US Security Research Articles

The politics of human rights trade sanctions: evidence from the African Growth and Opportunity Act

Scholars contend that embedding human rights conditionality in trade agreements can improve human rights. We argue that human rights interests may collide with trade, investment, and security interests. We examine these claims in the context of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a unilateral trade preference program with robust human rights conditions, created in 2000 by the United States for up to 49 potentially eligible sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) states. US decisions to terminate AGOA beneficiary status are determined strongly by US trade, investment, and security interests. The country’s human rights record, including state-sponsored killings and other violations of physical integrity rights, has a less consistent and weaker effect.

Why do «neighbouring» powers help? India, China, Russia, and their approaches to development in 2001–2021 Afghanistan

The paper identifies the development approaches of China, India, and Russia towards 2001–2021 Afghanistan, and investigates the complex mechanism of their impact on international relations in the region of wider Central Asia. The main finding is that only India has tried to incorporate Afghanistan into its regional economic initiatives. For China and Russia, Afghanistan has been a ‘troubled neighbour’, and they acted as free riders benefiting from the US security and economic presence there, regardless of their claims. Despite its minor activity in Afghanistan, China is becoming the most dominant actor in the region by cooperating with Pakistan. Therefore, India tended to oppose Chinese efforts by providing huge funding to Afghanistan to balance Chinese influence. Meanwhile, Russia was increasingly limiting its activity, both in Afghanistan and the region, and tried to balance the influence of other powers by diplomatic means. The article also proves that, despite their membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and their association in the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) Group, emerging donors in fact did not cooperate for Afghanistan’s development, and also did not try to compete with Western donors in this regard.

Environmental Awareness of Enterprises through Their Disclosure Magnitude: UK and US Evidence

In the absence of a validly mandatory public policy and a meaningful conceptual framework, corporate environmental disclosure practices have been diverse (Matthews, 1993). In other words, the lack of a single generally accepted standard in which environmental reports can be developed, akin to that of financial reporting principles, is one of the reasons for this undoubted dissimilarity in environmental reporting practices. However, there are imperative requirements relating to environmental information disclosure in many developed countries, for example, environmental related information is required in the Business Review in accordance with s.417 of the Act (Great Britain. Companies Act 2006) in the UK and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has developed rules governing disclosure of environmental liabilities, in relation to Items 101, 103, 303 and 503(c) in SEC Regulation S-K (SEC, 2008). The former is rather vague as it is not underpinned by a robust speculative structure, whereas the latter has only focussed on the disclosure of financial information that is environmentally related despite the non-financial nature of predominant environmental information. In response to these, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) has very recently issued the foundational standards, which are IFRS S1 and IFRS S2, to steer corporate sustainability-related disclosures worldwide. The former inaugurally provide general conceptual foundations and the latter has primarily pointed on climate risks and opportunities. The other dimensions are forsaken to line up sometimes in the future. Keywords: Environmental Information Disclosure, Environmental Reporting, Disclosure Quantity, UK, US

An institutional account of responsiveness in financial regulation- Examining the fallacy and limits of ‘same activity, same risks, same rules’ as the answer to financial innovation and regulatory arbitrage

Financial regulators face the persistent issue of being challenged by financial innovations and regulatory arbitrage. This article argues that a functional approach of ‘same activity, same risks, same rules’ is potentially vague and insufficient, and does not provide clear guidance for regulators. By critically discussing the US Securities Exchange Commission's and UK Financial Conduct Authority's approaches to cryptoasset offers, the paper argues that whether and how regulators respond to financial innovation crucially depends on regulators’ institutional structures. These structural limitations provide empowering as well as constraining aspects in relation to regulatory objectives and mandates, shaping financial regulators’ responsiveness in different ways. The paper argues that an institutional account of regulatory responsiveness more accurately explains policy responses. The benefits and drawbacks of such policy responsiveness are also crucially shaped by these institutional structures.

Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State, By Moon-Ho Jung

Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State, By Moon-Ho Jung

South Asian and Indigenous Experiences at the US–Mexico Border

This essay addresses the cultural politics of US Empire as it appears at the site of the US–Mexico border. I offer a reading of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that situates the case within the ongoing violence of US settler colonialism and border imperialism. To do this, I juxtapose two texts—a fictional short film and an interview—located at the borderlands. These texts highlight not only the violence South Asians confront as a result of the global War on Terror, but also how the expansion of the US security state in the post-9/11 era has further dispossessed Indigenous communities located at the US–Mexico border. The short film Thank You, Come Again (2020) was written by, directed by, and stars South Asian American Nirav Bhakta in a story about an undocumented South Asian convenience store clerk. In this short, the clerk contends with the memories of the loss of his father at the hands of border police in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The second text, an interview with Tohono O’odham activist Ofelia Rivas, emerged from a 2006 project entitled “O’odham Against the Wall.” In this interview, Rivas situated the construction of a border wall on the Tohono O’odham land within the context of post-9/11 racial anxieties. Together, these two texts offer us a meditation not only on the state of South Asian America 100 years after US v. Thind, where race-making continues to shape the lives of the diaspora, but also the settler logics that are entangled with this historic case and the ways in which South Asians have also become complicit in settler colonial processes. However, I suggest these two texts offer the diaspora the possibility to radically rupture their complicities by forming a relational politics against the white settler nationalism that continues to target both South Asians and Indigenous communities for domination at the border and beyond.

The Cost of Biotech Innovation: Exploring Research and Development Costs of Cell and Gene Therapies.

Clinical development paradigms for cell and gene therapies appear to be different to those of more conventional treatments: therefore, it is informative to explore this from the perspective of investments required to bring a new cell and/or gene therapy to the market. While there are a number of studies in the literature analyzing clinical-stage R&D costs for novel therapeutics, these are 'modality-agnostic' and thus do not elucidate costs specifically for the emerging class of cell and gene therapies. The objective of this study was to understand the research and development (R&D) costs associated with the clinical development of new cell and gene therapy assets METHODS: As part of our analysis of clinical-stage R&D costs for cell and gene therapies, we focused our efforts on cell and gene therapy assets recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or expected to receive FDA approval by the end of 2024. A total of 25 therapies were identified for the study, 11 of which had sufficient level of detail for our clinical-stage R&D costing study. We calculated the clinical-stage R&D costs to bring a new cell and/or gene therapy to the market following a three-step approach, starting with (1) calculation of the out-of-pocket investment reported in US SEC reports; (2) we adjusted these figures for the risk of failure by applying a clinical trial phase-dependent attrition risk rate; (3) we accounted for the cost of capital of 10.5%. After accounting for R&D attrition rate (i.e., costs of failed programs) and applying a cost of capital at 10.5%, we estimate that the clinical-stage R&D investment required to bring a new cell and/or gene therapy to market is US$1943 M (95% CI US$1395 M, US$2490 M). This knowledge can inform financial planning for biopharma companies looking to enter the space and inform policy makers within the context of the commercialization and pricing of such therapies.

Transpacific Radical Solidarities: Racial Capitalism, Empire, and Settler Colonialism

Transpacific Radical Solidarities:Racial Capitalism, Empire, and Settler Colonialism Leanne P. Day (bio) Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine. By Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 284 pages. $34.95 (paperback). Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State. By Moon-Ho Jung. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 368 pages. $29.95 (cloth). Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines. By Allan E. S. Lumba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 232 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $25.95 (paperback). Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries. By Jodi Kim. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 272 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $26.95 (paperback). On July 13, 2022, US vice president Kamala Harris spoke virtually at the Pacific Islands Forum: "The history and the future of the Pacific Islands and the United States are inextricably linked. We have historic bonds going back generations, and shared fights for freedom and for liberty."1 The Pacific Islands Forum summit included a meeting of representatives from Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu; notably absent were Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, and Nauru, which all abruptly withdrew from the forum in February 2021.2 While Harris's remarks allude to the "inextricably linked" histories of the US and Oceania, her phrasing elides the specific history of uneven relations of settler colonialism, imperialism, and military expansion throughout the Pacific. Despite Harris's emphasis on "shared fights for freedom [End Page 405] and for liberty," freedom indexes US democratic freedom and military access to the Pacific as opposed to supporting decolonization. Even more revelatory in Harris's speech is the implied necessity of increasing militarized security in the Pacific against the unstated but ominous threat of China's expanding influence, particularly in the Solomon Islands. Harris twice asserts the US's investment in building "maritime security" and alludes to China's influence by promising "to strengthen the international rules-based order—to defend it, to promote it, and to build on it."3 Not only is security associated with the discourse of international norms for sovereignty, which seems at best a very glamoured, even delusional, version of American militarism and empire in the Pacific, but Harris also emphasizes the necessity of "defend[ing]" rules regarding territorial integrity. This conflates the history of perceived mutual agreement of US imperialism, along with other colonial actors, in the Pacific, and explicitly contrasts the US's stance on protection and defense against China. Harris imagines a mutual relationship between US empire dependent on what Jodi Kim discusses in Settler Garrison as the "China threat discourse," which "can be deployed as an alibi to retrench the West's own imperial and neocolonial interests … [since] the Chinese threat must be contained, and that vulnerable nations must be protected from that threat" (57). The perceived threat of China to US military dominance in the Pacific is further illustrated by President Joe Biden's meeting at the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2022, with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Biden's meeting reveals not only US concerns over China's influence in the South China Sea but also a disturbing revisionist history of what Biden classified as "rocky times" during former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte's thousands of extrajudicial killings.4 Biden's commitment to the "defense of the Philippines" actually references the genealogies that Moon-Ho Jung and Allan Lumba explicate in their texts to analyze how US imperialism, economic colonialism, and expansive military campaigns in the Philippines utilize the rhetoric of protection for the sake of the Philippines.5 In the staggering yet unsurprising elision of colonial relations, Biden tweeted "Our nations' relationship is rooted in democracy, common history, and people-to-people ties, including millions of Filipino-Americans who enrich our nation. Our alliance is strong and enduring" in a 2022 manifestation of implicit racial paternalism, where Filipino Americans "enrich our nation," a phrase that gestures toward a false pretense of an equal relationship...

Climate change, financial risks and reporting: distant horizons?

The notes to financial statements and, in the case of credit institutions, Pillar 3 reports complete and supplement information contained in the balance sheet and income statement. This helps to provide a better estimate of the amount and timing of expected cash flows, and of the associated risks. The climate change challenge introduces new factors that affect the materialisation of those risks, and standards are being developed, from different vantage points and by various organisations, aiming to specify the type of public information –in addition to the notes to financial statements and Pillar 3 reports –that could provide a better picture of these factors. This article presents an overview of the initiatives under way to address the disclosure of climate-related financial risks, focusing on the main international work streams promoted by the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It sets out the context and rationale behind the proposals, their current status and their main content. It also discusses the mechanisms being considered to make the initiatives interoperable and to link this type of information with that provided in the financial statements, in order to prevent fragmentation that could affect financial stability.

The US Way or Huawei? An Analysis of the Positioning of Secondary States in the US-China Rivalry

This article examines the determinants of the positioning of secondary states in the US-China conflict over market access for China’s Huawei. Our explanations draw on three branches of realism: balance-of-threat theory, patron-client theory, and Hirschman’s theory on trade relationships and foreign-policy convergence. For the dependent variable, we assemble a new dataset of the attitudes of 70 states toward Huawei’s investment aspirations. We present a series of ordered logit regression models from which three main patterns appear. First, less powerful states seem more acceptive of the Chinese company. Second, those states that rely on US security guarantees tend to be far more rejective of Huawei. Third, whereas trade with China appears to be a factor in the reasonings of other states, trade with the US is not. In sum, the patron-client theory offers the most cogent explanation of the divergence of responses to Huawei.

SRAD Director's Corner: Recognizing the Increasing Importance of the US-ROK Alliance

My first essay as SRAD director sets the stage for the Strategic Studies Institute’s research on the growing importance of South Korea to the US alliance system and security objectives across the Indo-Pacific region, provides reasons why South Korea may become commensurate with Japan as the region’s primary US ally, and proposes ways the United States should leverage this reality to maximize this relationship and maintain a free and open Pacific. This important analysis challenges the orthodox view of South Korea as a self-contained problem set with little relevance to other regional security issues and explains its underappreciated connections to regional stability.

Seeing sustainability reporting through a lens of value creation

With a global push towards achieving the Paris Agreement as an imperative, there is a growing focus on how this will be achieved, and the role of organisations in supporting the transition to a net-zero economy and broader sustainability action. Investment decision-making is increasingly being informed by sustainability information, with stakeholders demanding greater transparency and comparability of disclosures, especially climate-related disclosures from organisations typically categorised as heavy emitters. This has ramifications for the oil and gas industry. Today, the sustainability reporting landscape is complicated, with a proliferation of sustainability disclosure frameworks developed by various standard setters. In an effort to standardise disclosures, the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation launched the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) in November 2021 to develop baseline global sustainability reporting standards including for climate disclosure (based on Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures). We have also seen proposals from The US Securities Exchange Commission on climate-related disclosures, which have sparked extensive public comment. Locally, the Government has committed to introducing standardised internationally aligned reporting requirements, including climate-related disclosures, which will be mandatory for certain entities. Regardless of exactly where each jurisdiction lands, it is clear that the sustainability reporting requirements will be significant, leading to increased costs for reporters, resulting in a business imperative to leverage value creation from this compliance transformation. Indeed, organisations putting sustainability at the heart of their business strategy will be the game changer in the new sustainable and equitable energy transition. And just as there will be leaders, there will also be laggards who risk value erosion.

Changing the Importance of Poland in the Security Policy of the United States in the Context of the war in Ukraine

The aim of the paper is to analyze and evaluate the changes in the importance of Poland in the security policy of the United States after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022. The paper consists of two parts. The first one covers the importance of Poland in the US security policy after the Cold War, and the second the change of this importance after the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine. The main research problem is the question of whether Poland’s importance in the US security policy has increased in connection with the Russian aggression on Ukraine? The thesis assumes that the war in Ukraine increased the importance of Poland in American security policy. This is due to three basic premises: Poland has become the main hub for American weapons supplied to Ukraine; Poland plays a key role in humanitarian support for Ukrainian refugees; and the dynamic development of the Polish army increases its importance in the defense of NATO’s eastern flank. Paradoxically, in the context of Polish-American relations, the outbreak of the war turned out to be beneficial for Poland, as earlier it was in danger of cooling down its relations with the USA in connection with the problems with adhering to the principles of the democratic state of law. Currently, this issue is overshadowed by the intensified US-Polish cooperation to help Ukraine and secure NATO’s eastern flank. The research involved interviews with scientists and analysts from scientific centers in Washington and New York.

Nudging the Ship in the Right Direction: United States Public Diplomacy and Development in 1960s Spain

In the early 1960s, Franco's Spain began to experience a rapid process of economic growth, which was encouraged by US diplomacy as it would underpin the stability required by the US defence program in the country. However, American officials felt that such an accelerated economic development should be orderly since chaotic modernization might spark social turmoil that would compromise the US geo-strategic objectives in Spain. The article unravels the US public diplomacy programs to steer Spanish society along with a stable development path based on US-inspired capitalism and alliance with the Western bloc. It examines the cultural, educational, and informational means employed by the US government in a bid to channel the socio-economic upheaval occurring in Spain in a direction that was compatible with US security interests. We also argue that modernization theory provided the ideological and intellectual framework for US persuasion efforts to harness Spain's socio-economic ferment. Nevertheless, the ‘development model’ promoted by the dictatorship generated inequalities and conflicts that fuelled anti-American sentiment among sectors of Spanish society called to play a role in the future post-Franco transition.

Modern History and Politics: Rebuilding Arab Defense: US Security Cooperation in the Middle East, by Bilal Y. Saab (book review)

Rebuilding Arab Defense: US Security Cooperation in the Middle East, by Bilal Y. Saab. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2022. 249 pages. $95 cloth, e-book.

ZKSQL: Verifiable and Efficient Query Evaluation with Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Individuals and organizations are using databases to store personal information at an unprecedented rate. This creates a quandary for data providers. They are responsible for protecting the privacy of individuals described in their database. On the other hand, data providers are sometimes required to provide statistics about their data instead of sharing it wholesale with strong assurances that these answers are correct and complete such as in regulatory filings for the US SEC and other goverment organizations. We introduce a system, ZKSQL , that provides authenticated answers to ad-hoc SQL queries with zero-knowledge proofs. Its proofs show that the answers are correct and sound with respect to the database's contents and they do not divulge any information about its input records. This system constructs proofs over the steps in a query's evaluation and it accelerates this process with authenticated set operations. We validate the efficiency of this approach over a suite of TPC-H queries and our results show that ZKSQL achieves two orders of magnitude speedup over the baseline.

Menace to empire: anticolonial solidarities and the transpacific origins of the US security state

As the United States escalates its military presence in the Asia–Pacific to ‘contain’ an ascendant China, Menace to empire reminds us that earlier US imperial aspirations in the region had deadly consequences. Moon-Ho Jung explores how the US actually encouraged the growth of anti-colonial movements that it tried to counteract, and eventually provoked the Pacific War with Japan. The book includes an insightful discussion about how nativist immigration policies during the early twentieth century resulted largely from American efforts to keep out the political activists who were radicalized through their experiences of US and British imperialism. Building on Alfred W. McCoy's pioneering study, Policing America's empire (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), Jung details how the draconian surveillance methods adopted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the Cold War had their origins in the US colonization of the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. At the time, US military intelligence set up an unprecedented surveillance state that was part of what Moon calls a ‘budding transpacific security apparatus’—encompassing the Philippine Constabulary, the Military Information Division, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Immigration. Its racist intent was epitomized in the use of the term ‘gook’ [a euphemism for subhuman] to characterize the Filipinos. Moreover, the celebration of killing illustrated the extent of racist thinking. Constabulary officer Jack Daly wrote in his diary in August 1902: ‘It was such fun to shoot them [Filipinos] and kill them where they lay’ (p. 26).

The United States and stability in the Taiwan Strait

ABSTRACT The changing dynamics of the Taiwan Strait necessitate a review of the United States’ “One China” policy. For more than four decades, this policy—anchored in the Taiwan Relations Act, the Six Assurances, and the three Joint Communiqués—has allowed Washington to maintain unofficial ties with Taipei. But China’s growing economic power, increasing military capabilities, and mounting pressure on Taiwan pose major challenges to US security commitments regarding Taiwan. In recent years, Washington has countered by attempting to pursue a multi-pronged approach while remaining under the umbrella of the One China policy framework—introducing such changes as new legislation conveying US support and commitment, engagement in high-level official exchanges, support for Taiwan’s pursuit of greater international space, and more arms sales. How these major policy changes are interpreted and implemented under the new environment imposed by China could affect Taiwan’s security, and whether a war with China can be avoided.

Climate Change: An Opportunity for INDOPACOM

US Indo-Pacific Command should actively plan for operations to respond to and combat climate change because it will grow US influence in the region and provide a compelling alternative to China’s influence. Combating climate change supports the primary objective of countering China, operationalizes climate change response for US commanders, and offers a less threatening means to develop partnerships. Through qualitative analysis of threats to US security, current policy analysis, and select case studies of humanitarian assistance and disaster-relief missions to operationalize climate change as a US military mission, this article will assist US military and policy practitioners in planning for climate change in Southeast Asia and future exercises in the region.

Американский кинематограф, ФБР и пропаганда: образ внутреннего врага (1941–1942 гг.)

Introduction. The period 1941–1942 became a time when American art was rapidly rebuilt on “military rails.” Cultural figures in every way reinforced the morale of American soldiers and were engaged in justifying various actions of the government through a more accessible and understandable language of artistic narrative. Methods and materials. The rich material of the archive of the FBI, the army and other US security services allows a better look at how the cinema obeyed the propaganda needs of the warring power. The article is based on the principles of historicism and systematics, as well as the methods of historical comparativistics and imagology (discourse-analysis, analysis of audiovisual representation and some others). Analysis and results. It is quite clear that cinema played a special role in these processes – the most massive and popular type of art, which in the previous two decades became the most common form of leisure for Americans. This article is devoted to the use of cinema to justify the initially extremely unpopular measure of the American government to intern the Japanese in concentration camps in the light of the entry of the United States into World War II.