Critical Security Studies

Five years after the February 2021 state of emergency, ASEAN has shifted from an emergency response toward a sustained restriction of Myanmar's high-level participation whose legal coherence now warrants scrutiny. This article examines the tension between that practice and the legal architecture of the ASEAN Charter. Adopting a normative juridical method and drawing on primary instruments the ASEAN Charter, the Constitutive Act of the African Union, the Treaty on European Union, and the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties it asks whether the restriction is Charter-compatible and whether the Five-Point Consensus has sufficient legal character to ground it. Through comparison with the suspension regimes of the African Union and the European Union, the study finds that the restriction operates outside any formal Charter mechanism and that the Five-Point Consensus, as a nonbinding political understanding, cannot supply the missing legal authority. It concludes that ASEAN should relocate its approach within the Charter through Article 48 amendment or authentic interpretation and restore functional engagement, since responsible engagement rather than prolonged exclusion is the more legally coherent course.

Since the XIX century, the project on the Bridge over the strait of Messina is a long-lasting obsession that entails symbolic, political and economic reasons that intertwine with different phases of capitalism and the Italian national history. Thus, it is possible to distinguish between a modern and
a contemporary phase of this project. The article focuses mainly on the latter phase, and it analyses the role that different actors played in reactivating this venture as well as opposing it. The main idea is that in spite of its original vertical nature, the project, though devastating, has been supported by large sectors of the local civil society. It is, therefore, the calamitous project that the city deserves –so that Messina is not another area of sacrifice, but an area of «deliberate immolation».

Principles and rules of international law are of great significance for the establishment of effective international security. International security in the broad sense of the term constitutes a specific system of intergovernmental relations, a system which will be observed only if it expresses mandatory rules of conduct by a state, while the latter is nothing other than the principles and rules of international law. The principles and rules of international law that enter into a system of international security indicate the boundaries of conduct by states, beyond which the actions of one state may do detriment to the security of others. The traditional concept of international security applies only to the renunciation of military force and issues directly related to this, such as peaceful resolution of disputes, sovereign equality, territorial integrity, etc. Principles of international law of the same name are formally articulated in the UN Charter, which also contains specified powers of the UN Security Council pertaining to maintaining international peace and security. This paper has discussed some major and most important concept pertaining to International Security.

In the context of the current US and Israeli wars on Iran (and Lebanon) and during what appears to be the eclipse of US primacy, we brought together a group of scholars with expertise on the “weak” states of the Middle East for a Project on Middle East Political Science workshop at the University of Alabama in March 2026. The essays from the collection show both the severity of the challenges confronting the weak states of the Middle East amidst regional turbulence and American decline, and the agency of those states (and non-state actors) in devising strategies to respond.  Even the weakest of actors seek out the means to preserve their vital interests and advance their goals, often frustrating the expectations and ambitions of the powerful.

The nature of espionage has undergone a profound transformation in the age of artificial intelligence, big data, and hyper-connectivity. Unlike traditional spying—which required physical access, human agents, and tangible documents—modern espionage operates through algorithms, encrypted networks, and digital footprints that are often invisible, instantaneous, and difficult to trace.

Policing is heavily experience-oriented and a practical person’s niche. However, high-quality policing requires more than experience because change outpaces experience; it requires the principles of ethics. Inculcating the principles of ethics is important for systemic, high-quality progressive policing. This is because society is primarily a moral setup, and for any civil action to contribute to societal objectives, it needs to trade on moral considerations. Therefore, if police are to stand as an example of civic virtue, they must be civically virtuous and stand on the ground of moral integrity. This is precisely because morality is embedded in the nature, functions, and the objective of policing; and more importantly, policing has social and moral consequences. Undermining of this fact explains various immoralities that are seen in various policing activities in the nation.

tention of public administration. A problematic aspect is the lack of clarity of interpretation of the main category and identification of components of state security, which slows down the formation of effective mechanisms of public administration in the field of state security, and thus reduces its effectiveness. The study used methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, as well as decomposition, which allowed to clarify the definition of state security, its structure and provide a primary description of these components. The definition of «state security» is formed. It is proposed to understand the state of protection of various vector interests of the state and the citizen, which ensures the effective functioning of all spheres, industries, institutional sectors, mechanisms, implementation of functions and powers of the state for their development. An important emphasis on this situation is its achievement in a changing environment, external and internal threats. The separation of the following types of components of state security with the corresponding content load is motivated: security of national administration; political security; economic security; military security; security of public and legal order; social and humanitarian security; information and communication security; resource and environmental security; technical and technogenic safety; international diplomatic security. In comparison with the existing approaches, the applied unification terminological approach allows to emphasize quite concretely the content of concepts in the context of their «historical nature». In contrast to the existing approaches to the structure of state security, the presented segmentation of state security takes into account the domestic regulatory framework, global approaches to determining the objective attention of the state and its threats, current trends in civil society. Due to the implementation of the author's proposals in practice, state security as an object of public administration acquires a clear systematics, which allows to form both scientifically sound mechanisms of the latter and new areas of research.