Uncertainty Threat And International Security

The rise of China is changing the strategic landscape globally and regionally. How states respond to potential threats posed by this new power arrangement will be crucial to international relations for the coming decades. This book builds on existing realist and rationalist concepts of balancing, bandwagoning, commitment problems, and asymmetric information to craft explanations about how states respond when faced with potential threats. Specifically, the book explores the role different types of uncertainty play in potential balancing situations. Particular focus is given to the nature of the rising state’s actions, the balance of forces, and the value of delay. These concepts are analysed and illustrated through a series of case studies on Europe in the 1930s as well as the present-day Southeast Asia, looking at great powers such as Britain and France, but also a wide range of smaller powers including Poland, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

The national security strategy of the United Kingdom is to use all national capabilities to build Britain's prosperity, extend the country's influence in the world and strengthen security. The National Security Council ensures a strategic and co-ordinated approach across the whole of Government to the risks and opportunities the country faces. Parts 1 and 2 of this document outline the Government's analysis of the strategic global context and give an assessment of the UK's place in the world. They also set out the core objectives of the strategy: (i) ensuring a secure and resilient UK by protecting the country from all major risks that can affect us directly, and (ii) shaping a stable world - actions beyond the UK to reduce specific risks to the country or our direct interests overseas. Part 3 identifies and analyses the key security risks the country is likely to face in the future. The National Security Council has prioritised the risks and the current highest priority are: international terrorism; cyber attack; international military crises; and major accidents or natural hazards. Part 4 describes the ways in which the strategy to prevent and mitigate the specific risks will be achieved. The detailed means to achieve these ends will be set out in the Strategic Defence and Security Review (Cm. 7948, ISBN 9780101794824), due to publish on 19 October 2010.

The rise of China is changing the strategic landscape globally and regionally. How states respond to potential threats posed by this new power arrangement will be crucial to international relations for the coming decades. This book builds on existing realist and rationalist concepts of balancing, bandwagoning, commitment problems, and asymmetric information to craft explanations about how states respond when faced with potential threats. Specifically, the book explores the role different types of uncertainty play in potential balancing situations. Particular focus is given to the nature of the rising state’s actions, the balance of forces, and the value of delay. These concepts are analysed and illustrated through a series of case studies on Europe in the 1930s as well as the present-day Southeast Asia, looking at great powers such as Britain and France, but also a wide range of smaller powers including Poland, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

This book engages in a constructive, practical debate on the nature and effects of uncertainty in global politics. International contributors explore the processes associated with different forms of uncertainty in the context of environmental issues, diplomacy and international negotiations, and conflict and security. From the collapse of the Soviet Union to the 1997 and 2008 financial crises to the Arab Uprisings and the European migrant crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, assessments of many events with lasting consequences on the global order have begun with: “why didn’t we see this coming?” There is much to learn from how phenomena that affect the global order generate uncertainty and what effects such uncertainty has on actors and issues. Presenting perspectives from all corners of the discipline and emerging and established scholars the book provides an up-to-date overview of the state of the literature; a concise yet conceptually rich theoretical framework; a mix of regional and global contemporary issues; process-oriented empirical evidence and methodological tools to assess different forms of uncertainty and propose practical solutions to addressing uncertainty in diverse contexts. The book will be of interest to scholars of global politics, international security, global environmental politics, international organizations and institutions, social movements, and conflict studies.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

This book describes what Intelligence Community (IC) analysts do, how they do it, and how they are affected by the political context that shapes, uses, and sometimes abuses their output. It is written by a 25-year intelligence professional.

Mainstream international relations continues to assume that the world is governed by calculable risk based on estimates of power, despite repeatedly being surprised by unexpected change. This ground breaking work departs from existing definitions of power that focus on the actors' evolving ability to exercise control in situations of calculable risk. It introduces the concept of 'protean power', which focuses on the actors' agility as they adapt to situations of uncertainty. Protean Power uses twelve real world case studies to examine how the dynamics of protean and control power can be tracked in the relations among different state and non-state actors, operating in diverse sites, stretching from local to global, in both times of relative normalcy and moments of crisis. Katzenstein and Seybert argue for a new approach to international relations, where the inclusion of protean power in our analytical models helps in accounting for unforeseen changes in world politics.

Master's Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict, Security, grade: 2,1, Free University of Berlin (Center for Global Politics), course: International Relations Online, language: English, abstract: Uncertainty has grown considerably after the end of the Cold War. In the place of one big threat a plenitude of many “smaller” and more incalculable risks superseded. New dangers have emerged or become more salient as compared to former times (like environmental issues, IT problems, or economic crises), while “old” ones have not entirely vanished. The risks emanating from WMDs or the threat of wars remain existent, albeit sometimes in an altered form. Several factors have contributed to the alteration of the threat and risk pattern: in the main, the transition to a multipolar world order, the processes of globalization, and last but not least the diminishing importance of borders and of the sovereign nation-state as such are decisive. Hence, the vulnerability of civil society has increased considerably, as open societies are more risk-prone. In reaction to these developments, academics and politicians have refined the traditional concept of national security into a broader notion, considering a multitude of aspects affecting the safety of the human being as such. In consequence the classical security architecture is being adapted bit by bit to the conditions of the 21st century. On each level, i.e. the national, regional as well as international layers, diverse mechanisms have been developed – as exemplary illustrated with reference to the transnational danger of terrorism.

Moving Target Defense: Creating Asymmetric Uncertainty for Cyber Threats was developed by a group of leading researchers. It describes the fundamental challenges facing the research community and identifies new promising solution paths. Moving Target Defense which is motivated by the asymmetric costs borne by cyber defenders takes an advantage afforded to attackers and reverses it to advantage defenders. Moving Target Defense is enabled by technical trends in recent years, including virtualization and workload migration on commodity systems, widespread and redundant network connectivity, instruction set and address space layout randomization, just-in-time compilers, among other techniques. However, many challenging research problems remain to be solved, such as the security of virtualization infrastructures, secure and resilient techniques to move systems within a virtualized environment, automatic diversification techniques, automated ways to dynamically change and manage the configurations of systems and networks, quantification of security improvement, potential degradation and more. Moving Target Defense: Creating Asymmetric Uncertainty for Cyber Threats is designed for advanced -level students and researchers focused on computer science, and as a secondary text book or reference. Professionals working in this field will also find this book valuable.

(Cont.) Uncertainty was found to be a significant "permissive condition" for the misperceptions of 1960-but uncertainty was highest just after Sputnik in 1957, and sharply decreased by 1960, yet public fear increased and peaked in 1960. There was no significant uncertainty in the 1980 panic--uncertainty is not a necessary condition for panic. Psychological hypotheses were not detected playing a role in causing these panics. Leaders private deliberations were examined and did not exhibit the patterns of reasoning predicted by these theories (e.g. leaders were aware of provoking the threat). National misperceptions guide policy and shape many leaders' beliefs through "blowback" and psychological post hoc rationaliztion. These large, important misperceptions are rooted in domestic politics, while international relations scholars focus on psychological and rational reasons for misperceptions. The study of misperceptions in international relations needs to be re-oriented.