Alexandra Homolar

• PhD
• Professor at University of Warwick

When the United Nations Development Programme formally introduced the concept of human security in 1994, it was widely celebrated as a long-overdue humanist alternative to orthodox models of security. Today, human security is a buzzword for describing the complex challenges that individuals and communities face in achieving safety and wellbeing in...

With the end of the George W. Bush presidency and the inauguration of the Obama administration, observers and policymakers around the world hailed the potential for the United States to engage in a new era of multilateralism on issues ranging from nuclear proliferation to climate change to humanitarian intervention. In contrast to the perceived uni...

This article investigates how key actors within the US defence policy community realigned their interests to forge a new consensus on the redirection of US defence strategy following the ‘peace shock’ they faced with the collapse of bipolarity. This consensus centred on the idea that achieving US security in the ‘age of uncertainty’ demanded overwh...

This article examines how the foundations of the ‘rogue states’ security narrative in the United States developed prior to the declaration of the George W. Bush administration’s ‘Global War on Terror’ and President Bush’s representation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’. The article argues that the puzzle of how US post-Cold War fo...

This article speaks to an established interest of International Relations scholars in the construction of the ‘China threat’ in US political discourse. We advance recent works which have argued that the rise of China has contributed to the success of populism in the United States and Western liberal democracies more widely. Specifically, we transpo...

Alliances are generally understood as groupings of states that combine to aggregate their physical capabilities against security threats. In this article we suggest transposing this well-established terminology of inter-state allegiance to the dimension of narrative. Focusing on the example of the ‘rules-based order’ (RBO), we provide a new concept...

This chapter examines how communicative practices, emotion, and everyday experiences of insecurity interlink in processes of populist political mobilization. Combining insights from international security studies, political psychology, and populism research, it demonstrates how populist political agents from the right of the political spectrum have...

The post-Cold War era is often seen as a missed opportunity of epic proportions for the United States to turn swords into ploughshares, with much of the blame placed on international developments. The Uncertainty Doctrine challenges the conventional take on post-Cold War history as imposed on the US by events largely outside its control. It shows i...

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of the rise of America’s preoccupation with the problem of rogue states in the US defense policy community from the late-1980s onwards. In contrast to most scholarship on rogue states, this account departs from both a realist epistemology and the treatment of rogue states as an ‘objective’ problem categ...

This chapter examines America’s quest for a comprehensive missile defense system in the post-Cold War era. Major weapons systems – especially those that come with a high price tag – require a successful political coalition that supports the initial research and future deployment of particular weapons systems over possible alternatives. The chapter...

This chapter ties the book’s key findings and its main arguments together. It reminds the reader why the analysis in the book has not told the familiar tale of how the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War ended, but the lesser known story of what happened during the period of systemic transition that began in the late 1980s and extended throughou...

This chapter unpacks the book’s two-fold concern with ‘narrative’: The study of narrative is the empirical focal point for exploring US defense policymaking in the context of the end of the Cold War and, developing a narrative mode of knowing, it is also the methodological cornerstone of how this is done. Looking more closely at the process of reco...

The post-Cold War era is often seen as a missed opportunity of epic proportions for the United States to turn swords into ploughshares, with much of the blame placed on international developments. The Uncertainty Doctrine challenges the conventional take on post-Cold War history as imposed on the US by events largely outside its control. It shows i...

This chapter introduces the reader to how narrative politics shaped US hard power after the Cold War. It reveals a fundamental problem with claims of significant and sustained reductions in US defense spending during the 1990s: the highly selective use of data. This creates the illusion of a starkly reduced US post-Cold defense burden, which equate...

This chapter explores how the principle that America’s security rests upon global military supremacy – achieved through the ability to fight wars on multiple fronts – emerged as a strategic consensus in the aftermath of the Cold War. It dissects and analyzes the bargaining dynamics within the US defense establishment and reveals how reorienting the...

This article makes the case for seeing hypermasculine posturing and appealing to male anxieties as integral to the wider purchase of nationalist populist narratives that fuel anti-democratic sentiments and demand a radical transformation of politics and society. It focuses on how populist rhetoric from—and to—the right of the political spectrum rel...

The rhetoric leaders use to speak to domestic audiences about security is not simply bluster. Political agents rely upon stories of enmity and threat to represent what is happening in the international arena, to whom and why, in order to push national and international security policy agendas. They do so for the simple reason that a good story is a...

The rhetoric leaders use to speak to domestic audiences about security is not simply bluster. Political agents rely upon stories of enmity and threat to represent what is happening in the international arena, to whom and why, in order to push national and international security policy agendas. They do so for the simple reason that a good story is a...

This article examines how communicative practices, emotion, and everyday experiences of insecurity interlink in processes of populist political mobilization. Combining insights from international security studies, political psychology, and populism research, it demonstrates how populist political agents from the right of the political spectrum have...

For most observers, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States (US) came as a shock. This has been widely recast as the culmination of the American public's long-standing dissatisfaction with the political elite and deep-seated frustrations with broader socioeconomic conditions. We argue that the Trump campaign's succes...

How does violence become understood as terrorism? In this article, we show how a narrative approach to the study of violent events offers a conceptually productive way to understand the process of “seeing” an event as a terrorist act, one that explicitly integrates the phenomenology of violence. While the collective practice of defining terrorism i...

The production of transnational knowledge that is widely recognized as legitimate is a major source of influence for international organizations (IOs). To reinforce their expert status, IOs increasingly produce global benchmarks that measure national performance across a range of issue areas. This article illustrates how IO benchmarking is a signif...

This article draws on the conceptualisation of ‘discursive formation’ to examine the particular configuration of the ‘objects, subjects, concepts and strategies’ which constituted ‘nuclear proliferation’ between 2006 and 2012. While previous studies have mostly explored the discourse of nuclear proliferation through the analysis of newspaper texts,...

With the end of the George W. Bush presidency and the inauguration of the Obama administration, observers and policymakers around the world hailed the potential for the United States to engage in a new era of multilateralism on issues ranging from nuclear proliferation to climate change to humanitarian intervention. In contrast to the perceived uni...

This paper explores the discursive processes of legitimizing leadership claims in the context of the nuclear proliferation crisis. Three complementary analyses of texts are carried out: discourse analyses of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and relevant speeches by members of the US administration, as well as a corpus analysis of...

The study of international security and political economy are two sides of the same coin. Yet the disciplinary fields of security studies and political economy too often maintain a deliberate distance from each other. The three books discussed in this article are a welcome departure from such an artificial division between (inter)national security...

The ‘neoconservative moment’ is widely assumed to have come and gone with the George W. Bush administration. This article argues, however, that the hope that the neoconservative chapter in US foreign policy will be definitively closed under Barack Obama's administration is unlikely to be realized in practice, owing to the continuing influence that...

http://www.bpb.de/apuz/27287/pax-americana-und-gewaltsame-demokratisierung?p=all