Globalization, Civil Conflict and the National Security State (Contemporary Security Studies)

This volume highlights the gap between the new security environment and the notion of state-centred national security favoured by Washington, showing how a Cold War phenomenon known as the national security state, in which defence and foreign policy interests essentially converge, remains largely intact.

The conventional wisdom since the suicide attacks of 9/11 is that the world has been transformed and, according to President Bush, "September 11 changed the strategic thinking" of the US. This book challenges these assumptions. Indeed, the Bush administration’s National Security strategy of 2002 has reinvigorated and even extended the idea of national security. Paradoxically, the renewed emphasis on a distinctly state-centred approach to security, including the War on Terror, has unfolded during an era of deepening globalization.

Drawing on the international expertise of fourteen specialists, the book examines four inter-related themes:

• the impact of globalization on the concept of security
• the strategic outlook of the world’s only superpower, the US
• the new conflicts that have come to characterize the post-Cold War era
• efforts to regulate the emerging patterns of conflict in the world.

Globalization and Conflict will be essential reading for students of strategic studies, security studies and international relations.

Robert G. Patman