Nanotechnology in a Globalized World: Strategic Assessments of an Emerging Technology

PASCC Report Number 2014-006Nanotechnologies are enabling, dual-use technologies with the potential to alter the modern world significantly, from fields as wide-ranging as warfare to industrial design to medicine to social and human engineering. Seizing the technological lead in nanotech is often viewed as an imperative for both 21st century defense and global competitiveness. Only revolutionary technologies are believed to allow a country to take advantage of its relative backwardness—in the sense of its lack of commitment to existing, incremental technologies—and leap ahead of existing technological leaders in developing and deploying a revolutionary new technology. New technologies, however, are only likely truly to revolutionize an economy and society if there is a broader national base that allows a new technology to spread and transform from its initial niche application, whether civilian or military, and if society is willing to adopt the technology in question. Globally, there is significant belief in the revolutionary potential of nanotechnology, not only to transform warfare, economy and society, but also the international geopolitical hierarchy. Between 2001 and 2014, over sixty countries followed the United States and established nanotechnology initiatives. These countries range from advanced industrial countries in Europe to Japan to the emerging markets of Russia, China, Brazil, and India to developing countries such as Nepal and Pakistan.U.S. Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), Center on Contemporary Conflict (CCC), Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering WMD (PASCC

Bounding Institutional Authority in Comparative Politics and International Relations

The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1015015arThis paper seeks to draw attention to a neglected but essential element of institutions: their boundaries.1 Boundaries permit actors to organize the world around them into categories and groups and to establish arenas of authority or jurisdiction. Scholars too often assume that boundaries between groups are firm and clear, and assume that these distinctions form the basis for social hierarchies and divisions of labor. However, the nature of boundaries is no less important to institutional operation and social organization than is the fact of their existence. As the first step in a larger research program, we set out to elaborate here not only the importance that the existence of boundaries has in creating and regulating social organization, but also the political significance that the varying nature of boundaries has. We draw on our own work from very different sub-disciplines of political science to highlight what boundaries do and how they vary, as well as to raise a set of theoretical questions to guide further investigation

H-Diplo ISSF round table: Steven Ward. status and the challenge of rising powers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Published versio

Center on Contemporary Conflict, Department of National Security Affairs (Brochure)

Topics of the brochure include: Security Research Publications, Engaging Emerging Security Issues, and Strategically Relevant Portfolio.Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

The Cold Peace: Russo-Western Relations as a Mimetic Cold War

In 1989–1991 the geo-ideological contestation between two blocs was swept away, together with the ideology of civil war and its concomitant Cold War played out on the larger stage. Paradoxically, while the domestic sources of Cold War confrontation have been transcended, its external manifestations remain in the form of a ‘legacy’ geopolitical contest between the dominant hegemonic power (the United States) and a number of potential rising great powers, of which Russia is one. The post-revolutionary era is thus one of a ‘cold peace’. A cold peace is a mimetic cold war. In other words, while a cold war accepts the logic of conflict in the international system and between certain protagonists in particular, a cold peace reproduces the behavioural patterns of a cold war but suppresses acceptance of the logic of behaviour. A cold peace is accompanied by a singular stress on notions of victimhood for some and undigested and bitter victory for others. The perceived victim status of one set of actors provides the seedbed for renewed conflict, while the ‘victory’ of the others cannot be consolidated in some sort of relatively unchallenged post-conflict order. The ‘universalism’ of the victors is now challenged by Russia's neo-revisionist policy, including not so much the defence of Westphalian notions of sovereignty but the espousal of an international system with room for multiple systems (the Schmittean pluriverse)

State, Power, Anarchism, A Discussion of The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S153759271000335XJames Scott’s volume is a broad, compelling paean to the political agency and power of those who have been written out of history as backward and premodern—the people who resist states and create alternative forms of social and political governance. It is a cautionary tale for policymakers, scholars, military planners, and would-be state builders about the limits of state power and legitimacy, but also something of a guidebook on how to tame them. Scott’s eulogy for polymorphous human societies appears premature, however, given the many alternatively governed structures currently enabled by geographical remoteness, population density, globalization, and the state itself. The Art of Not Being Governed is troubling, less because it questions the morality of the state as a sociopolitical form than because it romanticizes nonstate peoples who seek violently to repel and escape the state

Historical aspirations and the domestic politics of Russia's pursuit of international status

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.postcomstud.2014.02.0020967-067X/What determined Russia's national interests and grand strategy in the first decade after the Cold War? This article uses aspirational constructivism, which combines social psychology with constructivism, to answer this question. Central to aspirational constructivism are the roles that the past self and in-groups, and their perceived effectiveness play in the selection of a national identity and the definition of national interests. This article explains why Russian political elites settled on a statist national identity that focused on retaining Russia's historical status as a Western great power and hegemon in the former Soviet Union and in engaging the country in bounded status competition with the United States

U.S. and International Responses to Terrorist Financing; Strategic Insights, v. 6, issue 1 (January 2005)

This article appeared in Strategic Insights, v.6, issue 1 (2005 January)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Constructivism’s Micro-Foundations: aspirations, social identity theory and Russia's national interests (DRAFT)

Paper prepared for delivery at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, Aug. 28- Sept. 1, 2013. DRAFT. Please do not cite without author’s permission.This paper employs an aspirational constructivist approach that brings together social psychology and constructivism to provide causal microfoundations for the identities and status- seeking behavior of rising and declining power. It explains how the psychological need for collective self-esteem and value rationality, and construction of multiple ingroups and outgroups, shape its national identity, its status aspirations and international behavior. It applies this approach to post-Soviet Russia, where the elite converged around a status-driven national self-image that located Russia in the group of global great powers and the West. Contrary to oft-repeated warnings of a new Cold War, however, this identity generated diffuse national interests in social, rather than material, competition for global status, primarily with the United States

Constructivism’s micro-foundations: aspirations, social identity theory, and Russia's national interests (DRAFT)

Draft. Please do not cite without author’s permission.Russia's national interests have not been defined on the basis of conventional cost-benefit assessments, perceptions of material threat, or the identities projected onto Russia by other countries. Aspirations to regain the international great power status that Russians believe their country enjoyed during the tsarist and Soviet past were critical to the creation of its present national identity and national security interests. This paper asks how Russian elites came to have these national interests in social competition for great power status. In trying to explain how national interests are created, I present a novel aspirational constructivist approach that draws heavily on social psychology to answer three fundamental questions: What are the sources of national identity? Why do multiple identities come into contention? How does one of these candidate national identities come to dominate the others and become "social fact," acting as "the" national identity that defines a country's core national interests? In developing the answers, we gain a better understanding of how foreign “others” enter into the definition of Russia’s national identity and the formation of its interests