Militarism, Security, and War: The Politics of Contemporary Hollywood Superheroes

In the fields of political science and international relations, engagement with popular culture has been deemed predominantly un-important and irrelevant as an area of study. This dissertation interrogates one of the most popular cultural icons of the early 21st century, the fictional Hollywood superhero, and asks what it does for us to take seriously that which is often deemed frivolous entertainment. Understanding the superhero as a political entity in and of itself, this project reveals the mutually constitutive relationship between its production, consumption and reproduction and particular ideologies around militarism, security and war. Acknowledging the complexities of superhero characters, narratives, and aesthetics such as subversive and contested elements, this project reveals superheroes as potential sites of political and ideological reflection, articulation, constitution, and transgression. This project demonstrates that a pop cultural/aesthetic approach to IR can enable critical practices that contribute to complicating and enhancing our understandings of war and politics

ATTRIBUTES, COMPLIANCE AND EFFECTIVENESS OF NESTED REGIMESTHE BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS REGIME COMPLEX

Are non-proliferation regimes effective? If so, under which circumstances? Existing theoretical and empirical studies fall short of providing consistent indications of the constraining power of security institutions and non-proliferation regimes on state decisions. On the one hand, proponents of regimes highlight the overall capacity of institutions to contain the number of proliferators. On the other hand, detractors maintain that regimes have little or no effect on state decision to pursue specific weapons. The empirical associations between framework conventions and the non-proliferation of the weapons under provision have proved unsatisfactory and weak. Moving from a broader idea of regimes and a graduated notion of effectiveness, this project develops a theoretical argument about the importance of networks of individual institutions (regime complexes) in regime analysis. I argue that regime-complex level data can enhance our capacity to explain actual regime effectiveness, as well as the link between specific institutional features and non-proliferation outcomes. The project does so, interalia, by introducing a new dataset, which gathers information on several institutions that are part of the biological non-proliferation regime complex. The work then illustrates the use of the new dataset by developing measures of state exposure to the regime-complex in terms of overall embeddedness and compliance

Law and Policy for the Quantum Age

Law and Policy for the Quantum Age is for readers interested in the political and business strategies underlying quantum sensing, computing, and communication. This work explains how these quantum technologies work, future national defense and legal landscapes for nations interested in strategic advantage, and paths to profit for companies