Understanding New Security Threats

Michel Gueldry, Gigi Gokcek, Lui Hebron, Michel Gueldry, Gigi Gokcek, Lui Hebron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138104723
• eBook ISBN: 9781351590938
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This textbook examines non-traditional forms of security and expands the notion of security to include non-state actors and non-human actors.

Proposing an expansive view of non-traditional forms of security that go beyond traditionally recognized issues of threats to state and national territory, this new textbook rests on the following premises:

• traditional state-centered threats, such as nuclear proliferation and espionage, remain a concern;

• old and new threats combine and create interlocking puzzles—a feature of wicked problems and wicked messes;
• because of the global erosion of borders, new developments of unconventional insecurity interact in ways that frustrate traditional conceptual definitions, conceptual maps, and national policies;
• unconventional security challenges which have traditionally been seen as "low politics" or "soft" issues are now being recognized as "hard security" challenges in the twenty-first century;
• many of the so-called "new" threats detailed here are in fact very old: diseases, gender violence, food insecurity, under-development, and crime are all traditional security threats, but deeply modified today by globalization.

The chapters offer local and global examples and engage with various theoretical approaches to help readers see the bigger picture. Solutions are also suggested to these problems. Each chapter contains discussion questions to help readers understand the key points and facilitate class discussion.

This book will be of great interest to students of international security studies, human security, global politics, and international relations.

Part I

Ecosystems and natural resources

Introduction

Yesterday’s security debates, today’s realities

Michel Gueldry, Gigi Gokcek and Lui Hebron

Security: A central paradigm

The centrality of security for any society explains its stakes and its sheer complexity, and why it lies at the conceptual core of the discipline of international relations, alongside other key concepts such as power, peace, conflict, cooperation, and capability. In his classic People, States, and Fear, Barry Buzan explains: “(T)he concept of security is, in itself, a more versatile, penetrating and useful way to approach the study of international relations than either power or peace. It points to a prime motive for behaviour which is different from, but no less significant than, that provided by power. It also leads to a comprehensive perspective which is likewise different from, but no less useful than, that provided by peace” (Buzan 1991, 3; Buzan in Hughes and Meng 2011, 19).

That security also constitutes the foundation of any stable, prosperous society is recognized in countless founding compacts. In The Federalist Paper 23, Alexander Hamilton explained: “The principal purposes to be answered by union are these: the common defense of the members; the preservation of the public peace as well against internal convulsions as external attacks; the regulation of commerce with other nations and between the States; the superintendence of our intercourse, political and commercial, with foreign countries” (Federalist, December 18, 1787). In a similar vein, Europeans also squarely placed continental peace at the heart of their project of pan-continental integration. On May 9, 1950, five years and one symbolic day after the official surrender of Nazi Germany (May 8, 1945), French foreign minister Robert Schuman articulated in the Schuman Declaration the rationale for Franco-German cooperation and a European coal and steel community as preludes for continental reconciliation and unification. His plea for new efforts toward continental security resonated deeply with war-weary Europeans: “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it. (…) By pooling basic production and by instituting a new High Authority, whose decisions will bind France, Germany and other member countries, this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation indispensable to the preservation of peace” (Schuman Declaration 1950). The April 18, 1951 Paris Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the founding document of what over time became the European Union, re-affirms this intimate connection between economic cooperation and the quest for peace among nations. Its preamble states that “world peace may be safeguarded only by creative efforts equal to the dangers which menace it” (ECSC 1951).

A half-century later, after the fall of the USSR (officially on December 26, 1991), the 1992 Maastricht Treaty on the European Union established “a common foreign and security policy” to further its key objective “to promote peace, security and progress in Europe and in the world” (Paragraph 3).

Today, the governing body of the United Nations (UN) is the Security Council (aka “Permanent Five,” “Big Five,” or “P5”), and under the UN Charter (June 25, 1945), “the Security Council has primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” and “takes the lead in determining the existence of a threat to the peace or act of aggression.” The Preamble to this Charter explicitly rejects “the scourge of war” and calls for a very wide mandate to secure “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom” to further general peace and security. The Charter gives the UN mandates over numerous security issues—climate change, international development, peace operations, human rights, humanitarian assistance, food security, women’s and children’s rights, global health, governance, international law, nonproliferation and disarmament, drug control, crime prevention and counter-terrorism, sustainability, refugees, etc.—which together constitute today’s expansive security kaleidoscope.

Expanded views of security

This complex security agenda points to the trans-national nature of many security threats. Political borders and countries seem like the natural order of things, the evolutionary apex of human societies and territorial social systems, and the best way to organize security. This Westphalian view of states still structures our perception, yet nation-states are neither natural, self-evident, nor immutable. In fact, they are born of accidents, chance, and organized violence; they are also problematic, dysfunctional, and challenged in many parts of the world. They are also recent, porous, and blurred by all sorts of flows and forces, from environmental dynamics to technological development, from human and animal migrations to microorganisms contagion (e.g., AIDS, influenza), from terrorist groups to financial flows, and from climate change to the global mass culture. Globalization is therefore both an integrative and fragmenting process. On the one hand, it creates interdependence or, to be more precise, complex and asymmetrical interdependence: some key actors (China, the US, large countries), regions (the West, maritime straits), issues (religion), and resources (oil) affect the global system disproportionately, while others (the silent majority in the Global South, gender issues, etc.) are underplayed by state and other actors who control the hegemonic discourse of security for their own ends. On the other hand, globalization increases the borderlessness of international relations, thereby shaping and transforming security issues in new and unexpected ways.

Therefore, this book proposes an expansive and inclusive view of nontraditional forms of security that goes beyond traditional realist definitions—that is to say, beyond traditionally recognized issues of threats to state and national territory, beyond sovereignty, territorial disputes, geopolitics, and military-diplomatic affairs. According to Korab-Karpowicz,

Realism, also known as political realism, is a view of international politics that stresses its competitive and conflictual side. It is usually contrasted with idealism or liberalism, which tends to emphasize cooperation. Realists consider the principal actors in the international arena to be states, which are concerned with their own security, act in pursuit of their own national interests, and struggle for power.

(Korab-Karpowicz 2017)

For millennia, the official actors of politics were city-states, empires, nation-states, rulers, kings, ministers, generals, warriors, strategists, and other “great” men whose enduring enmity and strategies—political, military, economic, technological, and religious-cultural—fully vindicate one of realism’s main contentions that while national politics “is the realm of authority and law,” international politics, in contrast, is anarchical, “a sphere without justice, characterized by active or potential conflict among states” (Korab-Karpowicz 2017). The traditional realist vernacular also deems functioning states as sovereign, rational, unitary actors. Traditional conflict among nations—the stuff of realist theory—may be termed traditional military war, with its accepted forms (diplomacy, negotiations, treaties and alliances, formal declarations of war and peace, clear time markers), means (uniformed armed forces), and discourse. Today these age-old traditions, war and peace among nations have drastically evolved; dangers and security have morphed, and even change has changed: it is faster, more encompassing, more complex, and more unpredictable than before.

Therefore, our book addresses forms of threats and insecurity that do not have the state as their sole or central referent object, where state actors are but one player among many and must contend with powerful challenges, both trans-state (migrations, technological challenges, global crime and terrorism), sub-state (gender issues, urban misgovernance), and nonhuman (ecosystems dynamics, micro-pathogens). The following typology helps clarify the five broad types of situations that, put together, constitute security writ large. Needless to say, these threats overlap and interact.

In order to avoid the hubris of anthropocentrism, we acknowledge that human life and international relations are embedded in, and shaped by, planet Earth and ecosystems. Therefore, a first type of security, environmental security, describes threats coming from the living planet, such as climate change, environmental issues, and resource attrition (chapters 1–4 herein), and from other forms of life such as microorganisms and diseases (chapter 8).

Second, state-centered national defense still matters very much, which focuses on traditional state rivalry, military war, the geostrategic Great Game and new areas such as natural resources (water and oil, respectively chapters 3 and 4) and dark operations in cyberspace (chapter 13).

Third, human, community, and societal security focuses on widespread issues such as structural and cultural violence, notably gender violence, sexual and public health botheration, forced migrations, and economic and resource injustice (chapters 5–9).

Fourth, hybrid, mixed forms of insecurity combine state military dimensions with forms of dislocation (food and water crises, trafficking, radical ideologies), disruptive groups (organized crime, gangs, terrorists, drug cartels, pirates, anti-democratic forces) and technologies affecting civil societies (chapters 7, 10–17).

One last form of security, ecological security, deals with the threats, disruptions, and degradations that social systems impose on ecosystems and other forms of life (chapters 1, 2, 8).

Insecurity, risks, and uncertainty

Insecurity is characterized by both risks and uncertainty. In his classic Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921), Frank H. Knight, one of the founders of the Chicago School of Economics, drew a distinction between these two concepts that still inspires today’s risk analysis literature. Situations marked by risks have unknown outcomes, but the probability distribution (the probability of occurrence) of various outcomes is known and quantifiable. A situation is uncertain when not only its outcomes but the probability models that govern these outcomes are unknown (Knight 2006, 19–20). For instance, food insecurity will stifle personal and collective development (a recognized, quantifiable risk), but its impact on migrations and, in turn, the impact of migrations on departing and target countries are hard to estimate over time (fluid uncertainty). Movements of people across borders are immediately observable, but their impact is cascading, complex, and may compound other issues.

An inclusive definition of such multi-scalar security would also consider the difference between objective security (being protected from a dazzling array of dangers, close and far) and subjective security (feeling safe according to one’s norms and worldview). This raises the important question of the malleability, the mental and social construction (which the theory of constructivism studies) of the referent threats. For instance, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has identified heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States, but pro-life advocates insist that abortions are the primary cause of death among Americans, essentially amounting to a legal Holocaust. To provide another example, the US considers itself as a benign hegemon, the indispensable nation for global peace and stability—at least until President Donald Trump redefined America’s position in the world. But many in the world see the US either as a malicious menace or a well-meaning but incompetent giant—a bull in a china shop—because its throws its weight around irresponsibly and never faces the consequences of its foreign adventurism, e.g., the Vietnam way, its disastrous 2003 war in Iraq, and its overreaching global war on terror.

Planners and policymakers also draw a distinction between “tame” or “benign” problems and wicked problems. Benign problems can be, and routinely are, extremely complex—for instance, building a new generation of bridges or airplanes—but their commanding rules (the physical property of materials, the laws of physics and flight, the physical parameters surrounding these human artifacts, the laws of nature) are stable, and their behavior is largely predictable. The objectives (weight bearing over a gap), the physical rules (properties of constituent parts), and the environment (water and wind, terrain and geology) for building bridges have not changed since the first day the first bridge was built. Therefore, linear and cumulative progress is possible and easily observable. In contrast, social problems such as violence, poverty, gender discrimination, and racism are murky, their final resolution is elusive, and they can only be “re-solved—over and over again” (Rittel and Webber 1973, 160). They are wicked problems because there is no agreement regarding their very existence, their causes, or their solutions. They can even devolve further into wicked messes and became compounded, chronic, and intractable—for example, failed states (such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, or Yemen), drug addictions and epidemics (in the US, for instance), or climate change.

Among the ten defining properties of wicked problems (Rittel and Webber 1973, 160–165), several apply to the nontraditional security problems studied in this book. One: There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem or even its existence. For instance, climate change deniers do not recognize the dominant science or the existence of an anthropogenic problem. Other social actors deny women’s rights without seeing this as a problem at all, but as the natural, best, or divinely ordered society. Two: Wicked problems have no stopping rule, no clear or final solution, and approaches toward tackling these issues are in degrees of good or bad, or even contradictory. For instance, what should be done to fight violent crime? Disarm the population, as in Australia and Europe, or arm everyone everywhere all the time, as the National Rifle Association recommends in the US? Three: There are no classes of wicked problems (every wicked problem is unique), and every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem—for instance, economic hardship and cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgments
• List of key acronyms
• List of contributors
• Prologue
• PART I: Ecosystems and natural resources
• PART II: Human security, community and gender issues
• PART III: Sub- and trans-state actors and forces: Disruptions and violence
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Index