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Asymmetric Warfare: the West's Answer

Dr. Giuseppe Caforio, as Chairperson and Organizer, is developing a session devoted to "Asymmetric Warfare: the West's Answer" for the next International Sociological Association World Congress, Gothenburg, Sweden, July 11 through 17, 2010. He invites those interested to send proposals and brief abstracts to him by January 20th, 2010.

The general issues for the proposed session are along the following lines:

"The end of the Cold War and the resulting disappearance of the two opposing blocs of states (whose equilibrium was nevertheless a strong guarantee of the preservation of some sort of status quo) opened a Pandora's box from which progressively and tumultuously have emerged religious wars, ethnic conflicts, the disintegration of states and the birth of new state entities, often in conflict with each other. These are all phenomena strongly at odds with the free trade and globalization needs of the victors in that war.

Most of these new conflicts (new wars, according to the M. Kaldor definition) are asymmetric, and the Western World (in a broad sense) has now to face a different and peculiar form of warfare, characterized by a situation where a weak side (state or non state actor) is opposed to a strong military state power. What could an appropriate answer from the West be?"

ERGOMAS: Working Group on Public Opinion, Mass Media and the Military

I plan to organize an interim meeting of the Working Group: Public Opinion, Mass Media and the Military in Ljubljana, Slovenia, April 8-11, 2010. I invite all scholars and experts who are interested in public opinion and mass media research in the field of security, and especially of the military, to participate to the event. The agenda of the meeting will be:

1. presentation of papers on recent public opinion data and trends at the national and cross-national levels
2. presentation of papers resulting from analyses of mass media reports on security and especially military topics
3. discussion on methodological issues in the field of public opinion surveys and mass media analyses
4. preparation for publication of monograph as the result of the scientific meeting
5. discussion on future cross-national survey

I kindly invite all potential participants to propose their papers referring to points 1-3 of the above agenda no later than January 31, 2010. The proposals will enable me to create the detailed programme of the meeting. The logistical information will follow.

Marjan Malesic
Coordinator of the Working Group on Public Opinion, Mass Media and the Military