States, Citizens and the Privatisation of Security
States, Citizens and the Privatisation of Security

Author: Elke Krahmann

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-02-04

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139483684

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Recent years have seen a growing role for private military contractors in national and international security. To understand the reasons for this, Elke Krahmann examines changing models of the state, the citizen and the soldier in the UK, the US and Germany. She focuses on both the national differences with regard to the outsourcing of military services to private companies and their specific consequences for the democratic control over the legitimate use of armed force. Tracing developments and debates from the late eighteenth century to the present, she explains the transition from the centralized warfare state of the Cold War era to the privatized and fragmented security governance, and the different national attitudes to the privatization of force.

Transformations of the State?
Transformations of the State?

Author: Stephan Leibfried

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-06-13

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9780521672382

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This volume presents an innovative view of the nation-state and its future.

The Monopoly of Force
The Monopoly of Force

Author: Michael Miklaucic

Publisher: NDU Press

Published: 2011-08

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1780399154

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The mechanism of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) is widely acknowledged to be an essential component of successful peacekeeping, peace-building, postconflict management, and state-building. Security sector reform (SSR) has emerged as a promising though poorly understood tool for consolidating stability and establishing sovereignty after conflict. While DDR enables a state to recover the monopoly (or at least the preponderance) of force, SSR provides the opportunity for the state to establish the legitimacy of that monopoly.The essays in this book reflect the diversity of experience in DDR and SSR in various contexts. Despite the considerable experience acquired by the international community, the critical interrelationship between DDR and SSR and the ability to use these mechanisms with consistent success remain less than optimally developed. DDR and SSR are essential tools of modern statecraft, but their successful use is contingent upon our understanding of both the affinities and the tensions between them. These essays aim to excite further thought on how these two processes-DDR and SSR-can be implemented effectively and complimentarily to better accomplish the shared goals of viable states and enduring peace.

The Force of Nonviolence
The Force of Nonviolence

Author: Judith Butler

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-02-04

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1788732782

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Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

The Bonn Handbook of Globality
The Bonn Handbook of Globality

Author: Ludger Kühnhardt

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-03-06

Total Pages: 749

ISBN-13: 9783319903811

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This two-volume handbook provides readers with a comprehensive interpretation of globality through the multifaceted prism of the humanities and social sciences. Key concepts and symbolizations rooted in and shaped by European academic traditions are discussed and reinterpreted under the conditions of the global turn. Highlighting consistent anthropological features and socio-cultural realities, the handbook gathers coherently structured articles written by 110 professors in the humanities and social sciences at Bonn University, Germany, who initiate a global dialogue on meaningful and sustainable notions of human life in the age of globality. Volume 1 introduces readers to various interpretations of globality, and discusses notions of human development, communication and aesthetics. Volume 2 covers notions of technical meaning, of political and moral order, and reflections on the shaping of globality.

Politics As a Vocation
Politics As a Vocation

Author: Max 1864-1920 Weber

Publisher: Hassell Street Press

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 50

ISBN-13: 9781014408709

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Better Angels of Our Nature
The Better Angels of Our Nature

Author: Steven Pinker

Publisher: Penguin Books

Published: 2012-09-25

Total Pages: 834

ISBN-13: 0143122010

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Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.

Violent Entrepreneurs
Violent Entrepreneurs

Author: Vadim Volkov

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-03-25

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1501703285

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Entering the shady world of what he calls "violent entrepreneurship," Vadim Volkov explores the economic uses of violence and coercion in Russia in the 1990s. Violence has played, he shows, a crucial role in creating the institutions of a new market economy. The core of his work is competition among so-called violence-managing agencies—criminal groups, private security services, private protection companies, and informal protective agencies associated with the state—which multiplied with the liberal reforms of the early 1990s. This competition provides an unusual window on the dynamics of state formation.Violent Entrepreneurs is remarkable for its research. Volkov conducted numerous interviews with members of criminal groups, heads of protection companies, law enforcement employees, and businesspeople. He bases his findings on journalistic and anecdotal evidence as well as on his own personal observation. Volkov investigates the making of violence-prone groups in sports clubs (particularly martial arts clubs), associations for veterans of the Soviet—Afghan war, ethnic gangs, and regionally based social groups, and he traces the changes in their activities across the decade. Some groups wore state uniforms and others did not, but all of their members spoke and acted essentially the same and were engaged in the same activities: intimidation, protection, information gathering, dispute management, contract enforcement, and taxation. Each group controlled the same resource—organized violence.

Goliath
Goliath

Author: Matt Stoller

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 1501182897

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“Every thinking American must read” (The Washington Book Review) this startling and “insightful” (The New York Times) look at how concentrated financial power and consumerism has transformed American politics, and business. Going back to our country’s founding, Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny, one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis. A concentration of power—whether by government or banks—was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy. In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few whose misuse of their power induced a financial collapse. They drew on this tradition to craft the New Deal. In Goliath, Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today’s bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment. The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller’s study will only grow more relevant as time passes. “An engaging call to arms,” (Kirkus Reviews) Stoller illustrates here in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy.

In Defense of Monopoly
In Defense of Monopoly

Author: Richard B. McKenzie

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 554

ISBN-13: 0472901141

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In Defense of Monopoly offers an unconventional but empirically grounded argument in favor of market monopolies. Authors McKenzie and Lee claim that conventional, static models exaggerate the harm done by real-world monopolies, and they show why some degree of monopoly presence is necessary to maximize the improvement of human welfare over time. Inspired by Joseph Schumpeter's suggestion that market imperfections can drive an economy's long-term progress, In Defense of Monopoly defies conventional assumptions to show readers why an economic system's failure to efficiently allocate its resources is actually a necessary precondition for maximizing the system's long-term performance: the perfectly fluid, competitive economy idealized by most economists is decidedly inferior to one characterized by market entry and exit restrictions or costs. An economy is not a board game in which players compete for a limited number of properties, nor is it much like the kind of blackboard games that economists use to develop their monopoly models. As McKenzie and Lee demonstrate, the creation of goods and services in the real world requires not only competition but the prospect of gains beyond a normal competitive rate of return.