Matthew Crosston

Oh how fickle and strange ‘revolutions’ can be. Perhaps the Western academic world can be forgiven for its presumptuousness: after all, it has been nearly a generation since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and subsequent march of ‘democratic revolutions’ all over the globe. Well, actually, that is partially true. What has erupted all over the globe has largely been the triumph of democratic language: most regimes, whether they truly resemble...

While China has accepted human security as a new framework to study modern security challenges, it has been very busy trying to show how the implications of human security can be intrusive and even invasive of state sovereignty. Indicative of its confidence in projecting its own power outward across the global community, ‘non-traditional security’ includes not just people and populations but actual state security as well. Thus, China definitively inserts...

This piece investigates the unique peculiarities of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Instead of being a Eurasian counterpart to the EU, an additional IO bridge between East and West, or even influenced by organizations like ASEAN, the SCO is dominated by micro-agendas that work in opposition to the theoretical literature explaining international organization purpose. Consequently, this particular IO is not only failing to become a nexus...