Research and development in the emerging fields of biotechnology, including human enhancement and direct-effect genetic weapons, may very well change the nature of war and international politics. This biotech revolution in military affairs will offer great advantages to the United States and other technologically advanced states, but raises many new questions about just war and bioethics. Biotechnology and International Security contextualizes the militarization of biotechnology by examining its strategic uses, the nature of bioweapons, and the overall impact on warfare and security. The book looks at the many emerging military applications of biotechnology and provides a nontechnical assessment of how a wide range of technologies are influencing war fighting, international balance of power, and homeland security. It offers a thorough introduction to bioweapons and biosecurity challenges, along with the resulting ethical and policy dilemmas.
Foreign Fighters is the comprehensive study of foreign fighters examines patterns of recruitment using original data sets and detailed diverse case studies, and how recruiters use frames of existential threat to strengthen rebel groups.
Transnational Actors in War and Peace explores the identities, organization, strategies, and influence of transnational actors involved in contentious politics, armed conflict, and peacemaking over the last one hundred years. While the study of transnational politics has been a rapidly growing field, to date, the disparate array of actors have not been analyzed alongside each other, making it difficult to develop a common theoretical framework or determine their relative influence on international stability, war, and peace. This work seeks to fill this gap by bringing together a diverse set of scholars focused on a range of transnational actors, such as: pirates, foreign fighters, terrorists, private military security companies, criminal networks, religious groups, diasporas, political exiles, NGOs, environmental activists, global news agencies, and feminist advocacy networks. Each chapter examines a different transnational actor and is structured around five components: how the actor is organized; how it interacts with other actors; how it communicates both internally and externally; how it influences conflict/peace; and how it reflects developments in transnationalism.
In conflict zones around the world, the phenomenon of foreign insurgents fighting on behalf of local rebel groups is a common occurrence. They have been an increasing source of concern because they engage in deadlier attacks than local fighters do. They also violate international laws and norms of citizenship. And because of their zeal, their adversaries - often the most powerful countries in the world - are frequently incapable of deterring them. Foreign fighters have made headlines in recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, and the term is widely equated with militant Islamists. However, foreign fighters are not a new phenomenon. Throughout modern history, outside combatants have fought on behalf of causes ranging from international communism to aggrieved ethnic groups. Analyzing the long history of foreign fighters in the modern era helps us understand why they join insurgencies, what drives their behavior, and what policymakers can do in response. In Foreign Fighters, David Malet examines how insurgencies recruit individuals from abroad who would seem to have no direct connection to a distant war. Remarkably, the same recruiting strategies have been employed successfully in all foreign fighter cases, regardless of the particular circumstances of a conflict. Malet also catalogues foreign fighters in civil wars over the past two centuries, providing data indicating that they are disproportionately successful and growing in number. Detailed case histories constructed from archival material and original interviews demonstrate the same recruitment patterns in highly diverse conflicts including the Texas Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Israeli War of Independence, and the Afghanistan War. The results show that foreign fighters from Davy Crockett to George Orwell to Osama bin Laden create and respond to strategically crafted appeals to defend transnational communities under dire threat.
This is a study, in two volumes, of one of the longest-standing philosophical problems: the problem of universals. In volume I David Armstrong surveys and criticizes the main approaches and solutions to the problems that have been canvassed, rejecting the various forms of nominalism and 'Platonic' realism. In volume II he develops an important theory of his own, an objective theory of universals based not on linguistic conventions, but on the actual and potential findings of natural science. He thus reconciles a realism about qualities and relations with an empiricist epistemology. The theory allows, too, for a convincing explanation of natural laws as relations between these universals.
This book explores how post-death existence is represented in popular film, looking at issues such as continuity, personal identity, and the nature of existence beyond the grave. Film often returns to the theme of dying, death and the afterlife, both directly and indirectly, because there are very few subjects as compelling and universal. The book compares the representation of death, dying and the afterlife in films to scholarly surveys of attitudes towards life-after-death through the analysis of twenty films made between the end of World War II and now. It looks at the portrayals of stages between death and a final destination; spatio-temporal and personal continuity; the nature of afterlife existence in terms of embodiment, or not; and the contact between the worlds of the living and the dead. This book offers a wide-ranging view on a compelling subject in film. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Religion and Film, Religion and Media, the Philosophy of Religion, and the Sociology of Religion, as well as Religion, Media and Film Studies more generally .
Why did the window break when it was hit by the stone? Because the window is brittle and the stone is hard; hardness and brittleness are powers, dispositional properties or dispositions.' Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. This book is a record of the debate on the nature of dispositions between three distinguished philosophers - D. M. Armstrong, C. B. Martin and U. T. Place - who have been thinking about dispositions all their working lives. Their distinctive accounts cover many of the issues surrounding dispositions such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation. Dispositions illuminates this central topic in analytic philosophy and at the same time highlights deeper concerns of metaphysics.
Who are They, why are the (not) Coming Back and how Should We Deal with Them? : Assessing Policies on Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands
Who are They, why are the (not) Coming Back and how Should We Deal with Them? : Assessing Policies on Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands
Some 5000 men, women and children have travelled from Europe to Syria and Iraq since 2012. An estimated 1500 of these foreign terrorist fighters (FTF) have returned so far. This report looks into policies on returning foreign fighters in these three countries. It is the very first systematic and in-depth study into national approaches and policies vis-à-vis returnees. Its added value lies in the wealth of data, including data that has not been published before, and, of course, in the comparative angle. The authors hope to offer a reference point for future studies, for both practitioners and researchers. Each of the three country chapters in this report start with an overview of the scope of the FTF challenge, and a profile of the returnees. We also seek to compare current figures with those from previous jihadi conflicts, which is difficult given the paucity of data. Each chapter then looks at the evolution of the perception of this issue among authorities since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2012, and at the development of more coherent policies. Next comes a sequential description of the policies in place to deal with returnees: how to deal with fighters still in the conflict zone, with those that have come back, those in prison and those who have been released. Finally, the sensitive question of what to do about children in the jihadi war zone or recently returned from there is also assessed in some depth. Transcending the national perspectives, David Malet offers a historical perspective on foreign fighters in Europe, explaining that the issue is nothing new – not even in scope.
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