ASSIGNMENT

Assignment



Assignment

Q4) Security and Peak Oil Theory

Military Spending

Military expenditures, broadly defined, are the aggregate funds spent by a domestic government for military-related purposes. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's annual SIPRI Yearbook 2007, the aggregate military expenditure by all national governments in 2006 was $1.024 billion in market exchange rate (MER) terms. Adjusted for inflation, this figure marked a 37% growth in military budgets since 1997. This level of increased military spending follows a long trend that dates to World War II and that greatly accelerated during the Cold War. The levels of military spending over the past 60 years have been—and continue to be—a dynamic force that has profoundly altered the fabric of social, political, spatial, and economic relationships, from the scale of the local to that of the global. There are four necessary aspects of military expenditures (Cypher, 2007).

First, lavish levels of military expenditure are a prerequisite for the geopolitical power of a nation-state, a point exemplified by a comprehensive U.S. hegemony, which founded upon massive levels of military spending. Second, preparation for war has increasingly integrated commercial firms, modern production practices, and technological innovation with government spending. This mixture has created a military-industrial complex dedicated to the production of arms. Third, military spending has spatially reorganized local, national, and global economies in a manner quite different from that of the civilian economy. Fourth, lavish levels of military spending accelerate the international proliferation of modern weaponry (Cypher, 2007).

Military Spending and the Production of Geopolitical Power

Ranking national military expenditures in MER terms, when combined with equivalent data from previous years, reveals the close link between military spending and the production of global geopolitical power. The major military spender in 2008 was the United States, with $6.071 billion. This accounts for 41% of world military spending in the same year. China, with $84.9 billion, came in second. France and the United Kingdom each spent roughly $65 billion, putting them in third and fourth place, respectively. Russia ranked fifth, with $58.6 billion (Cypher, 2007).

Q7) Religion and Nationalism

Contemporary religion

The past two decades have seen resurgence in the study of how religion affects politics in the United States and around the wor1d. For generations, social scientists believed religion to be declining in influence to the point that it might eventually be marginalized. However, political scientists continue to observe, among other things, the importance of Christianity in the United States and the increasing influence of extremist Islam leading to events such as September 11, 2001. As political scientists have asked questions about these developments, the body of literature on the subject has grown to the point that the American Political Science Association recently initiated a journal titled Politics and Religion in order to give proper attention to this important area of research (Jelen, 2002).

To understand the current state of the literature in the field of religion and comparative politics, it is helpful to begin with the influence religion can have on individuals. It goes without saying that religion has always been important ...