Non State Actors Essay

The United States from the Cold War and into the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) continues to face challenges in translating military might into political desires due to its obsession with raising an army, electing politicians and assembling a diplomatic corp that continue to gravitate towards State-to-State engagements that if not rectified could lead to substantial delays in fighting terrorism and non-terrorist adversaries or worse total failure of the United States Military’s ability to properly carry out it’s politicians objectives due to being blindsided.

The most prevalent reasons for states going to war are security, interest, standing, and revenge; of these, I posit that security is the most frequent. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on warfare occurring since the onset of the 20th century, however many of the core arguments retain efficacy through the countless centuries of human warfare. States don’t trust one another; even the best relationships between states are mired in spycraft with, or in opposition to one another. To summarize Waltz, drive for security is something that all states want, and need, as long as there are multiple states and at least one of them is looking for power.

State interventions become complex when the severity of the illness is considered. If a child is ill, but not ill enough, the state is unable to intervene on the child’s behalf. It is only when the child becomes life-threateningly ill that the state is able to step in (Hirasawa, 2006, p. 322). The inclusion of potentially disabling and disfiguring illnesses has been proposed (Hirasawa, 2006, p. 324). The severity of illness complicates state intervention further when the child is stricken with a fatal illness that has a treatment but only provides a small chance of survival. The state has to choose between its mandates of saving the child’s life and preventing harm. In less severe cases, the state may not be inclined to intervene as a

In the wake of WWII, peace was the main goal sought out by the entirety of the world. However as the twentieth century hit its halfway mark, the conflicting ideals of two countries dragged the world into a tense struggle for power and international identity yet again. The United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), were now in a competition to sway the rest of the world’s unaffiliated nations. This political, ideological, scientific and military effort would ultimately determine the winner’s role in global affairs from that point on and the loser would experience reduced ability to exert hegemony in developing regions of the world. One notable tool each nation used was their progress in the field of

Succeeding the Cold War, the threat to the U.S. has shifted from traditional to non-traditional. As a global power, both actors target the U.S.; conversely, nation-states (traditional threat) have become steady while Non-State Actors (NSAs) (non-traditional threat) have cultivated at an amplified rate. Nation-states are defined as a sovereign geographical area with political legitimacy over a cultural population. “Non-state actors (NSA) are individuals or organizations that have economic, political or social power and are able to influence at a national and sometimes international level but do not belong to or ally themselves to any particular country or state,” (Joey 2015). The U.S. must assess the actors’ level(s) of the threat(s) as

Unilateralism principle applies in countries where state policies are deemed autonomous. In America, Unilateralism occurs when the state formulates policies without the mandate of bilateral and multilateral treaties and the resulting actions have impacts on people from the other nations. According to Crosseley (2008), American unilateralism started with the ideologies developed during cold war and traces to Christian influence on US foreign policy over China after World War II. On the other hand, multilateralism is a process of making agreements among the states. The principle compromises self-gains of the countries and creates an environment whereby all the participants have same rights. The principle is committed to ensuring mutual understanding among the states. The system of dispute management advocated by multilateralism enforce particular mode of behavior among member states.

In the post-cold war era, with the rise of globalisation and the interdependence of markets, one can observe the moribund decline of traditional inter-state conflicts and the rise of more complex intra-state conflicts. The reasons behind these conflicts are manifold but at the heart is arguably always a conflict of interest between two or more groups. The Uppsala Conflict Data Project (2016) defines armed

Russian Aggression is referenced over 6 times in the National Security Strategy (NSS) dated in February 2015 with similar references being made in the excerpt from Reagan Administration (March 1987) Soviet Military Power (SMP). Two documents with almost 28 years’ time difference show the continued importance that aggression by a Russian element still play in today’s environment. More importantly the method of how such aggression continues towards those states who are struggling to maintain a functioning government. Important similarities to take into account for both time periods are these conflicts are focused around failing states in areas such as the Middle East. These types of geopolitical locations continue to be the outlet where the conflicting ideals from the United States

War has been one of the major features of the twentieth century. An extensive percentage of people have been participants or victims of the interstate or civil wars. Nowadays wars still exist and large populations suffer from it. The book Why Nations Fight by Richard Ned Lebow analyzes war in the past and the motives for war in the future. This book is extremely interesting to me, because of the current civil war in Ukraine that has been going on for almost 2 years. Lebow uses different scholarly references and shows that civil wars have been in a sharp decline after the Cold War, however some of the most violent civil wars were sparked after the collapse of the USSR (like in case of Ukraine). In this paper I am going to discuss the critical analysis of the book and the constructivist argument of the factors that influence the international behavior.

At present, the United States of America is widely regarded as the strongest state on the planet, but this position is becoming more vulnerable. During recent times it has become apparent that the United States has in fact lost power through an evolution in other nations’ own power shares and the nature of warfare itself. While currently the strongest military force on the planet, the United States has suffered from its inability to sufficiently engage in modern, non-conventional warfare, as seen in Vietnam. The unparalleled rise of China since the late 1900s also poses a significant threat to the power of the United States. The unipolar post-Cold War Earth has since begun evolving into a multipolar world where what control means is multifaceted. From this, the United States must review its position in the world and determine what it needs to be as its control shifts and wanes.

One of the main global issues raised in this article revolves around state security. The author of this article tries to paint a picture that the state actors are participating in the security dilemma in which other countries feel the need to catch up to U.S. drone production levels in order to stay relative to an apparent global arms race. At the same time, the author points out that the use of drones seems to be more widely accepted because it does not use military personnel to operate. If left unchecked, it could lead to an unintentional acceleration in violence, simply because the use of drones is viewed as more responsible.

Global Politics The study of international or rather global politics, seeks to provide an account of politics in the broadest domain. The domain of international politics in the twenty-first century is characterised by the increasing number of actors pursuing common and personal interests. It is largely due to the globalised, interdependent nature of the current international political environment that the concepts of sovereignty and power deserve further evaluation.

All these important questions about terror and insecurity are a considerable part of the subject of international politics. In this regard, scholars have dedicated decades for understanding the relations between states in political, economic, social, and other

The first paradigm of international relations is the theory of Realism. Realism is focused on ideas of self-interest and the balance of power. Realism is also divided into two categories, classical realism and neo-realism. Famous political theorist, Hans Morgenthau was a classical realist who believed that national interest was based on three elements, balance of power, military force, and self interest (Kleinberg 2010, 32). He uses four levels of analysis to evaluate the power of a state. The first is that power and influence are not always the same thing. Influence means the ability to affect the decision of those who have the power to control outcomes and power is the ability to determine outcomes. An example of influence and power

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 altered the environment of international relations, as the world saw first hand the damage a non-state actor can inflict on a regional hegemon. While non-state actors have always existed, for example maritime pirates or private mercenaries, the events of 9/11 provided non-state actors, in the form of terrorist organizations, the platform needed to expand their influence. Despite the urgency posed by the rise of non-state actors, the field of international relations continues to use an interstate framework to analyze conflict. This is the natural result of a long history of state-centered analysis that came to formal fruition post-WWI and dominated through the Cold War. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this discipline remained intact. However, as most conflicts today involve non-state actors, such as terrorist organizations in the mountains of Afghanistan and pirates off the coast of Somalia, this state-centric framework is deteriorating.