ABSTRACT This article examines the case of Myanmar, specifically, how the country’s domestic human rights record and lack of democratic structure has been the root cause of its economic and political instability. The systematic and genocidal persecution of the country’s Rohingya population and denial of their democratic rights has become the central human rights issue upon which the international community defines Myanmar’s reputation. The article identifies how Myanmar’s actions have directly impacted its national security in three ways: internal insecurity, regional insecurity, and economic insecurity. Myanmar is a case study that demonstrates how ethnic conflict and democratic erosion threatens the legitimacy of the nation and hinders the realization of a stable country.

ABSTRACT Conventional models of deterrence focus on the ability to deter adversaries through ex-ante threats that impose ex-post costs or through the elevation of ex-ante costs through strategies that deny. The imposition of costs on adversaries in cyberspace is complex and the establishment of deterrence by threat or denial is constrained by problems associated with resource asymmetries, attribution, and a diverse set of actors with overlapping capabilities. Due to these challenges, conventional models of deterrence have seen limited success in cyberspace. Rather than building more robust defenses or threatening retaliatory actions, entanglement within cyberspace offers an alternative approach that might affect the decision-matrix of adversary states. This paper examines the concept of entanglement as a way of altering how states conceptualize offensive actions in cyberspace and works toward building mutual interdependencies to make actions that disrupt, degrade or deny within cyberspace undesirable.

In The Far Right Today, author Cas Mudde makes a decent argument for his central thesis, which is that there is a discernable trend in which erstwhile mainstream right-wing political parties have e...

ABSTRACTSometimes democratic political leaders voluntarily cede the armed forces too much authority, assigning them positions that should have gone to civilians. The over-delegation of posts to soldiers can invite problems of dependency, as civilians grow accustomed to the military handling defense policy. This study investigates the delegation of leadership positions in six advanced democracies: Israel, Taiwan, Spain, the US, the UK, and France. It finds that in the first three countries officers dominate many top-tier positions within the defense ministries, while in the latter three, civilians do. Deficiencies in civilian control are unexpected since these countries either face serious external threats or are members of NATO. It is argued that what links the three countries with civilian deficiencies is the presence of wide and longstanding gaps between military and civilian expertise and an absence of incentives to close them. Where civilians suffer from serious knowledge deficits, there is often a temptation to defer to the generals by delegating key ministerial posts to them.

ABSTRACTThis article introduces a concrete method of constructivist inquiry called norm mapping that illuminates the social dimensions of discrete global security threats and advances the study of democracy and security. Specifically, this article uses the puzzle of incomplete democratization in fragile states to highlight the weaknesses of typical Western liberal approaches that fail to account for pre-existing deep-seated normative preferences. It then introduces norm mapping as a way to analyze and visualize the local normative landscape, providing an empirically grounded model of social intelligence to deepen our understanding of localized political norms (whether regarding political participation, gender equality, nuclear security culture, or government transparency). In doing so, norm mapping allows researchers to pinpoint the real social barriers to normative change and illuminates more reliable pathways for positive transformation. Thus norm mapping not only provides an improved way to theorize how political transformations can take place, but it also provides a practical tool to enhance policy efforts to encourage the embrace of positive norms such as transparency, accountability, and participation.

ABSTRACTWhy does democratic peace theory not appear to apply to the US? Given the number of conflicts in which the US has participated, particularly since the turn of the twentieth century, it does not appear that citizens have often effectively restrained the state from entering into wars, as Kant predicted would be the case in republics. This article examines the role of pluralism and divisions within the ranks of wars' opponents as a possible factor in these failures.

ABSTRACTMilitary transformations are usually understood as linear processes involving diverse, steady, and costly initiatives to be achieved during a specific timeframe. However, other influencing elements, such as assessment, follow-up, and feedback from the personnel in charge of enforcing and evaluating their implementation, are often disregarded. This article seeks to bridge this information gap and provide a model to analyze the transformation of the military forces of Colombia as a virtuous cycle using the perceptions of its future implementers as its core and main evaluating resource. The questionnaire developed focuses on national interests and the roles and functions of the military forces, gathering the perceptions of officers who will be responsible for implementing the transformation. The statistical findings suggest that determining threats, factors of influence, obstacles, enhancers, and priorities such as drug trafficking, defense expenditure, conflict of interests, fiscal responsibility, and doctrine and policy are central to obtaining successful outcomes.

ABSTRACTIn spite of the inability of Gulf countries to develop a successful collective security strategy as asserted by the existing literature, the study contends that they have exceptionally adopted it toward their domestic uprisings. Based on the security regime theory, this study argues that threats of revolutionary sociopolitical change incentivize authoritarian regimes, such as Gulf countries, to formulate a collective security strategy within multilateral instances. By relying on a critical discourse analysis, the study traces Gulf countries’ perception of the different uprisings as reported by different national newspapers from December 2010 till March 2018.

ABSTRACTWithin the counterterrorism field, the concept of countering violent extremism (CVE) has emerged as a potential non-punitive solution to address the threat of radicalization. Practitioners and scholars have raised several concerns regarding CVE strategies including concerns about the CVE terminology. Using a survey experiment, this article responds to this concern by empirically analyzing the impact of CVE terminology on public support for CVE initiatives in the United States. Although many local communities have dropped the CVE terminology, the results suggest that a change in terminology at the national scale is unnecessary.

ABSTRACTOver the past decade more than 40 young men have left the Somali diaspora in the US state of Minnesota to fight for foreign terrorist groups. In 2011, fearing similar radicalization across the country, the Obama administration began to emphasize the potential for community policing to enable police agencies to partner with local communities to prevent it. Subsequently, the US Department of Justice sought to make the state’s capital, Minneapolis-St. Paul, a national model for doing so. This article assesses the success of this goal and elucidates the principal lessons that might be learned from the ongoing process.