical devices or resources, such as the Stuxnet virus, which caused the malfunction and destruction of Iranian nuclear centrifuges. Cyber-attacks might also enhance activities that are enabled through cyberspace, such as the use of online media by extremists to recruit members and promote radicalisation. Cyber-attacks are diverse: as a result, cybersecurity requires a comparable diversity of approaches. Cyber-attacks can have powerful impacts on people’s lives, and so—in liberal democratic societies at least—governments have a duty to ensure cybersecurity in order to protect the inhabitants within their own jurisdiction and, arguably, the people of other nations. But, as recent events following the revelations of Edward Snowden have demonstrated, there is a risk that the governmental pursuit of cybersecurity might overstep the mark and subvert fundamental privacy rights. Popular comment on these episodes advocates transparency of government processes, yet given that cybersecurity risks represent major challenges to national security, it is unlikely that simple transparency will suffice. Managing the risks of cybersecurity involves trade-offs: between security and privacy; individual rights and the good of a society; and types of burdens placed on particular groups in order to protect others. These trade-offs are often ethical trade-offs, involving questions of how we act, what values we should aim to promote, and what means of anticipating and responding to the risks are reasonably—and publicly—justifiable. This Occasional Paper (prepared for the National Security College) provides a brief conceptual analysis of cybersecurity, demonstrates the relevance of ethics to cybersecurity and outlines various ways in which to approach ethical decision-making when responding to cyber-attacks

Intelligence tradecraft and the pre-crime approach to EU internal security governance

EU internal security policy has been in recent years progressively focused onprevention of threats and risks. The 2010 Internal Security Strategy for the EUhighlighted the need for prevention and anticipation conceived as a proactiveintelligence-led approach to EU internal security. A pre-crime framework has beenwidely applied in fields like security studies, police science, criminology, ethics,political sociology and political geography, owing to its inherent explanatorypower. The core element of pre-crime approach is the selection and identificationof the most probable among abstract risks and dispersed threats, and the profiling,or sorting out, of particular social groups or individuals posing presumablyimminent threats. This paper aims at inserting the concept of intelligencetradecraft into the pre-crime analytical framework and verify the usefulness of such an approach to the study of EU internal security governance. The paper will focus on ‘intelligence process’ and ‘intelligence product’, i.e. how the stakeholders of EU internal security policy construct, modify and develop ‘products’ allowing for a better risk management and threat assessment in thecontext of precautionary and anticipatory attitudes towards EU securitygovernance

Militarising Mumbai? The ‘politics’ of response

This article focuses on how urban security has been governed in Mumbai in the aftermath of the 2008 terrorist attacks (26/11). The event was widely cited as a major turning point in the securitisation and militarisation of Indian cities. It also produced significant political upheaval, which in turn generated calls for a major institutional overhaul of the governmental architecture for handling terrorism. This article takes the political and policy repercussions of 26/11 as an intervention into critical debates about the (para-)militarisation of policing and the politics of urban security. Here I shift the focus from the disciplinary and divisive effects of policies towards an emphasis on their spectacular and theatrical dimensions. If we are to make sense of the ‘militarised’ focus of the policy response to 26/11, I argue, we need to take seriously its populist, aspirational qualities