1,720,957 research outputs found
The Bear Learns to Swim: Russia's Re-emergence in the Mediterranean
No full textThe article explores the recent surge of Russian military presence in the Eastern Mediterranean and evaluates the implications of Moscow’s decision to challenge the regional status quo. In November 2015, the downing of a Russian fighter jet over Syrian airspace turned analysts’ attention to the increasing involvement of Russia in the Syrian battlefield. Moscow’s entanglement in the Syrian civil war was only the latest episode in its historically persistent effort to establish a permanent presence in Mediterranean waters. Developments in recent years, however, point to a more ambitious approach. This article argues that Moscow’s unfolding strategy entails the gradual assertion of Russian air superiority over critical parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, a Russian aspiration that has been elusive even during the peak of the Cold War rivalry. Moscow’s grand strategy, in this regard, signals a renewed effort to disrupt NATO's south-eastern flank. Under this prism, the deployment of long-range S-400 and S-300 Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs), S-300 equipped ships and advanced fighter jets across regional flashpoints may prove to be a game changing initiative. The implications of Russia’s contemporary strategy could be important for the future of the Eastern Mediterranean, as Moscow’s approach appears to be upsetting the regional balance of power. Israel’s unchallenged dominance of the skies over Syria and Lebanon is compromised for the first time since 1970, when Russian air-defence forces were deployed to Egypt. The Turkish armed forces, moreover, will struggle to compensate for the Russian game plan, which complicates Ankara’s ability to project power over Syria, Iraq and the Aegean Sea. These dispersed airpower “webs” could, finally, restrict NATO’s capacity to deploy assets in the region and nullify the credibility of the alliance’s anti-ballistic shield. Overall, contemporary developments may enable Russia to challenge American control of a geopolitically vital area that has been in essence uncontested since the end of World War II
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
What Role for Media in Security Crises?
Get PDFThe chapter examines the impact of media on public opinion and leadership decision-making during security crises. Leaders pay particular attention to media outlets during crises in an effort to collect as much information as possible from open sources. While intelligence from state services and allies plays a crucial role in reaching decisions, the impact of electronic and social media in shaping leadership perceptions is increasingly hard to ignore. The fact that governments have access to “accurate” intelligence should mitigate, in principle, the danger of misperception arising from erroneous media reports. Nevertheless, we have no way of limiting the potential “contamination” of leadership perceptions by inaccurate media information. Intelligence, after all, may be inconclusive, and intelligence assessments could themselves be affected by factors such as hostile images of the “other” engineered by the media. But the media’s independence is being gradually compromised, with the post-Cold War trend being particularly revealing. From the “CNN effect” of the 1990s to the “War on Terror” campaign in the 2000s and the Hybrid Warfare doctrines of the 2010, it becomes increasingly evident that governments aspire to “weaponise” information so as to achieve their military objectives. Maintaining, therefore, accurate perceptions in an environment where disinformation, fake news, and propaganda are pervasive is a demanding task. As a result, governments will have to exercise effective oversight across media outlets in the future in order to ensure that public opinion and leadership perceptions are unaffected by disinformation and propaganda campaigns. With more governments engaging into the “weaponisation” of media, however, it is up to media professionals and journalists to defend their field and ensure that global audiences have access to impartial coverage of security crises
THE RISE OF A STRATEGIC SPOILER: RUSSIA’S EUROPEAN SECURITY STRATEGY
Get PDFRussia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 was the latest step in Moscow’s steadfast rejection of the post-Cold War security order in Europe. Nevertheless, analysts and scholars remain puzzled as to what exactly constitutes Russia’s long-term game plan vis-à-vis Europe. This chapter suggests that, far from following a concrete, well-planned blueprint at the operational and tactical levels, Russia’s grand strategic objectives enable Moscow to adopt a fluid, adaptive posture aiming at achieving two interconnected goals: to maintain, or even improve, the continental military balance of power through the deployment of strategic weapons and at the same time acquire the capabilities to disrupt NATO’s air and naval superiority in critical flashpoints, an aspiration that had been elusive even at the peak of the Cold War rivalry. The implications of Russia’s grand strategic doctrine are thus crucial for Europe’s security outlook; Moscow’s approach implies that Russian deterrence at the highest levels will be robust, while low-level, disruptive tactics in areas where Russia maintains an operational advantage could challenge the European security status quo. Contemporary developments, therefore, may enable Russia to undermine NATO’s supremacy in the Euro-Atlantic geopolitical space, altering the post-Cold War order
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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