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Notes for quiz 2 -Core Module IR
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Part II: IR Theory Debates
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IR 7: Security between statesConflict and security
Security between states (Mar 4)
From old to new wars: civil war (Mar 5)
Terrorism (Mar 11)
Peacekeeping and peacebuilding (Mar 12)
Guest lecture Rob Nagel: Gender and International Security (Mar 18)
What we are talking about …
- It's important to study conflict and security between states, even though we haven't
seen any major power wars since WWII. It is important to state that the incidence and
the lethality of wars between countries has declined, this is something we will learn in
the second half of the lecture. However, this doesn't mean we don't need to study
conflict between countries anymore.
- Illustration of why it is important to study conflict between states. Last year's Armenia
and Azerbaijan were actually fighting a war, about an issue that dates back 30 years
and probably even more. Around the time the Soviet Union collapsed Armenia and
Azerbaijan started to have a lot more conflict over the fate of majority ethnic arminian
in the enclave within Azerbaijan. At the time Armenia was more successful and de
facto controlled this territory but recently fighting regarding this enclave broke out again
and this time Azerbaijan took back some of that territory. This picture shows fire coming
out of houses that ethnic Armenians in the area put on fire instead to make the
Azerbaijanis take them over.
- Why do we care about this conflict? Apart from the thousands of people that died,
Azerbaijanis and Armenians and civilians. There is also international involvement in
this conflict. Turkey is involved, on the side of Azerbaijan, and Russia is allied with
Armenia, because Russia became involved now the situation has stopped. It is
important to us to study wars like this because international actors are involved which
can mean that the situation can escalate. We also know that Turkey and Russia
disagree with each other in a lot of issues and are now on opposing sides in the war
in Syria, so there is definitely a concern about escalation.
, Overview:
(1) Definitions and trends
- Defining security and conflict
- Empirical trends
(2) Why is there less (interstate) war?
- IR theory perspectives
- Critiques
I. Definitions and trends
● Definition security and conflict
Security – a fuzzy concept
Latin sine cura
- “without worries”: a situation with no concerns, a predictable situation (vamos sin cura
in spanish)
Security as “a low probability of damage to acquired values” (Baldwin 1997: 485)
Defining security
The previous definition leaves a lot of questions unanswered, here are some.
- Whose security?
- From which threats?
- Whose security?
if we ask scholars there will be a lot of answers to the question whose security? In traditional
IR the security is basically state security. So states, leaders, their security, how to ensure it.
This is what we find in traditional IR theories such as realism and some versions of liberalism.
However, people have visibly challenged this and argued what about security of groups?
Groups such as Kurds in Syria, shouldn’t their security also matter? Or the Syrian opposition?
Should we care about their security? We can go further here and ask about the security of
people, why should we care about the security of individual people? why shouldn’t we care
about human security?
So state vs group vs individuals security. Different IR theories give us different theories on
this. Historically the focus has been on state security, but this has changed a lot in the last
decades, now we find a lot more emphasis on human security.
, - Security from which threats?
Another question when defining security that we can think about is being secured from what?
At a basic level we can say being secure about war, from fighting, physically being secure.
But we can say that this is a narrow minded view of security. Why not being secure from
hunger, from threats to economic well being. Or we can make it even brader and say what
about being secure from diseases such as the Covid. Should we think about security in even
bigger terms?
Security – a fuzzy concept
Defining security, there are still other questions when defining security.
• Whose security?
• From which threats?
• For which values? - what values do we pursue when we want to provide security. Is it about
order, a more traditional view of IR? Or should it be about Freedom? Justice? Wealth?
• Objective or subjective security? - Should we care about security in objective terms, such as
crime statistics showing your neighbourhood is safe? Or should it be about subjective security,
such as I feel secure?
• How much security? - How much security is enough? Is it a question of degrees or being
secure or being insecure?
• By what means? - What means should we take to establish security? Does this mean we
invade other countries to establish security there? What are our responsibilities?
• At what cost? - What costs are we willing to take on to establish security? If we look at the
US, they invaded Afghanistan to make it secure but had to pull out when they decided that
they weren’t willing to take the cost to establish stability.
IR theory answers to these questions? Your answers?
- Different IR theories take different views on the concept of security. It is important to
emphasise that this concept is not clearly defined enough and that we can’t come up
with a clear enough definition to make this a manageable research question. So, she
(prof) emphasises that we can also learn a lot by studying the absence of security and
the absence of security is seen clearly in situations where conflict is ongoing, war is
ongoing. By studying those instances it is easier for us to reach a conceptual
agreement on what they mean, and also makes the research question more
manageable.
, Defining war and conflict
“War, to be abolished, must be understood. To be understood, it must be studied.” (Deutsch,
1970: 473) - This quote highlights two important things. 1) To understand war we need to
study it. 2) It is also fine to have normative motivations for studying a particular question. He
wants to understand war in order to do something about it (abolish). This is true for a lot of
people who study security and conflict.
Contrary to security the concept of conflict has a lot of more consensus agreement. However
there are still some questions.
What counts as a war? - There are wars where the answer to this question is straightforward,
but there are still difficult cases such as:
- Massacres? Rwanda, a lot of that violence is very one sided, is that a war or should
we call it something else
- The Cold War? We can ask about the Cold war where there was no major direct military
confrontation between the USA and Soviet Union.
- Cyber war? We can also ask about cases where there is no military confrontation at
all such as cyber wars.
Defining war
Conceptual definition
• “War is organized violence carried on by political units against each other.” (Bull, 1983: 184).
- Emphasises that war is violent, and violence is organized rather than being
spontaneous or random. Violence is organized and necessary to be a war, this rules
out cyber wars. It has to involve political actors, this is important, because it helps us
distinguish it from criminal violence. And it involves some reciprocity, meaning that
both actors engage in some violence. It might be that one overwhelmed engages in
more violence but it is not an entire one sided phenomena. Prof, says that she thinks
we need to study one-sided violence, aka massacres, but in terms of theoretical
explanations and dynamics behind them are different enough so it makes sense to
study them separately.
- This is a useful definition of war, but can we use this definition and say something
about empirical trends in warfare, not really because it is not specific enough in terms
of telling us what kind of violence would be necessary.
Operational definition (Correlates of War, UCDP data) - allows us to collect data of incidence
and patterns of warfare we need to be more specific, define it in a way that makes it able to
operationalize whether a conflict or dispute is a war or a lower-level conflict.
These are the operational definitions adopted by the major organizations collecting data on
war and conflict:
• Intensity threshold - Threshold used in terms of the intensity of the fighting focusing on the
number of people who are dying.
• War >1,000 fatalities per year - Common definition of war say that more than 1.000 fatalities
happen per year. So the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia would be qualified because
5.000 people died.
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