The ‘National Security Strategy of the USA’ and Brazilian military thought: Imagining the near future

This paper examines the US National Security Strategies, 2002 and 2006, with a view to understanding the impact that some of their elements, including the doctrine of pre-emptive war, may have on Brazilian military thought. By focusing on revealing articles by Brazilian military intellectuals, and re-examining the international legal implications of the Strategies, the author determines that the implicit threats to the national sovereignty of middle-range powers will intensify the growing suspicion and sense of threat posed by the US to the Armed Forces of Brazil

Defining a US defence diplomacy for Brazil at the beginning of the century

At the beginning of the 1990s, the US military was apparently considered to be a significant threat by the Brazilian Armed Forces. Other military establishments in the Hemisphere likewise expressed a lack of confidence, and even a sense of fear, regarding the North Americans. After an ‘opening’ in military relations between Brazil and the United States, directed by General Barry McAfree, commander-in-chief of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in the mid 1990s, Brazilian military sentiment regarding the US marginally improved. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1990s and the beginning of this Century, the Brazilian Armed Forces again felt threatened by the unilateralism of the US military. This work examines the the concept of ‘defense diplomacy’ and the process by which the Clinton Administration initiated an experiment in conjunction with the National Defense University (Fort Leslie McNair, Washington, DC), at the request of the Deputy Assitant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs, that established between 1999 and 2001 a broader understanding of possible US defense diplomacy for the subsequent seven years. I was an invited participant in this experiment, along with more than two dozen North American and Latin American academics, including Brazilians, the aim of which was to complete a proposal under contract with the Defense Department. Although it was ended soon after the Bush Administration began, this experiment, and the broader concept of ‘defense diplomacy,’ may well have represented an important option for future hemispheric military relations

Clean and green with deepening shadows? a non-complacent view of corruption in New Zealand

New Zealand has long been regarded as a country with little or no governmental corruption. In recent times it has been ranked consistently as one of the five least corrupt countries in the world, on Transparency International’s (TI) Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). In 2009 and 2011 it was ranked as the single most corruption-free country on the CPI, and in 2012 it shared first place with Denmark and Finland. This paper examines the reasons why historically New Zealand has been largely free of governmental corruption, using widely accepted definitions of what constitutes corrupt behaviour. It goes on to argue that, at least by its own normal standards, the country might now be more susceptible to corruption, for a variety of reasons, in both the public and private sectors, and that more political and administrative attention may need to be paid to this issue. The paper discusses New Zealand’s surprising tardiness in ratifying the United Nations Convention against Corruption, an apparent reluctance that leaves the country sitting alongside other non-ratifying countries which have endemic levels of corruption in all its forms. In this context, the paper also notes some international dissatisfaction with New Zealand’s anti-money laundering legislation, enacted in 2009

Imaging interferometry with non-redundant arrays

The performance of a set of nonredundant arrays, that convert an existing telescope to an interferometer, was simulated. Each array is a perforated mask, placed at an image of the objective. Each pair of holes in a mask transmits a unique spatial frequency that is present in the target; hence the term nonredundant. Each mask produces a fringe I(f) in the focal plane that is the product of the Fourier transforms of the object and the optical transfer function S(f)

Introduction

The "Third Wave of Democracy" has had a decidedly mixed impact on the world's military establishments. An increasing appearance of "tribal behavior" and social isolation of military institutions in a post-conscription era, wars of attrition fought conservatively by volunteer forces against ethnic armies, religious tradition versus various versions of modernity, these patterns are rapidly becoming the hallmarks of our age. The end of the Cold War, and of ideology as a driving force of conflict has had profound impacts upon our understanding of socio-political development in virtually all parts of the world. In an important sense, identities-ethnic, religious, linguistic and even historic-have replaced the dichotomous ideological divide that characterized the Cold War. Social science axioms of that now almost-forgotten period have collapsed, along with the major "East Bloc" political systems, while pre-WWI obsessions with conceptualizations of culture, identity, religion and ethnicity have increasingly come to dominate political behavior

Conclusion

Two critical points are highlighted in this examination of what we have chosen to call "quasi-ethnic identities" in military establishments: First, that although the emergence of this phenomenon has been, at best, gradual and incomplete, it has been increasingly aided by a global learning curve; and second, that its goal or strategy, the strengthening of military autonomy and bargaining power, includes the further isolation and alienation of the military from mainstream society, and hence from democratic practices. As to the first point, information exchange is now so rapid and so pervasive that even a relatively remote military establishment such as that of Guinea or Suriname can be fully aware within hours of developments in "military organizational engineering" across the globe. Of the cases in this volume, only Guinea, Tanzania and Algeria have fully established independently "invented" military cultures, the "quasi-ethnicities" that are the subject of this book. Of those, only Guinea has thus far been able to use its development to establish a largely separate, autonomous and independent military organization for purposes of bargaining, and maintaining a unified military position, and been able to maintain a relatively healthy budget and avoid the civil wars, albeit through a protracted military dictatorship, that have beset all of its West African neighbors

Tanzania and Uganda: Contrasting similarities

Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya provide striking institutional comparisons and contrasts in both ethno-political dynamics and civil-military relations, although both Tanzania and Uganda, in what were arguably their most formative periods at least, displayed what Ali Mazrui described as "the most acute manifestation[s] of the crisis of identity," while employing ethno-politics to resist the remnants of their colonial dependency. ¹ Both manifested forms of invented military ethnic identities, or quasi-ethnicities, at one or another junctures, although under very different circumstances, and for very different purposes. After the infamous 1971 Idi Amin coup, Uganda reverted to government by an ethnic, or quasi-ethnic, "Muslim club,"² the Nubian "martial race," or "warrior class," that had originally assisted in the establishment of the British colony of Uganda, prompting Mazrui to comment in 1975 that "tribalism in Africa is unlikely to disappear within a single lifetime. " ³ And yet tribalism seems largely to have done precisely this in neighboring Tanzania except, perhaps, for the emergence of religious differences in the 1990s as potentially divisive and even catastrophic factors

Der Diracsee im äußeren Feld

In der vorliegenden Habilitationsschrift wird der Diracsee im äußeren Feld definiert und im Detail im Ortsraum untersucht. Kapitel 1 gibt eine allgemeine Einführung und einen Überblick. In Kapitel 2 wird gezeigt, daß der Diracsee für die Diracgleichung mit allgemeiner Wechselwirkung eindeutig definiert werden kann, wenn man eine Kausalitätsbedingung für den Diracsee fordert. Wir leiten eine explizite Formel für den Diracsee als Potenzreihe in den bosonischen Potentialen ab. Die Konstruktion wird auf Systeme von Diracseen verallgemeinert. Falls das System chirale Fermionen enthält, liefert die Kausalitätsbedingung eine Einschränkung für die bosonischen Potentiale. In Kapitel 3 untersuchen wir den Diracsee in chiralen und skalaren/pseudoskalaren Feldern. Als Vorbereitung wird eine Methode entwickelt, mit der die avancierte und retardierte Greensche Funktion um den Lichtkegel entwickelt werden kann. Dazu werden zunächst alle Feynman-Diagramme entwickelt und anschließend die Störungsreihe aufsummiert. Diese Lichtkegelentwicklung beschreibt die Greenschen Funktionen mittels einer unendlichen Reihe von Linienintegralen über das äußere Potential und dessen partielle Ableitungen. Der Diracsee wird in einen kausalen und einen nichtkausalen Anteil zerlegt. Der kausale Anteil hat eine Lichtkegelentwicklung, die mit der Lichtkegelentwicklung der Greenschen Funktionen eng verwandt ist; sie beschreibt das singuläre Verhalten des Diracsees mit Hilfe geschachtelter Linienintegrale längs des Lichtkegels. Der nichtkausale Anteil ist dagegen in jeder Ordnung Störungstheorie eine glatte Funktion im Ortsraum.In this habiltation, the Dirac sea in the presence of an external field is defined and analyzed in detail in position space. Chapter 1 gives a general introduction and overview. In Chapter 2, it is shown that the Dirac sea can be uniquely defined for the Dirac equation with general interaction, if we impose a causality condition on the Dirac sea. We derive an explicit formula for the Dirac sea in terms of a power series in the bosonic potentials. The construction is extended to systems of Dirac seas. If the system contains chiral fermions, the causality condition yields a restriction for the bosonic potentials. In Chapter 3, we study the Dirac sea in the presence of chiral and scalar/pseudoscalar fields. In preparation, a method is developed for calculating the advanced and retarded Green''s functions in an expansion around the light cone. For this, we first expand all Feynman diagrams and then explicitly sum up the perturbation series. The light-cone expansion expresses the Green''s functions as an infinite sum of line integrals over the external potential and its partial derivatives. The Dirac sea is decomposed into a causal and a non-causal contribution. The causal contribution has a light-cone expansion which is closely related to the light-cone expansion of the Green''s functions; it describes the singular behavior of the Dirac sea in terms of nested line integrals along the light cone. The non-causal contribution, on the other hand, is, to every order in perturbation theory, a smooth function in position space