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This book provides an in-depth policy analysis of Asia's fourteen leading space programs, concentrating especially on developments in China, Japan, India, and South Korea. It shows that, in contrast to the close cooperation practiced among European states, space relations among Asian states have become increasingly tense. If current trends continue, the Asian civilian space competition could become a military space race. The book isolates the domestic motivations driving Asia's space programs, revisiting critical events such as China's 2007 anti-satellite weapons test and manned flights, Japan's successful Kaguya lunar mission and its Kibo module for the International Space Station (ISS), India's Chandrayaan lunar mission, and South Korea's astronaut visit to the ISS. It investigates these nations' divergent space goals and their tendency to focus on national solutions and self-reliance, rather than region-wide cooperation and multilateral initiatives. It concludes with recommendations for improved intra-Asian space cooperation and regional conflict prevention. The book also considers America's efforts to engage Asia's space programs in joint activities and the prospects for future U.S. space leadership. It extends its analysis to the relationship between space programs and economic development in Australia and across Asia.

This anthology explores the dynamics of shared religious sites in Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus and Algeria, indicating where local and national stakeholders manoeuvre between competition and cooperation, coexistence, and conflict. Contributors probe the notion of coexistence and the logic that underlies centuries of “sharing,” exploring when and why sharing gets interrupted—or not—by conflict, and the policy consequences. These chapters map the choreographies of shared sacred spaces within the framework of state-society relations, juxtaposing a site's political and religious features and exploring whether sharing or contestation is primarily religious or politically motivated. Although religion and politics are intertwined phenomena, the contributors to this volume understand the category of “religion” and the “political” as devices meant to distinguish between the theological and confessional aspects of religion and the political goals of groups. The chapters clearly delineate the religious and political factors that contribute to the context and causality of conflict at these sites. They draw on history and anthropology to shed light on the often rapid switch from relative tolerance to distress and back to peace and calm.

This book examines the competing themes of space competition and cooperation while providing readers with an understanding of the basics of space technology, diplomacy, commerce, science, and military applications. In this way, it offers a primer on space policy from an international perspective. It shows how, since the end of the Cold War, space has become increasingly crowded, with new countries, companies, and even private citizens operating satellites and becoming spacefarers. It argues that the recent expansion of human space activity poses new challenges to existing treaties and other governance tools for space, increasing the likelihood of conflict over a diminishing pool of beneficial locations and resources close to Earth. Drawing on more than twenty years of experience in international space policy debates, the book examines possible avenues for cooperation among the growing pool of space actors. It considers their shared interests in space traffic management, orbital debris control, the division of the radio frequency spectrum and the prevention of military conflict. It concludes with policy recommendations for enhanced international collaboration in space situational awareness, scientific exploration, and restraining harmful military activities.

This book assesses the impact of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) that was approved by the United Nations in 2013 and which set legally binding standards to regulate global arms exports. It explores the reasons top arms-exporting democracies have put aside past sovereignty, security and economic worries in favor of humanitarian arms transfer controls, and follows the early effects of this about-face on export practice. The book explains that this groundbreaking treaty reflects a growing concern that small and major conventional arms play a significant role in perpetuating human rights violations, conflict and societal instability worldwide. It shows that, while many countries once staunchly opposed shared export controls, they are now beginning to embrace numerous agreements, such as the ATT. The book begins with a brief history of failed modern arms-export control initiatives and then tracks arms transfer trends over time. It pinpoints the normative shifts in the 1990s that put humanitarian arms control on the table, and reveals that many states committed to these policies out of concern for their international reputations. It also highlights how arms-trade scandals threaten domestic reputations and thus help improve compliance. Using statistical data and interviews conducted in France, Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom and the United States, the book challenges existing IR theories of state behavior, while providing insight into both the role of reputation as a social mechanism and the importance of government transparency and accountability in generating compliance with new norms and rules.

Beginning with the Cold War and concluding with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, this book explores the overlooked opposition of U.S. diplomats to American foreign policy in the latter half of the twentieth century. During America's reign as a dominant world power, U.S. presidents and senior foreign policy officials largely ignored or rejected their diplomats' reports, memos, and telegrams, especially when they challenged key policies relating to the Cold War, China, and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The book recovers these diplomats' invaluable perspective and their commitment to the transformative power of diplomatic writing. It showcases the work of diplomats whose opposition enjoyed some success. George Kennan, John Stewart Service, John Paton Davies, George Ball, and John Brady Kiesling all caught the attention of sitting presidents and policymakers, achieving temporary triumphs yet ultimately failing to change the status quo. The book follows the circulation of documents within the State Department, the National Security Council, the C.I.A., and the military, and it details the rationale behind “The Dissent Channel,” instituted by the State Department in the 1970s, to both encourage and contain dissent. Advancing an alternative narrative of modern U.S. history, the book connects the erosion of the diplomatic establishment and the weakening of the diplomatic writing tradition to larger political and ideological trends while, at the same time, foreshadowing the resurgent significance of diplomatic writing in the age of Wikileaks.

This book describes the motivations that lead to modern Islamist terrorism and the different stages in the execution of a terrorist attack. Challenging the certainty that liberal democratic values offer an antidote to radicalism, the book exposes the exploitation of democratic institutions by terrorists to further their goals and confronts the difficulty democracies face in fighting terrorism, especially when international humanitarian law does not account for nonstate actors in armed conflict. The text especially focuses on the “hybrid terrorist organization” model, which calls for a new international doctrine to neutralize its threat.

Japan and South Korea are Western-style democracies with open-market economies committed to the rule of law. They are also US allies. However, despite their shared interests, shared values, and geographic proximity, divergent national identities have driven a wedge between them. The book investigates the roots of this split and its ongoing threat to the region and the world. It isolates competing notions of national identity as the main obstacle to a productive partnership between Japan and South Korea. The book shows how fundamentally incompatible, rapidly changing conceptions of national identity in Japan and South Korea—and not struggles over power or structural issues—have complicated territorial claims and international policy. Despite changes in the governments of both countries and concerted efforts by leading political figures to encourage US–ROK–Japan security cooperation, the Japan–Korea relationship continues to be hobbled by history and its deep imprint on ideas of national identity. This book recommends bold, policy-oriented prescriptions for overcoming problems in Japan–Korea relations and facilitating trilateral cooperation among these three Northeast Asian allies, recognizing the power of the public on issues of foreign policy, international relations, and the prospects for peace in Asia.

The counterinsurgency (COIN) paradigm dominates military and political conduct in contemporary Western strategic thought. It assumes future wars will unfold as “low intensity” conflicts within rather than between states, requiring specialized military training and techniques. COIN is understood as a logical, effective, and democratically palatable method for confronting insurgency—a discrete set of practices that, through the actions of knowledgeable soldiers and under the guidance of an expert elite, creates lasting results. Through an extensive investigation into COIN's theories, methods, and outcomes, this book undermines enduring claims about COIN's success while revealing its hidden meanings and effects. Interrogating the relationship between counterinsurgency and war, the text questions the supposed uniqueness of COIN's attributes and tries to resolve the puzzle of its intellectual identity. Is COIN a strategy, a doctrine, a theory, a military practice, or something else? This analysis ultimately exposes a critical paradox within COIN: while it ignores the vital political dimensions of war, it is nevertheless the product of a misplaced ideological faith in modernization.

The right to own property is something we generally take for granted. For refugees living in camps, in some cases for as long as generations, the link between citizenship and property ownership becomes strained. How do refugees protect these assets and preserve communal ties? How do they maintain a sense of identity and belonging within chaotic settings? Protection Amid Chaos follows people as they develop binding claims on assets and resources in challenging political and economic spaces. Focusing on Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, it shows how the first to arrive developed flexible though legitimate property rights claims based on legal knowledge retained from their homeland, subsequently adapted to the restrictions of refugee life. As camps increased in complexity, refugees merged their informal institutions with the formal rules of political outsiders, devising a broader, stronger system for protecting their assets and culture from predation and state incorporation. For this book, Nadya Hajj conducted interviews with two hundred refugees. She consults memoirs, legal documents, and findings in the United Nations Relief Works Agency archives. Her work reveals the strategies Palestinian refugees have used to navigate their precarious conditions while under continuous assault and situates their struggle within the larger context of communities living in transitional spaces.

Foreign-backed funding for education does not always stabilize a country and enhance its state-building efforts. This book shows how aid to education in Afghanistan bolstered conflict both deliberately in the 1980s through violence-infused, anti-Soviet curricula and inadvertently in the 2000s through misguided stabilization programs. It also reveals how dominant humanitarian models that determine what counts as appropriate aid have limited attention and resources toward education, in some cases fueling programs that undermine their goals. For education to promote peace in Afghanistan, the book argues that we must expand equal access to quality community-based education and support programs that increase girls' and boys' attendance at school. Referring to a recent U.S. effort that has produced strong results in these areas, the book commends the program's efficient administration and good quality, and its neutral curriculum, which can reduce conflict and build peace in lasting ways. Drawing on up-to-date research on humanitarian education work amid conflict zones around the world and incorporating insights gleaned from extensive fieldwork in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the book recalculates and improves a popular formula for peace.