Terror In The Balance

In Terror in the Balance, Posner and Vermeule take on civil libertarians of both the left and the right, arguing that the government should be given wide latitude to adjust policy and liberties in the times of emergency. They emphasize the virtues of unilateral executive actions and argue for making extensive powers available to the executive as warranted. The judiciary should neither second-guess security policy nor interfere on constitutional grounds. In order to protect citizens, government can and should use any legal instrument that is warranted under ordinary cost-benefit analysis. The value gained from the increase in security will exceed the losses from the decrease in liberty. At a time when the 'struggle against violent extremism' dominates the United States' agenda, this important and controversial work will spark discussion in the classroom and intellectual press alike.

In The Fragile Balance of Terror, the foremost experts on nuclear policy and strategy offer insight into an era rife with more nuclear powers. Some of these new powers suffer domestic instability, others are led by pathological personalist dictators, and many are situated in highly unstable regions of the world?a volatile mix of variables. The increasing fragility of deterrence in the twenty-first century is created by a confluence of forces: military technologies that create vulnerable arsenals, a novel information ecosystem that rapidly transmits both information and misinformation, nuclear rivalries that include three or more nuclear powers, and dictatorial decision making that encourages rash choices. The nuclear threats posed by India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea are thus fraught with danger. The Fragile Balance of Terror, edited by Vipin Narang and Scott D. Sagan, brings together a diverse collection of rigorous and creative scholars who analyze how the nuclear landscape is changing for the worse. Scholars, pundits, and policymakers who think that the spread of nuclear weapons can create stable forms of nuclear deterrence in the future will be forced to think again. Contributors: Giles David Arceneaux, Mark S. Bell, Christopher Clary, Peter D. Feaver, Jeffrey Lewis, Rose McDermott, Nicholas L. Miller, Vipin Narang, Ankit Panda, Scott D. Sagan, Caitlin Talmadge, Heather Williams, Amy Zegart

Since the sudden disappearance of the Soviet Union, many scholars have argued that the balance of power theory is losing its relevance. This text examines this viewpoint, as well as looking at systematic factors that may hinder or favour the return of balance of power politics.

Since 9/11, one of the most dominant issues in American politics has been: what exactly is a war on terror and who is in charge of it? Previous books on this topic have fallen off the horse on either side: on the right, making military actions under the Bush administration equal to previous declared wars and ceding too much war-making power to the presidency or on the left, requiring congressional approval for any national security steps at all, contradicting much of American historical precedent. Weinberger presents a novel understanding of the Declare War clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8), filtering it through the AUMFs passed by Congress since 9/11 and concluding that the Presidency has wide latitude and autonomy in the overseas theaters, but not on the domestic front.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Sociology - War and Peace, Military, grade: 2,3, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, course: Terrorism, National Security and Constitutional Rights, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the reaction to the new quality of terrorism after September 11, 2001 affects the balance between freedom and civil liberties on the one side, and national and public security on the other side. On the example of the Federal Republic of Germany it is examined, what civil liberties are affected and how. Before doing this, the issue of the perception of terrorism is shortly illuminated. The last part of the paper calls for the engagement of social scientists in response to the curbing of civil liberties and finally gives an outlook on the future development of the balance between freedom and security.

This book investigates the major changes in world history and world economy during the past five hundred years and explains to what extent world forces have been responsible for shaping both past and present. Its underlying theme is the struggle for power in which, since the sixteenth century, the West has prevailed. Many of the problems of the contemporary world - including terrorism - are the legacy of the period of Western domination. Until the rise of the West, and its incomparable impact on every branch of human activity, the centre of the world has been in Asia. By the nineteenth century world power was firmly in the hands of the West. America's later rise to world status was prompted by the two world wars. The most prominent of the Western nations, the US is now blamed for all the excesses of an earlier colonial age.