The National Security Sublime

The National Security Sublime PDF Author: Matthew Potolsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429558988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Why do recent depictions of government secrecy and surveillance so often use images suggesting massive size and scale: gigantic warehouses, remote black sites, numberless security cameras? Drawing on post-War American art, film, television, and fiction, Matthew Potolsky argues that the aesthetic of the sublime provides a privileged window into the nature of modern intelligence, a way of describing the curiously open secret of covert operations. The book tracks the development of the national security sublime from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and places it in a long history of efforts by artists and writers to represent political secrecy.

The National Security Sublime

The National Security Sublime PDF Author: Matthew Potolsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429558988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book

Book Description
Why do recent depictions of government secrecy and surveillance so often use images suggesting massive size and scale: gigantic warehouses, remote black sites, numberless security cameras? Drawing on post-War American art, film, television, and fiction, Matthew Potolsky argues that the aesthetic of the sublime provides a privileged window into the nature of modern intelligence, a way of describing the curiously open secret of covert operations. The book tracks the development of the national security sublime from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and places it in a long history of efforts by artists and writers to represent political secrecy.

National Security

National Security PDF Author: Donald M. Snow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317248317
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
This text analyzes the history, evolution, and processes of national security policies. It examines national security from two fundamental fault lines--the end of the Cold War and the evolution of contemporary terrorism, dating from the 9/11 terrorist attacks and tracing their path up to the Islamic State (ISIS) and beyond. The book considers how the resulting era of globalization and geopolitics guides policy. Placing these trends in conceptual and historical context and following them through military, semi-military, and non-military concerns, National Security treats its subject as a nuanced and subtle phenomenon that encompasses everything from the global to the individual with the nation at its core. New to the Sixth Edition Fully updated with expanded coverage of ISIS, the "new cool war" with Russia, cybersecurity challenges, natural resource wars and development, negotiations with Iran, border threats, and much more. Includes a completely new chapter on "lethal landscapes" such as developing world international conflicts in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; the "siren song" of the Islamic State; and the dilemmas of guns, butter, and boots on the ground. Shifts the focus from globalization to a more widely-ranging look at security, from the individual level to the regional to the global.

Creating the National Security State

Creating the National Security State PDF Author: Douglas Stuart
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069115547X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
For the last sixty years, American foreign and defense policymaking has been dominated by a network of institutions created by one piece of legislation--the 1947 National Security Act. This is the definitive study of the intense political and bureaucratic struggles that surrounded the passage and initial implementation of the law. Focusing on the critical years from 1937 to 1960, Douglas Stuart shows how disputes over the lessons of Pearl Harbor and World War II informed the debates that culminated in the legislation, and how the new national security agencies were subsequently transformed by battles over missions, budgets, and influence during the early cold war. Stuart provides an in-depth account of the fight over Truman's plan for unification of the armed services, demonstrating how this dispute colored debates about institutional reform. He traces the rise of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the transformation of the CIA, and the institutionalization of the National Security Council. He also illustrates how the development of this network of national security institutions resulted in the progressive marginalization of the State Department. Stuart concludes with some insights that will be of value to anyone interested in the current debate over institutional reform.

US National Security Reform

US National Security Reform PDF Author: Heidi Brockmann Demarest
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781351171564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This collection of essays considers the evolution of American institutions and processes for forming and implementing US national security policy, and offers diverse policy prescriptions for reform to confront an evolving and uncertain security environment. Twelve renowned scholars and practitioners of US national security policy take up the question of whether the national security institutions we have are the ones we need to confront an uncertain future. Topics include a characterization of future threats to national security, organizational structure and leadership of national security bureaucracies, the role of the US Congress in national security policy making and oversight, and the importance of strategic planning within the national security enterprise. The book concludes with concrete recommendations for policy makers, most of which can be accomplished under the existing and enduring National Security Act. This book will be of much interest to students of US national security, US foreign policy, Cold War studies, public policy and Internationl Relations in general.

National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives

National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives PDF Author: Donald E. Pease
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822314929
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
National narratives create imaginary relations within imagined communities called national peoples. But in the American narrative, alongside the nexus of belonging established for the national community, the national narrative has represented other peoples (women, blacks, "foreigners", the homeless) from whom the property of nationness has been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of their norms. Dismantling this opposition has become the task of post-national (Post-Americanist) narratives, bent on changing the assumptions that found the "national identity." This volume, originally published as a special issue of bounrary 2, focuses on the process of assembling and dismantling the American national narrative(s), sketching its inception and demolition. The contributors examine various cultural, political, and historical sources--colonial literature, mass movements, epidemics of disease, mass spectacle, transnational corporations, super-weapons, popular magazines, literary texts--out of which this narrative was constructed, and propose different understandings of nationality and identity following in its wake. Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Lauren Berlant, Robert J. Corber, Elizabeth Freeman, Kathryn V. Lingberg, Jack Matthews, Alan Nadel, Patrick O'Donnell, Daniel O'Hara, Donald E. Pease, Ross Posnock, John Carlos Rowe, Rob Wilson

State Secrecy and Security

State Secrecy and Security PDF Author: William Walters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351977644
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
In State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary, William Walters calls for secrecy to be given a more central place in critical security studies and elevated to become a core concept when theorising power in liberal democracies. Through investigations into such themes as the mobility of cryptographic secrets, the power of public inquiries, the connection between secrecy and place-making, and the aesthetics of secrecy within immigration enforcement, Walters challenges commonplace understandings of the covert and develops new concepts, methods and themes for secrecy and security research. Walters identifies the covert imaginary as both a limit on our ability to think politics differently and a ground to develop a richer understanding of power. State Secrecy and Security offers readers a set of thinking tools to better understand the strange powers that hiding, revealing, lying, confessing, professing ignorance and many other operations of secrecy put in motion. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of security, secrecy and politics more broadly.

American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability

American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability PDF Author: Russ Castronovo
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691249857
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
An incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacy For more than three centuries, Americans have pursued strategies of security that routinely make them feel vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure. American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability probes this paradox by examining American attachments to the terror of the sublime, the fear of uncertainty, and the anxieties produced by unending racial threat. Challenging conventional approaches that leave questions of security to policy experts, Russ Castronovo turns to literature, philosophy, and political theory to show how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. His incisive critique ranges from frontier violence and white racial anxiety to insurgent Black print culture and other forms of early American terror, uncovering the hidden logic of insecurity that structures modern approaches to national defense, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy. Drawing on examples from fiction, journalism, tracts, and pamphlets, Castronovo uncovers the deep affective attachments that Americans have had since the founding to the sources of fear and insecurity that make them feel unsafe. Timely and urgent, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability sheds critical light on how and why the fundamental political desire for security promotes unease alongside assurance and fixates on risk and danger while clamoring for safety.

Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature

Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature PDF Author: Kelly Ross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192669028
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation. Examining the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, the book shows how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close readings of understudied fugitive slave narratives published in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, Ross analyzes the different ways white and black authors take up these issues in their writing—from calming white fears of enslaved rebellion to abolishing slavery—and demonstrates how literary representations ultimately destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below. In so doing, the book demonstrates the importance of race to surveillance studies and claims a greater role for the impact of surveillance on literary expression in the US during the era of slavery.

Crisis Vision

Crisis Vision PDF Author: Torin Monahan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478023384
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores how artists confront the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance. He focuses on artists ranging from Kai Wiedenhöfer, Paolo Cirio, and Hank Willis Thomas to Claudia Rankine and Dread Scott, who engage with what he calls crisis vision—the regimes of racializing surveillance that position black and brown bodies as targets for police and state violence. Many artists, Monahan contends, remain invested in frameworks that privilege transparency, universality, and individual responsibility in ways that often occlude racial difference. Other artists, however, disrupt crisis vision by confronting white supremacy and destabilizing hierarchies through the performance of opacity. Whether fostering a recognition of a shared responsibility and complicity for the violence of crisis vision or critiquing how vulnerable groups are constructed and treated globally, these artists emphasize ethical relations between strangers and ask viewers to question their own place within unjust social orders.

U.S. National Security

U.S. National Security PDF Author: David Jablonsky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : National security
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
U.S. national security is a subject that has been under intense scrutiny since the end of the Cold War. What constitutes such security for the United States as this country approaches the new century? Are the ends, ways, and means of our national security and national military strategies sufficient to provide for the nation's future? And above all, as this country celebrates the 50th anniversary of the National Security Act of 1947, are the institutions that resulted from that act still sufficient for the post-Cold War era? With these questions in mind, the Strategic Studies Institute and Dickinson College's Clarke Center co-sponsored the series of lectures on American national security after the Cold War which are contained in this volume. The lectures take four different, yet complementary, perspectives. Professor Ronald Steel reminds us of the intellectual revolution embodied in the act that moved America from the concept of "defense" to one of "national security" and relates this concept to our attempts to define post-Cold War national security interests. Dr. Lawrence Korb reviews the evolution in our national security establishment since the 1947 act. Dr. Morton Halperin's focus is the continuing tension between secrecy in the name of national security and the openness required in a democratic society, with a commentary on continuing threats to civil liberties. In the concluding essay, Ambassador Robert Ellsworth surveys the key strategic challenges facing the United States as we enter the 21st century.