The book explores the evolution of civil-military relations in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1991. It analyzes the political dynamics, institutional changes, and the impact of historical legacies on military involvement in governance and civil society in these countries. Through comparative analysis, it highlights the distinct paths taken by each nation in navigating their military's role in a post-Soviet context.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came to symbolise the dawn of a new era of openness and connectivity. Yet today, the world is ever more divided, demarcated and — quite literally fortified. We are living in a guarded age. Why and how has this happened? Where will it take us? In this book, David Betz explores the expansion of fortified physical infrastructure at every level of the global political economy. In cities, where security is increasingly ‘designed in’ to public buildings and spaces as they are reshaped to mitigate mass terror attacks. Within corporations, who are burying their electronic assets in deep underground caverns and behind the leaded walls of ex-nuclear war bunkers against a range of threats and feared contingencies. In many urban areas, where the default condition of civil life is walled, gated, watched, and guarded. Year after year hundreds of miles of linear obstacles—walls, ditches, and watchtowers—are added to national borders. Practically everywhere you look there are signs of innovative fortification, often designed to be overlooked. The Guarded Age reveals the barriers which most have observed but few - until reading this book - have truly seen.
The major aim of Cyberspace and the State is to provide conceptual orientation on the new strategic environment of the Information Age. It seeks to restore the equilibrium of policy-makers which has been disturbed by recent cyber scares, as well as to bring clarity to academic debate on the subject particularly in the fields of politics and international relations, war and strategic studies. Its main chapters explore the impact of cyberspace upon the most central aspects of statehood and the state system―power, sovereignty, war, and dominion. It is concerned equally with practice as with theory and may be read in that sense as having two halves.
