Download or read book The Hydra the Strategic Paradox of Human Security in Mexico written by Zachary Martin and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-18 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper explores the social climate and circumstances in Mexico that have led to increased cartel activity over the past twenty years. Analysis of these circumstances shows that both Mexico and the United States have failed in their efforts to eradicate cartels and curb violent crime and illicit drug trafficking on both sides of the border. An examination of the Mexican administrations over two decades highlights the efforts and missteps the governments have made that contribute to the rising violent crime rates throughout the country. This paper also discusses potential solutions to those problems and the difficulties both countries face in implementing them

Download or read book The Hydra written by Zachary Martin and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cartels in Mexico produce significant levels of violence and criminality in Mexico through their illicit narcotics trade. The effects of cartel activity spill over into the United States through immigration issues and narcotics deaths. In 2006, the Mexican government applied a counternetwork decapitation strategy to eliminate cartel leadership and thereby reduce criminality in an attempt to ease pressure from both sides of the border. The US supported the Mexican strategy through the Mérida Initiative to build security capacity. However, from 2006 to 2018 homicide rates per 100,000 residents increased in Mexico by 248 percent, while illicit narcotics trafficking and indicators of corruption, extortion, kidnapping, and human trafficking rose. I have shown, using secondary source material and analytical and qualitative methods, the nature of the illicit-narcotics problem and explain why past strategies failed. The problem facing the US and Mexico consists of deficient human security fueled by an illicit narcotics supply-demand dynamic rooted in societal issues and economic underdevelopment. Cartels take advantage of this shortfall. Because the Mexican government misdiagnosed the threat, it applied incoherent and unproductive measures more suited for a Clausewitzian war paradigm strategy. Finally, I identify a paradox in the narcotics legalization argument that harbors significant challenges to successful implementation and holds the potential for transforming a human security problem into an insurgency."--Abstract.

Download or read book The Hydra written by Zachary W. Martin and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This paper examines why trafficking, corruption, and violence spillover effects associated with Mexican drug cartels worsened from 2006 to 2019 despite U.S. efforts to curb these problems by providing security assistance for the Government of Mexico (GoM). The paper accordingly addresses the viability and effectiveness of U.S. security assistance strategy. To assess U.S. security assistance to Mexico, the author develops and tests a novel theory - the Hydra Theory - that models the logics of cartel behavior, categorizes the types of strategies used to counter cartels, and predicts how the targeting of trafficking, corruption, violence, or any combination, will trigger changes in cartel behavior. This theory is applied to three phases of U.S. security assistance to Mexico between 2006 and 2019. The study finds that trafficking, corruption, and violence associated with Mexican drug cartels worsened between 2006 and 2019 despite U.S. security assistance because combined U.S. and GoM counter-trafficking efforts incentivized cartels to increase their use of violence and corruption practices. Neither U.S. security assistance nor GoM strategies increased the deterrence capacity of local and state law enforcement entities capable of preventing the subsequent rise in violence. U.S. programs and GoM initiatives also did not increase the capabilities of the Mexican government to accurately monitor for and consistently sanction the subsequent increase in bribe-taking amongst law enforcement. After the USG and the GoM had significantly disrupted the drug market by 2010, neither state increased counter-trafficking efforts to compensate for the subsequent rise in cartel drug production. Accordingly, U.S. security assistance programs bear some responsibility for the negative trends in cartel spillover effects today. This assessment has significant implications for U.S. security assistance strategy moving forward. The author concludes that implementing a combined two-vector strategy against trafficking and corruption is the best option the USG and the GoM can adopt today. The possession of law enforcement agents willing to enforce de jure policy increases the GoM’s strategy options by allowing it to implement a counter-trafficking or violence reduction strategy capable of significantly reducing cartel spillover."--Abstract.

Download or read book Can Human Rights Survive written by Conor Gearty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-18 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this set of three essays, originally presented as the 2005 Hamlyn Lectures, Conor Gearty considers whether human rights can survive the challenges of the war on terror, the revival of political religion, and the steady erosion of the world's natural resources. He also looks deeper than this to consider the fundamental question: How can we tell what human rights are? In his first essay, Gearty asks how the idea of human rights needs to be made to work in our age of relativism, uncertainty and anxiety. In the second, he assesses how the idea of human rights has coped with its incorporation in legal form in the UK Human Rights Act, arguing that the record is much better and more democratic than many human rights enthusiasts allow. In his final essay, Gearty confronts the challenges that may destroy the language of human rights for the generations that follow us.

Download or read book Strategic Appraisal written by Zalmay Khalilzad and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 1999-05-11 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advances in information technology have led us to rely on easy communication and readily available information--both in our personal lives and in the life of our nation. For the most part, we have rightly welcomed these changes. But information that is readily available is available to friend and foe alike; a system that relies on communication can become useless if its ability to communicate is interfered with or destroyed. Because this reliance is so general, attacks on the information infrastructure can have widespread effects, both for the military and for society. And such attacks can come from a variety of sources, some difficult or impossible to identify. This, the third volume in the Strategic Appraisal series, draws on the expertise of researchers from across RAND to explore the opportunities and vulnerabilities inherent in the increasing reliance on information technology, looking both at its usefulness to the warrior and the need to protect its usefulness for everyone. The Strategic Appraisal series is intended to review, for a broad audience, issues bearing on national security and defense planning.

Download or read book The Triple Helix written by Henry Etzkowitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-02-05 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Triple Helix of university-industry-government interactions is the key to innovation in increasingly knowledge-based societies. As the creation, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge moves from the periphery to the center of industrial production and governance, the concept of innovation, in product and process, is itself being transformed. In its place is a new sense of 'innovation in innovation' - the restructuring and enhancement of the organizational arrangements and incentives that foster innovation. This triple helix intersection of relatively independent institutional spheres generates hybrid organizations such as technology transfer offices in universities, firms, and government research labs and business and financial support institutions such as angel networks and venture capital for new technology-based firms that are increasingly developing around the world. The Triple Helix describes this new innovation model and assists students, researchers, and policymakers in addressing such questions as: How do we enhance the role of universities in regional economic and social development? How can governments, at all levels, encourage citizens to take an active role in promoting innovation in innovation and, conversely, how can citizens so encourage their governments? How can firms collaborate with each other and with universities and government to become more innovative? What are the key elements and challenges to reaching these goals?

Download or read book Understanding Global Security written by Peter Hough and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fully revised and updated, this fifth edition of Understanding Global Security considers the variety of ways in which peoples’ lives are threatened and / or secured in contemporary global politics. The traditional focus of security studies - war, deterrence and terrorism - are analyzed alongside non-military security issues such as famine, crime, disease, disasters, environmental degradation and human rights abuses to provide a comprehensive survey of how and why people are killed in the contemporary world. Key concepts of International Relations and globalization are defined and explained, prominent political thinkers and activists are profiled in short biographies and the human impact of the various security threats considered graphically illustrated in ‘top ten’ tables. Hence, this textbook introduces students to the full range of security issues in a clear and concise format that is easy to follow. Specific updates include: A refresh of the evolving theoretical literature on security including more analysis of feminist and post-colonial thought Key recent international political developments- such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan - are appraised and incorporated A new section on hybrid warfare is included in Chapter 2, misogynistic terror is profiled in Chapter 3, whilst gun-smuggling and cybercrime are considered in more depth in Chapter 10 Chapter 5 features analysis of the rise of ‘genocide diplomacy’ The rise of private legal challenges to governments for failing to implement commitments to the Paris 2015 Climate Change Accords is reviewed and analysed Greater evaluation of global governance, in the face of populist nationalist challenges to international cooperation, is offered User-friendly and easy to follow, this textbook is designed to make a complex subject accessible to all. Key features include: ‘Top ten tables’ highlighting the most destructive events or forms of death in those areas throughout history Boxed descriptions elaborating key concepts in the fields of security and International Relations ‘Biographical boxes’ of key individuals who have shaped security politics Further reading and websites at the end of each chapter guiding you towards classic texts and the most up-to-date information on the various topics Glossary of political terminology This highly acclaimed and popular academic text will continue to be essential reading for everyone interested in security.

Download or read book The Second Machine Age Work Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies written by Erik Brynjolfsson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-01-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The big stories -- The skills of the new machines : technology races ahead -- Moore's law and the second half of the chessboard -- The digitization of just about everything -- Innovation : declining or recombining? -- Artificial and human intelligence in the second machine age -- Computing bounty -- Beyond GDP -- The spread -- The biggest winners : stars and superstars -- Implications of the bounty and the spread -- Learning to race with machines : recommendations for individuals -- Policy recommendations -- Long-term recommendations -- Technology and the future (which is very different from "technology is the future").

Download or read book Unintended Consequences of Peacekeeping Operations written by Chiyuki Aoi and published by UNU. This book was released on 2007 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deployment of a large number of soldiers, police officers and civilian personnel inevitably has various effects on the host society and economy, not all of which are in keeping with the peacekeeping mandate and intent or are easily discernible prior to the intervention. This book is one of the first attempts to improve our understanding of unintended consequences of peacekeeping operations, by bringing together field experiences and academic analysis. The aim of the book is not to discredit peace operations but rather to improve the way in which such operations are planned and managed.

Download or read book Secession and Security written by Ahsan I. Butt and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Secession and Security, Ahsan I. Butt argues that states rather than separatists determine whether a secessionist struggle will be peaceful, violent, or genocidal. He investigates the strategies, ranging from negotiated concessions to large-scale repression, adopted by states in response to separatist movements. Variations in the external security environment, Butt argues, influenced the leaders of the Ottoman Empire to use peaceful concessions against Armenians in 1908 but escalated to genocide against the same community in 1915; caused Israel to reject a Palestinian state in the 1990s; and shaped peaceful splits in Czechoslovakia in 1993 and the Norway-Sweden union in 1905. Butt focuses on two main cases—Pakistani reactions to Bengali and Baloch demands for independence in the 1970s and India's responses to secessionist movements in Kashmir, Punjab, and Assam in the 1980s and 1990s. Butt's deep historical approach to his subject will appeal to policymakers and observers interested in the last five decades of geopolitics in South Asia, the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and ethno-national conflict, separatism, and nationalism more generally.

Download or read book Our Word is Our Weapon written by Subcomandante Marcos and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this landmark book, Seven Stories Press presents a powerful collection of literary, philosophical, and political writings of the masked Zapatista spokesperson, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. Introduced by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, and illustrated with beautiful black and white photographs, Our Word Is Our Weapon crystallizes "the passion of a rebel, the poetry of a movement, and the literary genius of indigenous Mexico." Marcos first captured world attention on January 1, 1994, when he and an indigenous guerrilla group calling themselves "Zapatistas" revolted against the Mexican government and seized key towns in Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas. In the six years that have passed since their uprising, Marcos has altered the course of Mexican politics and emerged an international symbol of grassroots movement-building, rebellion, and democracy. The prolific stream of poetic political writings, tales, and traditional myths that Marcos has penned since January 1, 1994 fill more than four volumes. Our Word Is Our Weapon presents the best of these writings, many of which have never been published before in English. Throughout this remarkable book we hear the uncompromising voice of indigenous communities living in resistance, expressing through manifestos and myths the universal human urge for dignity, democracy, and liberation. It is the voice of a people refusing to be forgotten the voice of Mexico in transition, the voice of a people struggling for democracy by using their word as their only weapon.

Download or read book Gore Capitalism written by Sayak Valencia and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of contemporary violence as the new commodity of today's hyper-consumerist stage of capitalism. “Death has become the most profitable business in existence.” —from Gore Capitalism Written by the Tijuana activist intellectual Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism is a crucial essay that posits a decolonial, feminist philosophical approach to the outbreak of violence in Mexico and, more broadly, across the global regions of the Third World. Valencia argues that violence itself has become a product within hyper-consumerist neoliberal capitalism, and that tortured and mutilated bodies have become commodities to be traded and utilized for profit in an age of impunity and governmental austerity. In a lucid and transgressive voice, Valencia unravels the workings of the politics of death in the context of contemporary networks of hyper-consumption, the ups and downs of capital markets, drug trafficking, narcopower, and the impunity of the neoliberal state. She looks at the global rise of authoritarian governments, the erosion of civil society, the increasing violence against women, the deterioration of human rights, and the transformation of certain cities and regions into depopulated, ghostly settings for war. She offers a trenchant critique of masculinity and gender constructions in Mexico, linking their misogynist force to the booming trade in violence. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to analyze the new landscapes of war. It provides novel categories that allow us to deconstruct what is happening, while proposing vital epistemological tools developed in the convulsive Third World border space of Tijuana.

Download or read book Drip Irrigation for Agriculture written by Jean-Philippe Venot and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Initially associated with hi-tech irrigated agriculture, drip irrigation is now being used by a much wider range of farmers in emerging and developing countries. This book documents the enthusiasm, spread and use of drip irrigation systems by smallholders but also some disappointments and disillusion faced in the global South. It explores and explains under which conditions it works, for whom and with what effects. The book deals with drip irrigation 'behind the scenes', showcasing what largely remain 'untold stories'. Most research on drip irrigation use plot-level studies to demonstrate the technology’s ability to save water or improve efficiencies and use a narrow and rather prescriptive engineering or economic language. They tend to be grounded in a firm belief in the technology and focus on the identification of ways to improve or better realize its potential. The technology also figures prominently in poverty alleviation or agricultural modernization narratives, figuring as a tool to help smallholders become more innovative, entrepreneurial and business minded. Instead of focusing on its potential, this book looks at drip irrigation-in-use, making sense of what it does from the perspectives of the farmers who use it, and of the development workers and agencies, policymakers, private companies, local craftsmen, engineers, extension agents or researchers who engage with it for a diversity of reasons and to realize a multiplicity of objectives. While anchored in a sound engineering understanding of the design and operating principles of the technology, the book extends the analysis beyond engineering and hydraulics to understand drip irrigation as a sociotechnical phenomenon that not only changes the way water is supplied to crops but also transforms agricultural farming systems and even how society is organized. The book provides field evidence from a diversity of interdisciplinary case studies in sub-Saharan Africa, the Mediterranean, Latin America, and South Asia, thus revealing some of the untold stories of drip irrigation.

Download or read book Army Leadership and the Profession ADP 6 22 written by Headquarters Department of the Army and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2019-10-09 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ADP 6-22 describes enduring concepts of leadership through the core competencies and attributes required of leaders of all cohorts and all organizations, regardless of mission or setting. These principles reflect decades of experience and validated scientific knowledge.An ideal Army leader serves as a role model through strong intellect, physical presence, professional competence, and moral character. An Army leader is able and willing to act decisively, within superior leaders' intent and purpose, and in the organization's best interests. Army leaders recognize that organizations, built on mutual trust and confidence, accomplish missions. Every member of the Army, military or civilian, is part of a team and functions in the role of leader and subordinate. Being a good subordinate is part of being an effective leader. Leaders do not just lead subordinates-they also lead other leaders. Leaders are not limited to just those designated by position, rank, or authority.

Download or read book Blindsight written by Peter Watts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book Antifragile written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. Praise for Antifragile “Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.”—The Economist “A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.”—Newsweek

Download or read book The Military and the State in Latin America written by Alain Rouquié and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: