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

Concurrent Design of Assembly Plans and Supply Chains: Models, Algorithms, and Strategies.

Assembly planning and supply chain designs are two inter-dependent activities in product development. The traditional sequential approach of designing the supply chain after completing assembly planning results in long lead time for product realization and sub-optimal product cost. The weakness of the sequential method is exacerbated nowadays as product proliferation brings more challenges to assembly system design and supply chain management. Making concurrent decisions on assembly plans and supply chain configurations is a desirable strategy. However, due to the complexity of both assembly representations and supply chain modeling, there have been limited systematic models, optimization algorithms, or deep understanding of the interaction between assembly-plan and supply-chain designs. This dissertation first analyzes and compares existing assembly representation methods. Hyper AND/OR Graph (HAG) is then developed to incorporate both assembly planning and supply chain configuration information by adding one additional layer representing supplier information on top of a typical assembly AND/OR graph. Based on HAG, a DP based algorithm with a polynomial complexity for typical assembly products is developed to generate the assembly plans and supplier assignment at the optimal cost. For the problem with a lead time constraint, a revised DP algorithm with a pseudo-polynomial complexity is also presented. Under the scenario of product family designs, an investigation is carried out on the optimal strategies to design assembly supply chains when commonality is limited between products in the family. The impact of product variety on safety inventory is derived and then evaluated with a performance measure. Strategies of prioritized differentiation and branch balancing are suggested for optimal process sequencing and assembly decomposition. The outcome of this research are threefold: (1) it establishes a foundation for the research on integrated designs of assembly plans and supply chains as well as other concurrent design problems; (2) it offers a tool for integrated assembly plan and supply chain designs using which manufacturers can shorten the product development time, lower the product cost, and increase the responsiveness to fluctuations in supply chains; and (3) it provides a measure of the impact of product variety on inventory and insightful strategies to manage complicated assembly supply chains.PhDMechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133210/1/hekuang_1.pd

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

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

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

Towards a Formal Reactive Autonomic Systems Framework using Category Theory

Software complexity is the main obstacle to further progress in IT industry, as the difficulty of managing complex and massive computing systems goes well beyond IT administrators’ capabilities. One of the remaining options is autonomic computing, which helps to address complexity by using technology to manage technology in terms of hiding and removing low level complexities from end users. Real-time reactive systems are some of the most complex systems that have become increasingly heterogeneous and intelligent. Thus, we want to add autonomic features to real-time reactive systems by building a formal framework, Reactive Autonomic Systems Framework (RASF), which can leverage specification, modeling and development of Reactive Autonomic Systems (RAS). With autonomic behavior, the real-time reactive systems are more self-managed to themselves and more adaptive to their environment. Formal methods are proven approaches to ensure the correct operation of complex interacting systems. However, many current formal approaches do not have appropriate mechanisms to specify RAS and have not addressed well on verifying self-management behavior, which is one of the most important features of the RAS. The management of evolving specifications and analysis of changes require a specification structure, which can isolate those changes in a small number of components and analyze the impacts of a change on interconnected components. Category theory has been proposed as a framework to offer that structure; it has a rich body of theory to reason about objects and their relations. Furthermore, category theory adopts a correct by construction approach by which components can be specified, proved and composed in the way of preserving their properties. In the multi-agent community, agent-based approach is considered as a natural way to model and implement autonomic systems, as the ability of an autonomous agent can be easily mapped to the self-management behaviors in autonomic systems. Thus, many ideas from the Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) community can be adapted to implement the autonomic systems, such as the self-management behavior, automatic group formation, interfacing and evolution. Therefore, in terms of achieving our research goal, we need to i) build an architecture and corresponding communication mechanism for modeling both reactive and autonomic behavior of the RAS, ii) formally specify the architecture, communication and behavior above using category theory, iii) design and implement the architecture, communication as well as behavior of the RAS model by the MAS approach with its implementation and iv) illustrate our RASF methodology and approach with case studies

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

BIOMECHANICAL ANALYSIS OF BADMINTON DIFFERENT FORWARD STEPS

The purpose of this study was to compare the biomechanical variables between 2-step and 3-step forward steps in badminton. Eight collegiate elite male badminton players participated in this study. Eight Vicon T-20 cameras (300 Hz) were used to record the 3D kinematics data and a Kistler force plate (1500 Hz) was used to collect the GRF data of the last steps. A Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank nonparametric statistical test was conducted to compare the differences between two kinds of forward step movements. The results showed that the movement time for 3-step movement was significantly faster than 2-step. We recommend that the badminton players should practice 3-step forward footwork technique. The additional strength and power training for lower limbs should be carried out for the footwork training