Imagining Security

This book considers how the issue of security is shaped by a range of actors and agencies in the public, private and nongovernmental sectors. The book has two key themes: that governance is now no longer simply shaped by thinking within the state sphere, but also within business and community spheres; and that these developments have implications for the future of democratic values as assumptions about the traditional role of government are increasingly challenged.

This book is concerned with the ways in which the problem of security is thought about and promoted by a range of actors and agencies in the public, private and nongovernmental sectors. The authors are concerned not simply with the influence of risk-based thinking in the area of security, but seek rather to map the mentalities and practices of security found in a variety of sectors, and to understand the ways in which thinking from these sectors influence one another. Their particular concern is to understand the drivers of innovation in the governance of security, the conditions that make innovation possible and the ways in which innovation is imagined and realised by actors from a wide range of sectors. The book has two key themes: first, governance is now no longer simply shaped by thinking within the state sphere, for thinking originating within the business and community spheres now also shapes governance, and influence one another. Secondly, these developments have implications for the future of democratic values as assumptions about the traditional role of government are increasingly challenged. The first five chapters of the book explore what has happened to the governance of security, through an analysis of the drivers, conditions and processes of innovation in the context of particular empirical developments. Particular reference is made here to 'waves of change' in security within the Ontario Provincial Police in Canada. In the final chapter the authors examine the implications of 'nodal governance' for democratic values, and then suggest normative directions for deepening democracy in these new circumstances.

'Soft security' - what does it mean? Cultural interaction is a key to secure coexistence - building of transnational institutions and processes and learning how to speak to each other across chasms of incomprehension. The effect of security is readable in the state of intercultural communication and dialogue. Learning to read it is vital to us all.

This volume calls upon over a dozen Indus observers to imagine a scenario for the Indus basin in which transboundary cooperation over water resources overcomes the insecurity arising from water dependence and scarcity. From diverse perspectives, its essays examine the potential benefits to be gained from revisiting the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, as well as from mounting joint efforts to increase water supply, to combat climate change, to develop hydroelectric power, and to improve water management. The Indus basin is shared by four countries (Afghanistan, China, India, and Pakistan). The basin’s significance stems in part simply from the importance of these countries, three of them among the planet’s most populous states, one of them boasting the world’s second largest economy, and three of them members of the exclusive nuclear weapons club. However, the basin’s significance stems also from the great importance of the Indus waters themselves – due especially to the region’s massive dependence on irrigated agriculture as well as to the menace of climate change and advancing water scarcity. The “Industan” this volume imagines is a definite departure from business as usual responses to the Indus basin’s emerging fresh water crisis. The objective is to kindle serious discussion of the cooperation needed to confront what many water experts believe is developing into one of the planet’s most gravely threatened river basins. It is thus both assessment of the current state of play in regard to water security in the Indus basin and recommendation about where to go from here.

An innovative reassessment of the War on Terror organized around the themes of seeing, waiting, travelling.

By any measure, Judith Gardam has accomplished much in her professional life and is rightly acknowledged by scholars throughout the world as an expert in her many fields of diverse interest — including international law, energy law and feminist theory. This book celebrates her academic life and work with twelve essays from leading scholars in Gardam’s fields of expertise.

"The situation in Syria poses an acute-some might say existential-challenge to the international community's commitment to justice and accountability. It also marks the abject failure of the international system of peace and security erected in the post-World War II period. The Security Council has been almost entirely incapacitated by the propensity of Russia to wield its veto against nearly every coercive measure of any consequence, including legal accountability, that might be imposed on the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. As a result, other actors, within and outside of the United Nations, have endeavored to find inventive ways around this geopolitical impasse. This forced creativity has generated a number of innovative institutions, legal arguments, and investigative techniques aimed at advancing justice and accountability for Syria, wherever possible. This book catalogues the many obstacles to this pursuit of justice for Syria and analyzes ways today's justice entrepreneurs have worked to find paths around them. The book's subtitle-Water Always Finds Its Way-reflects this idea that the quest for justice is inexorable. Just as water eventually finds its way through cracks and around obstacles, even if at a trickle, so too will justice. Virtually every international crime that forms part of the international penal code-a mélange of customary international law and treaty provisions-has been committed in and around Syria. The Syrian people have witnessed and been subjected to deliberate, indiscriminate, and disproportionate attacks; the misuse of conventional, unconventional, and improvised weapon systems; industrial-grade custodial abuses in a vast network of formal and informal prisons; unrelenting siege warfare; the denial of humanitarian aid and what appears to be the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war; sexual violence, including the sexual enslavement of Yezidi women and girls trafficked from Iraq and the sexual torture of detained men and boys; and the intentional destruction of irreplaceable cultural property. Thousands of Syrians are missing, many of them victims of enforced disappearances. Even children are not spared. The long-standing taboo against the use of chemical weapons has been repeatedly flouted in ways that constitute a double violation of IHL: the use of a prohibited weapon to target civilians. And, the sectarian nature of the violence has raised the specter of genocide against ethno-religious minorities. Indeed, then-Secretary of State John Kerry announced in 2016 that ISIL was committing genocide against a number of minority groups in Syria and Iraq. Violence in the region has contributed to the biggest exodus of refugees since World War II"--

Thematically, this book problematizes Iranian official nationalism. It reviews how every modern Iranian regime since the constitutional revolution of the 1905-06 has failed to legitimize its official identity, resulting in the fall of five different regimes. The book details how the collapse of each regime resulted in the interruption of the official meaning of being Iranian, as well as the meanings of its enemies. What remained the same was how every Iranian regime represented itself as the agent of a particular national desire defined in terms of making Iran to become sovereign, developed, democratic, and constitutional. Nonetheless, no regime was able to convince a great majority of the people that it achieved what it represented. This book makes three specific contributions. The first contribution is pedagogical. By focusing on the dynamics of regime changes, it provides a heuristic model for identifying challenges that all Iranian regimes have faced. Moreover, the book is a comprehensive review of the disruptive, oppressive, and bloody nature of the rise and fall of different regimes. The second contribution is theoretical. Rather than examining the behavior of various Iranian regimes in isolation from their international context, the book examines how each regime got to understand itself in relations to its imperial others. By examining the governmental rationality of each regime, the book offers a better theoretical framework for understanding political development not only in Iran, but also in all other Middle Eastern and South Asian states. Finally, the third contribution of this book is its critical approach to the main body of the literature on Iran, modernity, development, democracy, and constitutionalism.