Global Security Concerns Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Operation Jeronimo was the code name of the US operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on 2 May 2011. Jeronimo (Geronimo) was the code name used for bin Laden himself during the raid by the US Navy SEALs. It was not the name of a naval exercise in the Bay of Bengal, nor of the first nuclear tests of the United States or the Soviet Union.

Answer: B

National missile defence (NMD) is not recognised as an existential threat to mankind: it is a defensive system intended to intercept missiles, and although it is debated as a factor in the arms race, it is a means and not a threat to survival. Weapons of mass destruction, climate change and international terrorism are the kind of danger that can threaten human survival or security on a wide scale, so they are called existential threats.

Answer: D

Civil and political rights that stop the government from interfering with private individuals or civil society are first generation human rights, the 'negative' rights such as freedom of speech, the right to vote and fair trial. Second generation rights are economic, social and cultural rights, which require the state to act. Natural rights are the older philosophical idea from which they come, and 'rights based on democratic values' is not a standard classification. So the answer is first generation rights.

Answer: C

Human security in the twenty-first century requires security through development: the concept, brought into wide use by the UNDP Human Development Report of 1994, links security of the individual to freedom from want and from fear, which is achieved through development and not through arms. Dignity and survival are aspects of what human security protects, but the keyed answer is the one that states the means, and security through arms is the traditional approach that this concept moves away from.

Answer: A

Both (A) and (R) are correct, which is the keyed answer. The withdrawal of the US forces from Afghanistan in 2014 was expected to leave a strategic vacuum that would harm the global war on terror, and the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan were seen as likely gainers from it. The options that reject one of the statements are wrong, and the first option is the one that says both are correct.

Answer: B

The key gives the religious extremism of Islam as the main reason for the rise of fundamentalism in Afghanistan. The Mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation was organised on religious lines with outside support, and the Taliban movement that followed rested on a strict reading of the faith.

Poverty, illiteracy and a pastoral economy are the social conditions of the country, but they are not what gave rise to the fundamentalist movements, so the second option is correct.

Answer: B

Diego Garcia is an island in the Indian Ocean, the largest of the Chagos Archipelago. It is a British territory and is leased to the United States, which has a major naval and air base there.

It is not in the Pacific or the Atlantic Ocean, and the Baltic Sea is a sea of northern Europe. So the answer is the Indian Ocean.

The island was cleared of its inhabitants in the 1960s and 1970s, and its position in the middle of the Indian Ocean makes it useful to the United States for operations in the Gulf, South Asia and Africa.

Answer: D

The key gives 'all of the above activities of organised crime' for the terms Golden Crescent and Golden Triangle. They name the opium-producing regions (Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan; Myanmar, Thailand and Laos), and the criminal networks that carry the drugs are also involved in small arms trafficking and counterfeit currency, so all three activities are linked with them.

Taken narrowly, the terms are about narcotics trafficking, and a reader may choose the third option, but the key gives the fourth, which includes it.

Answer: A

'Operation Jeronimo' (Geronimo) was the name of the United States operation that killed Osama Bin Laden at Abbottabad in Pakistan on 2 May 2011. The code name was used for Bin Laden himself during the raid by the Navy SEALs.

Colonel Gaddafi was killed in Libya in October 2011, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi in 2007 and Anwar Sadat in Cairo in 1981, so the other options are not related.

Answer: A

The Spratly Islands are in the South China Sea, where China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have claims over them. The option is spelt 'Spartley' in the booklet.

Vanuatu and Viti Levu (Fiji) are in the south Pacific, and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands lie in the Indian Ocean, so none of them is in the South China Sea.

The chain of small islands, reefs and banks covers a wide area of the sea, which is rich in fisheries and may have oil and gas, and this is why six governments dispute it.