Global Security and Political Problems of the 21st Century

Abstract

Key Terms in this Chapter

Vertical Nuclear Proliferation: The expansion of the capabilities of existing nuclear powers to inflict increasing destruction with their nuclear weapons.

Disarmament: Agreements to reduce or destroy weapons or other means of attack.

Failed States: Countries whose governments have so mismanaged policy that their citizens in rebellion, threaten revolution to divide the country into separate independent states.

Policy Networks: Leaders and organized interests (such as lobbies) that form temporary alliances to influence a particular foreign policy decision.

Arms Race: The buildup of weapons and armed forces by two or more states that threaten each other, with the competition driven by the conviction that gaining a lead is necessary for security.

Peace Enforcement: The application of military force to warring parties or the threat of it normally according to international authorization to compel compliance with resolutions or with sanctions designed to maintain or restore peace and order.

Small Powers: Countries with limited political military economic capabilities and influence.

Peace Operations: A general category encompassing both peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations undertaken to establish and maintain peace between disputants.

Fascism: A far-right ideology that promotes extreme nationalism and the establishment of an authoritarian society built around a single party with dictatorial leadership.

Terrorism: Premeditated violence perpetrated against non-combat targets by subnational or transnational groups or clandestine agents usually intended to influence an audience.

Long Cycle Theory: A theory that focuses on the rise and fall of the leading global power as the central political process of the modern world system.

Polarization: The formation of competition coalitions or blocs composed of allies that align with one of the major competing poles of centers of power.

Kellogg-Briand Pact: A multilateral treaty negotiated in 1928 that outlawed war as a method for settling interstate conflicts.

Third World: A Cold War term to describe the less-developed countries of Africa, Asia, The Caribbean, and Latin America.

Realpolitik: The theoretical outlook prescribing that countries should increase their power and wealth to compete with and domestic other countries.

Clash of Civilizations: Political scientist Samuel Huntington’s controversial thesis that in the twenty-first century the globe’s major civilizations will conflict with one another, leading to anarchy and warfare similar to that resulting from conflicts between states over the past five hundred years.

International Court of Justice (ICJ): The primary court established by the United Nations for resolving legal disputes between states and providing advisory opinions to international agencies and the UN General Assembly.

Cyberspace: A metaphor used to describe the global electronic web of people, ideas, and interactions on the Internet, which is unencumbered by the borders of the geopolitical world.

Preemptive War: A quick first strike attack that seeks to defeat an adversary before it can organize an initial attack or a retaliatory response.

Jus in Bello: A component of just war doctrine that sets limits on the acceptable use of force.

Crisis: A situation in which the threat of escalation to warfare is high and the time available for making decisions and reaching compromised solutions in negotiation is compressed.

Preventive Diplomacy: Diplomatic actions taken in advance of a predictable crisis to prevent or limit violence.

Ethnic Nationalism: Devotion to a cultural, ethnic, or linguistic community.

Neocolonialism (Neo-Imperialism): The economic rather than military domination of foreign countries.

Massive Retaliation: The Eisenhower administration`s policy doctrine for containing Soviet Communism By pledging to respond to any act of aggression with the most destructive capabilities available including nuclear weapons.

Bandwagoning: The tendency for weak states to seek an alliance with the strongest power, irrespective of that power’s ideology or type of government, to increase their security.

Info War-Tactics: Attacks on an adversary’s telecommunications and computer networks to penetrate and degrade an enemy whose defense capabilities depend heavily on these technological systems.

Mediation: A conflict-solution procedure in which a third party proposes a nonbinding solution to the disputants.

Coup d’etat: A sudden, forcible takeover of government by a small group within that country, typically carried out by violent or illegal means intending to install their leadership in power.

Smart Bombs: Precision-guided military technology that enables a bomb to search for its target and detonate at the precise time it can do the most damage.

Genocide: The attempt to eliminate in whole or in part, an ethnic, racial religious, or national minority group.

Collective Security: A security regime agreed to by the great powers that set rules for keeping the peace, guided by the principle that an act of aggression by any state will be met by a collective response from the rest.

Civil Wars: Wars between opposing groups within the same country or by rebels against the government.

National Security: A country's psychological freedom from fears that the state will be unable to resist threats to its survival and national values emanating from abroad or at home.

Actor: An individual, group, state, or organization that plays a major role in world politics.

Cold War: The 42-year (1949-1991) rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as their competing coalitions, which sought to contain each other’s expansion and win worldwide predominance.

Coercive Diplomacy: The use of threats or limited armed force to persuade an adversary to alter its foreign and/or domestic policies.

National Interest: The goals that states pursue to maximize what they perceive to be selfishly best for their country.

Polarity: The degree to which military and economic capabilities are concentrated in the global system that determines the number of centers of power or poles.

Hegemonic Stability Theory: A body of theory that maintains that the establishment of hegemony for the global dominance by a single great power is a necessary condition for global order in commercial transactions and international military security.

International Aggression: Killing others that are not members of one’s species.

Bilateral: Interactions between two transnational actors, such as treaties they have accepted to govern their future relationship.

Hard Power: The ability to exercise international influence utilizing a country’s military capabilities.

Good Offices: The provision by a third party to offer a place for negotiation among disputants but does not serve as a mediator in the actual negotiations.

Hegemony: The ability of one state to lead in world politics by promoting its worldview and ruling over arrangements governing international economics and politics.

Military-Industrial Complex: A combination of defense establishments, contractors who supply arms for them, and government agencies that benefit from high military spending which act as a lobbying coalition to pressure governments to appropriate large expenditures for military preparedness.

International Criminal Court (ICC): A court established by the UN for indicting and administering justice to people committing war crimes.

Bilateral Agreements: Exchange between two states, such as arms control agreements, negotiated cooperatively to set ceilings on military force levels.

Retorsion: Retaliatory acts (such as economic sanctions) against a target's behavior that is regarded as objectionable but legal such as trade restrictions to punish the target with the measures that are legal under international law.

Rapprochement: Diplomacy is a policy seeking to reestablish normal cordial relations between enemies.

Multilateralism: Cooperative approaches to managing shared problems through collective and coordinated actions.

Sanctions: Punitive actions by one global actor against another to retaliate for its previous objectionable behavior.

Agency: The capacity of actors to harness the power to achieve objectives.

Non-Aligned Movement (NAM): A group of more than one hundred newly independent mostly less developed states that joined together as a group of neutrals to avoid entanglement with the superpowers competing alliances in the Cold War and to advance the Global South primary interest in economic cooperation and growth.

Neutrality: The legal doctrine that provides rights for the state to remain nonaligned with adversaries waging war against each other.

Peacebuilding: Post-conflict actions predominantly diplomatic and economic that strengthen and rebuild governmental infrastructure and institutions to avoid renewed recourse to armed conflict.

Irredentism: A movement by an ethnic-national group to recover control of lost territory by force so that the new state boundaries will no longer divide the group.

World-System Theory: A body of theory that treats the capitalistic world economy originating in the sixteenth century as an interconnected unit of analysis encompassing the entire globe.

Just War Doctrine: The moral criteria identifying when a war may be undertaken and how it should be fought once it begins.

Bush Doctrine: The unilateral policies of the George W. Bush administration proclaiming that the United States will make decisions only to meet America’s perceived national interests, not to concede to other countries’ complaints or to gain their acceptance.

Global South: A term now often used instead of the Third World to designate the less developed countries located primarily in the Southern Hemisphere.

Doctrines: The guidelines that a great power or an alliance embraces as a strategy to specify the conditions under which it will use military power and armed force for political purposes abroad.

Second-Strike Capability: A state’s capacity to retaliate after absorbing an adversary’s first-strike attack with weapons of mass destruction.

Peacemaking: The process of democracy mediation negotiation or other forms of peaceful settlement that arranges an end to a dispute and resolves the issues that led to conflict.

Multilateral Agreements: Cooperative compacts among many states to ensure that a concerted policy is implemented toward alleviating a common problem such as levels of future weapons capabilities.

Security Regime: Norms and rules for interaction agreed to by a set of states to increase security.

Diversionary Theory of War: The hypothesis that leaders sometimes initiate conflict abroad as a way of increasing national public attention away from controversial domestic issues and internal problems.

Negotiation: Diplomatic dialogue and discussion between two or more parties to resolve through give-and-take bargaining perceived differences of interests and the conflict they cause.

Just War Theory: The theoretical criteria under which it is morally permissible or just for a state to go to war and the methods by which a just war might be fought.

International Terrorism: The threat or use of violence as a tactic of terrorism against targets in other countries.

Arms Control: Multilateral or bilateral agreements to contain arms races by setting limits on the number and types of weapons states are permitted.

Military Intervention: Over or covert use of force by one or more countries to affect the target counties government and policies.

Military Necessity: The legal principle that violation of the rules of warfare may be excused for defensive purposes during periods of extreme emergency.

Antipersonnel Landmines (APLs): Weapons buried below the surface of the soil that explodes on contact with any person-soldier or citizen-stepping on them.

Great Powers: The most powerful countries, military, and economically in the global system.

Non-Aligned States: Countries that do not form alliances with opposed great powers and practice neutrality on issues that divide great powers.

High Politics: Geostrategic issues of national and international security that pertain to matters of war and peace.

Policy Agenda: The changing list of problems or issues to which governments pay special attention at any given moment.

Politics: To Harold Lasswell the study of who gets what when and how.

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty: The U.S-Russian agreement to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons by removing all intermediate and short-range ground-based missiles and launchers with ranges between 300 and 3.500 miles from Europe.

Information Warfare: Attacks on an adversary’s telecommunications and computer networks to degrade the technological systems vital to its defense and economic well-being.

Uni-Multipolar: A global system where there is a single dominant power but the settlement of key international issues always requires action by the dominant power in combination with that of other great powers.

Noncombatant Immunity: The legal principle that military force should not be used against innocent civilians.

Nonlethal Weapons: The wide array of soft kill low- intensify methods of incapacitating an enemy’s people, vehicles, communications system, or entire cities without killing either combatants or non - combatants.

Global North: A term used to refer to the world`s wealthy, industrialized countries located primarily in the Northern hemisphere.

Group of 77 (G-77): The coalition of Third World countries that sponsored the 1963 Joint Declaration of Developing Countries calling for reform to allow greater equality in North-South trade.

Détente: In general, a strategy of seeking to relax tensions between adversaries to reduce the possibility of war.

Yalta Conference: The 1945 summit meeting of the Allied victors to resolve postwar territorial issues and to establish voting procedures in the UN to collectively manage world order.

Zero-Sum: An exchange in a purely conflictual relationship in which what is gained by one competitor is lost by another.

Imperialism: The policy of expanding state power through the conquest and or military domination of foreign territory.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization: A military alliance created in 1949 to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe that since has expanded and redefined its missions to emphasize not only the maintenance of peace but also the promotion of democracy.

Anarchy: A condition in which the units in the global system are subjected to few if any overarching institutions to regulate their conduct.

Democratic Peace: The theory that although democratic states sometimes wage wars against nondemocratic states, they do not fight one another.

Nonalignment: A foreign policy posture that rejects participating in military alliances with the rival blocs for fear that formal alignment will entangle the state in an unnecessary involvement in the war.

Realism: A paradigm based on the premise that world politics is essentially and unchangeably a struggle among self-interest states for power and position under anarchy, with each competing state pursuing its national interest.

Diplomacy: Communication and negotiation between global actors that is not dependent upon the use of force and seeks a cooperative solution.

Unilateralism: An approach that relies on self-help independent strategies in foreign policy.

Militant Religious Movements: Politically active organizations whose members are fanatically devoted to the global promotion of their religious beliefs.

Ethnic Groups: People whose identity is primarily defined by their sense of sharing a common ancestral nationality, language, cultural heritage, and kinship.

Alliances: Coalitions form when two or more states combine their military capabilities and promise to coordinate their policies to increase mutual security.

Nation: A collective whose people see themselves as members of the same group because they share the same ethnicity, culture, or language.

Jus ad Bellum: A component of just a war doctrine that establishes criteria under which a just war may be initiated.

Ethnic Cleansing: The extermination of an ethnic minority group by a state.

Horizontal Nuclear Proliferation: An increase in the number of states that possess nuclear weapons.

International Criminal Tribunals: Special tribunals established by the UN prosecute those responsible for wartime atrocities and genocide bring justice to victims and deter such crimes.

World Politics: The study of how global actors' activities entail the exercise of influence to achieve and defend their goals and ideas and how it affects the world at large.

Armed Aggression: Combat between the military forces of two or more states or groups.

Xenophobia: The suspicious dislike disrespect, and disregard for members of a foreign nationality ethnic, or linguistic group.

Long Peace: Long-lasting periods of peace between any of the military strongest great powers.

Asymmetric Warfare: Armed conflict between belligerents of vastly unequal military strength, in which the weaker side is often a nonstate actor that relies on unconventional tactics.

Pacifism: The liberal idealist school of ethical thought that recognizes no conditions that justify the taking of another human’s life even when authorized by a head of state.

Hegemon: A preponderant state capable of dominating the conduct of international political and economic relations.

Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs): Institutions created and joined by state governments that give them authority to make collective decisions to manage particular problems on the global agenda.

Geopolitics: The relationship between geography and politics and their consequences for states' national interests and relative power.

Crimes Against Humanity: A category of activities, made illegal at the Nuremberg war crime trials, condemning states that abuse human rights.

Proliferation: The spread of weapon capabilities from a few too many states in a chain reaction so that an increasing number of states gain the ability to launch an attack on other states with devastating weapons.

Unipolarity: A condition in which the global system has a single dominant power or hegemon capable of prevailing over all other states.

Consequentialism: An approach to evaluating moral choices based on the results of the action taken.

Humanitarian Intervention: The use of peacekeeping troops by foreign states or international organizations to protect endangered people from gross violations of their human rights and mass murder.

Balance of Power: The theory that peace and stability are most likely to be maintained when military power is distributed to prevent a single superpower hegemon or bloc from controlling the world.

Peaceful Coexistence: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev`s 1956 doctrine that war between capitalist and communist states is not inevitable and that inter-block competition could be peaceful.

Nonproliferation Regime: Rules to contain arms races so that weapons or technology do not spread to states that do not have them.