security

Malcolm Fraser’s Dangerous Allies

May 27, 2015 / security / , ,
"Globe Retro" by vectorolie at freedigitalphotos.net
“Globe Retro” by vectorolie at freedigitalphotos.net

Malcolm Fraser was the Prime Minister of Australia from 1975 to 1983. He has recently written Dangerous Allies with Cain Roberts, in which he analyzes Australia’s grand strategy from the 19th century to the present. At its core, his argument is that Australia has always adopted a policy of “strategic dependency,” first with Britain and then with the United States. Given Australia’s economic and military weakness in the nineteenth century, he believes that this was an inevitable choice. At the same time, this approach has consistently led Australia into disaster. Fraser clearly has no love for Churchill. He describes the losses and perils that Australia faced from Gallipoli during World War One, to North Africa in World War Two. By 1941 Australian forces were far from the home front, which was left vulnerable by the British debacle in Singapore. Overall, Fraser’s depiction of Australia’s relationship with Great Britain is one in which the nation made great sacrifices for little reward. …

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Nuclear Sabotage in Europe

April 17, 2015 / energy, security / , , ,
"Nuclear" by luigi diamanti at freedigitalphotos.net
“Nuclear” by luigi diamanti at freedigitalphotos.net

In a previous article, I discussed how the French government has sought to suppress evidence regarding the massive costs that a nuclear accident would entail. But an accident is not the only danger facing nuclear reactors as a recent incident at Belgium’s Doel 4 nuclear reactor makes clear. Some person -most likely an employee at the plant- deliberately damaged an oil drainage system from a turbine, which caused so much damage that the plant will be closed until after the New Year. Now Belgium may face blackouts if winter demand for electricity is particularly high. The Doel 4 incident is particularly worrying because the plant is located in a heavily populated part of Europe.

Remarkably two other reactors are also offline in Belgium, because cracks were found in reactor casings, which means that Belgium has lost more than half of its nuclear capacity. While people often argue that renewable power is too intermittent to be relied upon, events in Belgium again make the point that there are also major risks in relying on nuclear power. In this particular case, we know very little about the sabotage. Was it carried out by an isolated individual? If so, what was their motivation? Clearly threats to to the integrity of nuclear reactors do not always come from outside the plant. Currently the case in Belgium is being investigated by the Belgian police. Do these forces have the expertise to investigate nuclear crimes? The Belgian case also should make security experts and plant owners question their practices. How carefully are plant employees screened, and what monitoring systems are in place? …

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The 2013 French White Paper on Defence and National Security

April 17, 2015 / Europe, security / , ,
Cities of France by David Monniaux, Wikipedia Commons.
Cities of France by David Monniaux, Wikipedia Commons.

National white papers on military strategy are key tools to understand trends in security thought. Last year, the French government issued a White paper on National Defense and security, which has a few interesting points. First, although the document never once uses the term “human security,” this concept has influenced the document: “The term `risk’ refers to any danger that does not include any hostile intent but which might impact on the security of France: they therefore include political events as well as natural, industrial, health and technological risks.” Part of the reason for this shifting emphasis may come from the fact that “France no longer faces any direct, explicit conventional military threat against its territory.” Indeed, Europe’s current security situation, the document suggests, is nearly unique in its history: “… since the end of the Cold War, the European continent has ceased to be the epicenter for global strategic confrontation. This is without precedent in the history of our continent.” …

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A book review of Robert Kaplan’s Asia’s Cauldron

May 27, 2015 / Asia, security / , , , , , , , ,

Robert D. Kaplan is a well-known journalist who has authored popular works on international issues, such as Balkan

South China Sea from Wikipedia Commons.
South China Sea by NASA from Wikipedia Commons.

Ghosts and the Coming Anarchy. Kaplan has a knack for writing books on topics about to rise to international prominence; in his most recent work, he has sought to understand the international competition in the South China Sea, which is in the global news this week because of a naval confrontation between Vietnam and China.

Kaplan’s works typically try to show the legacies of history for contemporary issues, and this book is no exception. He begins by describing the historical influence of India upon Vietnam, which he depicts as a kind of cultural shatter zone between two great Asian powers. One of the strengths of his work is that he has traveled widely in Asia while writing it, so he can draw on conversations that he has had from Vietnam to Singapore. He also has read widely in history, so the work is interspersed with allusions to Walter Benjamin, Livy, Machiavelli and Thucydides, which are are generally well-chosen and insightful. It is this ability to put contemporary issues into a broad historical and geographical context that is Kaplan’s strength. …

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Falling Demand for Mexican Marijuana

April 17, 2015 / Latin America, security / , , ,
"Seeding Poppy Heads" by Simon Howden at freedigitalphotos.net
“Seeding Poppy Heads” by Simon Howden at freedigitalphotos.net

In an earlier post, I talked about the move to decriminalizing marijuana in the Americas. What struck me last August how quickly this idea has gained political momentum, both within the United States and internationally. In the United States, medical marijuana is legal in 40% of states, while the next state to fully legalize the drug for recreational use may be Alaska. A recent article in the Washington Post examines the impact that this trend is having both in the United States and in Mexico. On the positive side, in Sinaloa the demand for marijuana has collapsed, with current prices just a quarter of what they were five years ago. Nick Miroff quotes one Mexican farmer about this economic transformation: ““It’s not worth it anymore,” said Rodrigo Silla, 50, a lifelong cannabis farmer who said he couldn’t remember the last time his family and others in their tiny hamlet gave up growing mota. “I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.’” While this economic change should weaken the power of the major drug cartels, it has also had an unintended consequence: Mexican farmers are transitioning to opium, which is used to produce heroin. According to the article, Mexican cartels have adopted heroin as their key product, and they are pushing near treatment centers in the United States. …

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Brazil’s “Nobody deserves to be raped” campaign

November 15, 2018 / Latin America, security / , ,

When I did my doctoral research in Brazil during the 1990s there was a pervasive fear of the police. I remember once watching as the police hunted someone who had gone into hiding, while I sat safely in a tram in central Rio de Janeiro. As the police poked into alleys and boxes, the other passengers had a look of disgust on their face, while the people on the street looked terrified. I escaped any serious crime while living in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and 1993. But I knew many people who had stories about carjackings, muggings and worse. When I did fieldwork in Sao Paulo in 2005 for my book in HIV in Latin America, I interviewed drug traffickers and users, most of whom were using crack, although injecting drugs were also common amongst an older generation of drug users. I went into the favelas, many of which were totally under the control of the drug lords at that time. One day I was at an NGO that did harm mitigation work around drugs. We were supposed to work in a favela that afternoon, but then a phone call came. The drug lords had closed the favela to protest some action that the government had taken, and nobody could enter it that day. …

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Cicada 3301

December 7, 2018 / mystery, security / , ,
"Cicada" by thawats at freedigitalphotos.net
“Cicada” by thawats at freedigitalphotos.net

I have covered many international mysteries on this blog, such as the strange story of the Arctic Sea, the puzzle of the Vela Incident,and the peculiar case of the ghost ship the Baltimore.  I’ve noticed that these posts usually are among the blog’s most popular. I don’t think, however, that any of these mysteries perhaps is as strange as the new puzzle of Cicada 3301. If you are curious, you will want to read Chris Bell’s account in today’s National Post. Bell describes how amateur cryptographers and hackers were enticed by a message in an internet forum called 4chan in January 2012, which appeared to contain hidden information encoded in the form of steganography. Those who tried to solve the problem soon walked through a door into an Alice of Wonderland world, with multiple cryptographic challenges. This puzzle was posed by an organization (almost certainly not an individual) with eclectic interests, which ranged from Mayan numbers to a British occult figure. How many groups would include references to medieval Welsh literature and King Arthur in the midst of an advanced cryptographic mystery? What was most staggering about this project was not the skills of the individuals involved -although they were prodigious- but rather the fact that their motive and identity both remained unknown. They appeared to be recruiting for some secret organization. Guesses about its identity have ranged from the NSA to the hackers group Anonymous. It could be a government agency, organized crime or a private firm. Some people even argued that this was an alternative reality game. But if so, it would have taken a group with immense resources (or that was very skilled at mass collaboration) to pull it off. …

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Decriminalizing drugs in the Americas

November 15, 2018 / drugs, Latin America, security / , , , ,
Map of America by Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net
Map of America by Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net

I’ve talked before in this blog about the idea of decriminalizing drugs as some European countries, such as Portugal, have already done. What is surprising is the rapidity and momentum behind this idea throughout the Americas. In November 2012 both Colorado and Washington decriminalized marijuana possession. Indeed, in Washington State the police recently handed out Doritos (along with a new marijuana legal fact sheet) at a public pot smoking event. But events in these states represent only the vanguard of a much larger movement. …

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Water and War in the Middle East

April 17, 2015 / environment, security / , ,
Canal by Evgeni Dinev courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
Canal by Evgeni Dinev courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

Kim Brown and I have started to work on a second edition of our Introduction to International and Global Studies textbook, which will be published in 2015. We are trying to not only make conceptual changes to the work, but also to reflect the many global events that have taken place since the first edition: in North America, fracking has changed the energy picture, in Europe, the financial crisis is changing perceptions of economic and political globalization, and around the world people are struck by the fact that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has passed 400 parts per million. Although there is a great deal of material to address in the next edition, one key issue has to be water, as drought is leading to crises and conflict in many regions, but particularly in the Middle East. …

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The Graphic Vault at Canada’s National Post

April 17, 2015 / security, websites / ,

Edward Tufte’s work, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is a beautiful book, which enables the reader to interpret statistics in a new light. The chart displaying the size of Napoleon’s army as he first invaded then retreated from Russia is awe-inspiring. No chart of the same information could have conveyed as effectively the extent to which French forces evaporated away. I thought of this recently when I looked at a graphic series in the National Post, one of the two major Canadian newspapers. The vault contains a rich array of images, which could be powerful tools in the classroom. For example, Rubab Abid and Richard Johnson produced a striking series of maps (in a graphic work titled “Out of Africa’) that showed the level of investment by former colonial powers in Africa, as well as the natural resources that might have attracted them to these countries. This one chart could spark a powerful class discussion about the nature of neocolonialism in Africa. As with all items in the vault, it is possible to download a high-resolution copy from the site. …

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