Rethinking Security Governance

This book explores the unintended consequences of security governance actions and explores how their effects can be limited. Security governance describes new modes of security policy that differ from traditional approaches to national and international security. While traditional security policy used to be the exclusive domain of states and aimed at military defense, security governance is performed by multiple actors and is intended to create a global environment of security for states, social groups, and individuals. By pooling the strength and expertise of states, international organizations, and private actors, security governance is seen to provide more effective and efficient means to cope with today’s security risks. Generally, security governance is assumed to be a good thing, and the most appropriate way of coping with contemporary security problems. This assumption has led scholars to neglect an important phenomenon: unintended consequences. While unintended consequences do not need to be negative, often they are. The CIA term "blowback," for example, refers to the phenomenon that a long nurtured group may turn against its sponsor. The rise of al Qaeda, which had benefited from US Cold War policies, is only one example. Raising awareness about unwanted and even paradoxical policy outcomes and suggesting ways of avoiding damage or limiting their scale, this book will be of much interest to students of security governance, risk management, international security and IR. Christopher Daase is Professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt and head of the research department International Organizations and International Law at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF/HSFK). Cornelius Friesendorf is lecturer at the Goethe University Frankfurt and research fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF/HSFK).

This book explores the unintended consequences of security governance actions and explores how their effects can be limited. Security governance describes new modes of security policy that differ from traditional approaches to national and international security. While traditional security policy used to be the exclusive domain of states and aimed at military defense, security governance is performed by multiple actors and is intended to create a global environment of security for states, social groups, and individuals. By pooling the strength and expertise of states, international organizations, and private actors, security governance is seen to provide more effective and efficient means to cope with today’s security risks. Generally, security governance is assumed to be a good thing, and the most appropriate way of coping with contemporary security problems. This assumption has led scholars to neglect an important phenomenon: unintended consequences. While unintended consequences do not need to be negative, often they are. The CIA term "blowback," for example, refers to the phenomenon that a long nurtured group may turn against its sponsor. The rise of al Qaeda, which had benefited from US Cold War policies, is only one example. Raising awareness about unwanted and even paradoxical policy outcomes and suggesting ways of avoiding damage or limiting their scale, this book will be of much interest to students of security governance, risk management, international security and IR. Christopher Daase is Professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt and head of the research department International Organizations and International Law at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF/HSFK). Cornelius Friesendorf is lecturer at the Goethe University Frankfurt and research fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF/HSFK).

Since the unexpected end of the Cold War, standard arguments about power politics can no longer be adopted uncritically. This has led to a renewed interest in Japan’s unusually peaceful security policy. Japan’s championing of "comprehensive security" is central to this collection. Peter J. Katzenstein’s essays explore this concept which not only encompasses traditional military concerns but also domestic aspects of security. The book's focus on counter-terrorism and national security highlights a policy approach which, over decades, Japan has developed with political patience and diplomatic finesse. These essays advocate an eclectic approach that helps in recognizing new questions and that seek to combine elements from different analytical perspectives in the exploration of novel lines of argument. Additionally, the book features an entirely new, substantial introduction that explores and elaborates the themes of the collection while bringing it up to date. This collection will be of significant interest to students and scholars of Japanese politics, security studies and international relations.

The world currently faces a number of challenges that no single country can solve. Whether it is managing a crisis-prone global economy, maintaining peace and stability, or trying to do something about climate change, there are some problems that necessitate collective action on the part of states and other actors. Global governance would seem functionally necessary and normatively desirable, but it is proving increasingly difficult to provide. This accessible introduction to, and analysis of, contemporary global governance explains what it is and the obstacles to its realization. Paying particular attention to the possible decline of American influence and the rise of China and a number of other actors, Mark Beeson explains why cooperation is proving difficult, despite its obvious need and desirability. This is an essential text for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying global governance or international organizations, and is also important reading for those working on political economy, international development and globalization.

A timely and authoritative assessment of the crisis in global cooperation and prospects for its reform and transformation.

This book examines the role of risk management in the recent financial crisis and applies lessons from there to the national security realm. It rethinks the way risk contributes to strategy, with insights relevant to practitioners and scholars in national security as well as business. Over the past few years, the concept of risk has become one of the most commonly discussed issues in national security planning. And yet the experiences of the 2007-2008 financial crisis demonstrated critical limitations in institutional efforts to control risk. The most elaborate and complex risk procedures could not cure skewed incentives, cognitive biases, groupthink, and a dozen other human factors that led companies to take excessive risk. By embracing risk management, the national security enterprise may be turning to a discipline just as it has been discredited.

This volume explores new directions of governance and public policy arising both from interpretive political science and those who engage with interpretive ideas. It conceives governance as the various policies and outcomes emerging from the increasing salience of neoclassical and institutional economics or, neoliberalism and new institutionalisms. In doing so, it suggests that that the British state consists of a vast array of meaningful actions that may coalesce into contingent, shifting, and contestable practices. Based on original fieldwork, it examines the myriad ways in which local actors - civil servants, mid-level public managers, and street level bureaucrats - have interpreted elite policy narratives and thus forged practices of governance on the ground. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of governance and public policy.

“A very valuable and much needed book on a central element in the processes of social change: the construction and reconstruction of social norms as they move between global and local levels.” —Naila Kabeer, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK “This book explores how gender equality norms are ever-evolving and argues convincingly that we cannot take their effectiveness, nor their acceptance, for granted.” —Judith Kelley, Duke Sanford School of Public Policy, USA “In an era of increasing resistance to gender equality, this is a much-needed volume that attends to how gender equality norms are interpreted and contested in governance organisations ranging from the UN and the EU to Mercosur and women’s NGOs in India and Uganda.” —Ann Towns, University of Gothenburg, Sweden This edited collection provides a new theoretical approach to the study of how global norms influence social processes. It analyses the institutional and highly political processes whereby actors – be they local, national, regional or trans-national – engage with global norms of gender equality. The editors bring together key thinkers who emphasise how context and history effect norm engagement and how particular groups and actors tend to be marginalised from discussions of global norms. By proposing a situated approach that underlines the contingent, multi-level processes that occur when actors interpret, use, manipulate, bend, or betray norms, notions of norm diffusion are fundamentally challenged. This book makes a further crucial contribution to the study of norms and gender equality in global governance by analysing very different empirical contexts, from New Delhi and St. Petersburg to the Organisation of American States, and from Kampala and New York to the European Union.