The Handbook of Global Security Policy

Mary Kaldor, Iavor Rangelov, Mary Kaldor, Iavor Rangelov

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118533796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This Handbook brings together 30 state-of-the-art essays covering the essential aspects of global security research and practice for the 21st century.

• Embraces a broad definition of security that extends beyond the threat of foreign military attack to cover new risks for violence
• Offers comprehensive coverage framed around key security concepts, risks, policy tools, and global security actors
• Discusses pressing contemporary issues including terrorism, disarmament, genocide, sustainability, international peacekeeping, state-building, natural disasters, energy and food security, climate change, and cyber warfare
• Includes insightful and accessible contributions from around the world aimed at a broad base of scholars, students, practitioners, and policymakers

Part I
Key Concepts

Chapter 1
Global Security

Ken Booth¹

“Global security” is a powerful idea, yet a settled understanding of the term remains elusive. This is not surprising because it couples together two concepts that are themselves individually contested. It will be argued that developing a common understanding of “global security” is a fundamental building-block in the construction of a better world – a world that works for all its human inhabitants and the natural world on which we depend.

What is a Global Security Issue? Existential and Emancipatory Threats

Every hour, for a growing proportion of people on earth, we are reminded of the shrinking of time and space and the reality of living in a truly global age. It is imperative therefore to situate the theory and practice of “security” in the context of the global, while incorporating the changing realities of the “global” in understandings and agendas of security. If a globalized we cannot define global security and develop a shared understanding of the term, how can we hope ever to achieve it? Concern with semantics is not always academic indulgence; here, this concern is fundamental in establishing what will later be called a global domestic security politics.

“Security”

Security is a fundamental human value. It is the condition of feeling or being safe from threats. Radical insecurity on the other hand is virtually synonymous with a person's struggle for survival as a biological organism, whether the source of that insecurity is fear of hunger or the threat of imminent injury and death in a violent conflict. Security, therefore, is what Philippa Foot (2001) might have called a “fact of human existence”, namely a value that is rational for humans to pursue because we cannot sustain social life in its absence, whether this involves attending to the needs of babies, developing communities, or exploring what it might mean to be “human”.

“Security” performs its central political role as a “speech act” (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, p. 26) and once an issue is labeled “security”, things happen. Significant features of world affairs over recent centuries can be explained by the power of the label “national security”. This chapter will explore the meaning and significance of the label “global security” to see whether it should or could have similar future leverage.

“Security” in the context of politics comprises three key elements: a referent (some person, group, or entity that is threatened); an actual or impending danger to that referent (a threat to which a probability of risk can be assigned); and the desire of the referent to be free from the dangers identified (resulting in strategies to mitigate or escape from them). How individuals and groups think about these elements in particular situations involves choices deriving from their most basic ideas about politics. One's underlying political theory (even if not explicitly articulated) shapes security choices regarding the referent to privilege (particular collectivities or individuals?), the threats and risks to be prioritized (which danger is most pressing and/or most consequential?), and the strategies to be pursued (by confrontation or cooperation?).

Mainstream opinion in academic International Relations (IR) generally defends a narrow concept of security, focusing on the so-called nation-state as the privileged referent, war as the ultimate danger, and successful military strategy as the basic mode of survival. The concept has been broadened since the end of the Cold War to include other referents, dangers, and strategies. The way for this significant move in thinking about international relations was lit earlier by – among others – Johan Galtung (1971) with his idea of “structural violence” and Richard Falk (1975) with his framework of “world order” values. This rethinking of the security of real people in real places, as opposed exclusively to “national security”, helped encourage the reconceptualizing of security beyond (but also including) the Westphalian international framework.

These deeper conceptions of what is at stake when we talk about security have been built upon in contemporary IR theory, for example, Andrew Linklater's (2011) theorizing of “harm”, and the “security-as-emancipation” theme in Critical Security Studies (Booth, 2007). As a result of the prizing open of the “iron cage” of statist² security thought, paths have been opened to explore poverty, patriarchy, tyranny, environmental destruction, cultural imperialism, and so on as legitimate concerns for Security Studies in addition to interstate war and other aspects of the traditional agenda.

“Global”

The term “global” is hardly more settled than “security” itself. In academic and political discourse “global” is generally used lazily. It is assumed that we know what is “global” when we see it, or that we will accept its promiscuous usage in publications uncritically. The following discussion emphasizes analytical clarity and offers a particular conceptualization, while accepting that the term will remain somewhat contested, characteristic of art not science.

Central to the term “global” must be a notion of “reach”. Reach is a necessary element and can refer to the actual physical range of something (e.g. global telecommunications) or an activity achieving coverage across the earth (e.g. global capitalism) or a project seeking to expand a particular aim everywhere (e.g. global democracy). As will become obvious, however, “reach” is not entirely straightforward.

The term “global” is obviously associated with the cognate terms “universal” and “world”, but they are not synonymous. Universal refers to “all people or things” (as in “universal human rights”), whereas world is less demanding, pertaining to something involving the whole of the earth in some sense, but in general rather than particular (as in “world history”). In other words, human rights pertain to every individual, anywhere, but an account of world history would be an exercise in what to omit rather than attempting to include everything. If universal therefore means all in particular, while world means all in general, “global” inserts itself fuzzily in between.

These distinctions involve judgment not exactitude. It might be argued for example that poverty is a world issue because it is widespread, but not a universal issue because many people are not poor; nonetheless, poverty is certainly a global issue because all parts of the globe are implicated in, and affected by its existence. In the different case of the conflict between 1939–1945, we can say that it was clearly worldwide in its scope, though it impinged only peripherally on some regions. It was therefore appropriately labeled a “World” and not a “Global” war. The latter term would have been applicable if the superpowers during the Cold War had unleashed what Herman Kahn called a nuclear “wargasm” involving upwards of 50,000 nuclear weapons. Nuclear destruction on this scale would have resulted in the collapse of the infrastructure of modern life globally, and in some predictions might have brought about a “nuclear winter” threatening the existence of all human life.

This semantic discussion is critical in relation to the referent for global security. Because no existing political or social grouping embraces the entirety of humankind, it follows logically that the human referent for global security must be the universal collectivity of individual persons. This global-we is an actual “community of fate” because of accelerating and densifying human interconnectedness, and a potential global identity group associated with ideas of “global citizenship”. In this global quasi-community, individuals and their groupings live in a natural (or “post-natural”) environment whose own flourishing is fundamental to human existence; the environment must therefore constitute a basic referent for global security. This chapter focuses on the human dimension, but the non-human must never be ignored.

“Global Security Threats”

A concept of global security requires a framework for understanding the dangers threatening the referent (the global-we). What follows is based on a schema of Arnold Wolfers (1962, pp. 73–77), who distinguished the foreign policy objectives of states in relation to their “possession” or “milieu” goals. The former pertains to “national possessions” (the “things to which it attaches value”, such as territory) while the latter pertains to “the shape of the environment in which the nation operates” (meaning the external conditions in which a people's values might flourish). The privileged referent for “global security” differs radically from Wolfers's state-centrism, but his distinction is nonetheless instructive.

First: global existential threats. These threats involve a danger of global reach, which poses a potential or actual risk to the continued being of individuals or groups. Such threats include nuclear weapons, “climate chaos” (the coinage of the World Wide Fund for Nature) threatening food and water security, and pandemics. The risks from climate change and disease underline that global existential threats do not necessarily have to be intentional or politically targeted. Global existential threats involve the survival of people and groups from physical dangers of global reach, whether or not a specific referent is designated as the target.

Second: global emancipatory threats. Emancipation involves freedom from oppression: the latter might be material threats such as hunger and poverty, social threats such as religious and cultural dogmatism, and political threats such as conquest, tyranny, and institutionalized racism (Booth 2007, pp. 95–116). Emancipatory goals are the equivalent for individuals and groups of the “milieu” goals that Wolfers identified for nation-states, namely those conditions that enhance or diminish the prospect of experiencing flourishing lives. By this conception, the abuse of human rights anywhere is a threat to human rights everywhere. Global emancipatory threats are local challenges to global human flourishing, whereby the political, social, and economic ideas and structures that promise to lift humans out of oppression are seriously challenged.

Existential and emancipatory securities are related in logic and in politics. Clearly, security-as-survival is logically prior to security-as-emancipation: existential security is the necessary condition for human flourishing. Politically, security-as-emancipation changes the conditions of possibility in relation to meeting existential threats. Above all, the wider and deeper the political identification with the referent of a global community embedded in shared values, the greater the likelihood of rational decisions being made in the global existential interest. Put simply, existence is the condition of possibility for emancipation, while furthering global emancipatory goals improves the conditions of possibility for global existential security.

The themes of human survival (in relation to threats of global reach) and emancipation (in relation to flourishing under conditions of global interconnectedness) will run through the rest of the discussion. “Global security”, for the moment, can therefore be defined as a condition in which humankind has a stable pattern of structures and processes, with associated institutions, attitudes, and behavior, that work towards the reduction and elimination of existential and emancipatory threats of global reach. The higher the level of global security experienced, the greater the conditions of possibility for people everywhere to explore the potentialities of being “human”, beyond the merely animal.

Global security threats, like those at any level, may be objective ...