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Collins: Contemporary Security Studies

Chapter 01

Instructions

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Question 1

What is security studies?

a) The analysis of states and state interactions in the international system in the absence of an overarching authority or power.

b) The analysis of the accumulation of tension in the international system and of the manifestation of organized political violence.

c) Survival of agents which has most often meant the state.

d) The analysis of the asymmetric impact of global interactions and processes resulting from the enmeshment of the global and local spheres of activity on the state

Question 2

What does it mean to be secure?

a) Security means the coercive capability to check a potential aggressor. Security is freedom from war coupled with an expectation of the ability to deter or defeat a potential aggressive act.

b) Security refers to safety from both external and internal vulnerabilities that may otherwise harm the state and their societies, including their values.

c) The freedom of people from physical and human constraints. Security is freedom to enable them to continue to enjoy those things that are most important to their survival and well being

d) All of the above.

Question 3

Post-Cold war security studies is dominated by:

a) an examination of the social processes by which groups of people construct something as a threat.

b) an agenda for peace; peacekeeping, peace-making and conflict prevention as priorities for avoiding military confrontations.

c) the re-addressing of past practice as a possible cause of insecurity.

d) the strategy for state security that is preoccupied with creating and maintaining a distribution of power in the system beneficial in terms of maintaining security and stability.

Question 4

What factors have facilitated the broadening of security studies?

a) The primacy of organized and sustained political violence taking place between actors was no longer inter-state but intra-state.

b) The emergence of the hegemonic state (USA) at the end of the Cold War was to provide favorable circumstances for the emergence of an extended period of stability in an international system

c) The disaggregation of the state through global policy networks resulted in the superseding of some degree of autonomy to international regimes

d) The process of globalization has led to internal issues becoming externalized and external issue becoming internalized

Question 5

How should security studies be studied?

a) An examination of the social processes by which people construct a threat taking into account the importance of ideational factors such as culture, beliefs, norms, ideas and identity.

b) Concern about the moral and ethical dimensions of international affairs.

c) The separation of fact and value sufficiently to generate theoretically ground hypotheses to be tested against evidence.

d) None of the above.

Question 6

In what way did traditional approaches seek to explain why and how states have sought security?

a) Traditional conceptions have sought to explain international politics as the distribution of power among members of an international system and specifically as the balance of power amongst major states. The relative distribution - and therefore constraints - is reflective of the security strategy of state.

b) The traditional approaches emerged in response to the Cold War and the accumulation of tension and competition between the two Superpowers seeking to explain behavior in terms of arms accumulation.

c) Traditional conceptions emerged to explain the clusters of norms and patterns of behavior that result in management of conflict and cooperation in the international system in specific spheres of activities.

d) Traditional approaches were concerned with sovereignty - the legal status conferred on the state to have control over a specified territory, free from arbitrary intervention, and responsible to no higher authority - and the implications on patterns of behavior and relative cooperation of sovereign states actors in the international system.

Question 7

In what ways are regime security issues differentiated from political security issues?

a) Regime security is concerned with the granting of rights to the governing elites to generate strong-feelings of self-determination and social and political consensus centred around the 'idea' of the state.

b) Regime security is concerned with the sovereign legal right of the state to be free from arbitrary external aggression against the territorial integrity of the state, the governing infrastructure, and values.

c) Regime security is the condition of security where the governing elites are secure from the threat of forced removal and can capably rule without challenge to authority. Regime insecurity can weaken the state structures.

d) Political security and regime security are interchangeable: concern with recognition and concern with legitimacy are mutually constitutive.

Question 8

In what ways has traditional security issues evolved post-Cold War?

a) The extensive enhancement of a society's coercive and (technological) resource base to defeat an adversary in the event of an attack

b) The creation of strategic alliances in order to check the expansion of a hostile power or force it to negotiate peacefully

c) The use of threats and limited force to influence an adversary to comply with a coercer's wishes with minimum cost.

d) The use of threats and specific actions to discourage the adversary from initiating action in the first place.

Question 9

Have traditional security threats diminished since the end of the Cold War?

a) Coercive diplomacy has successfully been used by western strategists as a means of combating WMD programs and used against states sponsoring terrorism with very little cost.

b) There is a strong psychological fear that WMD, particularly chemical and biological weapons, will be combined with a terrorist attack (particularly suicide attacks).

c) The end of the cold war has diminished the threat of WMD on international society. The logic of crisis stability and second strike has negated the probability of total Superpower war.

d) All of the above.

Question 10

In what ways has the security agenda been broadened to consider non-traditional threats?

a) The global HIV/AIDS pandemic has been increasingly thought of as a security issue constituting a direct threat to individuals as the referent object and to national and international security. Indeed three times as many people die from AIDS related illnesses every day than in the 9/11 terror attacks.

b) Transnational Crime has been increasingly prevalent since the 1990s facilitated by the opening up of political and economic space and movement by globalization.

c) Children, being under theorized and underutilized political agents, have become increasingly important actors in our understanding of combat and about security in pre- and post-conflict.

d) All of the above.

 

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