The United States and the Arab Spring

This article reveals, by studying correlative relationships between US regime support and regime properties, that the US foreign policy in the Middle East has traditionally helped governments to limit the political participation of Islamists, communists, enemies of Israel and populations that could be hostile to the US oil interests. This way the US economic and strategic security interests have contributed to human insecurity in the region. With the exception of the last interest, the US has relaxed its support for repression of the above-mentioned groups. This seems to be one of the international factors that made the Arab Spring possible

Can the Pragmatic East Asian Approach to Human Security Offer a Way for the Deepening of the Long Peace of East Asia?

East Asia (including Southeast and Northeast Asia) has witnessed the most spectacular pacification in the world during the past 30 years. Certain dimensions related to human security have been perceived as weak points in the long peace of East Asia. Despite progress, authoritarian violence is still a reality in East Asia. At the same time, certain other dimensions of human security - most distinctively those elements related to "freedom from want" - have developed very well during the long peace of East Asia. This article will study whether the concept of human security constructs realities that are useful for peace in East Asia. For this, the article will look at how the way in which "human" and "security" are linked, serve and deepen the existing social realities of peace in the region. Furthermore, the article will look inside the concepts of "human" and "security" to see how human security is constructed and whether the construction serves to deepen the long peace of East Asia. The article will argue that the East Asian human security debate could be an intellectual adaptation strategy useful for the promotion of the long peace of East Asia in a deeper sense

The United States and the Arab Spring

This article reveals, by studying correlative relationships between US regime support and regime properties, that the US foreign policy in the Middle East has traditionally helped governments to limit the political participation of Islamists, communists, enemies of Israel and populations that could be hostile to the US oil interests. This way the US economic and strategic security interests have contributed to human insecurity in the region. With the exception of the last interest, the US has relaxed its support for repression of the above-mentioned groups. This seems to be one of the international factors that made the Arab Spring possible

Power, Contribution and Dependence in NATO Burden Sharing

This article offers three new types of variables for computation of the share that NATO countries should contribute to the common defence. I use Uppsala conflict data (UCDP) on conflict participation to reveal how the asymmetry in power that allows the US to define most of the framings on which NATO’s utility calculations are based, compensates for the greater material contribution made to NATO by the US. Then I follow Ringsmose’s model of NATO burden sharing and create two types of variables crucial to the calculation of burden sharing. One reveals the share of US military protection aimed at protecting its NATO allies. The other measures how much US global security efforts against tyranny and terror are dependent on NATO allies. These two variables are developed by means of computer-assisted discourse analysis of US Presidential Papers. The three new variables contribute to a more complex mathematical model on fair burden sharing, indicating at the same time that the imbalance between US and allied contributions is declining. If European allies have ever exploited the United States in the past, then at least the relationship has become more even during the past two decades.<br/

How does nationalist selfishness creep into cosmopolitan protection?

This article investigates how selfish justifications enter cosmopolitan rationales in the political plane of the discourse. It makes sense of the ways in which selfish ideas are allowed to meddle in and merge with morally-based cosmopolitan norms. The article commits to the ontological and epistemological premises of critical discourse analysis, and focuses on US presidential papers since 1989. It substantiates the claims it makes by using computer-assisted discursive process tracing method as a supporting tool for qualitative analysis of texts. The computerized analysis of discursive entanglements reveals that cosmopolitan protective operations are in fact mainly framed in nationalistic frame. The roots of such nationalistic selfish arguments for international protective military operations can be traced in the realist and hegemonic fallacies that emphasize the naturality of national selfishness and the need for global hegemony. Furthermore, the article shows how the entanglement of discourse strands on “protection” and “innocent victimhood” as well as the entanglement between “crime prevention” and “terrorism prevention” make selfish internationalist arguments legitimate in the US political debate. <br/

Data on the Fragility-Grievances-Conflict Triangle

This dataset merges data on state fragility, developmental grievances and political violence into an annual country-specific format from 1995 to 2018. It is based on the following existing data sources: 1. Fatalities of political violence: UCDP Georeferenced data. URL: https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/index.html#ged_global 2. State fragility: State Fragility Index of Systemic Peace 2018. URL: https://www.systemicpeace.org/inscrdata.html 3. Population data: World Bank’s World Development Indicators. URL: https://databank.worldbank.org/reports.aspx?source=2&series=SP.POP.TOTL&country=# 4. Human development: UNDP Human Development Reports (various years). URL: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/download-data 5. Transparency International: Corruption Perceptions Index. URL: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi 6. US and other great power interventions: Kivimäki, Timo. Coding of US Presidential Discourse on Protection. University of Bath Research Data Archive, 2019. doi:10.15125/BATH-00535. The data is produced for an exploration of the associations between several indicators related to developmental grievances, state fragility and conflict. The definitions and operationalisations of the variables of each of the source variable can be found in the above sources, while the methodology of the development of the applied variables can be seen in the do-file of this data. Arguments for each of the applied variables can be found in the associated paper, “The Fragility-Grievances-Conflict Triangle in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA): An Exploration of the Correlative Associations”.The data is based on existing datasets and has been compiled from them by using statistical tools offered by the Stata program.New variables were created based on the variables in open source datasets (listed in the codebook), to make the data based on country-year observations.The Stata program was used to create the additional variables and to merge the existing variables. The do-file attached to this dataset shows how the new variables were created and how the existing open source variables were merged

Coding of US Presidential discourse on protection

This dataset is based on NVivo coding of all clauses in US Presidential Papers (Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States 1989–2012 [Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office]) with the word "protect" in any of its forms. Clauses are coded for their referent objects (who is being protected). For those clauses that deal with the protection of global civilians (referent object is not US or allies, but people in other countries), coding is also done for the agent of protection and for the method of protection (protection by changing someone else's behaviour vs. protection by changing one's own behaviour).The coding rules and theoretical connections can be found in the following publications: 1. Kivimäki, Timo. The Failure to Protect. The Path to and Consequences of Humanitarian Interventionism. (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019). 2. Kivimäki, Timo. “How Does Nationalist Selfishness Creep into Cosmopolitan Protection?” Global Responsibility to Protect, vol. 10, no. 1 (January 2019).Stata files are in release 117 format, corresponding to Stata version 13