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Humanitarian Arms Control, Symbiotic Functionalism and the Concept of Middlepowerhood

  • Nikola Hynek
This article arises from dissatisfaction with predominant accounts concerning changes in interactions between nongovernmental actors and governments in contemporary world politics, namely the image of a tension between so-called state-centric and transnational worlds. Specifically, it can be conceived...

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The Gratuitous Suicide by the Sons of Pride: On Honour and Wrath in Terrorist Attacks

  • Denis Madore
In the Western philosophic and literary tradition to be without home or country is a fate that both demands our loathing and pity. As Aristotle characterized it, a man born without a city is either a "beast or a god". Such beings Aristotle maintains, since they cannot properly be called human, have a...

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Israeli Security Doctrine between the Thirst for Exceptionalism and Demands for Normalcy

  • Shoghig Mikaelian
Israeli security has been invoked time and again to explain Israeli behavior and justify Israeli actions vis-à-vis neighboring states and peoples. Yet there have been few insights into the manner in which Israeli security doctrine3 has been formulated, the various factors that have shaped and influenced...

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EU Counterterrorism Policy and the 2004 Eastern Enlargement

  • Oldrich Bures
The European Union’s counterterrorism policy can be traced to the early 1970s, when the European Political Cooperation (EPC) came into being. The initial impetus for greater intergovernmental cooperation among Member States was the growth of terrorist incidents perpetrated by indigenous Western European...

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Conscription and European Security: A Theoretical First-Step

  • Mitchell A. Belfer
In the 18 year process of European reintegration, military conscription – as a feature of the European political scene – has largely vanished. The evaporation of sizeable, conscripted militaries reflects the widespread belief that conscription is a political, economic and military anachronism reminiscent...

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The Privatization of Peace: Private Military Firms, Conflict Resolution and the Future of NATO

  • Rouba Al-Fattal
The end of the Cold War marked the beginning of a new world order and an end of regional strategic patronage of superpowers. Withdrawing support to client regimes created a power void that prompted developing countries – which previously relied on major powers for their security and stability – to look...

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Demos and Ethnos: Dangerous Democratisation in Pre-Genocide Rwanda

  • Marie-Eve Desrosiers
The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a worldwide wave of democratisation. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, twenty-one states had, by 1990, embarked on a process to liberalise their political arena, leading to the ousting of eleven authoritarian leaders. The democratisation process in many...

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Humanitarian Intervention, Dirty Hands, and Deliberation

  • Charles A. Robinson
Let’s begin with a short exegesis of humanitarian intervention couched in terms of just war theory (JWT), in order to establish some practical and moral guidelines for the former. Of course, these criteria of action are meant as relatively specific and tight practical and moral constraints for the purposes...

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Search for a European Identity - Psycho-Sociological Perspective

  • Karel B. Muller
Many authors distinguish between collective and individual identity, or between the collective and individual dimensions of identity (e.g. Calhoun 1994, Taylor 1989). At first glance it seems quite obvious that European identity is a collective identity or a collective dimension of identity. On closer...

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EU Official Development Aid to the Palestinian Authority and the Rise of Hamas

  • Jaroslav Petrik
The economic situation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is to a large extent determined by its security condition. Given that a considerable part of Palestinians work on Israeli territory, the 2000 intifada followed by the closure of the borders, stringent checkpoint controls and eventually leading...

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The Political Cartoon and the Collapse of the Oslo Peace Process

  • Ilan Danjoux
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been challenging to researchers. The nature of the conflict appears, at times, to defy both the material interests and strategic rationality of the warring parties. The struggle has been described as possessing a primordial intensity, unpredictability and elusiveness...

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The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and Security in Post-Soviet Central Asia

  • Askhat Safiullin
Tracing the debate on the importance and influence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) on regional security integration in Central Asia, this work assesses the degree of its integration. It mainly addresses the interplay between individual state security needs, norms and identities. My proposed...

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