York Centre for International and Security Studies

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https://hdl.handle.net/10315/1302

The York Centre for International and Security Studies pursues a triple mandate of research, graduate teaching, and outreach. We undertake critical and theoretically-informed research that is guided by: a) a concern with the ethical-political dimensions of international security policies; and b) the assumption that the pursuit of security, defence, peace, and social justice requires the study of transnational and global forces in relation to local contexts and a range of social groups. The Centre, a research unit of York University, works and partners with academics, policymakers, practitioners, and activists across Canada and around the world. Our members include York faculty and graduate students, and visiting scholars from inside and outside Canada.

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 83

Open Access
America's Army Game and the Production of War
(YCISS, 2004-03) Kumar, Abhinava
This paper will take an approach where, rather than looking to individuals and behaviour, it will focus on the production of a discourse of war through a particular videogame, America’s Army: Operations (AA:O),3 to contemplate and complicate some of the ways in which war is made possible. My writing is oriented by a commitment to International Relations, specifically its subset Security Studies and as such, this paper is animated by a concern with security. Security has traditionally been conceived of as the protection of states from objective threats which originate from the outside of state borders. In light of much critical scholarship, punctuated by the events of September 11, this notion of security has become troubled. This paper strives to unsettle the notion that security can be thought and written outside of a discussion of representation.
Open Access
Amplifying the Social Dimensions of Security
(YCISS, 1993-11) Workman, Thom
Initially, a group of scholars began to systematically redefine the concept of security in a manner that directed attention towards the limited opportunity that "military" responses offered to "security" problems. Their primary activity was to redefine security in terms of an expanded idea to "threat," with the implication of these efforts necessarily questioning the appropriateness of military solutions - a politically important position given the thrust of Reaganism at that time. With the emergence of a clear post-positivist trend within IR by the late 1980s, however, a number of scholars began to address redefinitional efforts along axiological, conceptual and empirical grounds. These latter efforts - herein identified as an Alternative school - yielded important intellectual sanction for political movements, including women's organizations, aboriginal peoples, labour groups, the urban poor and the ecological movement, that often broach ideas of security within the context of a broader transformative agenda. International relations scholarship is arriving at the point, that is, where the breadth of intellectual activity regarding security reflects its polypolitical imbrications at the global and local levels. An exposition of the full scope of this novel critical line is the primary purpose of this paper.
Open Access
The Appearance of War in Discourse: An Analysis of the Neoconservative Movement
(YCISS, 2006-10) Ayyash, Mark
Much has been written on the US policy of invading Iraq. Some of these accounts have focused on the neoconservative movement, and powerful criticisms have been directed towards it. This study adds to this literature by analyzing the neoconservative discourse preceding the invasion. The specificity of this analysis lies in how it resists the temptation to launch an attack towards this discourse at every corner. While neoconservative discourse is often historically baseless, morally repugnant, or academically reprehensible, the principal aim here is to analyze the discourse on its own terms, so as to examine the way in which war appeared within it. This very appearance gives us a view of the paradoxical question that makes this discourse theoretically viable at the same time that it slowly destroys it.
Open Access
Between Scylla and Charybdis: The Ethical and Moral Dilemmas of Humanitarian Action
(YCISS, 2005-01) Sajed, Alina
The topic of this paper was inspired by Fiona Terry’s book Condemned to Repeat?, in which she illustrates the moral paradoxes confronted by humanitarian agencies in their work. I intend to show how, in their intention to ‘do no harm,’ humanitarian organizations ‘successfully’ avoid facing the consequences of their own hubris. By purporting that their work is and should be unambiguously apolitical, they embrace as their core principle the minimalist aim of saving lives. These agencies cause a prolongation of the suffering they are trying to alleviate, as their material resources end up fueling local or regional conflicts. I think it is most appropriate at this point, to mention that my purpose in exposing the inherent dilemmas of humanitarian action is not to belittle its positive effects or the dedication of its workers. Indeed it is most admirable that there are people whose calling is to alleviate suffering, and that deprive themselves of all comfort and physical security so that they can be in the midst of situations, in which most of us would not dare going. But this does not make humanitarian action, indeed humanitarianism itself, immune to criticism. I believe that, for these very reasons, it is crucial to discuss how it is possible that an enterprise geared towards saving lives ends up prolonging and even creating suffering and tragedy. My aim is to go beyond a mere description of these tragic consequences, although practical examples will be used to illustrate the argument of this paper. However, my primary goal is to expose the ethical and moral underpinnings of this dilemma. The questions that I am trying to answer are: What are the moral grounds on which the very concept of humanitarianism is founded? What is the prevalent mentality of aid workers ‘in the field’? How is it possible that organizations that have as their self-professed aim to alleviate suffering end up aggravating it? Are there any solutions to this dilemma?
Open Access
Beyond Dichotomies: A Reflexive Engagement of Critical Reflexivity
(YCISS, 2005-05) Hendershot, Chris
The purpose of the following paper is to critically engage Mark Neufeld’s claim, “it is only by exposing the limitations of positivism that a space can be created for alternative forms of theorizing about international politics.” My engagement of this statement involves three related assertions. Firstly, I contend that one can construct an effective argument that reaffirms – and indeed is inflected with – postpositivist assertions that exposing the ‘limitations of positivism’ will create the necessary space for ‘alternative forms of theorizing’. However, I also argue that Neufeld’s construction of theoretical reflexivity explicitly/implicitly works to (re)ontologize a dichotomous relationship between positivist and post-positivist approaches to International Relations. Hence, I challenge the potential to which Neufeld’s conceptions can work as space clearing exercises so long as such exercises proceed through a dichotomized framing process.
Open Access
Biopolitical Strategies of Security: Considerations on Canada’s New National Security Policy
(YCISS, 2003-03) Bell, Colleen
This paper examines Canada’s first national security policy in relation to Foucault’s postulation that modern society is marked by the emergence of biopower, a new mechanism of power that is principally concerned with the management of biological life. Alongside disciplinary power, which focuses on individual members of a society, arose ‘biopolitics,’ which conceives of and focuses on the life of populations. This power focused on life has meant that the problem of how best to govern has not only been posed as effecting ultimate dominion over a sovereign territory, but increasingly as one of yielding productive services from the citizenry. According to Foucault, ‘reason of state’ is no longer confined to the will of the prince, but is “government in accordance with the state’s strength,” that includes the ‘ends-means’ instrumental rationality associated with state survival in a competitive international system conjoined with the observance of what is governed, and how government might improve or enhance the qualities of a population. This study is invested in examining how state-building projects of national security, such as Canada’s national security policy, are mobilized through discourses and administrative practices that take elusive risks to the freedom, health, and safety of the population as an opportunity for action, and are made possible through a generalized expansion of surveillance. This reading of the new security policy suggests that the biopolitical character of security has greatly reduced the traditionally accepted distinctions between the state as a military and legitimated actor and the state as a service providing, regulatory agency for the management of the citizenry. In the context of national security, biopolitics, I suggest, has left unscathed a rationalization of the state as a direct authority, while also fostering decentralized mechanisms of rule that govern ‘at a distance.’
Open Access
Blackened Faces and Ticker-Tape Parades: Situating the Leviathan in Lakota and Euroamerican Conceptions of War
(YCISS, 1998-10) Beier, Marshall
It is in seeking to draw out the essential functional differences between the blackened faces of the Lakota warriors and the ticker-tape parades of the Euroamerican ones that we encounter some important implications for security studies. As R.B.J. Walker has observed, what is at stake for adherents to mainstream theoretical approaches to security studies is, fundamentally, “the constitutive account of the political that has made the prevailing accounts of security seem so plausible.” Imperiled in any contestation of the appropriateness of the state as the referent object of security, then, are deeply-held commitments with regard to the possibilities of political order itself — possibilities which are presumed to begin and end with the state. Thus, Michael C. Williams and Keith Krause propose that this is “perhaps the central reason why the orthodoxy of security studies has been so resistant to taking account of current transformative trends (usually by denying their relevance) that seem to challenge its analytical assumptions.” If what is most jealously guarded in traditional conceptions of security is, as Williams and Krause put it, “not simply a claim about the historical centrality of the state” but “a particular understanding about how the state resolves the problem of political order itself,” then an array of traditional Native North American knowledges and lifeways are doubly at odds with the orthodoxy of security studies: not only do they (re)present alternative — that is, non-state — possibilities of political order, but the denials of such possibilities which persist in mainstream constructions of their collective identity have been essential to state-building in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, many of the same assumptions which underpin the orthodoxy of security studies and its more fundamental political commitments may be found at the root of traditional anthropological and historiographical claims about Native North Americans which cast their pre-Columbian condition in terms of a Hobbesian state of nature. It is therefore instructive to consider some of these accounts and to assess both the integrity of the evidence upon which they rest and the extent to which they can or cannot be reconciled with the traditional worldviews and lifeways of the peoples to which they refer. Finally, the insights garnered from this exercise will be brought to bear in support of the proposition that the mainstream theoretical approaches to security studies are themselves implicated in the ongoing maintenance and reproduction of advanced colonialism.
Open Access
“Blood Looks Very Red on the Colour Television Screen”: The Evolution of Representing Modern War in America
(YCISS, 2005-03) Saso, Emily
This paper will explore the interests that are produced and supported by the particular frames that have been constructed in Iraq and conclude with an understanding that whatever extent the US Administration may choose to involve the American mainstream broadcast media in the future, in order to preserve the hegemonic status quo dominated by the United States, the dominant narrative frame of war will likely be constructed, censored, and controlled by the US military. After the last page is turned, I hope to have shed some light on the carefully planned media-military relationship, how it supports the frames for war, and what the consequences of this relationship are, not only for the media or the military, but for the innocent victims left out of the headlines.
Open Access
Broadening the Ban: Limitations of Agency, Intentionality, and Legitimacy in the Ottawa Convention
(YCISS, 2001-10) Allen Dauphinée, Elizabeth
This paper aims to contribute to a critical understanding of the implications of the Ottawa Convention through an assessment of the ways in which agency, intentionality, and legitimacy are woven into the discourse surrounding the ban treaty. It is hoped that through a problematisation of the discursive and conceptual limitations of the Ottawa Convention, the agenda and targets of the ban might at the very least be broadened to include other categories of weapons that perform and devastate in the same ways as AP landmines. At best, it is hoped that this paper will stimulate critical thinking about militarisation and state-centric security practices more generally, and will call into question those particular underlying norms that give rise to discursive constructions of states and state interests, militaries, and weapons usage as unproblematically ‘necessary.’
Open Access
Canada and Putin's Russia: A Canadian View with a Commentary from Moscow
(YCISS, 2001-10) Leahy, Anne; Arbatova, Nadia Alexandrova
This lecture is about Vladimir Putin's Russia and the policy of its Western partners, in particular of Canada. This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of official relations between our countries when the tsar's envoy Nicolas Struve arrived in Montreal in 1900 to set up the first Russian consulate in Canada. Russia today remains a nuclear power, permanent member of the UN Security council, rich in human capital and natural resources. Canada and its Western partners have politically and financially supported Russia’s transformation ever since Mikhail Gorbachov began the process in earnest. Since then, the challenge facing Boris Yeltsin’s successor has been sharpened by the high social cost of initial reforms and the evolving international context. Vladimir Putin has publicly committed to stay the course of democratic development. Canada wishes to build on what has been achieved so far and play its part in helping Russia stay the course.
Open Access
Completing Europe's Internal Market: Implications for Canadian Policy
(YCISS, 1990-03) Mutimer, David
The 1992 project in Europe promises to be one of the most significant developments of the contemporary international political economy, and Canadians need to be ready to meet the challenges and opportunities it presents. The focus of the present paper is to consider these challenges and Canada's response from the perspective of government trade policy. While obviously industry will need to consider the specific effects of the 1992 project, it is for the government to set the broad goals for the Canadian economy in light of a changed international environment. This paper's object is to examine, first of all, the recent patterns of the trading relations between Canada and the EC, and the current trade policy of the Canadian government, and thus the expectations Canada has for the future of this trading relationship. Having considered the context of the trading relationship, the project to complete the internal market by 1992 will be examined. The paper will then consider the expectations and the likely results of the programme, and how these results will influence Canada's position. Finally, a set of conclusions will be drawn from this analysis for the conduct of Canadian trade in the face of 1992.
Open Access
Cooperation in Contention: The Evolution of ASEAN Norms
(YCISS, 2007-01) Poole, Avery
This paper is motivated by several questions: what is the impact of recent challenges on ASEAN’s ‘experiment’ in regional cooperation? Does the Association represent a vehicle for effective cooperation, or are its declared aims merely rhetorical? More specifically, to what extent do member states identify with each other and regard security as interdependent? In exploring these questions, this paper demonstrates the ongoing evolution of ASEAN norms. Analyses of the Association’s development should recognize the dynamic nature of its principles and practices, as member state behaviour responds to changing circumstances.
Open Access
Critical Theory and Security Studies
(YCISS, 1996-02) Krause, Keith
Security studies has been among the last bastions of neorealist orthodoxy in International Relations to accept critical, or even theoretically-sophisticated, challenges to its problematic. Recent polemical exchanges in the security studies literature have, however, at least linked the term "critical theory" with security studies, and although they do not necessarily advance the debate, they at least raise the question: what is a critical approach to security studies? My goal in this paper is not to invoke a new orthodoxy of "critical security studies" or to participate in polemical recriminations, but to illustrate what a critical engagement with issues and questions that have been taken as the subject matter of security studies involves. I do this in several steps: (a) a review of the (brief) debate in security studies concerning the contributions of "critical" scholarship; (b) a presentation of the intellectual "foundations" of critical approaches to International Relations; (c) an overview of current research within "critical security studies" that illustrates its ability to generate a challenging and productive research agenda; and (d) a discussion of the intellectual and disciplining power of mainstream security scholarship, and the difficulties this poses for critical challenges. What I will not do is present a critique of traditional research and theory in security studies, except to highlight some of the conclusions of this critique. Since one of the main accusations levelled against critical theory (at least in International Relations) is that it cannot get "beyond critique," I intend to demonstrate that one can find lurking in the interstices of the discipline a wide range of critical scholarship and research that is "about" security (and its core subject matter), but which its authors, or the discipline, refuses to label as such. Simply bringing together these perspectives makes the challenges to orthodoxy more clear, and signals that critical approaches to security studies are more than a passing fad or the idiosyncratic obsession of a few scholars.
Open Access
Democracy Building in Georgia: The Case for the Ottawa Convention
(YCISS, 2001-12) Vigeant, Louise
Georgia would seem to present a particularly difficult case for the universal adoption of the Ottawa Convention. The focus of this paper will be to provide a specific strategy to encourage Georgia’s signing of the Treaty. The key to convincing Georgia to participate in the worldwide movement, is to focus on the Treaty’s utility as a mechanism for democracy-building. The country has shown an intense interest in being recognised as a democracy. Reinterpreting the Treaty as a step towards this goal may provide the needed impetus to have the Georgian government finally sign the document. I will use a proceduralist interpretation of the role of law in a nation to buttress my claim that signing the Ottawa Convention shows not only a commitment to human rights, but also to democracy.
Open Access
Democratic Peace Theory as Practice: (Re)Reading the Significance of Liberal Representations of War and Peace
(YCISS, 2003-03) Grayson, Kyle
Those in academia who have presented compelling evidence of the interactions between the Iroquois Confederacy and the founders of the American Constitution which plausibly points to the impact of the former on the latter, have been pilloried by their colleagues. While there seems to be no dispute within academia that the Iroquois political system embodied (and continues to embody) many characteristics that we might associate with liberal democracy (e.g., political representation, gender equality, individual freedoms), charges are still made that claims about the influence of the Iroquois on the American political system are unscholarly, without rigour, dogmatic, lacking in ‘objectivity’, and a practice of ‘myth-making’.The key question here is what does this have to do with international relations? The answer in part, is given that liberal democracy and the liberal democratic political system are firmly entrenched in the American national psyche, any suggestion that they are not wholly an ‘American’ (or at least ‘Western’) product is tantamount to a full scale attack on US national identity and the ontological presuppositions that form its foundations. This is particularly acute when Native Americans are involved, for they have traditionally been seen as the uncivilized and savage ‘other’ on the North American continent. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate that far from being just window-dressing to (geo)strategic interests as argued by realists, or the ultimate guarantor of peace as argued by democratic peace adherents, the American (and Western) conception of liberal democracy creates the binaries necessary for the war-making practices of the United States and other like minded allies such as Canada.
Open Access
The Demystification of Global Finance: A Feminist Interpretation
(YCISS, 1997-03) Mayhall, Stacey L.
There is a need for feminist work to explore the gendered processes and the gendered effects of global finance and global restructuring that is situated at the intersection of IPE, economics, and politics. In order to examine the theory, meta-theory, and practise of global finance through a gender-sensitive lens, I situate my research within a broader feminist project. With a theoretical framework informed particularly by current feminist sociological, post-colonial, critical economic, structural adjustment, and development literature, as well as mainstream political economy literature, I will begin to address the multi-levelled social, political, and economic inter-connections of restructuring processes. These processes and effects come to light, in part, through an examination of the discourse created by economics, IPE, and global finance. As well, utilising a small set of practises associated with global finance, I examine the links between feminist macro-economic policy literature and the operations of finance on a global scale, and conclude by suggesting some potential directions for future research that might promote fresh thinking about IPE and global finance, its discourse, the centrality of ‘the market,’ and the increasingly complex social and political relationship between production and reproduction.
Open Access
The Discourse of Civilization in the Works of Russia’s New Eurasianists: Lev Gumilev and Alexander Panarin
(YCISS, 2007-02) Matern, Frederick
This paper does not intend to be an exercise in prognosis. Nor will I try to analyse Russia in an international relations context. Nevertheless, I want to point out that if the Russian thinkers who have theorized Russia’s place in the world have been labelled “messianic” time and time again in the Occidental literature, it may be possible to forgive them. Keeping the country’s geographical and historical circumstances in mind, I will undertake to study what might be considered one of the most recent branches of Russian intellectual discourse, drawing on the ideas of the Eurasianists, by intellectuals known in the literature as the “New” Eurasianists or “Neoeurasianists.” The aim of this paper is to identify what writing is representative of Neoeurasianist thought, to distinguish Neoeurasianism both from its historical antecedents (particularly the writers whom I will term the “classical” Eurasianists, or simply “Eurasianists”) and some other modern, nationalist and conservative trends in Russian thought that many Western writers have frequently confused it with over the last ten years, and, most importantly, to analyse some of the texts of the Neoeurasianists to attempt to get a fix on what this school of thought represents, if it can indeed be termed a “school”.
Open Access
Discourses of War: Security and the Case of Yugoslavia
(YCISS, 1994-12) Crawford, Beverly; Lipschutz, Ronnie D.
The agonizing war in the former Yugoslavia, the interminable parlays about what to do, the innumerable threats made and peace plans offered, retracted and made again have all served to highlight the process by which Western decision-making elites have tried to redefine their own, and their countries', security in the post-cold war world. To the question: "What is to be done in Bosnia?" they have answered: "Almost nothing." To the question: "Why?" they have answered: "Because it does not threaten us." And, so, almost nothing has happened. In this paper, we argue that this policy response is directly related to conceptions of "security" and "threats" that have structured the debate on the causes of the war as well as its potential consequences. In turn, widespread acceptance of the dominant view of those causes has justified a policy of relative inaction, in the process virtually precluding future actions designed to prevent such carnage from becoming an accepted feature of global politics.
Open Access
Diverging Paths, Diverging Outcomes: A Comparative Analysis of Post-Communist Transition in the Successor States of Yugoslavia
(YCISS, 2007-02) Vasilevski, Steven
The purpose of this investigation is to identify which republics of the former Yugoslavia have experienced the most successful transitions from economic and political communism to free markets and democracy, and why. To this end, the paper is divided into three main sections. Section One offers some background information on Socialist Yugoslavia from its inception to its dissolution, followed by various data indicating where each of its six successor states currently find themselves on the road to democratic consolidation and market capitalism. The crux of this comparative analysis, Part Two proceeds by isolating the most important factors influencing post-communist transition in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, namely (1) problems of nationhood and “stateness,” (2) the nature of pretransition economies and (3) external actors. The third and final section of this paper reiterates the theoretical significance of the former Yugoslavia to the transition literature, concluding with some doubt as to whether Western-style democracy and free markets can bring a meaningful and lasting peace to the former Yugoslavia.
Open Access
Division and Democracy: Bosnia's Post-Dayton Elections
(YCISS, 1999-09) Donais, Timothy
This paper will examine the three rounds of country-wide elections that have taken place in Bosnia in the first three years of Bosnia’s post-Dayton existence. It will suggest that given the poisoned political climate, as well as the absence of fundamental democratic institutions such as a free press and a dynamic civil society, it was entirely predictable that the real victors of Bosnia’s post-war democratic experiment would be the nationalists of all three sides. This result is also in large part the product of the flawed compromise at the heart of the Dayton peace agreement, which left the central issue of the Bosnian conflict unresolved, thereby guaranteeing that the central issues over which the war was fought would continue to be played out at the level of the ballot box.

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