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2. Procurement Data and Safeguards: Looking Historically and to the Future
- Author:
- David Albright
- Publication Date:
- 11-2022
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS)
- Abstract:
- Because nuclear programs depend on procurements, understanding such procurements has become an important aspect of safeguards today. This paper looks back at the development of this approach and draws out lessons for tomorrow. Past cases, recounted using open source data and Institute archives, are drawn from, among others, Iraq Action Team investigations, Iran inspections during 2003-2006, the Khan Network investigations, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. These cases illustrate important lessons about collecting and including procurement data more explicitly in state declarations and meeting inspection and monitoring goals. The cases also demonstrate the value of procurement data in facilitating the detection of irregularities in a nuclear declaration or verifying the correctness and completeness of a state’s nuclear declaration. These experiences and historical cases yield additional insights and lessons into ways to increase the usefulness of procurement data in future safeguards practices and methodologies.
- Topic:
- Security, Nuclear Weapons, Data, and Procurement
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
3. Diversifying Supply Chains: The Role of Development Assistance and Other Official Finance
- Author:
- Conor M. Savoy and Sundar R. Ramanujam
- Publication Date:
- 06-2022
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS)
- Abstract:
- The Issue: The international political economy has undergone significant transformation since March 2020, profoundly impacting global supply chains and bringing to light the risks supply chains pose to economic development around the world. This brief explores some of these risks in detail and lays out the role foreign assistance can play in de-risking and diversifying supply chains by building capacity in new partner countries.
- Topic:
- International Cooperation, Political Economy, Foreign Aid, and Supply Chains
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
4. The Western Balkans at the End of the the 2010s – Beyond the Security Dilemma?
- Author:
- Mira Kaneva
- Publication Date:
- 11-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS)
- Abstract:
- Christopher Nolan’s film Inception creates a mesmerizing maze where each action of the protagonists has a ripple effect down through the whole fabric of the story. Making one’s way through the maze, though only in one’s own imagination, leaves the viewer disoriented. The film is all about process, about fighting one’s way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. There is no time or place synchronization; architecture has a way of disregarding gravity where buildings tilt, streets coil and characters are adrift in what is more an emotional than a rational ‘ball of thread’ of experience. In a similar fashion, a complex network of events envelops the Western Balkans since the neologism’s ambiguous inception in the early 1990-s. For nearly three decades the region has been misperceived as stuck-in-the mud, criticized for being entangled in a desynchronized microcosm, involved in a set of flashbacks to archetypal conflicts on identity grounds and doomed to stagnated Europeanization. Both material facts such as cost-benefit calculations and ideational categories such as perceptions, beliefs, values, narratives are at play here. Almost like a Wiki-article, this paper attempts a disambiguation of several key assumptions about the Western Balkans so that it advances the argument that the Western Balkans region is inevitably on its way out of the shoals not least due to the European and Atlantic perspective for its future as offered by the European Union and NATO. It tackles three highly contentious statements: first, it refutes the proposition that the Western Balkans are entrapped in a specific ethnic security dilemma that offers no exit; second, it contends that at the moment the region is caught in a vicious circle of hard security threats (territorial conflicts) and soft security threats (radicalization, populism, corruption and organized crime); third, it holds a moderate optimistic view that the region is likely to be involved in a process of socialization within a vaster security community. The course of reasoning follows the case study of Serbia’s political and social development in the last decade; the theoretical framework is influenced by the security dilemma debate in International Relations literature.
- Topic:
- Security and International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Balkans and Global Focus
5. The Changing Balance of Power in the Age of Emerging Cyber Threats
- Author:
- Ivo Tsekov
- Publication Date:
- 04-2017
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS)
- Abstract:
- This paper addresses one of the key issues of the international security agenda today: the role of cyber warfare in the changing security landscape of the 21st century. Cyber warfare involves the actions by a nation-state or international organization to attack and attempt to damage another nation's computers or information networks through IT means. While a great deal has already been written on the topic, there needs to be a stronger examination of how the combination of cyber weapons with traditional strategic approaches might impact strategic choices related to cyber war. In order to understand whether there is a security competition in cyberspace, it is necessary to assess the current balance of power. Therefore, the issue of cyber warfare has relevance to practitioners, policy-makers, and scholars in the national, regional and international levels.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
6. The Inflated Yet Unsolvable North Korean Nuclear Threat
- Author:
- Boyan Boyanov
- Publication Date:
- 09-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS)
- Abstract:
- After Pyongyang conducted its fourth nuclear test on the 5th of January 2016 and declared it a successful experiment with a hydrogen bomb, the international community resumed its appeals for finding a definitive solution to the issue with North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. What impresses is the routine of the international response following the North Korean habitual act of defying the nuclear nonproliferation system: diplomatic condemnation mostly coming from the United States, South Korea, Japan, and, in a far more restrained manner – from China. When Pyongyang launched a satellite in space two days later, Seoul responded by shutting down the Kaesong industrial complex – a mutually beneficial industrial zone where South Korean companies employ North Korean labor1 . Even this seemingly harsh action does not constitute a precedent. At that time it was not very demanding to foretell the execution of consequential U.S. – South Korea military drills to display the U.S. resolution to be constantly involved in whatever is happening on the Korean Peninsula and to dismay the latest great leader of the North. Indications appear to suggest that China, completely in terms with its traditional business-asusual foreign policy, would not apply overwhelmingly dutifully the up-to-date UNSC sanctions imposed on Pyongyang2 . Then, after months of expected scolding from abroad, Pyongyang remained true to its own behavioral logic and conducted a fifth nuclear test on September 9 2016, the repercussions of which are yet to unfold
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
7. The New Challenges to the EuroAmerican Relationship: Russia and the Middle East
- Author:
- Guido Lenzi
- Publication Date:
- 01-2014
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS)
- Abstract:
- We have not reached the “end of history”, but this is one of its crossroads, a hinge, like Westphalia in 1648, Vienna in 1815, Versailles in 1919, San Francisco 1in 1945 (or the soon forgotten Paris in 1990). We are all, in other words, once again „present at the creation‟. Not much further than the square one that Roosevelt and Truman established seventy years ago. The “winds of change” that Harold MacMillan detected in 19561 are blowing anew
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
8. Media – International Relations Interaction Model
- Author:
- Tsvetelina Yordanova
- Publication Date:
- 12-2012
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS)
- Abstract:
- What role do media play in international relations is the major question that this article attempts to answer. It argues that media have quite limited impact on international affairs and foreign policy process and that the political discourse still prevails over the one of the media and the public in the contest of power in democratic societies. The contribution of the article is to conceptualize the highly scattered knowledge about media-international relations interaction and to present a model which places media on the complex terrain of world politics.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Communications, Media, and News Analysis
- Political Geography:
- Europe, Eastern Europe, and Global Focus
9. Bulgaria in NATO and the EU: Implications for the Regional Foreign and Security Policy of the Country
- Author:
- Plamen Pantev
- Publication Date:
- 01-2005
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS)
- Abstract:
- The study includes three main interrelated issues, reflecting Bulgaria’s approaches and interests in preserving and developing a particular set of partnerships in South East Europe with the purpose of continuing the trend of the region’s modernisation in the fields of economy, infrastructure, technology, society and politics: first, the balancing between the special pragmatic relations of the United States with Bulgaria, and the EU integration of the country and the region; second, reaching a higher quality of NATO and EU memberships as a vehicle of pushing ahead the processes of regional emancipation, and, third, the specific regional consequences of the country’s membership in NATO and soon – in the EU
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus