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Assuring Assured Retaliation: China's Nuclear Posture and U.S.-China Strategic Stability
Whether China will abandon its long-standing nuclear strategy of assured retaliation for a first-use posture will be a critical factor in future U.S.-China strategic stability. In the past decade, advances in U.S. strategic capabilities, especially missile defenses and enhanced long-range conventional strike capacity, could undermine China's nuclear retaliatory capability, which is based on a relatively small force and second-strike posture. An exhaustive review of Chinese writings on military affairs indicates, however, that China is unlikely to abandon its current nuclear strategy of assured retaliation. Instead, China will modestly expand its arsenal, increase the sophistication of its forces, and allow limited ambiguity regarding its pledge not to use nuclear weapons first. This limited ambiguity allows China to use the threat of nuclear retaliation to deter a conventional attack on its nuclear arsenal, without significantly increasing the size of its nuclear forces and triggering a costly arms race. Nevertheless, China's effort to maintain its strategy of assured retaliation while avoiding an arms race could backfire. Those efforts increase the risk that nuclear weapons could be used in a crisis between the United States and China, even though China views this possibility as much less likely than the United States does.
Journal Article
India’s Counterforce Temptations
Is India shifting to a nuclear counterforce strategy? Continued aggression by Pakistan against India, enabled by Islamabad’s nuclear strategy and India’s inability to counter it, has prompted the leadership in Delhi to explore more flexible preemptive counterforce options in an attempt to reestablish deterrence. Increasingly, Indian officials are advancing the logic of counterforce targeting, and they have begun to lay out exceptions to India’s long-standing no-first-use policy to potentially allow for the preemptive use of nuclear weapons. Simultaneously, India has been acquiring the components that its military would need to launch counterforce strikes. These include a growing number of accurate and responsive nuclear delivery systems, an array of surveillance platforms, and sophisticated missile defenses. Executing a counterforce strike against Pakistan, however, would be exceptionally difficult. Moreover, Pakistan’s response to the mere fear that India might be pursuing a counterforce option could generate a dangerous regional arms race and crisis instability. A cycle of escalation would have significant implications not only for South Asia, but also for the broader nuclear landscape if other regional powers were similarly seduced by the temptations of nuclear counterforce.
Journal Article
Academic Freedom and Discipline: The Case of the Arguably Peaceful Protestors
Soon after Hamas's attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel's military response in Gaza, a global spotlight focused on university members' and leaders' conduct and statements regarding those events. Intense debate ensued about what academic freedom means when university members' political protest and speech are alleged to constitute forms of discrimination, harassment, and bullying of other members of the university. The debate revealed widespread uncertainty about the relationship between universities' policies and attitudes on academic freedom on the one hand and universities' disciplinary rules on the other hand. The aftermath also raised questions about the proper role of universities in speaking on world events. Every day, universities receive complaints from their members about other members' violations of university policies. Those complaints are often investigated and adjudicated within a university's disciplinary system. This Essay consists of a fictitious disciplinary proceeding within a hypothetical university's complaint adjudication process. We present a written determination by adjudicators at a fictitious school, Newgarth University, who must decide whether to discipline students accused of policy violations during political protest. Our goal is to present examples of common intellectual positions in the terrain of academic freedom, discrimination, and university discipline. We hope that by making visible the most common intellectual approaches to navigating the intersection of political protest, academic freedom, discrimination, and university discipline, readers may better understand the legal terrain.
Journal Article
Retaliation and Confrontation of the State
Popular resistance to the weaponization of government has eroded in America. On the political Right, the post-Reagan consensus favoring limited government has given way to a new generation of leaders--like Vice President J.D. Vance and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis--who openly advocate for using state power against their political opponents. Collectively they are the New Right: a populist, antiestablishment, conservative movement opposing pluralistic systems, institutions, and cultural elites. While both political liberals and conservatives have wielded state power against their adversaries, leveraging state power to reward friends and punish enemies is fundamental to the New Right's worldview. Following German jurist Carl Schmitt's political theory, the New Right frames government as a tool for waging cultural and political battles. In this environment, politicians explicitly declare their intent to retaliate against critics for exercising their First Amendment rights, yet their official retaliatory actions often escape judicial scrutiny by maintaining facial neutrality.
Journal Article
The Courts of Genocide
The Courts of Genocide focuses on the judicial response to the genocide in Rwanda in order to address the search for justice following mass atrocities. The central concern of the book is how the politics of justice can get in the way of its administration. Considering both the ICTR (International Criminal tribunal for Rwanda), and all of the politics surrounding its work, and the Rwandan approach (the Gacaca courts and the national judiciary) and the politics that surround it, The Courts of Genocide addresses the relationship between these three 'courts' which, whilst oriented by similar concerns, stand in stark opposition to each other. In this respect, the book addresses a series of questions, including: What aspects of the Rwandan genocide itself played a role in directing the judicial response that has been adopted? On what basis did the government of Rwanda decide to address the genocide in a legalistic manner? Around what goals has each judicial response been organized? What are the specific procedures and processes of this response? And, finally, what challenges does its multifaceted character create for those involved in its operation, well as for Rwandan society? Addressing conceptual issues of restorative and retributive justice, liberal legalism and cosmopolitan law, The Courts of Genocide constitutes a substantially grounded reflection upon the problem of 'doing justice' after genocide.
Nicholas A. Jones is an Assistant Professor and Police Studies Co-ordinator in the Department of Justice Studies at the University of Regina.
1. The Rwandan Genocide and the Judicial Response 2. A Theoretical Framework for Justice in the Aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide 3. The Gacaca Courts 4. The Rwandan National Judiciary 5. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 6. International Jurisprudence: Definitions of the Crimes and the Key Precedents 7. Issues Impacting the Search for Justice Across all Three Judicial Realms: Witness Protection, Hearsay, Evidence and Plea Bargaining 8. Conclusions, Predictions and Reflections
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