... ethnicide and stop systematic discrimination that had long been perpetrated against them by the Saleh government. And now to disappoint all those who like to force black-and-white scenarios and ‘good guy hats’ and ‘bad guy hats’ into foreign affairs: BOTH sides were right in their descriptions. The Houthi movement was begun and initially run by a radical Shia cleric. Its vision of Yemeni government is one that stays true to its own religious doctrine. The Saleh government was indeed ...
New sanctions were levied against Russia on July 16th by both the United States and the European Union. America has taken the lead in explaining the sanctions, claiming continued unrest in Eastern Ukraine is primarily because of tacit Russian support behind-the-scenes. This new round is a bit broader than the original sanctions from a few months back that tried a new tactic of strategically targeting individuals. Basically it was one of the first examples of a state trying to make Putin’s personal...
Thirteen years after Sept. 11, 2001 the United States still rightly prioritizes the development of new cadres for the intelligence community. This emphasis is not just logical because of the continued threat of terrorism but also makes sense when considering demographics: the oncoming retirement of the baby boom generation requires that new talent take its place. Developing that new talent, however, has not been as easy as US officials wish. There are at least three problems plaguing both the academic...
There seems to be a strong divergence in American governmental perception behind Chinese and Russian command of cyberspace and their general cyber interaction with state authority. On the one hand, there is the assumption that this is a natural manifestation of the growing desire on the part of Russia and China to achieve global superpower status. On the other hand, there are the counter-arguments that emphasize China's and Russia’s own perception of inability to operate effectively...
The Intelligence Community, regardless of regime type, has famously always tried to co-opt and ultimately adopt advancements and evolutions in technology, especially in terms of media. Newspapers, radio, and television have long been appropriated in order to influence, massage, and outright manipulate messages and events important to the national interest. Often the question is not so much whether a country’s intelligence community engages in such activity but rather how explicit and open will...
If you spend some time listening to reputable news shows all across the West you will start to notice several recurring ‘interpretations’ that explain all things Russian and Vladimir Putin. Rather than being enlightening about this complex country and perhaps even more complex leader, a series of increasingly incredulous ‘pop-psychology-analyses’ emerge instead. What follows are just five of the most commonly touted, with subsequent breakdowns for those who wish to read more...
Ecological dilemmas are moving beyond the realm of local environmental, health and human population studies to a more dangerous transnational aspect of globalization – intelligence operations. It is in opening up an interaction between environmental studies’ liberal domain and intelligence studies’ realist domain, projecting onto geopolitics, that ‘green security’ morphs into ‘ECOINT.’ While issues of water, energy, climate change, pollution, and deforestation...
