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Collins: Contemporary Security Studies

Chapter 08

http://www.sipri.org/.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) conducts research on conflict and cooperation in order to promote understanding of how international conflicts can be resolved peacefully and how stable peace can be established. It has very extensive empirical and conceptual research programmes on many aspects of military security and especially in relation to military spending and arms transfers and attempts to control the transfer of militarily significant technologies. A massive amount of data is provided free on this site

http://www.iiss.org/
Visiting the website of the International Institute for Strategic Studies provides a good overview of the main concerns of those with a traditional and primarily empirical approach to military security. There is little free content on the site,  but your institution may have hard copy or electronic access to its key publications including; The Military Balance (an inventory of armed forces worldwide), the Adelphi Paper monograph series (halfway between article and book length studies on selected issues), and Survival (its quarterly journal)

http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/peace/
The University of Bradford Peace Studies Centre is a world leader in its field, and exploring its site gives a good feel for what peace studies means in theory and practice. As well as containing extensive publications which can be viewed freely, one can gain a sense of how pathways into careers with a commitment to the values of peace studies are possible

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.
The National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, DC, uses the US Freedom of Information Act to declassify and make available vast numbers of documents on US military security policy, and selections can be accessed for free. By this indirect means, one also has access to intimate details of military security policy-making of many other countries as well

http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf
White House, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 17 September 2002. As the only remaining global power (at least for now), the United States impacts upon virtually all aspects of contemporary military security. This document is the most important single extended statement by the administration of President George W. Bush of its perspective on these issues. For context, see Mann 2004.

http://ciponline.org/
The Centre for International Policy is an NGO which seeks to promote a U.S. foreign policy based on ‘cooperation, demilitarization and respect for human rights.’ It has extensive research resources on Asia, Central America, Columbia, global financial flows and national security, with links to material from across the political spectrum

http://www.crisisgroup.org/
The International Crisis Group is an NGO with over one hundred staff located worldwide. It seeks to prevent and resolve armed conflict across the world by means of field-based analysis and high-level advocacy. Its many reports on Iraq, Indonesia, Nepal, Columbia, Kosovo, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Darfur and other actual or potential crisis and conflict locations are free. It is in-depth yet up-to-date, locally researched reports are superb at putting military security issues into political context

http://www.statecraft.org
Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S Guerrilla warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism 1940 - 1990. This website is a free online version of McClintock’s book of the same name published in 2002 and subtitled U.S. Guerrillas Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990. This valuable critical overview of this extensive military involve many worldwide can be useful supplemented by more recent insider studies such as Nagl 2002 and Hammes 2004 and by wider understandings of the nature of contemporary war such as Kaldor 1999 and Shaw 2005

http://disciplined-minds.com/
Disciplined Minds. What we choose to study and how we go about studying it reflects the values and politics that we operate within even if we adhere to the highest standards of argument and evidence. Hence the academic study of military security, like academic and professional work more generally, is inherently political. On this website (which contains excerpts from his book of the same name), Jeff Schmidt offers a controversial analysis of the ways in which professional (including academic) life, as disciplined ideologically, so that the professional’s identity is at stake. Reading this in combination with Booth 1997 could be productive