39 research outputs found
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 backwardnessâin the sense of its lack of
commitment to existing, incremental technologiesâand 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 1989â1991 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 âlegacyâ 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 âcold peaceâ. 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 âvictoryâ of the others cannot be consolidated in some sort of relatively unchallenged post-conflict order. The âuniversalismâ 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 Scottâs volume is a broad, compelling paean to the
political agency and power of those who have been written
out of history as backward and premodernâthe 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.
Scottâs 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
Constructivismâs 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 authorâs 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
Constructivismâs micro-foundations: aspirations, social identity theory, and Russia's national interests (DRAFT)
Draft. Please do not cite without authorâs 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 âothersâ enter into the definition of Russiaâs national identity and the formation of its interests