The Canberra Commission: Paths Followed, Paths Ahead

Despite its inauspicious start and virtual abandonment by the new Coalition government in Australia, the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons continued to attract international attention in arms control and disarmament circles

International disarmament as related to the development of civil aviation;

Mode of access: Internet

The Underlying Structure of Ethical Beliefs toward War

Behavioralists have tended to neglect the study of ethics as unimportant to an understanding of political behavior and its various manifestations, such as international conflict. In our analysis we examine the attitudes of a sample of retired American military officers toward war and war waging issues in order to infer the more fundamental nature of the ethical constraints that are embedded within the decision making of these individuals. Three fundamental dimensions of ethical thinking are apparent. These concern constraints on the use of force as a policy tool, the legitimacy of force and force planning, and the sensitivity of individuals to the risks present in the international system. In order to justify our interpretations, we present a detailed question by question analysis of the factor weights of each survey item. Finally, we speculate on the types of ethical tensions that will arise within the military when these three fundamental factors of ethical evaluation come into conflict.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Empirical Investigation of Normative Discourse on War: The Case of the Donagan—Aquinas Thesis

Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Political Decentralization and Technological Innovation: Testing the Innovative Advantages of Decentralized States

Are politically decentralized states better at fostering long-run technological innovation than centralized states? Societies with decentralized governments are widely seen as agile, competitive, and well structured to adapt to innovation's gale of creative destruction. Meanwhile, centralized states, even when democratic, have come to be viewed as rigid and thus hostile to the risks, costs, and change associated with new technology, or prone to cling too long to foolhardy or outdated technological projects. Therefore government decentralization is often perceived as a necessary institutional foundation for encouraging long-run technological innovation. However, in this article, I analyze data on international patent activity, scientific publications, and high-technology exports, and show that there exists little evidence for an aggregate relationship between government structure and technological innovation. Copyright 2007 by The Policy Studies Organization.

Argumentation in Foreign Policy Settings

This is a study of argumentation in three different kinds of high level, confidential, foreign policy settings: a collegial setting, a bureaucratic setting, and a bargaining setting. The causal and value assertions of the participants were coded using the detailed records of these three settings. The data show to be inadequate a defense/ attack model of argumentation in which the participants support their own arguments to make them resistant to attack, while attacking the weak spots in others'stated positions. In fact, there are few assertions which are supported by specific evidence, almost no mutually supported causal arguments, and the assertions which were attacked were no less emphasized than the assertions which were not attacked. More in accord with the data is the novel-arguments approach in which the key factor in persuasive argumentation is the development of arguments which others have not already taken into account.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67391/2/10.1177_002200277702100410.pd