Articles

Many energy consumers, and even analysts and policymakers, confront and frame energy and climate risks in a moral vacuum, rarely incorporating broader social justice concerns. Here, to remedy this gap, we investigate how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making by reframing five energy problems — nuclear waste, involuntary resettlement, energy pollution, energy poverty and climate change — as pressing justice concerns.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, states do not typically construct fortified boundaries in response to border disputes or to prevent terrorism. Instead, most build such boundaries for economic reasons, to keep out unwanted migrants from poorer states. Further, Muslim states are more likely to both build and be the targets of fortified boundaries.

The support of the local business community helped to make Islamists’ a powerful force in the Somali civil war. The Islamists gained business support not because of shared religious affiliation, but because they ran a more stable and less costly protection racket than did other belligerents.

Why do armed groups switch sides in civil wars? In weak states with few obstacles to switching sides, groups defect for material gain or to acquire military support in local struggles. Such shifts have implications for how long civil wars will endure, how they will end, and the prospects for state building.

Al-Qaida has established a metanarrative that enables it to recruit militants and supporters. The United States and its allies can challenge its ability to do so by delegitimizing the ideological motivations that inform that metanarrative.

Many academics and policymakers argue that the removal of leaders is an effective strategy in combating terrorism. Leadership decapitation is not always successful, however. A theory of organizational resilience explains why some terrorist organizations survive decapitation. Application of this theoretical model to the case of al-Qaida reveals that the deaths of Osama bin Laden and other high level al-Qaida operatives are unlikely to cause significant organizational decline.

While the threat of "resource wars" over possession of oil reserves is often exaggerated, between one-quarter and one-half of interstate wars since 1973 have been connected to one or more of eight distinct oil-related causal mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms can help policymakers design grand strategy and allocate military resources.

In the past five years, "far enemy groups" such as al-Qaeda Central have adopted a more hostile and explicitly takfiri rhetoric toward Muslim regimes. Conversely, "near enemy" activists such as the militants in Algeria have become more anti-Western in both words and deeds. A process of ideological hybridization has occurred, with the result that the enemy hierarchies of many jihadist groups are becoming more unclear or heterogeneous than they used to be.

The United Nations should thoroughly review its optimum role in a transforming world, because its existing contradictory policies risk damaging its credibility and efficacy for years to come.

Findings from representative national surveys in Algeria and Jordan show that nei- ther religious orientations, judgments about Western culture, nor economic circum- stances account for variance in approval of terrorist acts against U.S. targets. Alternatively, in both countries, approval of terrorism against the United States is dis- proportionately likely among men and women with negative judgments about their own government and about U.S. foreign policy. Taken together, these findings sug- gest that approval of terrorism is fostered by negative attitudes toward actors consid- ered responsible for the political and economic status quo. Given that Algeria and Jordan have had different experiences with respect to terrorism and also differ in demographic, political, and economic structure, identical findings from these dis- similar countries suggest that the observed relationships are not country specific and may apply more generally.