External resources relating to Threat perception
Climate change, increased global migration, and expanding border enforcement are three linked phenomena guaranteed to come to an explosive head in this century.
It’s the morning of Oct. 7 and a man stops traffic on Antonsanti Street in Santurce, behind the Ciudadela building. He is wearing a helmet, sunglasses, facemask, a vest with ammunition, gloves, plastic straps used for arrests, boots, camouflaged pants with knee pads, a knife and gun. There is a machine gun in his hand. He has no plaque or ID.
The world was stunned when rifle-toting police officers in masks and body armour rolled up in Ferguson, Missouri, in armoured vehicles, to stop the 2014 street protests over the police shooting of black teenager Michael Brown.
Following the public backlash, then-president Obama signed an executive order in 2015 limiting police access to equipment that belonged "on the battlefield".
Fast forward two years to Donald Trump. This week the US President promised to make it legal again for surplus military equipment, including grenade launchers and tanks, to be passed on to law enforcement agencies.
In real life they are accountants, bankers and business executives. Some have already reached retirement age. Today, these tourists from Hong Kong are pretending to be Israeli army commandos, specialists in counterterrorism...
With about half a dozen Israeli companies offering count-terrorism courses for tourists, IDF-style training for tourists as become a full-fledged industry. (VIDEO)
London Mayor Sadiq Kahn said he spoke with Israeli officials for advice on how to combat urban terrorism in the wake of terror attacks in London and Manchester.
In this public lecture, world renowned feminist scholar Professor Cynthia Enloe explores how militarisation is a social process that affects our everyday lives and enables states to fight wars. Enloe asks ‘where are the women?’ in international affairs and explores how women as soldiers' wives, secretaries, factory workers, shoppers and soldiers can both support and oppose armed conflict. She also explores how notions of masculinity and femininity can be militarised or de-militarised and what the implications of this are for state foreign policy.
Neill Franklin is a black man. But he'll admit that after decades of working at the Baltimore Police Department and Maryland State Police, he harbored a strong bias against young black men.
Franklin, executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which opposes the war on drugs, previously explained, "When I'd see a young black male in a particular neighborhood, or his pants were sagging a little bit, or he walked a certain way … my first thoughts were, 'Oh, I wonder if he's selling drugs.'"
On March 30 of this year, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) endorsed Donald Trump, effectively backing his bid for the presidency of the United States. NBPC president Brandon Judd heads the organization, which describes itself online as “the exclusive representative of approximately 18,000 Border Patrol Agents and support personnel assigned to the U.S. Border Patrol.” Judd himself published the NBPC’s pro-Trump communiqué, asserting that “if we do not secure our borders, American communities will continue to suffer at the hands of gangs, cartels and violent criminals preying on the innocent. The lives and security of the American people are at stake… There is no greater physical or economic threat to Americans today than our open border.”
Sales to Europe grew from $724 million in 2014 to $1.63 billion in 2015, presumably as a consequence of the refugee crisis and the rise in terror attacks on the continent. Sales to North America also climbed, to $1.02 billion...
King Abdullah II of Jordan is meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House on Wednesday, for working talks that the Jordanian Embassy describes as covering "the strategic partnership" between the two countries. In addition to discussing the flood of Syrian refugees into Jordan — there are now 750,000 of them — the Embassy also says that the two will "tackle global efforts to combat terrorism and extremism across the Middle East, Africa, and the world." The White House mentions the talks in the president's daily schedule, noting the two will discuss "efforts to counter ISIL (and) resolve the Syrian conflict," using the US government's favorite acronym for the Islamic State group.
But that's a very reductive description of what the monarch and the president are likely to talk about. There's a major war going on across the Hashemite Kingdom's northern and eastern border, and much about Jordan's military role in that war won't likely be the subject of press releases. But the border is undoubtedly somewhere buried in the briefing books. The Obama administration is spending close to a half a billion dollars to build a sophisticated electronic fence along Jordan's northern and eastern borders, a wall which US strategic planners hope will stem the flow of refugees and also wall off the increasingly important American base from the disintegration of Syria and Iraq.
Abstract: While the democratic paradigm of governance and its constituent political processes are well established in Australia, consistently negative media representations of people seeking asylum may be viewed as justification for institutional decisions allowing continued punitive treatment of people seeking asylum on Australian shores. Historically, notions of Australian sovereignty exist as a changing discourse with reference to land claims and the Australian Indigenous population (O’Dowd 2011; Due 2008). However, in terms of contemporary political claims about Australia’s need to enforce border protection policies, notions of sovereignty are consistently framed through the themes, images and language of military discourses. Media scholar, John Street suggests that although there is disagreement about whether specific political outcomes can be attributed to press influence, the role of television in politics has been more comprehensively established as shaping broader world views in regards to ideas, values and practices that are considered ‘common-sense’ (Street 2011; Craig 2013). This paper argues that the increasing role of the military in the treatment and processing of people seeking asylum may be justified, through repetitive negative media representations of asylum seekers which secures public support for such practices, thereby undermining the very principles of the democratic paradigm, and indeed the role of the media or ‘fourth estate’(Schultz 1998) in a functioning democracy.
The International Institute of Strategic Studies earlier this year called Mexico the third most deadly conflict in the world. While the war is purportedly between the state and drug traffickers, Mexican police, military and civilian institutions are deeply involved in protecting drug trafficking organizations, and many of those killed, tortured, or disappeared are Mexican and Central American families who have nothing to do with the drugs trade. European and U.S. governments and arms producers are well aware of the Mexican government’s involvement in widespread abuses, which is well documented, but the weapons kept flowing...
Meet the Israeli company that has a contract with the Organizing Olympic Committee for the 2016 Games in Rio / Conheça a empresa israelense que tem um contrato com o Comitê Organizador dos Jogos 2016 no Rio. [En/Pt]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced the start of construction of a fence along Israel's border with Jordan after calls for Tel Aviv to take in Syrian refugees.
Netanyahu said on Sunday that he would not allow Israel to be "submerged by a wave of illegal migrants and terrorist activists".
"Israel is not indifferent to the human tragedy of Syrian and African refugees... but Israel is a small country, very small, without demographic or geographic depth. That is why we must control our borders", he said at the weekly cabinet meeting according to his office...
There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that the militarization of domestic security is bad for human rights and has little impact on crime and violence in the long term. So what keeps attracting Latin American governments to adopt these “iron fist” policies?
Over a dozen suspected criminals died during a massive anti-crime police operation carried out in various parts of Venezuela, raising troubling questions over who is holding security personnel accountable for the excessive use of force...
El Salvador’s president has announced the deployment of military brigades to contain the country’s street gangs, a measure that will likely prove an unsustainable solution to the current security crisis and could even exacerbate the bloodshed...
The domestic security bill prepared by Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has triggered fist-fights in parliament and stirred a popular debate in the country. After a five day delay due to the fights, the debate over the legal package finally started at the General Assembly late Feb. 20.
The AKP government is currently pushing the bill, which it has renamed as the "Legal Package To Protect Freedoms," after postponing parliamentary debate on the matter twice. The government says the police need more powers to preserve public order and the safety of citizens, particularly on the eve of elections scheduled for June. They claim that more peaceful protests turn violent with the increasing use of Molotov cocktails and are also concerned about the recent spread of bonzai, a synthetic drug.
Latin America is witnessing a steady movement toward the militarization of the police, with the armed forces taking over many of the day to day functions of community policing. But given Latin America’s past troubles with military governments, this development is raising serious concerns. In the 1960s and 1970s a spate of coups across the region brought harsh right-wing regimes to power, with the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay deploying their militaries as internal security forces, purging their countries of domestic political opponents, real and imagined. Now many fear that we may be heading back toward the bad old days, with unbridled militaries running riot over the citizenry...
From tracking online activity to cameras that see through walls, Israel's homeland security industry offers European states a range of options as they tackle the terrorists in their midst.
FERGUSON, Mo. — For four nights in a row, they streamed onto West Florissant Avenue wearing camouflage, black helmets and vests with '
stamped on the back. They carried objects that doubled as warnings: assault rifles and ammunition, slender black nightsticks and gas masks.
They were not just one police force but many, hailing from communities throughout north
Their adversaries were a ragtag group of mostly unarmed neighborhood residents, hundreds of African-Americans whose pent-up fury at the police had sent them pouring onto streets and sidewalks in Ferguson, demanding justice for
As the military transitions into a tech-heavy force, increasingly reliant on robots and drones, local police forces are looking less like law enforcement and more like heavily armored combat units. Now, it seems they are starting to train like them, as well.
On 30 May 2013, police cleared Gezi Park in central Istanbul of a small group of protestors opposed to its destruction. The denial of their right to protest and the violence used by the police touched a nerve and a wave of anti-government demonstrations swept across Turkey. The authorities’ reaction was brutal and unequivocal. Over the next few months, police repeatedly used unnecessary and abusive force to prevent and disperse peaceful demonstrations. This report by Amnesty International documents the human rights violations that have accompanied the crushing crackdown on the Gezi Park protest movement.
Honduras has signed into law the creation of a military police force to help confront the country’s security crisis, a move that has provoked human rights concerns and skirts around the need to overhaul existing police bodies...