Since 2015, two influential American authors and military consultants have sought to leverage imaginative literature for the cause of national security. On the basis of concepts such as useful fiction and FICINT, a shorthand for fictional intelligence, they have sought to develop a new genre—the national security novel—which blends nonfictional research and predictive threat scenarios with the creative inventions and emotional appeal of fiction. In this article, I trace how the national security novel developed (...) through a process of securitization, which has gradually merged the realm of literature with that of policy and military strategy, and I assess the genre’s current and future impact on national and global security. (shrink)

Most discussions of the relationship between liberty and security focus on the idea that enhancing citizens’ security may require imposing constraints on their civil liberties. This paper explores the question of how measures to enhance security stand vis à vis the idea of political liberty, i.e. the idea of citizens’ collectively directing the power of their state. It distinguishes two models whereby citizens might enact that ideal of self-rule and argues that with respect to issues of (...) class='Hi'>national security, the less direct model, which entrusts political agents to make decisions beyond direct democratic input, will often be more appropriate. It argues as well that various practices often seen as fundamentally at odds with the ideal of rule by the people are in fact consistent with a reasonable construal of that ideal. It concludes by outlining various criteria that would have to be met for such practices to be morally permissible in democratic states. (shrink)

Perhaps nothing has become more evident in the months and years since 9/11 than the tension that exists between the publics access to information and concerns about protecting national security. This tension raises fundamental questions regarding how and to what extent national security secrecy is consistent with American notions of democracy; how institutions governing determinations about secrecy and disclosure should be designed; and the proper role of Congress, the courts, the public, and the media when it (...) comes to government assertions of secrecy. The materials in this book will provide the interested reader a window into the current shape of the eternal push-and-pull between secrecy and access to information in a democracy. (shrink)

Issues that arise in using game theory to model national security problems are discussed, including positing nation-states as players, assuming that their decision makers act rationally and possess complete information, and modeling certain conflicts as two-person games. A generic two-person game called the Conflict Game, which captures strategic features of such variable-sum games as Chicken and Prisoners'' Dilemma, is then analyzed. Unlike these classical games, however, the Conflict Game is a two-stage game in which each player can threaten (...) to retaliate — and carry out this threat in the second stage — if its opponent chose noncooperation in the first stage.Conditions for the existence of different pure-strategy Nash equilibria, or stable outcomes, are found, and these results are extended to situations in which the players can select mixed strategies (i.e., make probabilistic threats or choices). Although the Conflict Game sheds light on the rational foundations underlying arms races, nuclear deterrence, and other strategic situations, more detailed assumptions are required to tie this generic game to specific conflicts. (shrink)

This volume examines the ethical issues that arise as a result of national security intelligence collection and analysis. Powerful new technologies enable the collection, communication, and analysis of national security data on an unprecedented scale. Data collection now plays a central role in intelligence practice, yet this development raises a host of ethical and national security problems, such as: privacy; autonomy; threats to national security and democracy by foreign states; and accountability for (...) liberal democracies. This volume provides a comprehensive set of in-depth ethical analyses of these problems by combining contributions from both ethics scholars and intelligence practitioners. It provides the reader with a practical understanding of relevant operations, the issues that they raise, and analysis of how responses to these issues can be informed by a commitment to liberal democratic values. This combination of perspectives is crucial in providing an informed appreciation of ethical challenges that is also grounded in the realities of the practice of intelligence. This book will be of great interest to all students of intelligence studies, ethics, security studies, foreign policy, and International Relations. (shrink)

This paper identifies two conceptions of security in contemporary concerns over the vulnerability of computers and networks to hostile attack. One is derived from individual-focused conceptions of computer security developed in computer science and engineering. The other is informed by the concerns of national security agencies of government as well as those of corporate intellectual property owners. A comparative evaluation of these two conceptions utilizes the theoretical construct of “securitization,”developed by the Copenhagen School of International Relations.

The peculiarities of the “domestic” and political worlds’ interactions as well as their impact on the freedom of human choice are considered in the article. The purpose of the article is to analyze political and existential being which can be transformed in the light of collecting or distracting way. The phenomenon of national security is analyzed in theoretical as well as in practical dimension. The first part of the study of separatism is connected with the modern social world’s (...) tendency of social transgression which involves blurring the rules and limits expansion. The frontier concept as the transgressive space, which can be embodied in the form of possibility of political interaction or as a place of a political conflict, is offered. Frontier understanding in the light of a cultural dialogue permits to consider it as a perspective dynamic system in the social projects of common being construction. The second part of the article reveals three main directions of transgression: philosophical and reflexive, ethical and normative, common practices. An idea of correlation between freedom of choice, manifestation of will with the human ability of critical thinking, reflection is offered and proved. Tolerance is defined to be the strategical practice in the process of launching a dialogue program of conflicting political communication. (shrink)

Bioethics literature on national security issues is surprisingly sparse and the implications of neuroscience for national security are of increasing public and scholarly interest. This article elaborates one important source of evidence that can be found in reports by US government advisory committees over the past few years. It demonstrates that the growing interest in neuroscience on the part of national security agencies can be discerned in part by reviewing recent reports from the US (...) National Academies. The relationship between national security concerns and neuroscience is complex. Primary questions are discussed in the anthropomorphic terms of concerns and goals, and there is no inference to any particular sort of deliberations within these systems that leads ineluctably to a certain science policy agenda. This article also assesses the cultural underpinnings of neuroscience and ethical implications of evolving neurotechnologic capacity. (shrink)

it is mandatory that in building up our strength, we enlarge upon our technical superiority by an accelerated exploitation of the scientific potential of the United States and our allies. National Security Council, NSC-G8: United States Objectives and Program for National Security April 14, 1950 Innovation within the armed forces will rest on experimentation with new approaches to warfare, strengthening joint operations, exploiting U.S. intelligence advantages, and takingfull advantage of science and technology. George W Bush, The (...) National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 17,2002. (shrink)

Antony Flew; ‘Peace Education and National Security’: a comment, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 129–131, https://doi.

This article argues for an extension to the scope of corporate social responsibility (CSR) research to include a contemporary issue of importance to national and global security, critical infrastructure resilience. Rather than extending the multiple perspectives on CSR, this study aimed to identify a method of recognising CSR-related issues, before applying it to two dissimilar case studies on critical infrastructure resilience. One case study was of an international telecommunications company based in the US while the other was of (...) the railway network in Britain during a period of privatisation. The method used was derived from Okoye’s (J Bus Ethics 89(4):613–627, 2009 ) common reference core for CSR. Both case studies satisfied all the criteria sought which points to critical infrastructure resilience as being an emerging CSR issue. Because ongoing change characterises CSR, the method may have application for identifying future new CSR strands. As the findings suggest that some aspects of national and global security are CSR-related phenomena, the study demonstrates how CSR research may be significant at a societal, national and global level. Implications of the study include a broadening of the value and reach of contributions from CSR researchers and practitioners. (shrink)

Revolutions and aborted revolutions and bitter civil and "local" wars in the 1980s and since have raised new questions about national security, its definition, and its implementation. Nevertheless, a number of basic philosophical and political issues remain constant at a level deeper than tactical considerations. These are what eight accomplished philosophers, political scientists, Christian ethicists, and policymakers came together to discuss. They ask the fundamental and perduring questions of pacifism, war, intervention, and political negotiation. They focus on such (...) problems as ascertaining the role of the churches in the quest for peace, defining "national interest" and "national purpose," and construing intervention in other that strictly unilateral terms. (shrink)

Political realists claim that international relations are in a state of anarchy, and therefore every state is allowed to disregard its moral duties towards other states and their inhabitants. Realists argue that complying with moral duties is simply too risky for a state’s national security. Political moralists convincingly show that realists exaggerate both the extent of international anarchy and the risks it poses to states who act morally. Yet moralists do not go far enough, since they do not (...) question realism’s normative core: the claim that when national security is really at risk, states are allowed to disregard their moral duties. I contend that there is at least one moral duty that states should not disregard even if their inhabitants are at risk of death by military aggression: the duty to reduce extreme global poverty. The reason is that even granting that national security is about securing individuals’ right to life, global poverty relief is about that as well. (shrink)

This study examines Japanese reactions to neighboring countries’ behavior by addressing possible micro-motives, such as patriotism, the rational demand for national defense, and retrospective policy evaluation. This theoretical development leads to distinctive hypotheses from different motivations and directly tests them using macro-data . This research will apply this framework to Japanese politics and will show that foreign threats stimulate patriotism in the public mind and enhance political support for national leaders. It will also demonstrate that the Japanese public (...) has no optimistic view of the new prime minister and that the honeymoon effect in previous research may be confounded with the patriotic effect because the new leader is less experienced and is often challenged by foreign countries. (shrink)

Violations of ethical conductThis article is about torture, power and the breach of ethical conduct among military doctors, nurses and medics in the “War on Terror”. Violations of ethical conduct have been widely recounted in academic and non-academic journals and reports.1 This paper is also a call to international boards of doctors and nurses to intervene directly to stop abuses undertaken by US military healthcare providers under the guise of the War on Terror. With evidence growing that US military and (...) security services are actively engaged in the ill treatment, torture and deaths of suspects, details about the participation of healthcare professionals in such unlawful and unethical activities remain for the most part timidly accounted for. But according to current literature on this topic, there is increasing evidence that US doctors, nurses and medics have been complicit in torture and other unethical activities in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay .2–4The US government has inadequately dealt with these facts. Senior officials in the Bush administration who have played a major part in conducting the War on Terror have been either promoted or asked to remain in their posts. More seriously, despite worldwide condemnation of the reality behind the photos, allegations of torture continue at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.5 The graphic and appalling nature of several photographs are by no means the only evidence of abuses conducted by the US on its own territory and abroad. But the complicity of healthcare professionals in many venues , such as in capital punishment procedures in the US, exacerbates the already disturbing extent of bio-political abuses by the US government.Doctors and nurses often top the polls as caring and trustworthy professionals.6 Indeed, so strong …. (shrink)

In the wake of revelations about the American Psychological Association's complicity in the military's enhanced interrogation program, some psychologists have called upon the association to sever its ties to national security agencies. But psychology's relationship to the military is no short-term fling born of the War on Terror. This article demonstrates that psychology's close relationship to national security agencies and interests has long been a visible and consequential feature of the discipline. Drawing on social scientific debates (...) about the relationship between national security agencies and the social sciences in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this article also provides cautionary lessons for psychologists confronting the torture controversy. It concludes that an ethically robust response to this controversy requires that psychologists engage in a sustained reckoning with the powerful institutional, epistemological, and financial incentives that have bound the discipline to the military and intelligence communities since World War I. (shrink)

This paper theorizes that the effect of human rights violations on US economic aid is conditioned by the salience of US national security concerns. National security concerns will be more salient in situations where recipients contribute to maintaining US security and in temporal eras when the USA is perceived as being under increased external threat. As the relational and temporal salience of national security increases, any negative effect of human rights violations on US (...) economic aid should decrease. I test this hypothesis by examining US economic aid allocations to states from 1977 to 2005. The results show that the salience of national security concerns present in the US-recipient relationship does condition the relationship between human rights violations and US economic aid. There are also significant differences between different temporal eras of US foreign aid allocation. Future work should address how conflicts between interests and values in US foreign policy are negotiated. (shrink)

The article is devoted to defining the essence of security, particularly national security, its interpretation, main features, structure, and factors. The research focuses on the main concepts of the modern understanding of national security and defines national security according to recent research. The authors have performed a structural and functional analysis of the system of national security of Ukraine, which would be an adequate counteraction to threats to vital national interests. (...) The article examines the multi-vector interpretation and representation of the security phenomenon with an increased focus on the axiological paradigm of postmodern society analysis. The cardinal role of postmodernism is considered as a manifestation of postmodern culture in the value dimension of social-political existence. Postmodernism, on the one hand, enabled new vectors of analytical understanding and perception of the security phenomenon. On the other hand, it introduced an imbalance and determined the crisis factor in the space of classical perception of security guarantors due to violating the established foundations and traditions. The rejection factor is seen as a core feature of postmodern social-political reality. The emphasis is given to the problem of the security standard in the security studies and the idea of the mutual determination of both national interests and national values. The article states the importance and priority of historical memory and the phenomenon of mentality in the context of future analytical discourses in the scope of Ukrainian security studies. (shrink)

Nigel Blake; Peace Education and National Security, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 27–38, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.

Many individuals domestically and internationally who strive for peace and justice are concerned about the new National Security Strategy issued by the George W. Bush Administration in September 2002. 1 William Galston, for example, writes in a recent issue of Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly: A global strategy based on the new Bush doctrine of preemption means the end of the system of international institutions, laws and norms that we have worked to build for more than a half (...) a century. To his credit, Kissinger recognizes this; he labels Bush’s new approach “revolutionary” and declares, “Regime change as a goal for military intervention challenges the international system.” 2 Does the new Bush doctrine end the international legal system? Is the new Bush doctrine making policy declarations that are unprecedented in United States history? While I share many of the concerns critics are expressing about the new national security strategy, I contend that the more serious issue is not the ways in which this strategy represents a departure from those of prior United States presidential administrations but the actual practices of the Bush administration that appeal to this strategy. I will indicate how this new national security strategy does not represent much of a shift in policy, capability, or practice. Instead, this strategy Bush is using the strategy as an enabling device for a disturbing resurgence of United States global imperialism that serves interests that are actually opposed to the political rhetoric of the value of nations aiming for democracy and a market economy. I conclude by commenting on pursuing genuinely democratic values. I suggest that if the United States were truly committed to democratic values, then any military interventions would require the prior consent of the people. Otherwise what the United States refer to as “bringing democracy” to a people will be more like a militarily enforced authoritarianism that too closely resembles old-style exploitive imperialism. (shrink)

Is it possible and whether it is necessary to consider the events of the inter-church and inter-church Orthodox life of Ukraine through the prism of national security? What are the pain points in relations between the Ukrainian state and the Orthodox Churches? Does the legislation in Ukraine regulate state-church relations in Ukraine and whether it is Ukrainian-centric? These and other issues were the subject of consideration of the Expert Round Table on "Fighting Identities in Orthodoxy of Ukraine after (...) the" Revolution of Dignity ": an aspect of national security", which took place in Kyiv on July 1, 2014. The organizers of the event were the All-Ukrainian Society "Prosvita" named after Taras Shevchenko and the Ukrainian Association of Religious Studies. In the work of the Round Table, in addition to the representatives of the organizers of this conference, experts from the UOC-KP, UOC-MP, the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Brotherhood of Andriy Pervozvannogo of the UOC-KP, scholars and public figures from different cities and regions of the country, and other interested persons took part. (shrink)

Academia-intelligence agency collaborations are on the rise for a variety of reasons. These can take many forms, one of which is in the classroom, using students to stand in for intelligence analysts. Classrooms, however, are ethically complex spaces, with students considered vulnerable populations, and become even more complex when layering multiple goals, activities, tools, and stakeholders over those traditionally present. This does not necessarily mean one must shy away from academia-intelligence agency partnerships in classrooms, but that these must be conducted (...) carefully and reflexively. This paper hopes to contribute to this conversation by describing one purposeful classroom encounter that occurred between a professor, students, and intelligence practitioners in the fall of 2015 at North Carolina State University: an experiment conducted as part of a graduate-level political science class that involved students working with a prototype analytic technology, a type of participatory sensing/self-tracking device, developed by the National Security Agency. This experiment opened up the following questions that this paper will explore: What social, ethical, and pedagogical considerations arise with the deployment of a prototype intelligence technology in the college classroom, and how can they be addressed? How can academia-intelligence agency collaboration in the classroom be conducted in ways that provide benefits to all parties, while minimizing disruptions and negative consequences? This paper will discuss the experimental findings in the context of ethical perspectives involved in values in design and participatory/self-tracking data practices, and discuss lessons learned for the ethics of future academia-intelligence agency partnerships in the classroom. (shrink)

ExcerptIn 2021, in the pages of this journal, I contended that a coalition of interests in the United States had coalesced in opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump and duly taken power through the vehicle of Joe Biden.1 This coalition includes the Democratic Party, corporate elites, the media, academia, and—the subject of the present article—the national security (natsec) state. In that earlier piece, I focused on particular components of this coalition: legacy and social media. I went on (...) in a subsequent Telos piece to examine another of its elements: the academy.2 These fractions all appear, however, to be relatively minor players. While I argue that the legacy media have staged a counterrevolution to seize back control of the public sphere, this exhausts their parochial, pecuniary agenda; beyond this, they are simply part of a wider activist liberal cause. Contemporary liberal activism is in turn ideologically rooted in ideas propagated by sectors of the academy and hegemonic within it, but this has not, on my analysis, empowered the academy so much as the forces that make it increasingly redundant. (shrink)