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Geometric Effects Of Warfighters On Body Armor Fit And Protective Capabilities Against Shock Wave Energy, Melissa Lynn Sutter

Doctoral Dissertations

Body armor is a vital piece of protective equipment for warfighters to defend against threats, necessitating continued development to improve comfort, weight, and protection. However, female warfighters often wear unisex body armor, designed primarily for the male torso. Current research has evaluated the short- and long-term detriments of female warfighters wearing these armors, focusing on comfort and performance. However, these studies do not comprehensively consider how a non-form-fitting armor compromises warfighter safety from battlefield threats. This research examines the geometric effects of female warfighters on armor protection level when defending against shock threats by evaluating the energy distribution on a …

Cyberattacks, Modern Sovereignty Violations, And The Disadvantage To Developing States, Colleen Garcia

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Elite Cues Vs. Economic Vulnerabilities: What Explains Isolationist Foreign Policy Attitudes Among Americans?, Sabyasachi Karmaker

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines whether contemporary isolationist foreign policy attitudes among Americans are better explained by elite political cues or by economic vulnerabilities. Using data from the 2024 American National Election Study (ANES), the study also examines which mechanism holds more explanatory power in shaping isolationist views. The findings show that both elite cues and economic vulnerabilities are associated with isolationist attitudes, but elite cues have greater explanatory power. These results suggest that contemporary American isolationism is more strongly associated with political identity and elite messaging than with economic hardship alone.

“Because We Take Our Values To War” Analyzing The Views Of Un Member States On Aidriven Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems, Rangita De Silva De Alwis

Chicago Journal of International Law

In paragraph two of its resolution 2 on lethal autonomous weapon systems, pursuant to U.N. General Assembly resolution 78/241, the General Assembly requested the Secretary-General to solicit the views of Member States and Observer States regarding lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). Specifically, the request encompassed perspectives on addressing the multifaceted challenges and concerns raised by LAWS, including humanitarian, legal, security,

The Instruments Of Chinese Economic Statecraft, Wilson Han

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The global economic order is undergoing a profound transformation as China increasingly leverages its vast commercial resources not merely for market expansion, but as strategic instruments to reshape global governance and secure its national interests. Moving beyond traditional analyses that rely on aggregate macroeconomic indicators, this dissertation investigates the targeted, highly asymmetrical mechanisms of Beijing’s economic statecraft. It systematically examines three specific instruments – institutional, financial, and trade – through which China projects structural power and constructs an alternative economic order.

The first empirical study explores China’s institutional statecraft by analyzing its bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement …

Women's Right To Freedom Of Movement In Islamic Law And Under Taliban-Ruled Afghanistan, Lutforahman Saeed

Fordham International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

An Agrarian Force Before The Flames: A Greek Blueprint For Europe's Wildfire Prevention Strategy, Panayotis (Baki) Giorgos Agelarakis

Fordham International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Can – And Should – The Un Charter Be Saved?, Steven Ratner

Articles

World leaders from Canada’s Mark Carney to Germany’s Friedrich Merz have announced the demise of the international rules that provided some degree of order to international relations since the Second World War.2 The immediate cause is clear to them and others – a seeming abandonment of international law, and the UN Charter in particular, by the United States government, its chief architect and advocate. The U.S. actions and rhetoric over Venezuela and Iran – wars the United States has started – as well as Greenland and Ukraine seem to have confirmed the worst about the future of international law.

Safeguarding Human Rights In Climate Change-Driven Territorial Loss And Creation: Small Island States, Desertification, Antarctica, And The Arctic, Diane A. Desierto

Journal Articles

From the Article

Scholarly literature on territorial loss or creation arising from sea-level rise prominently focuses on framing this phenomenon's international legal consequences on the existence and continuity of statehood under international law. While these questions are crucial, tethering the analysis of territorial loss and creation during the Charter era only to the question of statehood obscures urgent questions of human rights protection for populations affected by such territorial loss and creation. The expansive corpus and extraterritorial application of contemporary international human rights law generate obligations on all States to address territorial loss and creation from climate change, whether as …

Protester As Combatant: Who Is Afraid Of A Peaceful Protester?, Heidi Gilchrist

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Prohibition Of Force Is The First Principle Of International Humanitarian Law, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

This article tracks the decline of respect for the prohibition of force, IHL, and human rights law. At the same time, it will clarify the inter-relationship of the three bodies of international law relevant to armed conflict. The article also considers why presidents first began to “abandon peace.” The evidence indicates that a major reason involves the influence of realist political theory. Realism asserts that national security is attained by amassing and demonstrating superior military capability. A president who follows the theory will defy the law against the use of force. Following realism is also at odds with the empirical …

Nuclear Deterrence And Nuclear Modernization: A Strategic Analysis Of Global Nuclear Threats And U.S. Policy, Abraham Morland

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The nuclear imperative comes from the idea that all three legs of the Triad must be retained to ensure a viable deterrent posture, provide flexibility in a response, and give decision makers options to create uncertainty in an adversary’s decision calculus. The nuclear imperative is the need to fund suggested shortfalls in the nuclear enterprise and modernize the U.S. Triad, not just one or two legs, but all three, due to the ever-increasing nuclear risk. To understand the current state in which the United States finds itself and the need for the nuclear modernization program, this thesis will review nuclear …

Drone Dichotomy: Investigating The Application Of Unmanned Aerial Systems For Offensive And Defensive Chemical, Biological, Radiological, And Nuclear-Related Tasks, Evan Jacob Martinovitch

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis investigates the application of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) for both offensive and defensive chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) tasks to determine if they serve as a force multiplier on the modern battlefield. As CBRN weapons reemerge as realistic threats alongside the rapid proliferation of UAS, the intersection of these fields presents unique challenges and opportunities. Through a methodology that examines the history of the UAS-CBRN intersection, military doctrine, and the status of UAS technology, this research evaluates the capability of current and emerging UAS against specific CBRN delivery, reconnaissance and surveillance, and decontamination tasks. The analysis conducted …

Europe In The Indo-Pacific - Implications For The United States, Joshua G. Zinicola

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Within the last five years the Indo-Pacific has become a region of increasing interest to European NATO members. In particular, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy have assigned strategic importance for their national security to the region, signing cooperative agreements with regional allies of the United States and deploying significant forces to the region. These agreements include commitments to jointly develop new technologies and combat systems for employment in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific, such as the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), and the Trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (AUKUS). They also include …

The Black Paintings: A Work For Orchestra, Cody Anderson

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Based on The Black Paintings, a series of paintings by Francisco Goya, this orchestral composition ventures into various themes and satirical elements present in select paintings. Topics such as military overreach, the church’s influence on society, and the resistance of scientific ideas are just a few of the areas explored in the finished three movements. First, the composer’s interpretations of the selected works are covered, and then how those themes were translated into the music. Goya’s painting, “Women Laughing,” has numerous names given to it, which are much darker in tone. However, given the somber nature of the subsequent movements, …

The United States' Nuclear Deterrent Outlook: Strategies, Challenges, And Future Prospects, Jonathon L. Beening

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This study contends that the United States cannot sustain a credible nuclear deterrent through the mid-21st century without modernizing its aging nuclear arsenal and revising its nuclear doctrine to address emerging technological, geopolitical, and strategic threats posed by both near-peer adversaries and non-state actors. Through an examination of deterrence theory, historical developments, current force posture, modernization initiatives, doctrinal debates, counterarguments, and prospective geopolitical scenarios, this research assesses the adequacy of existing policies in maintaining strategic stability. The analysis concludes that credible deterrence in the coming decades will require integrated modernization, doctrinal clarity, and strategic adaptability to face any future threat …

From Aid To Looting: Justice And Sovereignty Issues In The Ukraine–U.S. Mineral Deal, Petra Gümplova

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

This essay identifies three central moral and political issues with the the Ukraine–U.S. Mineral Deal. First, by linking financial and military assistance to access to Ukraine’s natural resources, the deal entrenches a form of resource conditionality that is highly problematic from the moral standpoint of international justice and other ethical principles. Second, the absence of a commitment to a just peace—including the restoration of territorial integrity, reparations, and security guarantees—renders the conditions for secure, long-term investment in Ukraine’s extractive economy a distant prospect, while raising the risk that a substantial portion of Ukraine’s resource wealth unlawfully seized by Russia will …

Applying Machine Learning Techniques For Early Detection Of Cyber Attacks On Iot Devices, Noor Adnan Allamy

Al-Esraa University College Journal for Engineering Sciences

This research designs, implements, and evaluates a machine learning-based framework for the early detection of cyber attacks targeting Internet of Things (IoT) devices, with a specific focus on the context and challenges present in Iraq. The study conducts a comparative analysis of three supervised learning algorithms—Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and Deep Neural Networks (DNN)—using a combination of benchmark datasets (NSL-KDD, CIC-IDS-2017, Bot-IoT) and a synthesized dataset adapted to simulate the Iraqi threat landscape. Key performance metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, were used for evaluation. The proposed Random Forest model demonstrated superior performance, achieving an accuracy …

Advancements In Intelligent Systems For Industrial Management: Enhancing Efficiency And Automation, Samir Ali Amin, Salah Sabeeh Abed Al Kareem, Laith Jaafer Habeeb

Al-Farahidi Expert Systems Journal

The modern industrial management is quite dependent on intelligent systems that promote intensifying automation and general efficiency in different industries. With the introduction of advanced technologies in form of AI, machine learning, CPS and IoT these systems move the industrial functionality to a great extent. By combining, such technologies have the ability to quickly interpret data, detect the need for maintenance early in the line and make informed decisions, which produce highly optimized manufacturing processes. Automation has automated the process, reducing costs considerably, producing more, and maintaining high standards. Development of industry 4.0 has been a major tool in coordinating …

Operational Context's Impact On Cockpit Behavior: Case Studies In Aviation, Nick Mehrdad Loghmani

Dissertations - ALL

This thesis examines instances where pilots in a tightly regulated environment, the modern airline cockpit, exhibit diverging responses when presented with identical information. Despite explicit standardization of procedures, instrumentation, and Crew Resource Management, observable patterns of operational divergence persist. The study adopts distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995) as the primary lens and analyzes the crew–procedures–artifacts system using cockpit transcripts and flight data. Operational context is the evolving set of roles, procedures, cognitive artifacts (including automation), constraints, and environmental conditions, while the operational configuration denotes its time-indexed instantiation at moment t. Within this frame, the thesis documents when cues do—and do not—propagate …

Building Bridges: Industrial Trade Unions In A Changing Climate, Nicole Möller

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation examines how German industrial trade unions and workers in the automobile and coal industries navigate the profound challenges of the green transition. Workers’ experiences are situated within a broader political-economic context shaped partly by market-led decarbonization efforts, welfare retrenchment/austerity, erosion of progressive institutions in society, and global competition, as well as a global restructuring of value accumulation. The analysis critically engages with unions’ current responses to a market-led transition and their implications for labor’s future. The dissertation develops its argument across three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 investigates workplace-level changes in coal mining and automobile production, analyzing how workers …

The Mansion That Disney Built: Revitalizing Antitrust Enforcement In The Film Industry, Drew Chandler

BYU Law Review

The Paramount Decrees, for over sixty years, barred the major film studios from anticompetitive practices like vertical integration and block-booking. The Department of Justice’s decision to sunset the Decrees in 2020 came prematurely, with the movie industry today rocked by major mergers, the advent of streaming, the pandemic, lessened output due to industry strikes, and changing consumer tastes. True, the industry has changed since 1948, but those very changes call for regulatory intervention to avoid repeating the problems of the past.

For example, Disney’s recent merger and acquisition activity, together with the dominance of its in-house streaming service Disney+, is …

Legal Issues Arising From The Military Use Of Ai-Supported Biometrics, Marten Zwanenburg

International Law Studies

Biometrics is increasingly used by armed forces for a variety of purposes, such as access control, the registration of detainees, and increasingly also targeting. The capabilities of biometric systems are considerably strengthened when they are enabled by artificial intelligence (AI). This article analyzes legal questions that are raised by the military use of such AI-supported biometrics. It argues that relevant legal frameworks are International Humanitarian Law, international human rights law, and the right to privacy in particular, as well as data protection law. The article finds that arguably, IHL may require the use of (AI-supported) biometrics in certain situations if …

Compliance With International Humanitarian Law And Peacebuilding In Post-Conflict Kosovo, Avni H. Alidemaj, Alban Maliqi, Johne Doone, Valdon Bytyci

Hasanuddin Law Review

Unprecedented violent conflicts occurred worldwide during the 20th century. Millions of lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and generational effects on post-conflict nations. Meanwhile, international humanitarian law was developed to reduce conflict damage. Government parties to International Humanitarian Law (IHL) conventions have enforceable obligations to implement, promote, and perform their duties, helping to promote their wider recognition and enforcement. During the Kosovo conflict, Serbian military commanders and the police violated international humanitarian law by breaking fundamental precepts. The study of the Kosovo conflict prioritizes criminal accountability and historical documentation over the enduring societal consequences of violations of IHL. There are not many …

The Sustainability Game: A Case Study Of The Effectiveness Of A Training Game, Michał Mijal

Studia i Materiały Wydział Zarządzania Uniwersytet Warszawski

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to analyse the possibilities and limitations of using the educational game “Eko Smakosz” in academic teaching, as well as to evaluate the potential of adapting its mechanics for managerial training and scientific research.

Design/methodology/approach: A case study method was employed, comprising quantitative research (pre-test and post-test) and qualitative research (participant observation and DATA model debriefing). The study was conducted on a group of 14 individuals (university students and employees) who played a series of game sessions.

Findings: The study demonstrated an increase in knowledge and participant engagement with subsequent gameplay …

Acceptability Of Using Brain-Computer Interface In The Workplace – Attitudes Of Prospective Employees, Aneta Biernikowicz

Studia i Materiały Wydział Zarządzania Uniwersytet Warszawski

Purpose: This study aims to examine the attitudes of young management students toward the use of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) in the workplace, considering both the potential benefits and the associated risks of this technology.

Methodology: The study is exploratory in nature and was conducted using the CAWI method on a group of management students. Both open-ended and closed-ended questions were used on a 7-point Likert scale. Qualitative analysis included descriptive and focused coding, and quantitative analysis - descriptive statistics.

Results: Respondents showed a high level of awareness of the existence of BCI technology, mainly for medical purposes. …

Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China, Richard Norton, Hal Brands, Michael Beckley

Naval War College Review

No abstract provided.

Winning Without Fighting: Irregular Warfare And Strategic Competition In The 21st Century, Kevin D. Stringer, Rebecca Patterson

Naval War College Review

No abstract provided.

Neither Confirm Nor Deny—The U.S. Navy’S Declaratory Policy On Nuclear Weapons, Jeffrey A. Larsen, James J. Wirtz

Naval War College Review

The reintroduction of the submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile into the U.S. Navy’s arsenal signals a shift in U.S. nuclear policy, challenging long-standing declaratory norms and public statements such as the “neither confirm nor deny” stance on the presence of nuclear weapons on warships.

Book Review: Pivotal Poland: Europe’S Rising Power, Magnus Petersson

Parameters Bookshelf – Online Book Reviews

Author: Janusz Bugajski

Reviewed by: Magnus Petersson, professor of international relations, Stockholm University

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland has emerged as the strategic anchor of NATO’s eastern flank, reshaping the continent’s security landscape. Janusz Bugajski explores how Warsaw’s military modernization, economic resilience, and assertive diplomacy have positioned it as a rising power capable of countering Russian imperialism and leading regional defense efforts. This timely and incisive book reveals Poland’s transformation from a peripheral actor to a pivotal force in Europe’s evolving geopolitical order.

©2025 Magnus Petersson