The Peruvian Army Center for Strategic Studies (CEEEP) and the Perry Center join together for an open discussion on Women, Peace and Security in the Americas.
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The purpose of this paper is to briefly review the impact of the 2008 National Defense Strategy (NDS). More specifically, the aim is to analyze the main transformations derived from the NDS in the Brazilian defense sector between 2008 and 2013. For this purpose, the most significant Brazilian legislations and academic publications produced on the subject in the period were analyzed. It is argued that, despite not having achieved all the objectives set out in the NDS itself, this document was fundamental to initiate the process of effective immersion of security and defense issues in the public policy agenda in Brazil.
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Brazil lives within a regional security context, a “securosphere” that is immensely hard to avoid. Strenuous disagreements among defense and security agencies over approaches to precise methods of identification, measurement, and reactions of living and emerging threats on this securosphere proved their shared ability to be mistaken. This article proposes a national security border system of systems with enough power of discrimination and capacity for integration to address danger or take advantage of changing circumstances across Brazil's borders, tied to appropriate outcomes of the security agents. I discriminate sensible topological differences to lay out interconnection patterns of the various elements defining three specific border environments, using them to plan a more successful action. I also discriminate between subtle similarities among practical operational concepts of the armed forces and the police forces to provide better-analyzed premises, using them to build wholeness of understanding. From a better understanding of the whole, we can infer system requirements for the parts, providing capacity to conduct a disciplined exercise of planning with politically and financially affordable costs.
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Throughout the last decades, the armies of the European countries have evolved in a non-concerted but convergent way, developing common characteristics among which the growing integration of women, both in the troop class and in the officer ranks, stands out. This work makes a comparative exercise of the different national cases, establishing as basic elements of analysis the antecedents of the presence of women in the Army, the normative evolution that has protected and governed their incorporation to the ranks, their specific quantitative and qualitative dimensions in the armies, the diverse modalities of access to the academies, the possible limitations in the professional career, and the level of evolution of certain social policies that favor the professional development and the family norms.
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This paper proposes to show part of the transformation process of the Argentine Armed Forces from an exclusively male to a mixed profession. The paper emphasizes, with different emphases, two points: On the one hand, the importance of including in the analysis of what is usually called "the incorporation of women into the Armed Forces" the role that women have played so far within the institution as wives and as the axis of a family model promoted and regulated by the institution itself. On the other hand, the modifications of the regulations in the last five years are analyzed, with the aim of giving an account of the Argentine experience in gender policy in the field of defense, but also with the intention of revealing how the State builds a family model and a gender ideology from the application of its public policies.
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The current model of resource allocation for the acquisition of weapons systems in Chile is based on Law 13.196 on Copper Reserves (LRC) and its subsequent modifications, which respond to a specific historical context; the last records recorded in public documents were made in 1941 when the Superior Council of Defense (CONSUDENA) was created. Compared models of resource allocation for national defense have a solid organizational structure within the Executive Branch, which is coupled with a permanent link with the Legislative Branch. The characteristics of the acquisition cycles of weapon systems and their implementation times indicate that the associated resources cannot respond to circumstantial criteria and that, therefore, a multiannual resource acquisition model offers the necessary elements to achieve strategic planning for the acquisition of military material and equipment for the armed forces of the region.
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This paper is aimed at carrying out an assessment of Central American vulnerabilities, especially structural violence or daily brutality, and state responses in the citizen security area, with a focus on the police-the quintessential auto protective social instrument. Moreover, the work is meant to bring a set of recommendations to the reader's consideration, aimed at improving governmental capacities in order that it more successfully face critical issues in public security.
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Scholars have analyzed participation by civilians in defense ministries in Latin America from a dual perspective: as part of a civilian-military integration and as an instrument of civilian control of the sector. These practices have been adopted in a context of democratic consolidation and, in the governmental sphere, of a demand for rationalization and greater efficiency and effectiveness in the conduct of government. The case of Chile is a good example of this. Since the restoration of democracy (1990), the inclusion of civilians in the Ministry has been a constant. All of the ministers have been civilians, as have all undersecretaries; however, because the Ministry does not have a permanent staff of civilian professionals, an Advisory Committee has gradually and inorganically developed within the Ministry, which brings in people who provide advisory services on political, politico-strategic, budgetary, international, communications and auditing issues.
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