In common with many other regions, the Western Balkans have been faced with numerous emergency situations in recent years including major fires, massive flooding and heavy snow. These emergencies were frequently beyond the response capacity of the individual countries affected and revealed an obvious need for a joint response to civil emergencies and catastrophes. This book presents papers from the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) on ‘Sustained Emergency Relief – Regionally Developed Capacities’. This workshop took place in Struga, Republic of Macedonia, in June and July 2012. The workshop was attended by 44 representatives from 10 countries and from the NATO Operations Division and HQ KFOR, who presented national views and individual research in the field of sustainable development of regional capacities for emergency relief. The book is divided into two sections: Capabilities for Emergency Relief - National Challenges and Perspectives, and Development of Regional Capacities for Emergency Relief in the Spirit of the Smart Defence Initiative. This book summarizes the analysis of the current regional situation and gives recommendations for policy integration and capacity development across the Balkan countries and territories, but it will be of interest to all those whose work involves the planning of responses to emergency situations.

This collection is the first book-length study of NATO's bureaucracy and decision-making after the Cold War and its analytical framework of 'internationalization' draws largely on neo-institutionalist insights.

To reason is to talk. To think is to use tools. To learn is to join a community of practice. This book explores thought and reasoning as inherently social practices, as actions situated in specific environments of demand, opportunity, and accountability. Authors from diverse disciplines - psychology, sociology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology - examine how people think and learn in settings as diverse as a factory, a classroom or an airplane cockpit. The tools that people use in these varied settings are both physical technologies and cultural constructions: concepts, structures of reasoning, and forms of discourse. This volume in the NATO Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology is based on an international conference on situated cognition and learning technologies.

Countries establish defence industries for various reasons. Chief among these are usually a concern with national security, and a desire to be as independent as possible in the supply of the armaments which they believe they need. But defence industries are different from most other industries. Their customer is governments. Their product is intended to safeguard the most vital interests of the state. The effectiveness of these products (in the real, rather than the experimental sense) is not normally tested at the time of purchase. If, or when, it is tested, many other factors (such as the quality of political and military leadership) enter into the equation, so complicating judgments about the quality of the armaments, and about the reliability of the promises made by the manufacturers. All of these features make the defence sector an unusually political industrial sector. This has been true in both the command economies of the former Soviet Union and its satellites, and in the market or mixed economies of the west. In both cases, to speak only a little over-generally, the defence sector has been particularly privileged and particularly protected from the usual economic vicissitudes. In both cases, too, its centrality to the perceived vital interests of the state has given it an unusual degree of political access and support.

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, Ravello, Italy, 8-17 November 1999

Communication is central to how we understand international affairs. Political leaders, diplomats, and citizens recognize that communication shapes global politics. This has only been amplified in a new media environment characterized by Internet access to information, social media, and the transformation of who can communicate and how. Soft power, public diplomacy 2.0, network power – scholars and policymakers are concerned with understanding what is happening. This book is the first to develop a systematic framework to understand how political actors seek to shape order through narrative projection in this new environment. To explain the changing world order – the rise of the BRICS, the dilemmas of climate change, poverty and terrorism, the intractability of conflict – the authors explore how actors form and project narratives and how third parties interpret and interact with these narratives. The concept of strategic narrative draws together the most salient of international relations concepts, including the links between power and ideas; international and domestic; and state and non-state actors. The book is anchored around four themes: order, actors, uncertainty, and contestation. Through these, Strategic Narratives shows both the possibilities and the limits of communication and power, and makes an important contribution to theorizing and studying empirically contemporary international relations. International Studies Association: International Communication Best Book Award