Welcome
to the Inaugural Issue of Security and
Defense Studies Review. This
journal, published by the National Defense University’s Center for
Hemispheric Defense Studies, is intended to provide a focus and venue for the
publication and circulation of practical and scholarly research on defense and
security issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. The journal responds to repeated requests from academics in
our region for a professional, refereed journal that focuses on the broad,
interdisciplinary issues of defense and security studies in our hemisphere.
The need for such a forum was first identified at the CHDS-hosted
Education and Defense Seminar held
in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1998 (EDS 1998).
It was echoed—loudly—in Miami in 2000.
We have sought to be responsive.
This
journal is intended to fill a gap. There
is need for a broadly inter-disciplinary journal with a region-wide and global
audience. Our goal is to
encourage studies by economists, sociologists, political scientists,
international relations specialists, and government practitioners from
throughout our region and the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world in the
very specialized area of defense and security studies.
In the past, all will recognize, this field was left to military
officers. Today, many of the
younger generation of military officers are also scholars, and the field of
defense and security studies is opening up to civilian specialists as well.
Those who are teaching in this field—and we at CHDS count ourselves
among this group—feel a desperate lack of empirical research to document
what is happening in the region. For
example, in Latin America there is relatively little research in military
sociology—a major field of interest in Europe, Canada and the United States.
Relatively few scholars have focused on defense economics
although defense is a major element of central government expenditures.
Increasingly it is necessary to fight for the defense budget; to do so,
it is necessary to establish criteria for placing value on defense spending.
That is an academic challenge of the first order.
With no apologies, our
journal model is Armed
Forces and Society, the journal of the Inter-University Seminar on
Armed Forces and Society launched many years ago by Morris Janowitz to bring
together the disparate community of scholars studying the military in the
United States. Today Professor Janowitz’s journal and society draw
contributions from across the disciplinary spectrum and from around the world.
We aspire to no less. As a
new journal, we must earn our place in the scholarly world.
We have an outstanding and growing editorial board.
The Board has worked hard to provide personalized comments on the
research articles presented in this issue.
We are grateful for their dedication to this enterprise.
Our goal is to provoke
research and comments. Research
articles in this journal will be reviewed by at least two outside reviewers
and authors will be given opportunity to respond to their comments.
The highest standards of academic review will be applied to materials
presented in the Research section of the journal.
There are other topics of
ongoing interest, which we will publish as Research Notes and Essays.
These articles may be less academic in orientation, or shorter, or more
controversial. But they will
always reflect topical issues in our inter-disciplinary field.
Security and Defense Studies Review
also welcomes submissions of
research and book reviews, as well as comments on articles published in the
journal.
We hope you will join us in
embracing the publishing technology available today.
By publishing our journal on line, we will be able to reach a much
broader audience, at no cost to the subscriber or the one-time reader.
It is our intention to publish a very limited number of library copies
of the journal on an annual basis. Please
let us have your comments. Enjoy
this opportunity to expand knowledge in an important and challenging field.
