post-September 11th Era Research Articles

Aspects of military prehospital care

The military prehospital care experience has adapted civilian practice to reflect the nature of injuries sustained in recent conflicts. The main adaptations stem from differences in the mechanism of injury, clinical timelines and personnel. The large number of blast injuries and resulting extremity trauma means that an emphasis is placed on the control of catastrophic haemorrhage using a number of novel haemostatic strategies. This paradigm of <C>ABC is now universally followed and differs from civilian practice in a number of other ways— particularly in the management of C-spine, airway, chest injuries and circulatory access. This review highlights these differences in practice and outlines military techniques and protocols. It also emphasizes those areas in which civilian practice has borrowed from its military counterparts and successfully employed their techniques. This may become more relevant in the modern, post-September 11th era, in which urban mass casualty incidents are no longer a fictional fear.

After Abu Ghraib: exploring human rights in America and the Middle East

Introduction 1. American imaginings of human rights and the Middle East 2. The human rights challenge from within 3. The Middle Eastern gaze on American human rights commitments 4. American imprints and the Middle East's new human rights landscape 5. From the ashes of the post-September 11th era: lessons for the human rights project.

Warrior geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and The Kingdom Of Heaven

The “war on terror” and remilitarization of political anxiety in the aftermath of September 11th in the West, is both facilitated and challenged by representations of geopolitical danger and the supposed necessity for warriors to fight wars in distant lands. Ridley Scott's three movies, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and most recently The Kingdom of Heaven explore the morality and identity of warriors. They do so in exotic landscapes and settings that emphasize the confrontation with danger as external and frequently unknowable; political violence is presented as something that has both simple and very complicated geographies. The public discussion of the necessity for warfare and “intervention” in Western states is enmeshed in discourses of moralities, rights and “just war”. The professional Western warrior, whether a special forces operative or garrison soldier in peacekeeping mode, is a key figure of the post September 11th era, physically securing the West, and simultaneously securing its identity as the repository of virtue against barbaric threats to civilization. These themes are key to Ridley Scott's work. Analyzing them in terms of the warrior, empire and the particular geographies of combat adds a specifically military dimension to the critical geopolitical literature on war and representation.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Diplomats

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Diplomats Quentin Hodgson (bio) Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World, by Dennis Ross. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, 370 pages. $26.00 (hardcover). At the annual launch of the International Institute for Strategic Studies' (IISS) Strategic Survey, director general John Chipman said, the "authority, prestige and reputation of the US is not what it might have been four or five years ago."1 He is only one of many to have expressed such sentiments.2 The Pew surveys of recent years have shown a precipitous decline in global opinions of the US, particularly in the Muslim world.3 The Iraq conflict is one of the primary reasons cited for this sad state of affairs, leading many to hope that a new administration in 2009 will quickly be able to restore the United States' power and prestige. Undoubtedly the next president will enjoy a honeymoon of sorts and we will see an increase in favorable opinions of the US—for a time. But the US will still likely pursue some version of the War on Terrorism. Iran will still seek to establish regional hegemony in the Middle East. China will continue to grow, presenting challenges and opportunities for the world at large. Many challenges will remain. Into this breach steps Dennis Ross, Counselor and Ziegler Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former Middle East envoy under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. His new book's title puts him firmly in the camp of Bush administration critics, but his critique is a more tempered and even-handed one. While unflagging in his criticism of the Bush team, he also freely admits when they have gotten things right (although he finds few examples to trumpet). And he fully recognizes the challenges President Bush has had to face. The crux of Ross's argument is not that the Bush administration has necessarily been wrong in its policy choices, but that its execution has proven so poor.4 In fact, he steers well clear of the old chestnuts about an administration blindly charging forth, ignoring the warnings of friends and allies. He points out that the argument over unilateral versus multilateral behavior is more than a false dichotomy; the Bush administration has not followed the unilateral path much more than previous presidents have. Ross's focus is on the implementation of statecraft, which he defines as "the use of the assets or the resources and tools (economic, military, intelligence, [End Page 191] media) that a state has to pursue its interests and to affect the behavior of others, whether friendly or hostile."5 To make his case, Ross lays out four case studies (German reunification, the response to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the Balkan wars—Bosnia in particular, and the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime) and describes briefly how the US exercised statecraft. Of course the starkest comparison is the approach to coalition building to face Iraq as practiced by Secretary of State James Baker and George H. W. Bush on the one hand, and Bush W. Bush's team on the other. The theoretical meat of the book lies in the chapters "Lessons of Statecraft for Today" and "Statecraft in a New World." Ross draws some simple, but concrete lessons from his case studies. His focus is on the practical, not the ideological. And so he ponders whether the United States can practice good statecraft without the constant attention and participation of the President and Secretary of State (yes, but it takes a strong interagency team with access to the senior leadership when needed); or whether even the best efforts at statecraft can fail (yes, when the objectives are wrong). Statecraft demands "hardheaded" assessments and the ability to "frame" the issue for domestic and foreign audiences. The US will need good statecraft to address the security challenges of the post-September 11th era—from proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to weak and failing states. The chapters on rules for effective negotiation and mediation are the most business-like. Ross does not promise success, but one can imagine eager...

Human Rights in the Post-September 11th Era: Between Hegemony and Emancipation

The post-September 11th era has presented immense challenges and disappointing setbacks for the advancement of human rights. Yet, the era has also been marked by complexity, paradoxes and ample opportunities for introspection as events expose contemporary human rights' various weaknesses and contradictions. This article provides an overview of the interplay between the human rights concept's various instrumental appropriations and its more autonomous emancipatory capacity manifested in post-September 11th developments. Instead of an exhaustive examination, the article simply poses and juxtaposes different dimensions and layers of the formidable presence of the human rights idea in post-September 11th developments impacting the Middle East. To this end, it places a particular emphasis on human rights' capacity to simultaneously aid, transcend and confront local and international power structures.The article begins with a discussion of the ways in which American hegemony is both bolstered and challenged through human rights discourses after September 11th. It then turns to the Middle Eastern encounter with human rights amidst the American "War on Terror." It is argued that while widespread Middle Eastern consciousness of American appropriations of human rights foster cynicism about the promise and legitimacy of human rights, post-September 11th dynamics have also resulted in greater Middle Eastern engagement with the human rights concept and international human rights norms. In subsequent sections, the article presents a brief outline of the various challenges and openings presented for human rights advocacy in the last few years followed by a discussion of the renewed imperative for a genuine international human rights dialogue. Throughout the article, examples are presented of how pre-existing human rights geographies and hierarchies ascribing relativism to the East and universalism to the West have been unsettled during this period.

Women, War, and Winning Elections: Gender Stereotyping in the Post-September 11th Era

Scores of political science studies reveal that female candidates fare as well as their male counterparts. But the percentage of citizens willing to support a woman presidential party nominee has significantly decreased over the last two years. Based on the results of a Knowledge Networks national random sample survey, this article offers the first empirical examination of the manner in which the atmosphere of war might affect women candidates’ electoral prospects. I find that citizens prefer men’s leadership traits and characteristics, deem men more competent at legislating around issues of national security and military crises, and contend that men are superior to women at addressing the new obstacles generated by the events of September 11, 2001. As a result of this gender stereotyping, levels of willingness to support a qualified woman presidential candidate are lower than they have been for decades. These findings carry broad implications for the study of women and politics. If women fare as well as men when the political climate is dominated by issues that play to women’s stereotypical strengths, but are disadvantaged when “men’s issues” dominate the political agenda, then we must reconsider the conclusion that winning elections has nothing to do with the sex of the candidate.

Women, War, and Winning Elections: Gender Stereotyping in the Post-September 11th Era

Women, War, and Winning Elections: Gender Stereotyping in the Post-September 11th Era

Comment on “The macroeconomic consequences of terrorism”

Blomberg, Hess and Orphanides (henceforth referred to as BHO) have taken on the enormous task of combining data from several existing sources to construct a new data set that is rich with information on various forms of conflict, including but not limited to terrorism, and on standard macroeconomic variables across both countries and time. Of course, in the post-September 11th era, studying the consequences of terrorism is of immediate interest to policymakers and the general public. However, the applicability of this new panel data set is much broader in scope—for example, in testing recent theories linking institutions which mediate conflict to measures of economic performance such as economic growth, development, and the variability of economic outcomes. The central aim of BHO in this paper is slightly more modest, but nonetheless important—namely, to identify some ‘‘basic facts’’ about terrorism, and to characterize its effects, as separate from the effects of internal and external conflict, on aggregate economic activity. As their analysis involves a new data set, the issues of variable and model selection are very important. Indeed, BHO invest much effort to fit various models to these data and to consider different data subsets and model specifications. And, their efforts yield some fairly reasonable results: ARTICLE IN PRESS

What Lutherans Have to Offer Mission in Preaching

Abstract: What characterizes Lutheran preaching and how can this aid preachers in bringing the gospel to north American culture in a post‐Christian and post September 11th era? Lutheran preaching is distinct in its juxtaposition of Word and sacrament, mandate and promise, and oration and art. Preaching should address the futility of the human condition and proclaim the promise of the gospel that gives hope and brings salvation to a fearful and fragmented world. In our preaching moralism needs to be superceded by grace and proclamation of the Word needs to be honest about life events and always have Christ as the center.

Bus interdiction efforts by the police:United States v. Drayton

The Supreme Court recently addressed the constitutionality of police interdiction efforts when conducting bus sweeps. The Court held that law enforcement officers are not required by the Fourth Amendment to “advise bus passengers of their right not to cooperate and to refuse consent to searches” (U.S. v. Drayton, 2002, p. 2107). The decision may have implications for how the judicial branch will balance the needs of law enforcement against citizen freedoms in the post-September 11th era. This article explores the surrounding legal issues, the case opinion, and policy implications of this case.

Whither Environmental Security in the Post–September 11th Era? Assessing the Legal, Organizational, and Policy Challenges for the National Security State

What are the implications of the war on terrorism for the progress made to date and the likely future of environmental security efforts in the national security state? To put the evolving post–September 11th environmental security challenge facing the U.S. military in perspective, this article begins with a synopsis of the doctrinal, tactical, operational, and regulatory dilemmas faced by the U.S. military in the post–Cold War era. Next, the article reviews how and why the 1990s bequeathed a set of misaligned administrative systems that make existing and future progress in balancing national security with environmental and natural resources protection extremely vulnerable to shifts in the political economy surrounding this issue in the post–September 11th era. The article concludes with a review of how September 11th has affected the patterns of politics surrounding this issue since those tragic events. Despite recent increases in the defense budget, this analysis suggests that conflict over this issue will continue, rendering structural realignment a daunting challenge and further complicating the integration of national security and environmental and natural resources responsibilities in the post–September 11th era.