Perceptions Of Security

This is the first book to reveal what people in the eastern half of Europe really think about the international political climate in which they find themselves after the Cold War. Most of the chapters in this volume are written from the viewpoints of the main countries of the region: Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak Republics.

The traditional conception of security as national security against military threats has changed radically since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945. The perceived nature and sources of threats have been widened as well as the objects of protection, now including individuals, societies, the environment as such and the whole globe. In International Law and Changing Perceptions of Security the contributors reflect on whether and how changing concepts and conceptions of security have affected different fields of international law, such as the use of force, the law of the sea, human rights, international environmental law and international humanitarian law. The authors of this book have been inspired by Professor Said Mahmoudi to which this Liber Amoricum is dedicated.

This book demarcates the barriers and pathways to major power security cooperation and provides an empirical analysis of threat perception among the world’s major powers. Divided into three parts, Emil Kirchner and James Sperling use a common analytical framework for the changing security agenda in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the EU. Each chapter features: an examination of national ‘exceptionalism’ that accounts for foreign and security policy idiosyncrasies definitions of the range of threats preoccupying the government, foreign policy elites and the public assessments of the institutional and instrumental preferences shaping national security policies investigations on the allocation of resources between the various categories of security expenditure details on the elements of the national security culture and its consequences for security cooperation. Global Security Governance combines a coherent theoretical framework with strong comparative case studies, making it ideal reading for all students of security studies.

Millennials, those born between 1982 and 2000, are the largest segment of the U.S. population, with 84.3 million people, and by 2040, they will account for an even larger segment of the population. As these young Americans become more prominent in all professional fields—politics, government, media, academia, business—their attitudes, preferences, and beliefs will have increasing weight in public discourse and U.S. policy toward security. But the millennial outlook has not been carefully studied. Do their attitudes toward security differ from the views of previous generations? And if so, what do these perceptions imply for U.S. security policy in 2040? This report—part of a series examining critical security challenges in 2040—analyzes survey data from a nationally representative sample of adults, examines perceptions of economic and national security, compares attitudes and opinions of millennials with previous generations, and concludes by making inferences about potential millennial concerns about security in the year 2040. The report reveals that attitudes and opinions of security tend to pattern with age, not generation. Specifically, older people expressed more worry about national security topics than younger people, while younger people expressed more worry about economic security. Younger people also were less likely than older people to report that living in a democracy was important to them.

This book explores citizens' perceptions and experiences of security threats in contemporary Britain, based on twenty focus groups and a large sample survey conducted between April and September 2012. The data is used to investigate the extent to which a diverse public shares government framings of the most pressing security threats, to assess the origins of perceptions of security threats, to investigate what makes some people feel more threatened than others, to examine the effects of threats on other areas of politics and to evaluate the effectiveness of government messages about security threats. We demonstrate widespread heterogeneity in perceptions of issues as security threats and in their origins, with implications for the extent to which shared understandings of threats are an attainable goal. While this study focuses on the British case, it seeks to make broader theoretical and methodological contributions to Political Science, International Relations, Political Psychology, and Security Studies.

The term 'security' has always been vague in terms of its definition. After the end of the Cold War however this vagueness increased as new paradigms emerged. Those studying security need a better understanding of the term 'security' to deal with complex issues within the broadly understood discipline of security studies. This thesis describes the uncertain nature of security by analyzing: (1) various definitions of security and some of the terms directly related to it in different contexts; and (2) the empirical meaning of security by examining threats as indicators of 'insecurity' based on the different characters of threats and levels of analysis from the field of international relations. The thesis argues that regardless of the vague meaning of the term 'security' empirically its parameters are quite certain and definable by the specification of threats as indicators of insecurity. This clarification of the meaning of security studies, in turn, makes it easier for scholars and policy- makers to deal with this increasingly important sphere of human life.

This volume examines the explanatory nesting approach in the analysis of international relations and its continuing relevance in the 21st century. International relations theory urgently needs strategies for coping with the growing complexity of the international system following the collapse of the US-Soviet bipolar stalemate, the multiple challenges to US unipolar hegemony, and the rise of powerful non-Western actors. Over the course of this book, leading scholars of international relations and diplomatic history return to an approach to explanation pioneered in the writings of the late Robert Jervis. The approach calls for nesting multiple layers of explanation--systemic, strategic, and perceptual--in an integrated causal account that is simultaneously parsimonious and nuanced. Highlighting the logic of strategic interactions under uncertainty, it also integrates the effects of psychological biases and the unintended consequences of acting in complex systems to provide explanations that are at once theoretically rigorous and rich in empirical detail. Analyzing the current state of Realist theory, signaling under conditions of uncertainty and anarchy, the role of nuclear weapons in international politics, the role of cognition and emotions in economic and foreign policy decision making, and questions of responsibility in international affairs, the authors provide a compelling guide for the future of international relations theory. This book will be of much interest to students of international relations, foreign policy, and security studies.

'Everyday Security Threats' explores public perceptions of security threats in contemporary Britain, using data from extensive fieldwork and drawing on perspectives from International Relations, security studies and political psychology.

This book demarcates the barriers and pathways to major power security cooperation and provides an empirical analysis of threat perception among the world�s major powers. Divided into three parts, Emil Kirchner and James Sperling use a common analytical framework for the changing security agenda in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the EU. Each chapter features: an examination of national �exceptionalism� that accounts for foreign and security policy idiosyncrasies definitions of the range of threats preoccupying the government, foreign policy elites and the public assessments of the institutional and instrumental preferences shaping national security policies investigations on the allocation of resources between the various categories of security expenditure details on the elements of the national security culture and its consequences for security cooperation. Global Security Governance combines a coherent theoretical framework with strong comparative case studies, making it ideal reading for all students of security studies.