The other War on Terror revealed: global governmentality and the Financial Action Task Force's campaign against terrorist financing

Abstract. Despite initial fanfare surrounding its launch in the White House Rose Garden, the War on Terrorist Finances (WOTF) has thus far languished as a sideshow, in the shadows of military campaigns against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. This neglect is unfortunate, for the WOTF reflects the other multilateral cooperative dimension of the US-led ‘war on terror’, quite contrary to conventional sweeping accusations of American unilateralism. Yet the existing academic literature has been confined mostly to niche specialist journals dedicated to technical, legalistic and financial regulatory aspects of the WOTF. Using the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) as a case study, this article seeks to steer discussions on the WOTF onto a broader theoretical IR perspective. Building upon emerging academic works that extend Foucauldian ideas of governmentality to the global level, we examine the interwoven overlapping national, regional and global regulatory practices emerging against terrorist financing, and the implications for notions of government, regulation and sovereignty

Shaping the Indo-Pacific? Japan and Europeanisation

n this Strategic Update, Professor Yee-Kuang Heng investigates European power projection and presence in the Indo-Pacific, and its converging nature with Japan’s attempt to shape the regional environment in its favour. While UK threat perceptions have converged significantly with Japan’s since former Prime Minister David Cameron’s promulgation of a “golden era” in relations with China, managing expectations of Japan’s attempt to ‘shape’ and encourage Europeanisation remains crucial. But is it fair to conclude that Japan has been successful in encouraging a stronger European presence to help it shape the Indo-Pacific order

Risk, human rights and the bureacratisation of counter-terrorism

Since the events of September 11th 2001 much as been written on how the construction of the terrorist threat post-9/11 contributed to the legitimising and use of extraordinary practices outside of the traditional boundaries of legal and, indeed, security practice. Much of this literature has focussed on the violation of the human rights of individuals caught up in the web of practices ranging from extraordinary rendition to targeted assassination to military intervention. Simultaneously a growing literature has drawn attention to the low key risk-based institutions and practices that have grown up around the ‘War on Terror’ such as the efforts against terrorist financing, the growing web of dataveillance and the emergence of risk management bureaucracies designed to calculate and manage risks to a tolerable level. This paper seeks to examine these latter discussions towards the concerns raised in relation to the less visible practices of counter-terrorism. What are the implications of the construction of risk-bureaucracies that operate on the logic of prevention and risk-management for our understandings of human rights? What accountability mechanisms are in place and how do they operate in practice? Given the complex and largely hidden nature of such regimes, the question of how we can reconcile them with the ideals of democratic and liberal societies is a pressing one, particularly as such structures once established may prove to be more long-lasting and have greater repercussions than the more controversial but visible practices mentioned above

After the 'War on Terror': regulatory states, risk bureaucracies and the risk-based governance of terror

In March 2009, the Obama administration sent a message to senior Pentagon staff instructing them to refrain from using either of the terms ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ and to replace these terms with ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’. Similarly, the 2009 UK Strategy for Countering International Terrorism eschews military terminology, preferring instead National Risk Assessments whose overall aim is ‘to reduce the risk to the UK’. This paper seeks to explore what it terms an emerging risk-based approach being deployed by states. Such an approach has already played a significant role in the ‘War on Terror’ to date, particularly in relation to Anti-Terrorist Financing and Aviation security guidelines. The change in tone and, potentially, substance from the Obama White House may however create the opportunity for risk-based approaches to move further onto the centre stage in the war on terror, just as it has in the wider Risk Society. This paper argues that the end of the ‘War on Terror’ at the rhetorical level suggests a need to shift our academic attention towards developing appropriate analytical frameworks for examining such risk-based strategies for countering terrorism. Our framework proposed here deploys the twin concepts of ‘risk bureaucracies’ and risk regulatory regimes (RRRs) in examining terrorist financing and aviation security regulations

War as risk management.

This thesis examines the reconceptualisation of war as risk management. It is suggested that recent wars exhibit repetitive patterns revolving around the central concem of managing systemic risks to security in an age of globalisation. It implies continuity where one might expect discontinuity in US and British campaigns over Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq from 1998-2003, given the different US Administrations and strategic contexts involved. The challenges it poses relate to 'classical' notions associated, rightly or wrongly, with war such as 'noble' heroic purposes, to decisive outcomes in the form of surrender ceremonies. Such notions have hampered a proper appreciation of the various forms war can take. Furthermore, the predominant International Relations (IR) approach relating to war and security - Realism- appears to contribute incomplete explanations to these wars. The alternative perspective developed here is based on 'risk management'. Underpinning this study is what sociologists call the Risk Society where risk management has emerged as an axial organising principle. Social science disciplines, notably sociology and criminology, have incorporated these theories into their research agendas, yielding richer perspectives as a result. Yet, IR has largely not done so in a concerted way, despite its inherently cross-disciplinary nature and increased prominence of risk in the strategic context. The framework informing this study is thus adapted from recent theorising on risk management strategies in the wider social sciences. The purpose is to systematically analyse using the theoretical framework developed herein, how concepts of proactive risk management such as active anticipation, the precautionary principle, 'reshaping the environment' and appreciating 'non-events' can be usefully applied to understanding contemporary war and IR

Construct validity and reliability of Malay language-perception towards smoking questionnaire (BM-PTSQ) among secondary school adolescents

Multitude studies have demonstrated that perception is an integral factor associated with smoking. However, no such tool was available in the Malay language. In this study, we established a Bahasa Malaysia version of PTSQ (BM-PTSQ) and tested the validity and reliability among secondary school adolescents. The English version of PTSQ originally consists of 12 items. It was translated into Bahasa Malaysia and back-translated again into English to check for consistency. After face validity (face-to-face query) was determined among 20 secondary school adolescents, only 10 items were included in the survey. Construct validity was established from 407 school adolescents through random selection in the same locality. More than 60% of the respondents were female, while the majority of them (67.3%) were schooling in rural areas. Then, the reliability of the questionnaire was determined with Cronbach’s alpha. The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) has grouped PTSQ into two components associated with either knowledge or attitude towards smoking. The variance and Cronbach’s alpha for the first and second components were 38.24% and 0.861 (7 items), 21.62% and 0.661 (3 items), respectively. The PTSQ showed good validity and reliability for measuring perception of smoking among secondary school-going adolescents in Malaysia. Hence, this is a viable measurement tool. But, more importantly, this study showed an urgent need to improve smoking education among adolescents in Malaysia

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Ghosts in the machine:Is IR eternally haunted by the spectre of old concepts?

Where ideas such as the ‘End of History’, ‘Globalisation’ or a ‘New World Order’ once animated the academy, recent debates within International Relations (IR) seem indicative of an emerging sea-change in intellectual trends. Scholars are now mooting instead a ‘Return of History’, the ‘Return of Authoritarian Great Powers’, the ‘Return of Realism’, the ‘Resurgence of geopolitical competition’ and even a ‘Replay of the Great Game’. The resurrection of these so-called ‘traditional’ concepts raises an intriguing question: is the study of IR continually plagued by concepts that refuse to go away? This article begins by reviewing the intellectual historiography of IR, demonstrating that heralds of a ‘new dawn’ have repeatedly encountered the stubborn lingering presence of ‘old’ assumptions. The article then proceeds to analyse how the philosophical metaphor of a ‘ghost in the machine’ can help elucidate these peculiar intellectual quirks of IR, before concluding by contemplating the possibility of eventual ‘exorcism’