Mortal Enemies Definition

The Goodyear Explosion

Hostile Interrogations & the Military Physician

In an age when a dedicated terrorist, or small terrorist team, can cause injury or death to many, the necessity of forcible extraction of information from a person is a timely, relevant, and vitally important topic for discussion and debate. When actionable intelligence indicates direct knowledge by a detainee of the impending attack, society must answer the question of whether the application of torture is defensible on the grounds of saving many lives. Uniformly, following international conventions against torture, bioethicists condemn its use. However, most countries apply torture to extract information. In emergent situations, when every moment matters and the lives of many are in balance, considerations of torture must be made in a coherent and logical manner whose ethics mandate consideration prior to the event. Positing that torture is justified in such a setting, the torture team, usually consisting of a physician, or other health care person will apply important medical knowledge regarding the detainee’s health and strength to advance the session. In the military community, such as when the United States is the occupying power, the military physician may be asked to assist the torture team. The author posits four specific criteria for the military physician, arguing that the application of torture in emergent conditions is not only defensible but reflects the furtherance of the physician's duty of care to the society of which s/he is part.

Critical Security and Chinese Politics

This book examines how critical approaches to security developed in Europe can be used to investigate a Chinese security issue - the case of the Falungong. The past few decades have produced a rich field of theoretical approaches to ‘security’ in Europe. In this book, the security-specific notions of securitization, the politics of insecurity, and emancipation are used as analytical approaches to investigate the anti-Falungong campaign in the People’s Republic of China. This campaign, launched in 1999, was the largest security-related propaganda campaign since 1989 and was directed against a group of qigong-practitioners who were presented as a grave threat to society. The campaign had major impacts as new security legislation was established and human rights organizations reported severe mistreatment of practitioners. This book approaches one empirical case with three approaches in order to transcend the tendency to pit one approach against another. It shows how they highlight different aspects in investigation, and how they can be combined to gain more comprehensive insights, and thereby invigorate renewed debate in the field. Furthermore, this is used as a vehicle to discuss more general philosophical issues of theory, development, and theory development and will assist students to comprehend the effects research framework selection has on a piece of research. Such discussions are necessary in order to apply the frameworks in investigations that go beyond the socio-political context they were originally developed in. This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies, Chinese politics, research methods and IR in general.