Hcss report

HCSS REPORT
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Others remain gloomier. Richard Rosecrance points out that “since 1500 there have 
been thirteen cases of one Great Power approaching or passing a hegemonic leader in 
economic or military terms. Of these, all but three ended in major war.”
28
Nassim 
Taleb, the now famous author of 
The Black Swan
(2007), argues that Pinker’s statistical 
trends do not exclude the possibility of a one-off catastrophic conflagration.
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‘Realist’ 
scholars like Colin Gray even talk about the possibility of ‘another bloody century’.
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There is no debate about the fact that great power war has been of enormous 
importance in the past. With respect to the future, there is no such consensus. Joshua 
Goldstein recently conceded in a piece written for the National Intelligence Council’s 
latest major foresight study 
Global Trends 2030
: “[i]n my opinion we just do not 
understand war and international relations well enough to predict anything twenty 
years into the future.”
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A fair way to sum up the debate, may be to say that many 
authors seem to agree that the likelihood of great power war may have diminished, 
but that its future re-occurrence cannot just be assumed away. If it is true that great 
power assertiveness has increased – as much anecdotal evidence seems to suggest – 
and that the world has thus come closer to a possible abrupt break in the Long Peace, 
then policymakers in all countries, great and small, should take heed.
2.3 What is Assertiveness?
In Other Disciplines
Assertiveness is a term that became popular in the 1970s, especially in the fields of 
psychology and of communication.
FIGURE 2.6: OCCURRENCE OF THE WORD ‘ASSERTIVENESS’ IN GOOGLE BOOK CORPORA
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1800
0.00018
0.00016
0.00014
0.00012
0.00010
0.00008
0.00006
0.00004
0.00002
0
1820
1840
1860
1880
1900
1920
1940
1960
1980
2000
% of c
orpus – Ngram Viewe
r

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STRATEGIC MONITOR 2014
It is typically positioned between ‘passive’ and ‘aggressive’ behavior or communication. 
Behavioral psychologists, for instance, talk about four major personality/communication 
types: