The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the influence of the media on the U.S. decision to withdraw from humanitarian operations in Somalia in 1994. The conclusion highlights the limits of the CNN effect as a theoretical framework for explaining media influence on foreign policy decisions. It instead emphasises the unique situational factors which influence policy.
I riot because I have absolutely nothing to lose. I riot because I’m angry. Anger envelopes me like a blanket every day of my life. I’m angry because I’m poor, I’ve always been poor, and I know I will never be able to afford all those nice things people are supposed to have. I’m angry because my life is shit and I know it’s always going to be shit. You want to lock me up for it? Go ahead. It means nothing to a nothing like me.
In light of the War on Terror, conceptions of security are evolving. Focus on national security is, and has been, waning as the sovereign state begins to lose some of its pre-eminence. Many security analysts claim the process of globalisation and it’s associated ‘risks’ are largely outside the control of nation states and that only the development of a global community can deal with this adequately.
Realism leaves little place in order to study broader fields such as health security that states may face, and therefore does not take into account HIV/AIDS as a threat to human, national or international security. However, scholars have recently emphasised the growing negative effects of HIV/AIDS on core pillars of states, receiving ever more attention by policy-makers as a potential threat to national security.
Using an approach that is as much anthropological as it is historical or political, Anatol Lieven’s ‘Pakistan: A Hard Country’ provides a more intimate portrait of the country than other recent publications. It also lends a fresh perspective on a country that is often misunderstood by Western observers. The book’s central message is that Pakistan is cohesive and dysfunctional all at once.
The continued survival of the Kim regime at the head of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has been somewhat of a mystery to international scholars. The Juche ideology employed by the regime is at the heart of North Korea’s longevity and its success in providing continued internal legitimacy for the regime.
The democratic peace theory supports, obscures and excuses the coercion and violence of a liberal expansion policy through its reliance on narrow definitions. The use and construction of the democratic peace theory has mainly been about preserving the peace and dominance of western powers under the guise of spreading liberty and equality.
This paper will seek to investigate the ambiguous status of child soldiers looking at their victimhood, their level of agency and the resulting post-conflict implications. It will argue that although local communities and child soldiers themselves understand their inherent duality, the international discourse has yet to incorporate it, which leads to an inadequate response.
The decision for the United States and Britain to go to war with Iraq in 2003 was, and remains, one of the most controversial foreign policy acts that any British government has undertaken. This essay proceeds to compare and contrast the various aspects of the Just War Theory with the causes and outcomes of the war against Iraq in order to determine whether the war conforms to the theory.
The German sociologist Max Weber claimed “the state is the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly on legitimate physical violence.” This is essentially a statement about state sovereignty. This essay suggests that while only the most extreme and systemic examples of a state abusing its power could properly be called state terrorism, the concept is not a contradiction in terms when derived from dominant conceptions of sovereignty.
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