Research within security studies has struggled to determine whether infectious disease (ID) represents an existential threat to national and international security. With the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), it is imperative to reexamine the relationship between ID and global security. This article addresses the specific threat to security from COVID-19, asking, “Is COVID-19 a threat to national and international security?” To investigate this question, this article uses two theoretical approaches: human security and biosecurity. It argues that COVID-19 is a threat to global security by the ontological crisis posed to individuals through human security theory and through high politics, as evidenced by biosecurity. By viewing security threats through the lens of the individual and the state, it becomes clear that ID should be considered an international security threat. This article examines the relevant literature and applies the theoretical framework to a case study analysis focused on the United States.

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The purpose of this essay is to present a theoretically informed and operationally useful definition of cyberterrorism to advance research in the fields of terrorism and cyberscience as well as to inform policy makers. The operationalization distinguishes terrorist events that are distinctly and fundamentally cyber in nature from those that are not. It frames cyberterrorism as a form of aggression and distinguishes it from other forms of cyber aggression: cyberwar, cyber espionage, cybercrime, and cyber mischief. The essay includes illustrative cases to identify key features of cyberterrorist events relative to other cyber and non-cyber aggression and concludes with a clear process to classify cyber aggression as cyberterrorism or not.

There is a debate in Political Science concerning how best to teach American Government courses. We investigate whether students learn more effectively with texts from the great tradition or from textbooks and other secondary sources. Which medium better guides students toward becoming better citizens? We examine how teaching ''The Great Tradition'' may increase success in student-learning outcomes. We examine four categories of learning outcomes in the Introduction to American Government classroom: general knowledge, knowledge of current events, civic engagement, and civic virtue. These outcomes were pretested and posttested with a quasiexperimental design. The experimental group studied Tocqueville's Democracy in America, while the control group studied traditional textbooks. The purpose of this project is to see if reading Tocqueville increases success in student-learning outcomes over classes that do not. We test two main sets of hypotheses. The first set concerns group=overall class improvement, and the second set deals with individual student improvement. Our results demonstrate that students' mean improvement scores preto posttest increase more in the experimental sections than in the control sections for the general knowledge, civic engagement, and civic virtue learning components. This research suggests a return to the ''classics'' as a pedagogical innovation.