Security: Collective good or commodity?

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 Sage.The state monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in Europe and North America has been central to the development of security as a collective good. Not only has it institutionalized the state as the prime national and international security provider, it has helped to reduce the threat from other actors by either prohibiting or limiting their use of violence. The recent growth of the private security industry appears to undermine this view. Not only are private security firms proliferating at the national level; private military companies are also taking over an increasing range of military functions in both national defence and international interventions. This article seeks to provide an examination of the theoretical and practical implications of the shift from states to markets in the provision of security. Specifically, it discusses how the conceptualization of security as a commodity rather than a collective good affects the meaning and implementation of security in Western democracies.ESR

A View from the Top: International Politics, Norms and the Worldwide Growth of NGOs

This article provides a top-down explanation for the rapid growth of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the postwar period, focusing on two aspects of political globalization. First, I argue that international political opportunities in the form of funding and political access have expanded enormously in the postwar period and provided a structural environment highly conducive to NGO growth. Secondly, I present a norm-based argument and trace the rise of a pro-NGO norm in the 1980s and 1990s among donor states and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), which has actively promoted the spread of NGOs to non-Western countries. The article ends with a brief discussion of the symbiotic relationship among NGOs, IGOs, and states promoting international cooperation

International Nonregimes: A Research Agenda1

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146934/1/j.1468-2486.2007.00672.x.pd

Discourses of War: Security and the Case of Yugoslavia

The agonizing war in the former Yugoslavia, the interminable parlays about what to do, the innumerable threats made and peace plans offered, retracted and made again have all served to highlight the process by which Western decision-making elites have tried to redefine their own, and their countries', security in the post-cold war world. To the question: "What is to be done in Bosnia?" they have answered: "Almost nothing." To the question: "Why?" they have answered: "Because it does not threaten us." And, so, almost nothing has happened. In this paper, we argue that this policy response is directly related to conceptions of "security" and "threats" that have structured the debate on the causes of the war as well as its potential consequences. In turn, widespread acceptance of the dominant view of those causes has justified a policy of relative inaction, in the process virtually precluding future actions designed to prevent such carnage from becoming an accepted feature of global politics

Eco-utopia or eco-catastrophe? Imagining California as an ecological utopia

In this article, I explore four California-based eco-utopias: The Earth Abides (George Stewart, 1949), Ecotopia (Ernest Callenbach, 1975), Pacific Edge (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1990), and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1992). All four novels were written during, and deeply informed by, the Cold War (Although published in 1992, Snow Crash was clearly written toward the end of the Cold War and in the shadow of Soviet implosion), against a backdrop of imminent nuclear holocaust and a doubtful future. Since then, climate change has replaced the nuclear threat as a looming existential dilemma, on which a good deal of writing about the future is focused. Almost 70 years after the appearance of The Earth Abides, and 40 years after the publication of Ecotopia, eco-utopian imaginaries now seem both poignant yet more necessary than ever, given the tension between the anti-environmental proclivities of the Trump Administration, on the one hand, and the tendency of climate change to suck all of the air out of the room, on the other. And with drought, fire, flood, wind and climate change so much in the news, it is increasingly difficult to imagine eco-utopias of any sort; certainly they are not part of the contemporary zeitgeist—except in the minds of architects, bees and futurists, perhaps. But does this mean there is no point in thinking about them, or seeking insights that might make our future more sustainable? This article represents an attempt to revive eco-utopian visions and learn from them

Why Is There No International Forestry Law?: An Examination of International Forestry Regulation, both Public and Private

[No abstract

Why Is There No International Forestry Law?: An Examination of International Forestry Regulation, both Public and Private

[No abstract