Security In International Relations Research Articles

The Security Landscape from the International Law Perspectives on the New-Taliban-Afghanistan State

Post-cold war security in international relations is identified as security in the global contemporary. Contemporary global issues are closely related to issues that are no longer dominated by East-West relations, such as the threat of nuclear war, ideological competition between Liberal-Democracy and Marxism-Leninism, crisis diplomacy, and so on. In the perspective of liberalism, peace and security are important for the international system, being considered by international law and organizations. However, recent developments in Afghanistan and Ukraine mark a challenge to this idea and challenge the consistency of peace and security under international law. This study uses a qualitative method by using secondary sources and classifying the data into two, namely security and international law to investigate the situation in Afghanistan. The method of analysis of the Taliban regime in international law uses a juridical-normative approach. The results of the juridical-normative research to describe the situation in Afghanistan are then correlated with the security aspects of the security situation. It is in the case of the new-Taliban state that the situation of the "vacuum" of international law in terms of government recognition can be hijacked to obtain the "approval" of the new regime. The security landscape in the perspective of International Law is fragile against minorities and the vulnerable which can create an unstable international system and encourage the possibility of certain powers to take action to take the opportunity given under the doctrine of effective control. Where must pay attention to aspects of human security, which are related to the obligation to fulfill, respect, and protect human rights recognized in International Human Rights Law. This shows the consistency of actions by member states at the UN, especially big powers like the US and its allies, otherwise similar problems will happen again in the future and weaken the international system as already started in Ukraine.

Ontological security in international relations: on the mechanics of appropriation of territories inside the consciousness of nations

Book review: Ejdus F. Crisis and Ontological Insecurity. Serbia’s Anxiety over Kosovo’s Secession (Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2020).

ASEAN's economic security and regional economic cooperation: Past, present, and future

Since the end of the Cold War, ASEAN has continuously increased its level of integration into the global economy to enhance regional economic prosperity and stability. Given the conceptual fluidity of economic security in international relations, however, ASEAN's firm commitment to promoting positive synergies between economic and security interests warrants further attention. In this vein, this article examines the evolving nature of ASEAN's economic security with a focus on regional economic initiatives, including trade agreements and the ASEAN Economic Community. The article suggests that ASEAN can maximize its potential for economic security when it increases the credibility of its commitment to regional economic cooperation and integration. To do so, ASEAN should more effectively address the issues of weak institutional capabilities and domestic political conflicts over regional economic governance. It should also proactively respond to unexpected challenges from external factors, such as US–China rivalry and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Separatists, state subjectivity, and fundamental ontological (in)security in international relations

Ontological security studies (OSS) in International Relations (IR) emphasize the role of identity, anxiety, and a sense of self in world politics. Yet suggesting that states act in certain ways because of ‘who they are’ also assumes that they are in fact states. In this article, I problematize the presupposition of state subjects in the context of separatist conflicts in which claims to statehood compete and overlap. Where unrecognized de facto states are pitted against their unyielding parent states, the two threaten each other’s very state personhood, thereby presenting a more radical challenge to their existence than traditional ‘physical’ and ‘ontological’ security threats. Separatist conflicts thus reveal a widely overlooked dimension of fundamental ontological security, provided by the constitution and recognition of states as such. Moreover, because of the exclusiveness of state subjects in the modern international order, any third parties attempting to resolve such conflicts inevitably face a meta-security dilemma whereby reassuring one side by confirming its claim to statehood simultaneously renders the other side radically insecure. Thus, rather than regarding particular state subjects as merely the starting point of quests for ontological security in international relations, they should also be understood as already their result.

Flexibility in International Economic Law vs. Pacta Sunt Servanda: Maintaining Legitimacy Over Time

Pacta sunt servanda is a key principle in international law, which ensures order, stability and legal security in international relations. It renders commitments in international law generally binding unless a country decides to withdraw from them. This paper argues that the protection of market access rights requires considerable flexibility in order to remain suitable for the strict application of the principle pacta sunt servanda, since market realities change quickly, therewith altering the nature of corresponding international obligations. With regard to the interpretation of the legal scope of, in particular, the general exception clauses in international economic law, otherwise inconsistent trade measures originating in a popular vote qualify in principle as ‘necessary for the protection of public morals’ (within the meaning of GATT Art. XX(a) or GATS Art. XIV(a)). Reverting to majority decisions in a popular vote on most pressing concerns regarding trade policy would, thus, provide a legal way of mending the gap between international economic law and governance of trade-related issues.

Bioinformational diplomacy: Global health emergencies, data sharing and sequential life

Global health emergencies – like COVID-19 – pose major and recurring threats in the 21st century. Now societies can be better protected against such harrowing outbreaks by analysing the detailed genetic sequence data of new pathogens. Why, then, is this valuable epistemic resource frequently withheld by stakeholders – hamstringing the international response and potentially putting lives at risk? This article initiates the social scientific study of bioinformational diplomacy, that is, the emerging field of tensions, sensitivities, practices and enabling instruments surrounding the timely international exchange of bioinformation about global health emergencies. The article genealogically locates this nascent field at the intersection of molecularised life, informationalised biology and securitised health. It investigates the deeper political, economic and scientific problematisations that are engendering this burgeoning field. It finally analyses the emergent international instruments developed by governments, scientists and industry to facilitate more rapid global sharing of bioinformation through novel practices of data passporting. Overall, the in-depth study of bioinformational diplomacy reveals just how deeply, and even constitutively, international relations are entangled with the life sciences – by carefully tracing how laboratory practices of sequencing life at molecular scale also end up recontouring the play of sovereignty, power and security in international relations.

Danger and Security: History and Present

This article focuses on the theoretical analysis of changes in the content of the concept of risk and security, the expression of the concept of security in international relations, the concept of risk and security in historical processes, which has a long history. The article analyzes a number of modern approaches to these two concepts from a scientific point of view, focusing on the underlying causes, including the transition of military threats to a secondary basis in the system of these bases, the impact of conflicts in practice.

ТЕНДЕНЦІЇ РОЗВИТКУ ТОРГОВЕЛЬНО-ЕКОНОМІЧНИХ ЗВ’ЯЗКІВ УКРАЇНИ З КРАЇНАМИ СВІТУ

The article examines the indicators of foreign trade of individual countries of the world; substantiates the directions of reducing the dependence of national exports on commodity prices on world markets; clarifies the development trends of trade and economic relations of Ukraine with countries of the world; examines the direction of expanding the national export potential. Object of research – the process of economic security in international relations. Purpose of study – improving efficiency of the mechanism of activization of development of the trade and economic relations of Ukraine with the countries of the world. Methods of research – method of abstracting, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, system approach. One of the main prerequisites for the effective functioning of the national economy, the key to its dynamic development is the expansion of export potential. Accordingly, the strategic objective is the largescale growth of Ukraine’s presence in foreign markets. The partial or complete loss of traditional markets reinforces the need to find effective solutions for the development of exports of Ukrainian products. The presence of Ukraine in the global production network has increased significantly over the past ten years, but still remains insufficient. For the active inclusion in the global value chains, it is necessary to change the commodity structure of Ukrainian exports and switch to the production of medium and high-tech products. Forecast assumptions about the object of study – improvement of the mechanism of ensuring economic security in international relations. KEYWORDS: TRADE AND ECONOMIC RELATIONS, EXPORT POTENTIAL, GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS, COMMODITY STRUCTURE OF UKRAINIAN EXPORTS, EXPORT DIVERSIFICATION, FREE TRADE ZONE, EXPORT STRATEGY OF UKRAINE

International Security in a Globalized World: An Exploration of Critical Issues

Since it took hold in the 1950s, the study of International Security (IS) has been at the heart of international relations studies. This paper emphasizes that it grapples with questions about war and peace, life and death, safety and survival. Traditionally its terrain has focused on concerns about the stability of the state system, the use of force, nuclear proliferation, military strategy, intelligence and the distribution of resources. Its content has expanded over the years. Today it covers a variety of interconnected issues in the world that affect survival. Concerns about climate change, migration, poverty, health, privatization, organized crime and international terrorism are also on the agenda. This paper introduces different ways of conceptualizing security in international relations. It points to the importance of recognizing that security is highly contested and contestable, and emphasizes the Euro - or Western – centric tendencies of security studies. It examines the effect of the end of the Cold War on international security. In particular, it looks at the question of whether international relations, especially in an era of increasing globalization, is likely to be as violent in the future as it has been in the past. This paper, further, looks at disagreements that exist about the causes of war and whether violence is always likely to be with us. It scrutinizes the traditional/classical Realist and more contemporary neo-realist perspectives on international security. It also investigates alternative approaches. And before it ends, it considers the continuing tension between national and international security and suggests that, despite the important changes associated with the processes of globalization, it remains too early to make a definitive judgment about whether a fundamentally different paradigm of international politics is emerging, or whether it is possible for such a transformation to occur.

Evolution of human security in international relations

Evolution of human security in international relations

Psychoanalysis, cultures of anarchy, and ontological insecurity

When ontological insecurity looms, what comes next? Is chaos the sole alternative to the maintenance of established role-identities and routines? Or is there a more complex set of possible responses to the dread threat of ontological insecurity? The principal approach to ontological security in International Relations (IR) relies unduly on Giddens' account. Consequently, this approach fails to adequately capture both the variety of ways in which coherent and continuous identities can be maintained and the variety of ways in which the available cultural repertoire can support ontological security differently when challenged. Typically, ontological security is re-established, prior to collapse, through re-balancing of the cultural repertoire to give broader scope to an alternative cultural form and the qualitatively different practices it organizes. Due to misrecognition, this reorganization may proceed without disturbing the ontological security of states-in-interaction. Unconscious processes, encoded into cultural forms, are integral to such variable defenses against ontological insecurity. A re-conceptualization that regards Wendt's cultures of anarchy, and their qualitatively different modes of relating, as dynamically co-present within cultural repertoires, but with potentially variable weightings, complements this approach to ontological in/security.

Returning to the roots of ontological security: insights from the existentialist anxiety literature

Research on ontological security in International Relations (IR) has grown significantly in recent years. However, this scholarship is marked by conceptual ambiguity concerning the meaning of and relationship between the key concepts of ontological insecurity and anxiety. In addition, ontological security scholarship has been criticized for applying a concept that was originally developed for understanding individuals to states, and for being excessively concerned with continuity while largely ignoring change or seeing it as a negative force to be avoided. Despite such issues, however, reflection on the theoretical origins of ontological security remains limited. Based on such reflection, the present article argues that these issues can be circumvented if we return to one of the theoretical precursors of ontological security studies, the existentialist literature on anxiety. R.D. Laing, who coined the term ontological security, was strongly influenced by the existentialist anxiety theorists. Anthony Giddens, however, who drew on Laing and whose understanding of ontological security permeates IR scholarship, explicitly rejected the distinction between normal and neurotic anxiety, which was central to the work of existentialists like Rollo May. This article reintroduces this distinction. Doing so is useful, the article argues, both for providing conceptual clarity and for moving beyond the criticisms of ontological security mentioned above. More generally, the article suggests that ontological security studies has much to gain from drawing on the insights of the existentialist literature on anxiety to a greater extent than has hitherto been the case.

Decentering the Self, Seeing Like the Other: Toward a Postcolonial Approach to Ontological Security

AbstractThis article advances a critical outlook on dominant interpretations of ontological security in international relations. It suggests that the preoccupation with state- and identity-centric analyses diminishes the value of the Other to an archetype of ontological insecurity and a source of ontological insecurity for the Self. It argues that seeing ontological security from the postcolonial perspective expands the self-referential understanding of ontological security to a Self-Other relation of mutual coexistence. To do so, the article proposes a framework that loosely intersects Giddens’ work on late modernity with postcolonial notions of interstitiality and hybridity. Postcolonial ontological security foregrounds the emergence of a “third hybrid Other” from an ontologically insecure status through three interrelated conditions of reflexivity, resourcefulness, and resistance. It aims to shed light on creative, nondestructive ways of confronting ontological insecurity and to encourage a view of the postcolonial Other as a learning source for the Self. These arguments are illustrated with the case of Okinawan “Otherness” vis-à-vis the US and Japanese selves, with particular attention to antimilitary base movements.

Determinanty bezpieczeństwa narodowego. Nowe zagrożenia – nowe wyzwania

This paper analyzes the definitions and characterizes the elements related to national security. The author pays particular attention to the change of determinants and threats which significantly influence the way in which a given state’s security is perceived, and how it evolves. In the author’s opinion, at present one can observe the tendency to expand the subject matter and spatial range of national security in international relations, which follows from the internationalization of various realms of social life. It is impossible to improve the national security of a given state while tolerating the disturbances of peace that result from the widening gaps between different parts of the world, or unsolved regional and local conflicts. The main purpose of this paper is to draw the reader’s attention to the changes resulting from the need to adjust the national security system to the new challenges; the changes that not only aim to defy these challenges, but also to prevent the factors that generate them.

Mobile diasporas, postcolonial identities: the Green Line in Cyprus

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the scope for understanding postcolonial and hybrid identities through the theory of ontological security in International Relations. It examines the circulation of identity for a dispersed postcolonial population, namely Cypriots. This circulation happens amongst a deterritorialised public, through media and movement of people. It carries meaning that is formative of the identity of the diaspora and of the identity of the home state, implicating both in a complex and relational ontological security comprising identity, memory, state and society. The Green Line dividing North from South in Cyprus represents the bifurcation of the island, rupturing the possibility of a territorially unified Cypriot identity. The line also represents a rupturing of contiguous ethnic identities, marking the creation of refugee populations and Cypriot diasporas. The Green Line is both a physical location and circulating symbol of ontological insecurity. On one hand, the Green Line marks the creation of Cypriot refugees and diasporas. On the other, it marks a gateway to Europe for asylum seekers attempting to enter the Southern part of the island. I theorise the Green Line as an emblem of ontological insecurity whose meaning is (re)constituted in the lived experience of Cypriot diaspora and migrants seeking security, revealing a hybrid and fluid identity.

Sharing the struggle: constructing transnational solidarity in global social movements

ABSTRACTStruggles for peace, self-determination and demilitarization are common near military installations around the world. Increasingly, these struggles have become linked in globe-spanning assemblages of activism. Based on interviews in South Korea, Okinawa, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and Guåhan (Guam) this paper analyzes how activists in these locales develop a sense of shared oppression that serves as a basis for connecting geographically distant activist communities. Through visiting each other’s places – and participating in activities such as direct action protests, eating together and dancing – activists develop a recognition of shared circumstance not only through intellectual discussion, but also through the production of shared visceral and emotional states. This shared feeling of mutual oppression then serves as a basis for solidarity and mutual aid among social movements that protest militarization and challenge traditional conceptualizations of security in international relations.

‘Not a heap of stones’: material environments and ontological security in international relations

Extant scholarship on ontological security in international relations has focused on the significance of social environments for state identity. In this article, I argue that material environments also provide an important source of ontological security for states. In order to assume this role material environments need to be discursively linked to state identity through either projection or introjection. Once incorporated into state identity narratives, material environments become ‘ontic spaces’: spatial extensions of the collective self that cause state identities to appear more firm and continuous. However, ontic spaces are inherently unstable and require maintenance, especially during periods of crisis or transition. States bear agency in this process but they never achieve full control, as identity discourses are continuously contested both domestically and internationally. I illustrate these claims by looking at the role of the General Staff Headquarters in Belgrade, destroyed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999, in the ontological security of Serbia.

Broadening the Contestation of Norms in International Relations

Broadening the Contestation of Norms in International Relations

A Relational View of Ontological Security in International Relations

A Relational View of Ontological Security in International Relations

Book Review: Brent J Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State

Book Review: Brent J Steele, <i>Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State</i>