National Security,Self-rule,and Democratic Action

Most discussions of the relationship between liberty and security focus on the idea that enhancing citizens’ security may require imposing constraints on their civil liberties (e.g., freedom of association, of movement, of communication, and so on). This paper explores the question of how measures to enhance security stand vis à vis the idea of political liberty, i.e. the idea of citizens’ collectively directing the power of their state. It distinguishes two models whereby citizens might enact that ideal of self-rule and argues that with respect to issues of national security, the less direct model, which entrusts political agents to make decisions beyond direct democratic input, will often be more appropriate. It argues as well that various practices often seen as fundamentally at odds with the ideal of rule by the people (e.g., government deception, lack of transparency, covert action) are in fact consistent with a reasonable construal of that ideal. It concludes by outlining various criteria that would have to be met for such practices to be morally permissible in democratic states.

     

先秦国家安全思想及其当代借鉴价值

在中国历史上,关于国家安全问题的战略性思考起源于先秦时期,许多重要的指导思想和原则,如以民为本、和而不同、慎战、亲仁善邻等思想已在那时得到了明晰。这些宝贵的思想具有久远而深厚的文化基础。他们不仅为历朝历代安内攘外,维系中国作为世界上唯一不曾中断几千年文明进程的国家发挥了重要的历史作用。而且对于我们今天研究安全问题、制定国家安全战略提供了可资借鉴的价值。     

“A Lingering Whiff of Descartes in the Air”: From Theoretical Ideas to the Messiness of Clinical Participation: Commentary on Paper by the Boston Change Process Study Group

From a perspective in recognition of my unconscious attachment to their theoretical conceptualizations as well as intrinsic blind spots to both their and my conceptualizing, I offer a consideration of the clinical assistance and difficulty created by the Boston Change Process Study Group's formulation of the reflective, the implicit and the disjunction between the two as an “intention unfolding process.” I first consider how their conceptualizations can either clarify or obscure organizing experience for the analyst trying to make sense of what is going on between her and her analysand. Then I consider how these ideas might guide or mislead the analyst's active participation in the micromoment process flow of clinical interaction. The impact of dissociation is recognized as constitutive of a messiness and uncertainty that accompanies, and often can undermine, the adoption of any theoretical “idea,” including these, for clinical organizing and intervening activity.     

Scaling the Security Staircase

Building on the U.N. human security taxonomy of 1994, this article aims to explore the constructability of a reliable, valid, parsimonious, useful measure of human security that is relevant to contemporary environments and situations? A seminal 1994 U.N. report, Human Security in Theory and Practice, outlined seven types of human security (personal, health, food, community, economic, environmental, political). A quarter-century on, we added two more, cyber and national security, and tested if a single measure could capture all nine security concerns. A national sample of N = 1033 New Zealanders completed a brief online measure in which participants reported yes or no to experiencing each type of security and basic demographics. Guttman scaling placed these needs in an ascending order of difficulty. Analogous to a staircase, security may be scaled from personal up to political security (coefficient of reproducibility = .88), with three distinct but interrelated flights: (1) proximal (personal, health, food security); (2) social (cyber, community, economic, environmental); and (3) distal (national, political). We confirmed this nine-step, three-flight measure in our sample (Χ² = 81.72; df = 24; RMSEA = .048, 90%CI [.037, .06]; CFI = .976; TLI = .964; SRMR = .028). The measure showed configural, metric, scalar, and factorial invariances (across random-split subgroups). Ethnic groups and the precariously employed scored significantly differently, in coherent ways, on the security staircase scale.     

Contributions of Religious Actors to Peace and Security

The past decade has seen a shift of rhetoric, where religious actors are presented not just as aberrations in the secular and democratic order, but also as significant players in the development of peaceful and diversified societies. However, experiences of extremist religious groups raise questions about the legitimacy of involving religious actors in these kinds of processes, in particular in relation to security, which according to a classical perspective is a matter of national and international security agencies. This paper analyzes the challenges relating to the inclusion of religious actors in security situations in East Africa, particularly those involving confrontations between religious actors, in which the concept of the “religious other” has a specific reference. The main finding is that religious actors have a contribution to make in relation to security and conflict involving religion and faith, given that security is understood in a broader sense than the classical.     

Commentary on Nebbiosi's “Organizing Patterns in a Dyad and in a Group: Theoretical and Clinical Implications”

Here I comment on Gianni Nebbiosi's paper “Organizing Patterns in a Dyad and in a Group: Theoretical and Clinical Implications.” Nebbiosi's thinking about dyadic and group experience from an intersubjective perspective is reflective of current trends in psychoanalysis—with the emphasis in contemporary theory shifting toward the affective dimension of self-experience. His formulations regarding the essential role of affect regulation in establishing dyadic and group organizing principles are consistent with the main point in intersubjectivity theory—that affects are organizers of self-experience. Nebbiosi develops an overarching conceptual framework and clearly elucidates the central role these organizing principles have in the formation of group identity and group cohesion.     

Organizing Patterns in a Dyad and in a Group: Theoretical and Clinical Implications

This paper describes the importance of group experience in relation to affect regulation for the individual and the group. After surveying work that has significantly influenced the psychoanalytic perspective on the group, the author illustrates how group experience can be a key affect regulator during some developmental phases and can have an important role in development of a person's identity. From an inter-subjective perspective, the author emphasizes how group identity is attained through shared and repeated expectations that regulate the affective life of the group—what he calls group organizing principles. Last, using clinical examples, the author emphasizes the importance of affect regulation and the creation of expectations and group organizing principles in the therapeutic arena.     

Timescapes of Security: Clocks,Clouds, and the Complexity of Security Governance

This article pulls together the disjointed complexification of security studies. Such analytical overview suggests that the perspective of “timescapes” allows for exploring the complexity that shapes meanings and practices of security and its governance. In this respect, it is the imperative to change that suggests the significance of complexity thinking to security studies—that is, it is alone in taking the discontinuities of global life seriously. Security, in this regard, is not merely about the clockwork of survival, but is redefined through the cloudlike adaptive contingency of “security as resilience.” In this setting, the security governance of complexity is identified through its dancing to the timescaped rhythms of uncertainty, cognitive challenges, complex risks, and exaptation prompted by the heterogeneity of global life.     

Finding the Gift in the Horror

Summary

This brief article proposes an analysis of the risks society faces in coping with terrorism, and suggests broad outlines of a plan to increase national resilience through creating a national strategy for enhancing psychosocial security. The analysis is based on survival mode theory, which posits two survival sub-systems in human beings: the threat detection system and the human bonding and attachment system. It proposes to redefine the concept of national security policy to go beyond the traditional military aspects of defense to include establishing psychological countermeasures that define maintaining psychological safety as a key marker of the defense against terrorism.     

A World of Systems: The Role of Systemic Patterns of Experience in the Therapeutic Process

This article underscores and expands on a contextualist, complexity theory perspective in conceptualizing the organization of personal, subjective experience and the therapeutic process. It emphasizes that one's personal, lived experience originates and continues to evolve from within a relational matrix, with affect as its primary currency, and reevaluates what, exactly, is being analyzed and potentially transformed in the clinical setting. An extension of intersubjective systems theory, this article focuses on two complementary themes: the concept of the interpenetration of multiple worlds of experience and the idea of systemically derived organizing principles. These ideas enhance our understanding of the positive transformation of subjective experience and expand our perspectives about therapeutic change in psychoanalysis.     

农村留守儿童安全感及其影响因素初探

目的:从亲子关系的角度来研究留守儿童的安全感状况及其影响因素对进一步认识留守儿童问题发生发展的心理规律有重要意义。方法:采用调查法,选取湖南、广西、四川、云南四省共660名农村初中学生被试进行问卷调查,回收有效问卷573份。结果:留守儿童与非留守儿童在安全感与亲子依恋安全性上均有显著差异;一年中亲子相处的时间,替代养育方式,分离时间对留守儿童安全感及亲子依恋安全性的发展有着显著的交互影响;亲子依恋安全性对留守儿童安全感具有一定的预测性。     

安全依恋启动影响社会行为：方法、效果与机制

阈上或者阈下的安全依恋启动可以使个体获得暂时的依恋安全感,并对个体的社会行为产生显著的影响。这种影响主要表现在个体会表现出更多的亲社会行为、揭露行为以及更少的欺骗、歧视行为和道德脱离行为。这可能是因为启动激活的依恋安全感迁移至外显行为。脑神经活动是迁移顺利发生的生理基础。今后的研究可以设置更具生态效度的实验条件,以其它社会行为为研究对象,或者结合当前研究提出的迁移视角,进一步探索安全依恋启动对社会行为的影响。     

Patients' Motivations and the Analyst's Experience

Although the analyst's way of organizing what he or she hears is influenced by assumptions about human motivation, the analyst's experience in the room with a patient is quite removed from any theories about motivation he or she might hold. So compelling is the clinical interaction that it may only be retrospectively that it is possible to observe how one's theory of motivation influences one's work. Several years ago, on the day before I began working on this paper, I took verbatim notes on the last three sessions of a holiday shortened week to see whether I could discern what assumptions about motivation I was making. I would not describe my theory of motivation as it appears at the end of the essay the way I did at the time I wrote this essay. Today, I would try to integrate drive theory with object relations more explicitly.     

Breaking the Cyber-Security Dilemma: Aligning Security Needs and Removing Vulnerabilities

Current approaches to cyber-security are not working. Rather than producing more security, we seem to be facing less and less. The reason for this is a multi-dimensional and multi-faceted security dilemma that extends beyond the state and its interaction with other states. It will be shown how the focus on the state and “its” security crowds out consideration for the security of the individual citizen, with detrimental effects on the security of the whole system. The threat arising from cyberspace to (national) security is presented as possible disruption to a specific way of life, one building on information technologies and critical functions of infrastructures, with relatively little consideration for humans directly. This non-focus on people makes it easier for state actors to militarize cyber-security and (re-)assert their power in cyberspace, thereby overriding the different security needs of human beings in that space. Paradoxically, the use of cyberspace as a tool for national security, both in the dimension of war fighting and the dimension of mass-surveillance, has detrimental effects on the level of cyber-security globally. A solution out of this dilemma is a cyber-security policy that is decidedly anti-vulnerability and at the same time based on strong considerations for privacy and data protection. Such a security would have to be informed by an ethics of the infosphere that is based on the dignity of information related to human beings.     

Analytic Confidence and Political Decision‐Making: Theoretical Principles and Experimental Evidence From National Security Professionals

When making decisions under uncertainty, it is important to distinguish between the probability that a judgment is true and the confidence analysts possess in drawing their conclusions. Yet analysts and decision‐makers often struggle to define “confidence” in this context, and many ways that scholars use this term do not necessarily facilitate decision‐making under uncertainty. To help resolve this confusion, we argue for disaggregating analytic confidence along three dimensions: reliability of available evidence, range of reasonable opinion, and responsiveness to new information. After explaining how these attributes hold different implications for decision‐making in principle, we present survey experiments examining how analysts and decision‐makers employ these ideas in practice. Our first experiment found that each conception of confidence distinctively influenced national security professionals' evaluations of high‐stakes decisions. Our second experiment showed that inexperienced assessors of uncertainty could consistently discriminate among our conceptions of confidence when making political forecasts. We focus on national security, where debates about defining “confidence levels” have clear practical implications. But our theoretical framework generalizes to nearly any area of political decision‐making, and our empirical results provide encouraging evidence that analysts and decision‐makers can grasp these abstract elements of uncertainty.     

Institutional Origins of Subjective Well-Being: Estimating the Effects of Economic Freedom on National Happiness

We exploit the cross-country differences in economic freedom to examine the link between the quality of institutions and subjective well-being. Using Veenhoven’s happiness dataset, the evidence suggests countries with better economic institutions and higher level of economic freedom, captured by the security of property rights, open markets and more limited government, are significantly more likely to experience greater subjective well-being after controlling for structural confounders of national subjective well-being such as income, unemployment, inequality, social capital and life satisfaction. The effect of institutions on cross-national happiness is both significant and robust to different model specifications, estimation techniques and possible sources of endogeneity. Furthermore, our panel data analysis reveals that over time higher levels of economic freedom are associated with decreasing subjective well-being after controlling for state dependence and income.     

Satisfaction with HyFlex Teaching and Law-abiding Leadership Education in Hong Kong University Students Under COVID-19

Since the early days of COVID-19, university teaching has changed from face-to-face format to online mode. With the gradual containment of the pandemic, there is no need for school lockdown. As a result, the teaching format has changed to HyFlex mode integrating both face-to-face and online modes. Obviously, it is necessary to understand the academic quality of life among students under the Hyflex teaching mode. In this paper, we report an evaluation study on a leadership subject in Hong Kong delivered via HyFlex teaching using a post-lecture evaluation strategy. In one of the lectures, we covered law-abiding leadership in university students, including abiding by the Hong Kong National Security Law. The post-lecture evaluation showed that students generally held positive views toward the HyFlex teaching and they perceived that the subject promoted their well-being indexed by psychosocial competence. Regarding the lecture on law-abiding leadership, students agreed that the lecture promoted their psychosocial competence, personal development, knowledge about law-abiding behavior and national security (including the Hong Kong National Security Law), and readiness to serve as socially responsible leaders. Positive perceptions of the lecture design, teacher performance, lecture content of law-abiding leadership and national security, and benefits positively predicted students’ overall satisfaction with the lecture on law-abiding leadership and national security.

     

Renewing the senses: conversion experience and the phenomenology of the spiritual life

In his discussion of conversion experience, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James draws attention to a variety of experience which has not been much investigated in the philosophy of religion literature, but which seems to be of some importance religiously??namely, an experience which consists in a re-vivification of the sensory world as a whole. In this paper, I develop four accounts of the nature of this kind of experience, and I show how the experience can inform our conception of the spiritual life, considered as a world-directed mode of experience and practice.     

God Versus Party: Competing Effects on Attitudes Concerning Criminal Punishment,National Security,and Military Service

We explore how images of God interact with political party to predict attitudes concerning the appropriate role of government in both criminal punishment and national security. Using the second wave of the Baylor Religion Survey (2007), we analyze the extent to which beliefs regarding God's moral judgment moderate the influence of party affiliation on opinions about the death penalty, fighting terrorism, punishing criminals, serving in the military, and U.S. involvement in the Iraq War. Specifically, we find that Democrats who believe in a judgmental God tend to support more conservative policies. In fact, attitudes converge such that the effects of party membership are erased if rival partisans both believe in a judgmental moral authority.