Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific

This book contributes to the construction of an integrated analysis of Brazilian foreign policy by focusing on the country's insertion into both the regional and global system over the roughly twenty-five years through to the end of Dilma's first term as president in 2014. An attempt is made to order the discussion through exploration of a series of themes, which are further broken down into key component parts. The first section presents the context, with chapters on institutional structures and the tactical behaviours exhibited by the country's diplomacy, which will be used to guide the analysis in subsequent chapters. The second focuses on issues, taking in trade policies, the rise of Brazilian foreign direct investment, security policy and multilateralism. Key relationships are covered in the final section, encompassing Latin America, the Global South, the US and China. A central contradiction is the clear sense that Brazilian foreign policy makers want to position their country as leader, but are almost pathologically averse to explicitly stating this role or accepting the implicit responsibilities. The recurrent theme is the rising confusion about what Brazil's international identity is, what it should be, and what this means Brazil can and should do. A repeated point made is that foreign policy is an important and often overloooked aspect of domestic policies. The Dilma presidency does hold an important place in the analytical narrative of this book, particularly with respect to the chapters on trade, Brazil Inc., security policy and bilateral relations with the US and China.

Constructing cybersecurity adopts a constructivist approach to cybersecurity and problematises the state of contemporary knowledge within this field. Setting out by providing a concise overview of such knowledge, this book subsequently adopts Foucauldian positions on power and security to highlight assumptions and limitations found therein. What follows is a detailed analysis of the discourse produced by various internet security companies, demonstrating the important role that these security professionals play constituting and entrenching this knowledge by virtue of their specific epistemic authority. As a relatively new source within a broader security dispositif, these security professionals have created relationships of mutual recognition and benefit with traditional political and security professionals. The book argues that one important product of these relationships is the continued centrality of the state within issues of cybersecurity and the extension of a strategy of neoliberal governance.

This book is a critical study of John Burton's work, which outlines an alternative framework for the study of international conflict, and re-examines conflict resolution. It argues that culture has a constitutive role in international conflict and conflict resolution. The book provides an overview of the mediation literature in order to locate problem-solving workshop conflict resolution within the context of peaceful third-party involvement. It analyses human needs thinking and examines the similarities between it and Burton's thinking. The book also examines the logic of Burton's argument by means of metaphor analysis, by analysing the metaphors which can be found in his human needs theory. It studies further Burton's views of action and rationality, and moves into phenomenology and social constructionism. The book takes as its starting-point a totalist theory of international conflict resolution, namely Burton's sociobiologically-oriented conflict theory, and demonstrates the logic of argument and the denial of culture underlying his problem-solving theory. It explains the dimensions of the social world in order to lay a foundation for the study of conflict and conflict resolution from the social constructionist perspective. The book presents a phenomenological understanding of conflict and problem-solving conflict resolution. Finally, it argues that problem-solving workshop conflict resolution can be best understood as an attempt to find a shared reality between the parties in conflict.