A new in-depth assessment of ‘soft security’ threats in Europe and Eurasia. These threats are now posed by many kinds of trafficking and are being responded to with a range of methods. Experts from around the world are brought together to provide a detailed analysis of the various aspects of trafficking, covering illegal migrants, the black market weapons trade, sex trafficking and drugs. They consider the nature of this threat facing society and the effectiveness of national and international attempts to eradicate it. An assessment of EU responses to ‘soft security’ and a case study of US Homeland Security deliver the latest developments in this key area. Is the concept of ‘soft security’ useful to analysts and policy-makers? Will they be able to manage these sources of insecurity successfully in the future? This work provides likely trends and projections to resolve these pressing questions. This book is a Special Issue of the leading journal European Security.

A new in-depth assessment of 'soft security' threats in Europe and Eurasia. These threats are now posed by many kinds of trafficking and are being responded to with a range of methods. Experts from around the world are brought together to provide a detailed analysis of the various aspects of trafficking, covering illegal migrants, the black market weapons trade, sex trafficking and drugs. They consider the nature of this threat facing society and the effectiveness of national and international attempts to eradicate it. An assessment of EU responses to 'soft security' and a case study of US Homeland Security deliver the latest developments in this key area. Is the concept of 'soft security' useful to analysts and policy-makers? Will they be able to manage these sources of insecurity successfully in the future? This work provides likely trends and projections to resolve these pressing questions. This book is a Special Issue of the leading journal European Security.

Redefining European Security is a collection of essays concerned with changing perspectives on peace and political stability in Europe since the end of the Cold War, in both the hard security terms of military capacity and readiness and in the realm of soft security concerns of economic stability and democratic reform. European governments, the European Union, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are dealing with the fundamental problem of determining the very parameters of Europe, politically, economically, and institutionally. This book defines security as the efforts undertaken by national governments and multilateral institutions, beginning with the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany, to continue to protect European populations from acts of war and politically-motivated violence in light of the dissolution of the imminent political threat posed to Western Europe by the Soviet Union, 1945-1991 Together these essays assess the progress made in Europe toward preventing conflict, as well as in ending conflict when it occurs, after the abrupt passing of a situation in which the source and nature of a conflict were highly predictable and the emergence of new circumstances in which potential security threats are multiple, variable, and difficult to measure. Contemporary Europe is a mixture of old and new, of arrested and accelerated history. Europe's governments and institutions have been only partly successful in meeting new security challenges, to a high degree because of failing unity and political will. Yesterday, Europe only just avoided perishing from imperial follies and frenzied ideologies, wrote the late Raymond Aron in 1976, she could perish tomorrow through historical abdication.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Politics - Region: Western Europe, grade: B+, University of Malta (University of Malta - Faculty of Arts / International Relations), course: European Security and Defence II (IRL2095), language: English, abstract: The socio – political developments of the outgoing 1980s and beginning 1990s to the greatest extent in Europe initiated the rise of a new era, impacting various political, societal and economic levels drastically throughout the world. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, i.e. the drowning of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its split into (semi–) independent states , the breakdown of East Germany (GDR) and its unification with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) , and the turn up of the United States of America (USA) as the only liable superpower, the final act of the forty years lasting Cold War era found its cumulating closure. The paradigm of the West versus the East, of democracy versus communism was determined, and new patterns had and – since this redefinition appears to be an ongoing process – have to be rethought. In terms of security, the school of the political scientist Barry Buzan presented a structural cluster for the understanding of new evolving threats, resulting from the dissolution of the bipolarity with Russia and USA as having been oppositional poles of more or less equal strength. Apart from the military - related aspects that have dominated the thinking of conflict research throughout the period of the Cold War, this approach includes the means of politics, society, economy and environment as inter-relating and equally impacting issues of high importance for the analysis of security politika. This analysis strives to present the main issues which characterise the transformation of the European security system from the 1990s until today. Hereby, conceptual approaches regarding a theoretical framework of the newly either emerged or recognised threats are related to the actual agenda of the most important players, to say states and institutions, the like, without loosing the perspective for important non–official political actors such as non governmental organisations (NGOs) or (mega–) terrorists (to mention a positive and negative example), as well as economic influences. A description and explanation of the present European security architecture hereby entails the aspects of the phenomenons of globalisation and the idea of a global governance.