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This book delivers on two analytical levels. First, it is a broad study of Sweden as an international actor, an actor that at least for a brief period tried to play a different international role than that to which it was accustomed. Second, the book problematizes the role of international military missions as drivers for change in the security and defence field. Several perspectives and levels of analysis are covered, from the macro level of strategic discourse to the micro level of the experiences of individual commanders. The book focuses upon Sweden and its participation in the international military mission in Afghanistan during 2002-2012 and also contributes to the growing literature evaluating the mission in Afghanistan, the security practice which has dominated the security and defence discourse of Western Europe for the last decade.
This book examines the political consequences of European security commercialisation through increased reliance on private military and security companies (PMSCs). The role of commercial security in the domestic setting in Europe is widely acknowledged; after all, the biggest private security company globally – G4S Group – has its roots in Scandinavia. However, the use of commercial security contracting by European states for military purposes in international settings is mostly held to be marginal. This book examines the implications of commercialisation for the peace and reconciliations strategies of European states, focussing specifically on European contracting in Afghanistan. Drawing upon examples from Scandinavia, Central Europe and Continental Europe, each chapter considers three key factors: the national contexts that give security contracting in Afghanistan its meaning; the national contracting practices; the political consequences for the operation in Afghanistan. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, global governance, peace and conflict studies, European politics, and IR in general.
This volume explores the way governments endeavoured to build and maintain public support for the war in Afghanistan, combining new insights on the effects of strategic narratives with an exhaustive series of case studies. In contemporary wars, with public opinion impacting heavily on outcomes, strategic narratives provide a grid for interpreting the why, what and how of the conflict. This book asks how public support for the deployment of military troops to Afghanistan was garnered, sustained or lost in thirteen contributing nations. Public attitudes in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe towards the use of military force were greatly shaped by the cohesiveness and content of the strategic narratives employed by national policy-makers. Assessing the ability of countries to craft a successful strategic narrative, the book addresses the following key areas: 1) how governments employ strategic narratives to gain public support; 2) how strategic narratives develop during the course of the conflict; 3) how these narratives are disseminated, framed and perceived through various media outlets; 4) how domestic audiences respond to strategic narratives; 5) how this interplay is conditioned by both events on the ground, in Afghanistan, and by structural elements of the domestic political systems. This book will be of much interest to students of international intervention, foreign policy, political communication, international security, strategic studies and IR in general.
This book explores the post-national defense and its gender implications. Specifically, it explores how the United Nations Security Council resolution to increase the participation of women in peace negotiations, humanitarian planning, peacekeeping operations, post-conflict peacebuilding and governance has influenced the organization and policy practices of the post-national defense.
This book compares the conflicting and consequential interpretations of jihad offered by mainstream Muslim scholars, violent Muslim radicals, and New Atheists.
This book offers a feminist analysis of military sacrifice and reveals the importance of a gender perspective in understanding the idea of honourable death. In present-day security discourses, traditional masculinised obligations to die for the homeland and its women and children are challenged and renegotiated. Working from a critical feminist perspective, this book examines the political and societal justifications for sacrifice in wars motivated by human rights and an international responsibility to protect. With original empirical research from six European countries, the volume demonstrates how gendered and nationalistic representations saturate contemporary notions of sacrifice and legitimate military violence. A key argument is that a gender perspective is necessary in order to understand, and to oppose, the idea of the honourable military death. Bringing together a wide range of materials – including public debates, rituals, monuments and artwork – to analyse the justifications for soldiers’ deaths in the Afghanistan war (2002–14), the analysis challenges methodological nationalism. The authors develop a feminist comparative methodology and engage in cross-country and transdisciplinary analysis. This innovative approach generates new understandings of the ways in which both the idealisation and the political contestation of military violence depend on gendered national narratives. This book will be of much interest to students of gender studies, critical military studies, security studies and International Relations.
NATO has many European and global partner countries. The political and military utility of all these partnerships is clear; they 'provide' more security than they 'consume'. But the utility for NATO of partners also changes over time. This book scrutinizes these partnerships, both from a NATO perspective and from that of its partners.
This volume examines the interaction between foreign policy-making and multicultural societies. It analyses the challenges of rapid social change associated with inward migration and increased ethnic and cultural diversity in ten EU Member States.
This book examines how national security strategies relate to an emerging common European or global vision of security, and to human security ideas. Human security and national security are often regarded as competing and mutually antagonistic; the former was proposed and has been operationalised in ways which represent a paradigm shift away from state-centric approaches and the dominance of national-security perspectives. This has led to human security being associated with a broadening of the security agenda to encompass not only physical security, the use of force and military capabilities, but also the provision of material well-being and dignity to vulnerable communities. This edited volume seeks to identify key concepts and themes in the national discourse of several European countries, addressing security at a meta-narrative and conceptual level, illustrating the changes taking place in approaches to security, and in particular, mapping moves away from a paradigm of 'national security' to one which might be called 'human security'. It also enables an assessment of whether national security is currently converging at either European or global levels. This book will be of much interest to students of human security, European politics, discourse analysis, war and conflict studies, and IR/security studies in general.
In what ways can we think through the complexities of identity? Identity is a contested concept, but it is more than a thing possessed by agents. Identity is contingent and dynamic, constituting and reconstituting subjects with political effects. In this edited book, identity is explored through a range of unique interdisciplinary case studies from around the world. Questions of citizenship, belonging, migration, conflict, security, peace and subjectivity are examined through social construction, post-colonialism, and gendered lenses from an interdisciplinary perspective. This combination showcases in particular the political implications of identity, how it is constituted, and the effects it produces. This edited collection will be of particular interest to students of international relations theory, migration studies, gender and sexuality, post-colonialism and policy-making at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.