Simons Working Paper Series in Security and Development

A disturbing trend in the contemporary approaches of states to space security has been the decline in diplomacy and the consideration of diplomatic options to achieve national security goals. The official characterization of outer space as "congested, competitive and contested" has ignored the legacy and potential for "cooperation" in this unique if vulnerable realm. The authority of the foundational Outer Space Treaty of 1967, with its stipulation that space is to be used for "peaceful purposes", is being eroded by neglect and unilateral assertions that space is a domain for "war-fighting". The champions of space peace will have to become as active as the exponents of space war if a benign environment for space operations is to be preserved for future generations. 

Human rights have improved but not everywhere and for everyone. Scholarship has focused on domestic conditions under which they improve but we know little about how they affect different groups. Whose rights are being protected? Under what conditions? I compare dissidents and criminals as targets of human rights violations – specifically torture. I also examine the effectiveness of human rights protections under conditions of public insecurity due to crime – as opposed to political or civil conflict or terrorism. I argue that mobilization and judicial enforcement are less effective in the face of public insecurity, and criminals benefit less than dissidents because courts provide less accountability for violations of those accused of crimes. Human rights treaties that depend on these mechanisms thus primarily benefit dissidents. My statistical analysis supports this argument and directly addresses concerns about measurement bias. The key finding is that commitment to the Convention against Torture enhances judicial protection only for dissidents.

In this paper I explore ethnographically the tension between urban Toba indigenous people living in Buenos Aires, ubiquitous incorporation of mobile phones and the deep disconnecting effects mobile phones have when they break down. While mobile phones enable the intensification of informal economic activities and are used to mediate with state institutions, broken phones isolate, if only temporarily, urban Toba family members from each other and from their hard-built relations with people in the city. From a spatial perspective, broken mobile phones not only disrupt the flow of communication between people but also permanently restrain access to institutions and places in the city center. I argue that the current and limited forms of access to mobile phone communication and the managing of information both produce and dismantle the territorialities of urban indigenous networks. Mobile phones for the urban Toba, in short, both enable the fluidity of connections and re-create separation and segregation from the city.

This paper shows how and why Russia’s outer space strategy and capabilities have evolved since the 1990s, including recent diplomatic initiatives on outer space governance. The leadership has placed space strategy in the context of defence requirements and state military control. No longer economically competitive in the race for control of outer space, Russia still invests in new technologies and also uses diplomacy – working with UN and other disarmament organisations – to influence the growing militarisation of space. It has come to promote a collective approach to the problem, rather than one dominated by the richer and more powerful states.

Note: This paper will appear as Chapter 19 in the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Russian Security Strategy, edited by Roger Kanet.

In this paper, I analyze the forms of mobility and the affective modulations that shaped the trajectories of indigenous people from the Chaco region to the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they now live. Considering the macro-structural forces of political and economic process as insufficient to explain why, how and when indigenous people moved to the city, I focus on habits around movement and affective modulations that made indigenous people previously living in rural Chaco region to “end up” in the capital city of the country. These movements were unusual in their form, as the first arrivants had little connections and no hosting institution in the city. Through an analysis of the life histories and trajectories of indigenous people who are now living in and indigenous barrio (poor neighborhood) in Buenos Aires, this research traces the specific affective states that triggered travels to the city. I produce an “odd” typology of these affective mobilities that emerged as common forms of experience within larger context. My aim is to offer an alternative analysis of mobility, one that departs from preconceived understandings of migratory push and pull factors and engages with the lived experience of urban indigenous people who move in spite and across multiple socio-economic constraints.

Traditional analyses of financial statecraft typically assume the term refers to major powers exercising influence over weaker states by such means as foreign aid blandishments or banking system sanctions. Newer scholarship highlights the subtler political influence advanced capitalist democracies also wield through their centrality to global monetary and financial markets and governance networks. Not surprisingly, rising powers are keen to expand the venues through which they too can support their larger foreign policy visions through tapping into state levers of control over cross-border currency, credit, and investment flows, as well as tilting international regulatory reforms toward their preferences. The article concludes with a comparison of United States’ and China’s financial statecraft capabilities and recent actions.

This report seeks to better understand how NATO and Canada are adapting to new patterns of conflict involving Russia, with the goal to suggest how Canada can better respond conceptually, politically and strategically. It reveals significant “gaps” in both the academic and grey literature and policy. The four areas of NATO and Canadian responses since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 examined in this report are: diplomatic; military (conventional and nuclear); “hybrid warfare” (focusing on information and cyberwarfare); and partnership with Ukraine. At a time of flux in the alliance and in Russia’s behaviour, policy makers are applying old and new concepts simultaneously, and are sometimes responding to events ahead of conceptual thinking about them.

This paper is based on a report to Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) on the findings from a SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis grant awarded to Dr. Jackson in 2017. The full online report can be accessed here.

Over the past 30 years, Hindu nationalism has risen to a position of dominance in Indian politics. Although the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party political wing of the ‘family’ of Hindu nationalist organisations, does not win electoral majorities all over the country, Hindu nationalist ideas – what we term ‘banal Hindutva’ – are now firmly part of everyday politics. This chapter traces the growth since the early twentieth century of organizations and movements that reject liberalism and secular understandings of the nation, through to the establishment of political dominance by the BJP under Narendra Modi. Thanks largely to Modi’s inspiration, the BJP has effectively projected the idea of a ‘new India’ that is a land of hope and opportunity, downplaying the welfare state upon which most people’s well-being depends. Our examination of the relationship between Hindutva, demonstrative religiosity and incidents of communal violence, mainly against Muslims, finds that there are many local reasons for the occurrence of inter-community tensions that can give rise to violence but whether they do or not depends heavily upon how governments act. The chapter both opens and concludes with accounts of  majoritarian action under BJP governments since 2014, and argues that Narendra Modi’s regime may be described as an instance of authoritarian populism.

How might one conceptualize the international political dimensions of money and finance? As the world moves from a post-Cold War “unipolar moment” toward the greater uncertainty associated with multipolarity – or bipolarity/multipolarity – the zero-sum aspects of economic resources may take on heightened significance in national calculations. The paper proposes five national financial characteristics that sovereign governments sometimes wield as power capabilities: the country’s (1) position as an international creditor, (2) home financial market attractiveness, (3) currency strength, (4) international debtor presence, and (5) leverage in global financial governance. A new dataset on the global monetary and financial powers of states (GMFPS), covering 180 countries and 27 indicators from 1995 to 2013, constructs indices for four state financial power concepts, and also provides an updated overall material capabilities index. After profiling the US, Britain, Germany, Japan, and China, we suggest a recurring, although not inevitable, financial life cycle of major powers.

International cooperation on outer space security has fluctuated over the past decades, marked by periods of common endeavor and relative stability as well as times of destabilizing developments and rising tensions. The UN Group of Governmental Experts’ 2013 consensus report on Transparency and Confidence Building Measures, with its rich menu of measures and promised new levels of cooperative security conduct by states, was a diplomatic high-water mark. Regrettably, subsequent negative developments threaten to reverse the cooperative trend the report espoused. These developments include the introduction (by Russia and China) and rejection (by the US) of a revised draft treaty on the Prevention of Placement of Weapons in Outer Space (PPWT); the adoption by the UN General Assembly of a divisive resolution on “No First Placement” of space weapons; the failure of the EU to gain support for its proposed Code of Conduct; and escalating strategic tensions. This paper analyzes the reemergence of these “dark forces” as to their implication for multilateral diplomacy and suggests several remedial actions to preserve space security.