In a new security world of growing international population displacement, refugee protections are an essential source of peace and global stability. This article evaluates the capacity of a bifurcated international refugee regime constructed in a neo-liberal order of the last mid-century, to respond to the humanitarian demands of the 21st century. Focusing on the UNHCR and UNRWA, this study compares two key international organizations mandated by the United Nations to protect dispossessed people and weighs them against humanitarian and demographic outcomes. The neo-institutional analyses of legal frameworks, policy instruments, and norms point to intrinsic institutional flaws hindering progress for international refugee protection. From the historical institutional perspective adopted here, the persistence of a faulty segmented refugee regime can be understood as a product of institutional path dependence. In the specific case of displaced Palestinians, the result of a stand-alone group-centric refugee organization has been a deepening politicization of refugee protection, a diminution of humanitarian aid, and perpetuation of civilian sufferings. The conclusions offer potential solutions and policy recommendations to redress the refugee settlement gap more effectively.
This article advocates incorporating theories of criminalization into theories of democratization. The article adds to the growing theory and analysis of democratic policing and the role of policing in societies transitioning to, and away from, democracy. It provides some tools of analysis to look at criminal law and policing in popular autocracies. The link between criminalization, policing, and securitization is also considered. Adopting a critical analysis of the importance of the rule of law to democratization and how critical legal and criminology theories have analyzed the rule of law, it looks at how the criminal law can be used to control target populations. The article suggests that democratization analysts could benefit from more closely scrutinizing criminal laws and policing in backsliding democracies. Democracy analysts often use a positivist and institutionalist view of policing but insights from critical criminology and legal theories provides a deeper ability to analyze policing and power in transitional societies. Given that overcriminalization is often popular, the article concludes that populists and autocrats in backsliding democracies will increasingly securitize criminal threats and use criminal law to increase their powers and at the same time increase their popularity.
This paper introduces the Global Terrorism Trends and Analysis Center's (GTTAC's) Record of Incident Database (GRID), a publicly accessible dataset encompassing domestic and transnational terrorism incidents worldwide since 2018. We present its conceptual and methodological framework, elucidating the data collection process. In addition, we conduct a comparative assessment by contrasting GRID with an existing and widely used event database, the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). We delve into methodological differences between these two databases, particularly those related to the use of local, non-English sources; region-specific or attribute-specific coders; and the reporting of casualties when information is unclear. Through a country- and year-level comparison, we analyze how these methodological differences affect the records of incidents, resulting in temporal and regional disparities in terrorism data. We conclude with insights on mitigating false positives and negatives in reporting, while enhancing the reliability and validity of event databases.
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is accused of exhibiting biases in its stance and actions that prioritize the interests of permanent member states (P5) and their friendly or hostile relationships with nations involved in conflicts. In this series, the Israel-Palestine conflict is a long-standing issue that has been subject to such accusation. This study analyzes the discursive framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict by the P5 members of the Security Council from 2000 to 2024. We hypothesized that the Council's rhetoric would support a noninterventionist stance that upholds the status quo while legitimizing itself through humanitarian discourse. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis of P5 speeches, we found systematic contrasts: The United States and the United Kingdom employ security-centric narratives favoring Israel; Russia and China emphasize humanitarian concerns for Palestinians; and France maintains a more dialogic approach. These patterns intensify during conflict events, highlighting how fragmented P5 discourse has led to limited or deferred Council actions. This study is distinctive in linking language patterns in UNSC rhetoric to institutional outcomes, offering a replicable discourse-outcome framework for multilateral conflict contexts.
Hybrid governance in Kosovo produced dense coordination interfaces where domestic elites, international missions, and civil society interacted. We theorized interface capture as a mesolevel mechanism whereby elites monopolized procedural levers. We developed the FICM protocol and the ICI and applied them to 75 interfaces across five domains. Drawing on 108 structured documentary observations from 2012-2023, doublecoding achieved reliability (alpha = 0.81). Capture was systemic yet uneven: rule of law and public administration had the highest average scores; civil society was comparatively resilient; and foreignled interfaces showed higher capture in most domains. Dimensionally, staffing influence and agenda control were most exploited, while outcome distortion was least. A short vignette illustrated how a discretionary appointment enabled agenda deferrals and resource reallocation despite formal compliance. We argued that internationalization alone did not insulate interfaces from elite domination and that design features mattered. We recommended coled agenda setting, transparent recruitment, thirdparty monitoring, and conditionality tied to interface integrity. The FICM-ICI toolkit provided a replicable diagnostic for donordense settings.
While adversaries operationalize generative AI for financial fraud, infrastructure attacks, and influence operations, the U.S. homeland security apparatus responds with voluntary frameworks and process-oriented measures. This study examines this critical governance gap through qualitative content analysis of 23 documents including federal strategies, audit reports, congressional testimony, and industry frameworks (January 2023-June 2025). Drawing on Beck's risk society theory, the analysis reveals a fundamental mismatch between exponentially evolving AI threats and linear bureaucratic adaptation. Federal agencies default to managing calculable social harms - bias, fairness, transparency - while ignoring incalculable security threats. Government audits confirm systematic failures: DHS lacks implementation plans for its AI strategy three years post-drafting; financial regulators cannot legally examine AI vendors processing trillions in daily transactions. This constitutes what Beck termed "organized irresponsibility"-conscientious proceduralism that masks collective security failure. Misaligned institutional incentives and incompatible stakeholder risk definitions reinforce this pattern.The temporal dimension proves particularly damaging: AI capabilities double every six months while policy cycles require 18-24 months. The evidence shows systematic inability to match adversarial innovation with defensive adaptation, not isolated failures. Without fundamental reconceptualization from voluntary to mandatory security controls, including proposed red-teaming requirements and procurement mandates, current trajectories point toward systematic defensive failure by 2027, when AI-enabled attacks on critical infrastructure will be limited only by adversary imagination rather than technical constraints.
This mixed-method study maps the current political landscape of Afghanistan by examining data from 90 Afghan male respondents of a 2023 semi-structured survey. A thematic and sentiment analysis of their qualitative statements is performed including codification of key themes to assess a) prevalent political sentiments of the Taliban and b) perceptions of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA)'s governance quality among Afghan men (ages 18-50) residing in country. Results indicate that most Afghan men hold politically moderate sentiments toward the IEA, noting modest governance improvements mainly in domestic security. Comparatively, 20.5% of Afghan men hold strong anti-Taliban sentiment, while 12.05% hold strong pro-Taliban sentiment. Bootstrap modeling indicates that higher pro-Taliban sentiment significantly increases perceptions of the IEA's overall governance quality, including its intention to govern for all fairly and control corruption (Adj. R-2 = 0.88, Wald chi 2 = 1650.44, p = 0.00). Each additional point higher that an Afghan man scores the IEA's overall governance is predictably associated with a 0.26-point (6%) increase in their political sentiment toward the Taliban (Adj. R-2 = 0.86, Wald chi 2 = 867.57, p = 0.00). Prioritizing good governance including political accountability is crucial if the IEA is to maintain the peace.
EU's relationship with the Southern partners is reviewed during contemporary international tensions and security failures. Neighborhood dynamics' shortcomings and complex entanglements across EU foreign-policy positioning frontiers may be redressed multidisciplinary locations. Traversing EU identity margins highlights intertwining themes within and across the North and South; inquiring whether orientalist gated boundaries may increase insecurity in the South and, consequently, in the EU, and the potential of ENP toward regional district security tracing positioning political, economic and societal themes and their implications.
Political violence can have dire implications given its scope and extent leading to destruction of property, key infrastructure and mass casualties, while instigating political instability. Institutions have evolved to prevent violent conflict. The work presented aims to explore the relationship between political violence and institutions. We have explored the frustration-aggression hypothesis. The first step in this regard was estimating the social mobilization-institutionalization and technological change gap. Then its impact on violence and its intensity is explored and discussed. Further, non-linearity of the relationship between mobilization-institutionalization-development gap and incidence and intensity of political conflict was investigated by introducing the squared gap in the analysis. The results depict that by recognizing the challenges posed by unmet aspirations, societies can proactively address these issues, fostering peaceful change during periods of significant social transformation.
The process of globalization and polarization of the world contributes to the change of security environment in which a hierarchically structed and territorially based state is weakened and a new social condition is created promoting relentless violence, the chaotic and volatile mixture of identities, ideologies, organized crime, terrorism and other forms of violence - the world of new wars. These threats directly target social cohesion, which can be understood as trust and cooperation of individuals, groups and societies working toward common goals - prosperous and safe state and the world. The authors of that paper make an attempt to analyze how nowadays social cohesion is challenged by the new wars from political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental perspectives (PESTLE). The analysis will help to identify the threats to social cohesion in the above-listed areas of human activity.
This research article investigates the contribution of Croatia, a small state with a limited naval force, to European maritime security from 2008 to 2024. While the country's' engagement with the European Union's (EU) naval missions was largely symbolic, its involvement in FRONTEX and NATO was significantly more operational and regionally focused. The article explores the notion that small states pursue naval diplomacy strategically through symbolic deployments. Croatia was more active in EU missions before membership than after but engaged meaningfully when national/regional interests were involved. This circumstance challenges assumptions about small states being marginal actors in European maritime security.
