Journal of National Security Law & Policy

Issue Number

Latest documents

• The Case for Attempted Perfidy: An 'Attempt' to Enhance Deterrent Value
• Lawfare and Sea Power: A Historical Perspective
• China's Anti-Monopoly Merger Control and National Security: Interactions with Foreign Investment Law and Beyond

  China has adopted a unique approach that combines foreign investment law and anti-monopoly law to protect national security in merger transactions. As a legal tool at China's disposal, anti-monopoly merger control has actively contributed in its first decade of enforcement to addressing national security concerns arising from overseas mergers, including pseudo-overseas and actual overseas mergers. In pseudo-overseas mergers, such as in the well-known Coca Cola's prohibited acquisition of the Chinese juice maker Huiyuan and the conditionally approved acquisition of the Chinese online supermarket Yihaodian by Wal-Mart, anti-monopoly merger control has interacted with China's foreign investment law and served as its supplementary tool in the task of protecting national security. Beyond this interaction with foreign investment law, anti-monopoly merger control has served as the sole line of defence for national security (particularly the import security of supplies) in actual overseas mergers, such as in the resource merger between two Swiss-based enterprises; Glencore and Xstrata. Such connection between national security and anti-monopoly merger control has been less discussed so far but gains increasing importance in today's international economic climate. It is argued that anti-monopoly merger control has been an indispensable part of China's national security protection framework, with four characteristics that make it a suitable tool for national security purposes, including its extraterritorial reach, flexible substantive competition assessments, tailored merger remedies and the institutional link upon the dual responsibilities of China's Ministry of Commerce. China's combined approach ensures national security protection, but the anti-monopoly law's intended values in protecting competition and promoting economic efficiency are thereunder distracted and undermined. Although this combined approach is likely to continue to be used in the near future, a possible alternative - namely, to restructure China's national security review regime to apply in a nationality-neutral manner - could be a long-term fundamental solution

• A Bellicose Founding Charter: The U.S. Constitution and Providing for the 'Common Defence'-A Book Review of Akhil Reed Amar: The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840 (Basic Books, New York, 2021)
• Advanced Reactors and Nuclear Terrorism: Rethinking the International Framework
• Congressional and Supreme Court Restraints on Treaty Termination Carried Out at the President's 'Lowest Ebb' of Authority
• Analyzing the Impacts of Targeted Killing: Lessons for the United States
• Analyzing the Legality and Effectiveness of U.S. Targeted Killing
• Over-the-Horizon Drone Strikes in an Ongoing Global War: Afghanistan and Beyond
• Drone Strike-Analyzing Public Perceptions of Legitimacy

  Mitt Regan evaluates the scholarship on the effectiveness of the U.S. drone program since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In doing so, he raises an important question about the implications of public opinion for the sustainability of U.S. counterterrorism strikes and similar operations conducted by other countries. Whereas most researchers understand public attitudes in terms of support and approval, Regan's analysis suggests that perceptions of legitimacy are equally, if not more important for countries' drone policies. The purpose of this article is to address how Regan's book informs our understanding of the public's perceptions of legitimate drone strikes. While scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners often reference legitimacy, they rarely, if ever, empirically evaluate this outcome. After outlining the literature for public opinion and drone warfare, I relate Regan's analysis to our understanding of the public's perceptions of legitimate strikes. I then incorporate Regan's insights into an emerging research agenda that defines drone warfare based on countries' use and constraint of strikes to prevent unintended consequences, namely civilian casualties. Unlike qualitative studies that are difficult to falsify, replicate, and generalize, this approach allows researchers to analyze empirically derived data using statistical methods to determine the public's subjective beliefs on appropriate strikes

Featured documents

• Emergency Powers, Real and Imagined: How President Trump Used and Failed to Use Presidential Authority in the Covid-19 Crisis
• Data Collection: Lessons of Cost-benefit Analysis, Skepticism, and Legal Transparency
• Nuclear Command and Statutory Control
• The First Calling Forth Clause: The Constitution's Non-Emergency Power to Call Forth the Militia to Execute the Laws

  The January 6 insurrection and the federal government's response to the George Floyd protests highlight the perils of confiding vast military authority in a single person and the possibility of military force being used against civilians. Troublingly, the Insurrection Act gives the President...

• Student Note the Militia Clauses and the Original War Powers
• ISIL as Salesmen? The Roles of Due Diligence and the Good Faith Purchaser in Illicit Artifact Trafficking from the ISIL Insurgency
• Assessment of National Security Concerns in the Acquisition of U.S. and U.K. Assets
• Cyber Attacks and Cyber (mis)information Operations During a Pandemic
• Roosevelt's 'Limited' National Emergency: Crisis Powers in the Emergency Proclamation and Economic Studies of 1939

  On September eighth 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a proclamation of a "limited" national emergency. This was mere days after the Nazi invasion of Poland, but years before the U.S. entry into the Second World War. Roosevelt did not invoke any statutory authority as a basis for the...

• Analyzing the Impacts of Targeted Killing: Lessons for the United States