Pursuit Of Security Research Articles

Catchy but Not New: "Indivisible Security" in the Chinese Foreign Policy Lexicon

Abstract: "Indivisible security" is included as one principle of China's Global Security Initiative, which was outlined in April 2022. Because, in English, the term is generally associated with Russian framing of its pursuit of security, of interest to this article is whether China is mimicking the Russian phrase in its own usage. Searching for the Chinese equivalent of "indivisible security" (anquan bukefenge) in databases, the authors find that the specific use has a certain tradition in China. The findings should be helpful in future dialogues and debates over Chinese rhetorical framings of security, and in appraising the country's self-rationalisation of specific foreign policy actions.

Dream of European Army: Is It a Feasible Objective or Not?

The European Union’s (EU) defense initiatives have changed over time, reflecting both the pursuit of security and defense goals and the shifting dynamics of European integration. To improve defense cooperation and create a common defense strategy for the EU, several initiatives have been made. The EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), which strives to strengthen its capacity to handle security concerns and preserve stability, has a significant influence on defense-related operations. We have witnessed new security and military efforts from the EU in the first two decades of the 2000s, such as the European Security Strategy, EU’s Global Strategy and Security Compass. 2013 marked a turning point when the USA deployed its new nuclear weapons in Europe. The announcement of the creation of the European army was made on November 13, 2017. Europe should be able to act independently in areas of defense and security rather than merely relying on the US or NATO. Because of these kinds of reservations, desires to pursue more advanced capabilities on their own have been raised.
 There has been a lot of debate and analysis around the reasons for and against the formation of a European army. Numerous parties have expressed interest in and influence over the notion of a European army. The development of a European army has been heavily debated over the past several years. Why is the idea of a European army so heavily investigated? Is building such an army a realistic goal or not? What are the benefits, drawbacks, and challenges to achieving it? Who is in favor of and against building an army in Europe? These are the primary questions that we attempt to address in this article.

Security, digital border technologies, and immigration admissions: Challenges of and to non-discrimination, liberty and equality

Normative debates on migration control, while characterised by profound disagreement, do appear to agree that the state has at least a prima facie right to prevent the entry of security threats. While concern is sometimes raised that this ‘security exception’ can be abused, there has been little focus by normative theorists on concrete practices of security, and how we can determine what a ‘principled’ use of the security exception would be. I argue that even if states have a right to prevent migrants from entering on grounds of security, the practices required to implement this right will likely compromise core liberal democratic values in ways that have not been sufficiently appreciated. I draw on literature from Science and Technology Studies and Critical Security Studies to examine the proliferation of digital border control technologies which are increasingly dominating state security practices, and explain the challenges these technologies pose to non-discrimination, liberty and equality. I also highlight the difficulties of taking these principles as presumptive limitations on the operation of the security exception. A more sustained conversation among ethical theorists is needed to address the profound ethical challenges that the ever-increasing use of these technologies poses, particularly in pursuit of security.

AUKUS: When naval procurement sets grand strategy

Traditionally, a grand strategy lays out the trade-offs a state must make in pursuit of security, thereby setting all aspects of foreign policy, from trade deals to defence budgets. This essay argues that the trade-offs embodied in a deal as complex, expensive, and long-lasting as AUKUS will manifest themselves in Australia's grand strategy for decades to come. Going forward, Australia's naval procurement decisions will shape its grand strategy, rather than vice versa. The essay makes three related points. First, Australia's costly reneging on France in favour of the US is the most important aspect of the deal to date. Even if these nuclear submarines are never built (a not entirely remote possibility), this shift in investment will determine Australia's approach to the world for a generation. Second, understanding this approach requires acknowledging that arms deals, even between allies, are tough, zero-sum negotiations requiring all parties to give up something of value. Given this, the essay makes the final point that Australia, and any other country entering AUKUS in the future, will pay in autonomy as much as in dollars.

협력적 위협감소(CTR) 프로그램의 국제법적 쟁점과 과제

There are many skepticisms about the prospect of North Korea's denuclearization due to North Korea's strong willingness to possess nuclear weapons and the polarization of the international community. However, the “mission of peaceful unification” stipulated in the preamble of the Republic of Korea's constitution is difficult to make progress without North Korea's denuclearization process. The issue of establishing a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula is inseparable from the issue of North Korea's denuclearization. Therefore, it is necessary to individually review various denuclearization paths that North Korea may take and seek different policy directions suitable for them. To this end, an in-depth review of the state practice that has succeeded in denuclearization is necessary. Among them, Ukraine, which succeeded to nuclear weapons following the dissolution of the former Soviet Union in 1991 and became the world's third-largest nuclear power, has significant implications for North Korea's denuclearization in that it went through denuclearization negotiations in pursuit of security from Russia.
 Since the cost of denuclearization is considerable, external technical and financial support is also a very important factor in inducing denuclearization to countries with poor economic conditions such as North Korea. In Ukraine, which was in a similar situation, U.S. financial support through the “Cooperative Threat Reduction”(CTR) program had a significant impact on the denuclearization decision. Of course, there are significant differences between North Korea and the former Soviet Union, but the CTR concept could be a powerful tool to support verifiable reductions and dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons and other WMDs and their means of projection. Accordingly, this paper analyzes the international legal implications based on the institutional basis of the Ukrainian CTR program and derives S. Korea's countermeasures.

Architecting the Autocuckoo Filter to Defend Against Cross-Core Cache Attacks

Cross-core cache timing side-channel attacks, which observe cache access behavior of victims running on different physical cores to infer sensitive information, have become a significant threat. Although the attacks are covert, they cause the attacked cachelines to frequently migrate among cache hierarchies, rendering abnormal traffic. Based on this observation, the proposed scheme PiPoMonitor records cache-memory access traffic and prefetch suspicious lines under attack to interfere with adversaries’ probes. In pursuit of security and performance, PiPoMonitor exploits a Cuckoo filter as the recording structure and introduces two features to it: 1) autonomic deletion and 2) relocation accelerating. The former exponentially increases the uncertainty of record eviction against reverse engineering attacks, while the latter leverages a pipelined architecture to alleviate the impact of intensive filter queries on the memory critical path. PiPoMonitor is not only able to effectively mitigate cross-core cache attacks and defeat sophisticated defense-aware attackers but also induces a negligible performance penalty and acceptable hardware overhead.

Family's roles as a welfare pillar: The case of older persons living in extreme poverty in Bangladesh

SummaryMotivationMany mainstream welfare theories developed by social scientists and applied by economists and policy‐makers underestimate families' roles in providing welfare to citizens. This is surprising given that the family constitutes one of the main welfare pillars across typologies of the welfare state.PurposeThis article seeks to explore the role of the family as a welfare pillar with an ageing perspective. We aimed to test whether the family serves as a space for negotiations to improve wellbeing and achieve security in the absence of effective formal mechanismsMethods and approachApplying the framework of “informal security regimes,” this article draws on 37 life‐history interviews collected from older persons living in extreme poverty in Bangladesh. Recurring themes are identified and analysed to explore the relationship between family and wellbeing/security.FindingsWe find that family relationships are often central in the pursuit of security. This shows how welfare delivery in low and middle‐income countries (LMICs), in this case Bangladesh, is deeply rooted in reciprocal family systems where all members actively fulfil moral and material expectations. Pursuing this collective goal can take different forms relative to each member's physical and mental capacity, position, gender, and age. Building on the empirical evidence, we propose the concept of “relational security” as a crucial marker and shaper of wellbeing.Policy implicationsTo be effective, welfare policies need to better consider how the conception and experiences of wellbeing and security, especially for the older persons living in extreme poverty, are deeply embedded within the complex functioning of the relationships that can shape welfare outcomes in different directions.

The "left" and "right" arm of the prison: Prison work and the local legal culture of the penitentiary

This contribution aims to explore the tension between the juridical dimension of the prison system and the everyday practices that take place within it. The article focus on prison officers’ and health professionals’ legal culture, drawing from ethnographic researches made by the authors in 4 correctional facilities in Northern Italy. Prison officers’ and health professionals’ working practices can be representative of two ideal-typical patterns of prison staff's action, that we exemplified using the “right” and “left arm" metaphor. The empirical researches conducted by the authors, while highlighting differences and affinities between the two working styles, describe the mutual adaptation of both groups to the peculiarities of the “local legal culture” that characterizes the prison environment. Both groups, grafting within this local legal culture of the prison, contribute to reproducing the maintenance of order and the pursuit of security, which are the main aims of the prison itself.

Design and Implementation of Real-Time Image Acquisition Chip Based on Triple-Hybrid Encryption System

With the improved hardware storage capabilities and the rapid development of artificial intelligence image recognition technology, information is becoming image-oriented. Increasingly sensitive image data needs to be processed. When facing a large amount of real-time sensitive image data encryption and decryption, ensuring both the speed and the security is an urgent demand. This paper proposes an original triple-hybrid encryption system for a real-time sensitive image acquisition chip. This encryption system optimizes the symmetric encryption algorithm AES, asymmetric encryption algorithm ECC, and chip authentication algorithm PUF in pursuit of security, calculation speed, and to ensure that it is lightweight. The three optimized algorithms are further mixed and reused on the circuit level, to ensure mutual protection while making full use of their advantages. Apart from sensitive image protection at the algorithm level, the image chip itself is also protected by an innovative PUF chip authentication method that prevents it from being tampered with and copied. Triple-hybrid encryption system hardware implementation achieves a frequency of 132.5 MHz under the Virtex-5 FPGA with an area of 2834 Slices; with Virtex-7 FPGA, it reaches a frequency of 137.6 MHz with an area of 2716 Slices. The system is also implemented on SMIC 40 nm ASIC, and the clock frequency reaches 480 MHz and the area is 94,812.4 μm2. In terms of computing speed, the peak image encryption speed is 6.15 Gb/s, which meets the real-time image encryption requirement. In terms of hardware resource usage, AES reduced the hardware area by 60.1% compared with the results in other literature, ECC reduced the hardware area by 43.4%, and the PUF hardware area decreased exponentially with the increase in information entropy. The implementation of the three algorithms is reasonable and cost-effective, and the mixture of algorithms does not increase the required capacity of the hardware resource. The triple-hybrid encryption system cooperates with the image acquisition subsystem, storage subsystem, and asynchronous clock subsystem through software control to realize a complete triple-hybrid encryption SoC chip solution, and was successfully taped-out under the SMIC 40 nm process with all constraints passed and a total area of 10.59 mm2.

A génese da formação das FALINTIL: contributos para a edificação do Estado

This essay, told in the first person, aims to analyse the transformation process that took place in 2001, between Aileu and Metinaro, when the National Liberation Armed Forces of Timor-Leste (FALINTIL) gave rise to the Defence Forces of Timor-Leste (FDTL). Following the 1999 referendum, in the context of the United Nations Mission (UNTAET), the formation of FALINTIL-FDTL began in 2001 and constituted one of the central pillars for the construction of the Timorese State. This strategy materialised on May 20, 2002, when the independence of East Timor was formally declared, at a time when the Timorese Armed Forces had already assumed their role as guarantors of the Constitution and central elements of the Rule of Law in the pursuit of security and development of the country.

Toward a Frigid Body: Minimalist Fashion and the Sinthomosexual in China

The emergence of “the frigid style,” namely the appellation of minimalist fashion in China, is synchronized with a heightened national policy that aims at boosting reproduction and compensating for an aging society—a new phase of China’s sexual revolution since the economic reform in the late 1970s. This article argues that the frigid style, incarnating sexual aloofness, is a bodily defense against the discursive reconstruction of body for a reproductive agenda. The frigidly dressed body is not a conspicuous manifesto against biopolitics; instead, it incorporates the Chinese ideal of security and nobility. Articulated in the pursuit of security is a persona of nothingness safe from the normative discourses of ideal citizenship, while in nobility a fantasized western lifestyle that disregards the limitations on gender, class and race. Moreover, the rise of frigid style is accompanied by the popularization of what Lee Edelman calls “sinthomosexuality,” namely sex without any impetus of reproduction. The sinthomosexual outlook on bodily autonomy and agency connotes a new subjectivity in China—the construction of subjects appealing for apoliticality. This apolitical subjectivity might furnish us with a critical lens to look at normcore fashion across the globe.

Freedom or Security in Russia: The False Choice

The paper aims to study the problem of enhanced tendency of the state to limit citizens’ fundamental rights and freedoms, globally and in Russia, justifying it with the need to provide security. Two major approaches to the ratio of freedom and security can be identified in the Russian public discourse – neo-conservative and liberal-democratic. The author uses the concept of social constructivism as a methodology basis for the research to analyze these approaches’ content and ways of constructing them. A contradiction has always exists between the individual’s right for freedom and pursuit of security. However, the specific way of solving it depends on the type of political system and the role of the political elite. The following results were obtained. People’s basic need for security is used by the Russian political elite as a justification for any state policy measures, including limitation of citizens’ constitutional rights and freedoms and curtailing democratic institutions and practices. This is implemented by establishing the state control of mass media, manipulating the public opinion through propaganda, as well as funding the security apparatus in ways not controlled by the society. Security instead of freedom is a false choice imposed on the population by the authorities. Achieving security and freedom is not mutually contradictory; it is mutually determining under conditions of an effective rule-of-law state.

Peace Education in Cambodia : Focusing on Peace Education in Elementary School

This paper aims to examine Social Studies textbooks of Cambodia in terms of the theories of peace education. To achieve this goal, this study, using the conceptual framework for analysis, attempt to analyze 4-6 grades social studies textbooks in elementary school. One of the most pressing concerns in Cambodia today could be considered the pursuit of security. Therefore social studies textbooks can be said to be hard-working in passive peace. Unlike the general concept of passive peace, the non-peaceful factors in Cambodia are the insecurity associated with the mines and bombings of the Khmer Rouge regime era, the current traffic and security issues. Thus, the insecurity associated with the mines and bombings of the Khmer Rouge regime era, the current traffic and security issues in textbooks is emphasized as educational objectives and contents. Also, in the first-sixth grade social textbooks, this problem is discussed through an independent chapter, and a way to avoid it is presented. What is regrettable here is that focusing on passive avoidance from non-peaceful factors, students are not able to explore and practice active measures to solve them. The textbook discusses passive peace as avoidance from non-peaceful factors, but textbook does not deal with the nature of violence, types of violence as a structural violence, and a peaceful solution to the real problem. In this regard, worth noting revealed through the analysis of textbooks is that their orientation is placed on social maintenance rather than social change. In relation to the problem of participation, social textbooks focus on contributing to social maintenance rather than active participation in social change. It emphasizes being a good student and a good citizen who can contribute to social development. The main features of the teaching-learning methodology that appear in the teacher’s guidebook is that question or discussion theme does not attach much important to analyzing, critical thinking, and interpreting etc. In the part of the results of the expected learning, guidebooks provide learning result by rote memorization or learning by repetitive conditioning.

A Political History of the World: Three Thousand Years of War and Peace by Jonathan Holslag

Reviewed by: A Political History of the World: Three Thousand Years of War and Peace by Jonathan Holslag Martijn Lak A Political History of the World: Three Thousand Years of War and Peace. By jonathan holslag. London: Pelican Books, 2018. 639 pp. $23.52 (hardcover). Albert Einstein allegedly stated that 'peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding', whereas Albert Camus was of the opinion that 'peace is the only battle worth waging'. Indeed, it is unlikely that many people would object to these opinions. To the large majority of the world's population, peace is all that is wanted, and justifiably so. Yet, throughout its history, mankind has known more years of war than peace. How is this to be explained? What causes wars to erupt time and time again and why don't peace treaties last long, despite all their good intentions, especially after devastating wars like the First and Second World War? Those and other questions are dealt with superbly by Jonathan Holslag in his extensive and well-written A Political History of the World: Three Thousand Years of War and Peace. The author, who teaches international politics at the Free University Brussels, Belgium, indeed takes a global sweep, covering the whole globe from the start of the first empires to our present day. His book reads almost like a thriller, and as a reader you do not want to put it down. Holslag succeeds in doing this by showing a great mastery of the existing literature (he does not claim to provide new primary sources) and by daring to take a provocative stance. For example, when he writes of the battle of Thermopylae (480 b.c.), often seen as one of the turning points in Western history, he states: 'Despite the favourable geographical conditions, the Greek army led by King Leonidas and a small unit of Spartan spearmen could delay the Persian troops for only three days' (p. 133). The author points to a number of paradoxes when explaining why war has been more prevalent than peace. One of them is that 'the pursuit of security caused so much misery […] any firm distinction between defensive and offensive wars could seldom be made' (p. 50). This did not only apply to the ancient empires of Egypt, Assyria or China, but also to more recent times, for example during the Cold War. Holslag does a great job in showing these continuities in human history, also with regard to peace conferences. For example, he states that 'between 750 and 500, the ideal throughout the Eastern Hemisphere may have been harmony, but the overwhelming reality remained anarchy' (p. 125). This would basically remain the same until deep into the twentieth century. [End Page 643] Moreover, what hardly changed throughout history was the fact that those who suffered the most were ordinary men, women and children. As an illustration Holslag shows that Rome paid an immense price for its victory in the Second Punic War, losing almost 100,000 soldiers. The city itself was 'a beleaguered city of lice-infested apartment blocks, claustrophobic backstreets, and filthy slums; a city afflicted by famine and torn by the loss of loved ones' (p. 191). Little has changed in the respect of suffering; one only needs to think of the Second World War, the Vietnam War or more recently Iraq and Syria. Images of paradise, either religious or more earthly (and Holslag's emphasis is understandably on the latter, at least when he describes how contemporaries saw it), persisted despite all the carnage. Around 400 c.e., Holslag writes, 'the dream of men living in harmony with nature had hardly changed' (p. 243). Unfortunately, those visions did not reflect reality: war and suffering remained the dominant feature of most of the people on earth, no continent or region excepted. The Mongol invasions caused immense carnage, for example. Holslag states that tens of millions of people were killed. From the point of view of world history, equally important in the long term was 'the fact that the great upsurge of Chinese cosmopolitism under the Song – one of the most outward-looking of Chinese dynasties – had been cut off at the...

Reassessing Chilean international security

In this paper, I offer a neorealist interpretation of Chile’s pursuit of security in the Southern Andean Cone in Latin America. I challenge current liberal institutionalist interpretations to shed light on the mounting evidence suggesting Chile’s strong sense of interstate rivalry and competition for power with its regional neighbours. Since the turn of the century, relations with Peru and Bolivia are at a low considering the recent demands in The Hague over territorial bargaining, and, unlike the amicable bilateral relations that have developed recently with long-time rival Argentina, Chile’s interactions with Lima and La Paz reveal the use of purposeful alliances, military deterrence, and diplomatic means to balance each other’s strategic advantages. Against this backdrop, the paper provides with explanatory power to understand Chile’s overall mistrust of Latin America’s rebellious security scenario as it breaks through the theoretical ceiling of current Southern Cone international politics studies.

Small towns and rural growth centers as strategic spaces of control in Rwanda’s post-conflict trajectory

ABSTRACTSince the 1994 genocide, the government’s vigorous pursuit of security, development and poverty alleviation has been translated into its strategy for urban development. With urban population growth rates rocketing in the period following the genocide with the return of both new and old caseload refugees, urban security became a critical focal point for the new government, which takes an active role in the planning and managing its urban trajectory to bring about secure and orderly development. Whereas the growth of Kigali has often been studied as a critical site in the context of post-conflict reconstruction and securitization, the dynamics at play in small towns and urbanizing centers have been less in the picture. This paper focuses on the role of small towns and emerging urban centers in the debate on the politics of urbanization in post-conflict settings. It investigates the significance of rapidly growing small towns for development in the post-conflict context of Rwandan society by analysing two cases of emerging urban centers. Presenting small towns and rural growth centers as strategic spaces of control, the paper argues that the process of rural urbanization in Rwanda can be understood as a potentially contested arena of change.

Exporting Security: Success and Failure in the Securitization and Desecuritization of Foreign Military Interventions

ABSTRACTAlongside humanitarian motives, the pursuit of security is the main justification given by states for their foreign military interventions. This is constructed as an ‘export of security’, part of a strategy to combat material and ideological threats abroad in order to enhance the sending state’s security. Such securitized justifications are highly ambiguous, with the military intervention itself often becoming a source of insecurity. Given the Janus-faced nature of military securitization, what are the conditions for a successful securitization move leading to foreign military intervention? In response to this question, the following article compares separate cases of security exports undertaken by the United States (US), Germany and Japan. It is argued that a stable commitment to a military intervention on the part of a sending state is only possible if the pre-intervention securitization process includes a successful desecuritization move once there are boots on the ground. This argument underlines the fundamental ambiguity of securitization moves, as well as the importance of and conditions for audience acceptance. Furthermore, this article proposes a template for exploring the links between securitization and desecuritization.

Humanitarian Pluralism: The Arctic Passage in an Age of Refugees

As I write, the Syrian migrant crisis is boiling over and the Arctic Circle has become the latest precarious route desperate Syrian refugees are braving in their pursuit of security and shelter. A young Syrian woman is interviewed on the Norwegian evening news. Earlier this year other members of her family had fled to Germany. She stayed in Syria, waiting to hear from them before setting out herself. When she finally managed to get a call through to her family, they recounted the humiliating agonies they had endured on their journey through Turkey and advised her to find another route. She decided to take the new migration route to Europe, the safer and less expensive Arctic route, as far as possible from the horrors of war. She doesn't go into the details of her long journey, other than to say that she has been hungry for a couple of years, often dizzy from hunger. As she is interviewed in the polar night, she stands in front of a building decorated with Christmas lights, a Bethlehem star in each of the windows, skinny pines covered in frost in the background, snow on the ground: “I don't mind that my ears are frozen and that I can see my breath. I want to be safe and have a dignified life. Get a proper education, work, and be able to feed myself.” The camera shows other Syrian families with young children, single men and women, and girls and boys, traveling alone. Volunteers from the “Refugees Welcome to Norway” (RWTN) association distribute warm clothes, nappies, prams, toys, coffee, tea, sandwiches, and traditional Christmas cakes.

Beyond interdependence: Economic security and Sino-American-Australian trilateralism

China’s economic and politico-military development is placing considerable strain on the established framework of the trilateral relationship between itself, the United States, and Australia. Specifically, China’s rise is generating security concerns that are politicizing economic relations between the three states. A more guarded approach to economic collaboration will transform trilateralism, which up to now has been characterized by the scope allowed for the discrete pursuit of security and economic relations. This will force political authorities to carefully consider their policy priorities and further strain relations between the states, as well as supporting a more cautious approach to China on the part of the United States and Australia.

The epistemological crisis of counterterrorism

This article describes the nature, origins and consequences of the epistemological crisis at the heart of contemporary counterterrorism. The epistemological crisis of counterterrorism is an identifiable epistemic posture towards knowledge about, as well as a way of acting towards, the terrorist threat. It manifests itself discursively in the manner in which officials, scholars, pundits and others speak about the threat of terrorism, and the way counterterrorism and security practitioners then act in pursuit of security against that threat. The article argues that many of the bizarre counterterrorist practices regularly observed in many Western countries, as well as costly and counterproductive counterterrorist practices such as preemptive war, targeted killings, mass surveillance, torture, control orders and de-radicalisation programmes, among others, are neither anomalous nor irrational in the context of the new paradigm. Rather, they flow logically and directly from the particular paranoid logic, which is constitutive of the epistemological crisis. The article concludes with a discussion about how and why critical scholars can and should attempt to resist and deconstruct it.