Security Policymaking Research Articles

Secure in insecurity: The case of threat perception/acceptance in the Philippines

AbstractCurrent theoretical and policy-based explanations of security in the Philippines have portrayed “politics” and “security” as distinct and separate fields. However, the recent “2011–2016 National Security Policy: Securing the Gains of Democracy”, has conflated “security” and “politics”, as may be observed in its two national security goals “to promote internal socio-political stability” and “to exercise full sovereignty over its territory”. Although likely derived from administrative expediency, the composite policy definition is also likely to result in the conceptualisation of political goals that are only partially attainable and of a security environment that will remain “unsecured”. As this appears to be a norm of governance in the Philippines, this paper examines the possibility that national security policy-making is likely more concerned with the survival of the regime during which the policy was created rather than with the long-term stabilisation of the entire state. Several theories may ...

Heading west? Georgia's Euro-Atlantic path

Events in Ukraine in 2014 are likely to transform the presence and role of western institutions such as NATO in the post-Soviet area. The crisis has starkly revealed the limits of their influence within Russia's ‘zone of privileged interest’, as well as the lack of internal unity within these organizations vis-a-vis relations with Moscow and future engagement with the area. This will have long-term implications for the South Caucasus state of Georgia, whose desire for integration into the Euro-Atlantic community remains a key priority for its foreign and security policy-makers. This article examines the main motivators behind Georgia's Euro-Atlantic path and its foreign policy stance, which has remained unchanged for over a decade despite intense pressure from Russia. It focuses on two aspects of Georgia's desire for integration with European and Euro-Atlantic structures: its desire for security and the belief that only a western alignment can guarantee its future development, and the notion of Georgia's ‘European’ identity. The notion of ‘returning’ to Europe and the West has become a common theme in Georgian political and popular discourse, reflecting the belief of many in the country that they are ‘European’. This article explores this national strategic narrative and argues that the prevailing belief in a European identity facilitates, rather than supersedes, the central role of national interests in Georgian foreign policy.

Bringing democracy back in: The democratic peace, parliamentary war powers and European participation in the 2003 Iraq War

Referring to Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’, research on the democratic peace is based on the assumption that citizens’ preferences are fully and directly transferred into actual security policy by democratic leaders. However, democratic responsiveness in foreign politics is a more complex issue. Parliaments are usually key institutions with regard to ensuring responsiveness of democratic leaders both by authorizing political decisions and by monitoring executive policy-making and implementation. However, in several democracies military security policy-making is understood as part of an ‘executive prerogative’. This article examines the role of parliaments in providing for democratic responsiveness of security policy-making. We test the hypothesis that, depending on the extent of their ‘war powers’, parliaments do effectively limit the scope of executive security policy if and when public opinion strongly opposes military action. The decision-making of 25 European democracies on military participation in the 2003 Iraq War serves as a test. Testing the hypothesis we find that countries with strong parliamentary war powers tended to be significantly less involved in the military intervention against Iraq. However, several puzzles of a theory of ‘parliamentary peace’ remain to be addressed by future research.

Australia's Strategic Culture: Constraints and Opportunities in Security Policymaking

This article draws on fourth generation strategic culture debates to show the gap between the rhetoric of Australian defence and the more modest reality. Our analysis shows that these limits derive from tensions between national strategic culture and organizational strategic subcultures. There are serious debates in the nation regarding the preferred course of the Australian military and security policy. This article frames these debates by examining the ‘keepers’ of Australia's national strategic culture, the existence of several competing strategic subcultures, and the importance of norm entrepreneurs in changing defence and national security thinking. Strategic subcultures foster compartmentalization, constraints, and bureaucratic silos that narrow national conceptions of security threats and opportunities, and impinge on the formation of coherent foreign and defence policy in relation to the Asia-Pacific region. This analysis shows that a distinct national strategic culture and organizational strategic subcultures endure beyond individual governments, placing potential limits on Australia's interface with other Asia-Pacific strategic cultures in the future.

Terrorism in Nigeria

Using the Boko Haram terrorist group in Nigeria as a point of departure, this paper examines the implications of the operations of terrorist groups on the security and stability of states in West Africa. It predominantly utilises secondary sources of data. Findings indicate that the membership and operations of this terrorist group are spreading across the sub-region. This spread is consequent upon Boko Haram's collaboration with other terrorist groups within West Africa and beyond. This constitutes threats to the security and stability of states in the sub-region. Thus, the paper recommends, among other things: a thorough understanding of the operational strategies of terrorist groups by states and those involved in security policymaking in the sub-region; and for agreements to be reached among Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) member states and their governments for collaboration in various areas in order to curtail transnational crime and terrorism, and reduce socio-economic inequality that generates aggressive behaviours among the less privileged.

The Strategic Culture of Foreign and Security Policymaking: Examining the Southern African Development Community

ABSTRACT This article explores the effects of strategic culture on the parameters of the decision making elite in the Southern African Development Community. By examining the contemporary southern African foreign and security decision making track record, it also addresses the question of convergence. The article examines the theoretical and conceptual state of research relating to strategic culture and adopts a constructivist understanding of the concept. Before applying it to the Southern African Development Community case, it examines the context of African decision making by highlighting a range of issues that act to constrain choices, and it explains the Southern African Development Community decision making structures and examines the state of research relating to Southern African Development Community members’ foreign policy and national security policy behavior. The summary offers an outline of a southern African strategic culture. It finds that despite signs of extensive convergence, in reality, Southern African Development Community exercises partial convergence, frequent but mostly unsystematic interaction characterized by partially compatible interests.

Non-strategic nuclear weapons as a ‘Trojan horse’: explaining Germany's ambivalent attitude

Germany's ambivalent attitude toward nuclear weapons is the result of an intricate rivalry between competing principles and goals of foreign and security policy-making. A deeply engrained strategic culture of anti-nuclearism and anti-militarism competes with a belief in collective defense and alliance cohesion. Similarly, the long-held belief in multilateralism is time and again challenged by newly emerging claims for leadership within multilateral institutions. The strategically rather insignificant non-strategic nuclear weapons issue provides a nodal point around which these conflicting principles came to the fore.

What Do Policymakers Want From Us? Results of a Survey of Current and Former Senior National Security Decision Makers

What do the most senior national security policymakers want from international relations scholars? To answer that question, we administered a unique survey to current and former policymakers to gauge when and how they use academic social science to inform national security decision making. We find that policymakers do regularly follow academic social science research and scholarship on national security affairs, hoping to draw upon its substantive expertise. But our results call into question the direct relevance to policymakers of the most scientific approaches to international relations. And they at best seriously qualify the “trickle down” theory that basic social science research eventually influences policymakers. To be clear, we are not arguing that policymakers never find scholarship based upon the cutting-edge research techniques of social science useful. But policymakers often find contemporary scholarship less-than-helpful when it employs such methods across the board, for their own sake, and without a clear sense of how such scholarship will contribute to policymaking.

Statecraft, Decision-Making, and the Varieties of Historical Experience: A Taxonomy

This article constructs a taxonomy of the various ways that national security policy-makers attempt to use history. It identifies four types of history: experience, memory, tradition, and study. It then defines and describes three categories of how history is used in national security policy: predictive, prescriptive, and existential. Each category is distilled further into specific manifestations. The article agrees with existing scholarship that policy-makers often misuse history, but argues that nevertheless policy-makers engage with history in more diverse and complex ways than are commonly understood. Thus before scholars attempt to critique and improve the manner in which policy-makers use history, we should first employ a more sophisticated understanding of the multiple ways that policy-makers approach history in the first place.

When have violent civil conflicts spread? Introducing a dataset of substate conflict contagion

The spread, diffusion, spillover, or contagion of violent civil conflict – including insurgencies, coups, or other internal armed conflict – across international borders is of great concern to civil war scholars and international security policymakers alike. For instance, great power military interventions are often predicated in part on the belief that if a given conflict is not stopped now, it may spread and destabilize an entire region. Nevertheless, our understanding of this phenomenon of ‘substate conflict contagion’ is hindered by the lack of a comprehensive and accurate universe of cases. In this article I introduce an original dataset of cases and non-cases of substate conflict contagion between 1946 and 2007. The key difference between my dataset and other datasets of this phenomenon is that I require in my definition of contagion not only the spatial and temporal proximity of two conflicts, but also a documented causal link between them. After introducing the dataset and the process by which it was constructed, I show that substate conflict contagion by my definition is significantly less common than previous scholarship and policymaker rhetoric suggest, and that its correlates – and potentially the best methods with which to measure those correlates – are different from prior research as well. Policy implications are considered, and applications of this dataset for future conflict research are explored.

Russia and Syria: explaining alignment with a regime in crisis

This article explores explanations of Russia's unyielding alignment with the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad since the Syrian crisis erupted in the spring of 2011. Russia has provided a diplomatic shield for Damascus in the UN Security Council and has continued to supply it with modern arms. Putin's resistance to any scenario of western-led intervention in Syria, on the model of the Libya campaign, in itself does not explain Russian policy. For this we need to analyse underlying Russian motives. The article argues that identity or solidarity between the Soviet Union/Russia and Syria has exerted little real influence, besides leaving some strategic nostalgia among Russian security policy-makers. Russian material interests in Syria are also overstated, although Russia still hopes to entrench itself in the regional politics of the Middle East. Of more significance is the potential impact of the Syria crisis on the domestic political order of the Russian state. First, the nexus between regional spillover from Syria, Islamist networks and insurgency in the North Caucasus is a cause of concern—although the risk of ‘blowback’ to Russia is exaggerated. Second, Moscow rejects calls for the departure of Assad as another case of the western community imposing standards of political legitimacy on a ‘sovereign state’ to enforce regime change, with future implications for Russia or other authoritarian members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia may try to enshrine its influence in the Middle East through a peace process for Syria, but if Syria descends further into chaos western states may be able to achieve no more in practice than emergency coordination with Russia.

Co-opting human security and deductions for security policy-making in Ghana

Popularized in development and security parlance by the Human Development Report of 1994, human security emphasizes prevention and protection of people from critical and pervasive threats that violently disrupt lives. Its conceptual basis derives from the inadequacy of the state-centric conception of security to comprehensively address threats to people, particularly those of a non-military nature. Despite agreement over the importance of making the individual the referent object of security, specific threats that should be considered under human security are inconclusive. Additionally, critics argue that human security merely echoes aspects of human rights and development studies and as such, has nothing new to offer. These issues continue to hamper efforts to co-opt the concept into the mainstream of security dialogue and policy-making. Through content analysis of secondary data, this article presents obstructions to the co-optation of human security into the mainstream of the security dialogue and policy-making, and juxtaposes it against trends that appear to be promoting its integration in relevant fields of endeavour. It argues that far from being an abstract idea, human security meets a tangible need. Using Ghana as a case study, the article hints at possible implications of the co-optation of human security on security policy-making in Ghana.Keywords: Human Security, Protection, Empowerment, Threats, National Security

User Requirements Elicitation in Security and Counter-Terrorism: A Human Factors Approach

This paper presents work conducted as part the ‘Shades of Grey’ (EP/H02302X/1) research project that aims to develop scientific interventions for the detection of suspicious behaviors in public spaces. To provide an understanding of security and counter-terrorism work in different contexts the project adopted a human factors approach as part of a program of user requirements gathering exercises. These activities focussed on the needs of different end-users and stakeholders, ranging from frontline security personnel, managers and strategic security policy makers. By taking a user-centred approach, the discipline of human factors can be integrated into the security/counter-terrorism domain to support the design of practical security solutions. This paper presents a case study investigation using data collected from three security agencies. Common themes are explored, ranging from ‘the importance of temporal measures’ to ‘enhancing positive user experiences’. These factors are discussed in relation to the practical application of human factors methods within security research.

Disaster, Resilience and Security in Global Cities

Today the majority of the globe’s inhabitants live in urban areas, and according to all prognoses, cities will continue to grow in the coming decades. Global cities are also becoming increasingly connected as a result of economic, political, cultural and demographic globalization. In the context of urban security management, the growing complexity these connections bring may present a double-edged sword: global cities can be both the most secure and the most dangerous places to be when disaster strikes. Developing appropriate mechanisms to prepare for and cope with complex crises in cities will, in the future, be a key aspect of security policy-making. In this article we explore current trends in research and practice concerning the management of disasters in eight global cities, particularly focusing on aspects of preparedness, response, urban resilience and cooperation. The results of the study indicate that cities must improve the capacity to predict new or unforeseen risk by diversifying capabilities for risk assessment and improving inter-agency collaborations. In addition, cities must adopt new approaches to disaster management that are sufficiently flexible to adapt to a changing risk environment and to safeguard urban security.

Conceptualizing Communications Security: A Value Chain Approach

Cybersecurity has become a top priority for policymakers these days, but as the engineering saying goes: if you don’t know what you want, it’s hard to do it This paper finds considerable shortcomings in current conceptual and legal frameworks for communications security policymaking. The misleading concept of cybersecurity incorporates a wide range of social issues under its umbrella, such as child protection, foreign policy and intellectual property protection. Cybersecurity distracts communications security conceptualizations and policies from the technical conception that should be at their core, i.e. ensuring confidentiality, integrity and availability of communications to authorized entities. The paper develops a value chain approach for the conceptualization and legal governance of communications security. This value chain approach is informed by an empirical case study into HTTPS governance and multilateral security engineering methods SQUARE and MSRA. It offers a 9-step framework for granular, functional communications security conceptualizations, tailored to specific communications settings. The framework enables policymakers to devise technical security goals, apprise constitutional values, confront stakeholder interests and balance associated public and private interests. The value chain approach should assist policymakers in deciding what they want, and to know whether they are the appropriate actor to get it right.

Defense Education Enhancement Program: The Consortium Perspective

The Early YearsThe Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes, based at the George C. Marshall Center Garmisch, Germany, is leading an innovative and unprecedented program for defense education reform five Partner countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Moldova). The modus operandi for these efforts includes finding fertile ground for defense reform other countries beyond the Partnership for Peace nations. Defense education general is gaining attention as a useful tool for security policy makers. Why and how this is happening is an intriguing story that begs to be told. This article attempts to tell that story.It begins, as do so many post-Cold War accounts, with the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR 1991 and the steadily growing interest from Central and Eastern European countries NATO membership. At the same time, the newly independent sovereign states of the USSR, the former Soviet Socialist Republics, began to choose their own paths. Some of them installed democratic systems of government and links to the West, while others retained authoritarian rulers.NATO's response to all three groups began first as an offer of a of friendship, an exploration of a new cooperative relationship. By 1994, this hand evolved into the Partnership for Peace, a practical program of bilateral cooperation for those states willing to participate as Partners alongside NATO Allies. NATO shaped these individual programs initially around achieving interoperability for peacekeeping operations, a useful goal indeed as a number of Partner countries deployed troops to Bosnia and Herzegovina 1996. By 1999, NATO opened its doors to three new members, a political choice based heavily on military criteria - specifically, on what these countries could add to the Alliance's capabilities.In the same year, NATO endorsed the Partnership for Peace Consortium, a joint German-American initiative established to strengthen defense and military education and research through international cooperation. Switzerland and Austria quickly joined the Consortium as stakeholders. NATO remained on the sidelines, preferring to see the organization operate in the spirit of PfP, free to follow the interests of the stakeholders and the Partner members.Uncharted TerritoryThe Consortium embarked on a journey of discovery into uncharted territory, helping the Partners find their way security sector and defense education reform. Switzerland's Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces played a key role these early years. Working groups fields of interest to both the stakeholders and the Partners formed, met, and exchanged ideas. Although exposure to Western colleagues was valuable, a number of working groups drew criticism because they lacked products or deliverables, as some like to call them.1A new vista opened for the Consortium with the publication of NATO's Partnership Action Plan for Defense Institution Building (PAP -DIB) and its supporting initiative for Education for Defense Reform 2004-05. Soon after, NATO's International Staff saw promise the Consortium as a way to influence defense institution building Partner states and joined the Consortium as a stakeholder. But what concrete tasks should the Consortium take on? How and where should it start?New Energy, New DirectionsAn intriguing idea emerged early 2006. An ad hoc group of defense educators, calling themselves the Friends of PAP-DIB, met several times that year and elaborated what eventually became the foundation for the current Defense Education Enhancement Programs, or DEEPs. The formula was simple concept - to engage Western defense educators peer-to-peer discussions with their Partner counterparts on three themes:* What to Teach (that is, curriculum content)* How to Teach and Learn (pedagogy)* Faculty Development (peer-to-peer mentoring aimed at a holistic approach to defense education). …

UN Support to National Security Policy-Making from an Institution-Building Perspective

S&F Sicherheit und Frieden , Seite 141 - 147

Managing Strategic Changes Through DEEP Reforms: A View from the Perspective of U.S.–Armenia “Smart Power” Cooperation

Education is a systematic process of forming the fundamental ability to think analytically, incorporating both basic and specialized knowledge. Therefore, in the armed forces of leading countries of the world, the field of military education and personnel management is regarded as a primary factor for ensuring the efficiency of the defense security system and the combat capability of the military.Defense education reforms are a significant part of the overall reforms being implemented in the defense security sector in Armenia that are helping bring both more credibility and accountability into the Armenian Armed Forces and the National Security System on the whole. The importance of defense education has grown significantly within recent years due to the introduction of sophisticated new armament systems. Current military standards demand a new level of requirements for both soldiers and officers, and military professional education is one of the most important tools to help prepare highly qualified personnel who will be capable of implementing different tasks in the rapidly changing atmosphere of the modern battlefield.The cause and the essence of these innovations are not only due to hard power subsystem dynamics, but also require accepting the fundamentally new orientation in thinking about security that is not exclusively based on threat assessments and a presumed hard power response, as was the case in the past. Over the past decade, after the Prague NATO Summit, Armenia has employed comparative analysis and innovative decision making to smoothly turn its defense security thinking toward a goal-oriented approach that synthesizes both soft and hard security dimensions within one holistic smart power-oriented defense security policymaking system. The other important dimension of these improvements is a gradual transition from an obsolete apparatchik mode of Stalinist-style military governance of the Ministry of Defense to a modern leadership and management culture characterized by the redistribution of powers between defensepolicy institutions and military bodies and the delegation of power and duties to lower tiers in the hierarchy.In the United States, the system of professional military education (PME) must meet certain basic requirements, namely that it should be comprehensive, systemic, consistent, realistic, effective, and unanimous in concept, terms, goals, challenges, and opportunities. The U.S. system is familiar to me, due to my five and a half years of Defense, Army, Air Force, and Navy Attache service as well as having held academic fellowships at the Defense Language Institute in San Antonio, Harvard University's National Security Program, the National Defense University, RAND, and the Marshall Center for Security Studies. PME training places constant tension on the mind, will, and body, giving great attention to physical fitness and its major role in service activity of all categories of personnel.The Early Stages of Armenia's Defense Education Sector DevelopmentThe formation of Armenia's armed forces coincided with what was probably the most difficult and stressful period of modern Armenian history: the transition from a Sovietstyle totalitarian regime to independent national statehood oriented around the values of liberal democracy. Drafting the main design of the Armenian Army simultaneously with the establishment of Armenian independent statehood became a challenge that needed to be addressed precisely, given the conditions of extreme uncertainty that characterized the dynamics of the post-Soviet system of global, regional, and national security. It was a matter of great responsibility and commitment for me to be ordered by the leadership of the newly born Ministry of Defense to develop the Basics of Military Policy of the Republic of Armenia, published in 1992 as the first military-political national document outlining the doctrinal content and strategic caliber of an independent Armenia. …

Decision-Making and Dissensus: Policy Uncertainty, the Media, and the Iraq Surge Debate

This paper examines national security policymaking under conditions of elite dissensus and how this policy uncertainty is reflected in the mass media. Previous research suggests that the American mass media tends to index the range of voices and viewpoints according to the views expressed in the mainstream government debate; much of this scholarship focuses on times of elite consensus. Policy uncertainty, however, provides the opportunity for other voices from outside of government to come into the mainstream debate. The often conflicting goals of political and bureaucratic actors, in conjunction with the immediacy associated with national security decisions, tend to exacerbate policy uncertainty. We evaluate the 2007 Iraq troop surge to explore policymaking and media sourcing during a period of elite dissensus, moving toward a better understanding of the interaction between policy entrepreneurs and the media. Examining congressional testimony and mass media accounts, we find that the composition of policy entrepreneurs in national security debates changes as elite consensus dissolves. The media reflects this dissensus, enriching the debate over foreign policy by giving space to non-governmental sources. From these findings, we derive broader implications regarding the role of policy entrepreneurs and the media in national security policymaking.

The Value of the Military Commissions Act as Non-Judicial Precedent in the Context of Litigation Over National Security Policymaking

At this writing, President Barack Obama has authorized the resumption of military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, for those detainees eligible for trial before the commissions. By the time this essay is published, the war on terror will be entering its tenth year. By any reasonable measure, the emergency has ended, and it seems an appropriate time to examine the way in which the three branches of the federal government have responded to the terrorist threat. Here, we focus on the extent to which Congress can and should play a role in directing the war and national security issues related to terrorism. We have little doubt that the constitutional text allocates national security power between the legislative and executive branches. The question is whether Congress can wield that power in a meaningful way. We contend not just that Congress can do so, but that courts should invest particular Congressional actions with some presumptive weight when addressing disputes over the breadth of the executive’s national security powers. This is, to be sure, a modest point, but we should not overlook any potential lessons that can be learned from the legal battles over the conduct of the war on terror.