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Global Security Reading notes/summary
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Summary of the required readings for Global Security (2nd year IRO course).
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L1 Abrahamsen & Sandor: The Global South and International Security- areas of the global South have moved from the periphery to the center of academic and
policy debates about international security.
- speaking about the global South as a singular, uniform unit is fraught with difficulties,
analytically and politically, and that areas of the global South are occupying an increasingly
central, yet ambivalent and contradictory position, within contemporary international
security.
- On the one hand, the global South appears in the figure of the “weak state” as a major
threat. On the other, the global South performs as the “intervener state” by contributing
the majority of personnel to peacekeeping missions in the world’s trouble spots -
contradictory position of being part problem, part solution
- global South is likely to continue to occupy a central place within international security and
the contradictions are likely to multiply.
- Regional southern interventions will therefore be required but will remain dependent on
northern actors for funding and equipment.
- As more actors from the global South act as interveners, the creation of competing interests
and practices is inevitable. Southern actors will not only increasingly come to compete over
how to solve security concerns that cross borders, but also over access to economic and
material resources from Northern actors.
- The potential for southern cooperation and cohesion might thus become ever more elusive,
an unintended political casualty of the present security landscape.
Key concepts
- Security: a powerful political tool in claiming attention for priority items in the competition
for government attention’; can be military, political, economic, societal, environmental; the
alleviation of threats to cherished values
- referent object = whose security; state, human beings, society, individuals, the planet
- deterrence
L2 Human Security
- The concept of human security came into popular use through its introduction in the United
Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) 1994 Human Development Report
- thinking about security beyond the confines of the state
- fears, needs and priorities of ordinary people were brought to the forefront, highlighting
that the security (and interests) of states did not necessarily coincide with the security (and
interests) of people
- sustained critique absence of a clear theoretical foundation; as a concept it is ‘everything
and nothing’
,- fails to provide a resource for either understanding global security politics or the processes
through which political communities give meaning to security. On the latter, human security
has been accused of failing to alter the security considerations and practices of key actors,
namely states or conversely of being co-opted to serve as a tool of neo-liberal power-
brokers that perpetuates Western-dominant interests, particularly through the use of
military intervention
- atmosphere of international cooperation after the Cold War, it was clear that the narrow
definition of security as a militarized and elite notion reserved for the ‘state’, bound within
an anarchic international system regulated by superpowers, was insufficient for making
sense of key international political concerns
- human security has contributed to ‘deepening’ (from the state down to the individual) and
‘widening’ (from state and military security to economic, environmental etc.) the concept of
security from the Cold War focus on military defence of the state to include a much broader
and comprehensive set of concerns
- The UNDP report argued that the everyday security of people around the world was usually
focused on worries and fears of unemployment, disease, localized discrimination and
violence, and crime
- state was by no means the sole security provider
- at its core, human security is concerned with how people experience security and insecurity
- four essential characteristics of human security in UNDP report: 1) universal to all, 2)
interdependent (insecurities from both local and international levels), 3) imperative of
prevention (calls for measures to prevent insecurities from arising), 4) people-centered
- seven main categories of threats against human security: political, personal, food, health,
environment, economic and community security
- The concept of human security thus draws attention to security dynamics at the level of
civilians or non-state actors
- state largely assumed to be the primary provider of human security – another tool of state?
Key Concepts
- Human security
- environmental security: 1. Risks from environmental change (e.g., armed conflict), 2.
Resource management, conservation techniques, pollution prevention to maintain the parts
of the natural world that humanity uses in conditions that allow for the continued use by
the economy.
- ecological security: maintaining the integrity of natural systems on which humanity is
dependent, an especially complicated and difficult matter now that humanity is effectively
changing the planet’s ecology in the Anthropocene.; key component of climate security
, - Anthropocene: age of humankind; we live in an increasingly artificial world, Powering this
transformation is the combustion of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas; Anthropocene
suggests that the rich and powerful decision makers in the global economy are increasingly
shaping the future of the planet’s essential biological systems, and hence humanity’s future
in a rapidly changing biosphere; new context for studying security and making policy in this
age of the Anthropocene.
Hendrix: Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War.
- dominant narrative: climate change contributes to a historic drought (2007-2010), which
leads to crop and livestock failure, which leads to rural hardship and migration to urban
centers, which leads to dissatisfaction with the government and employment prospects,
which leads to protest and violent repression, which leads to dissidents taking up arms
- contested:
1) there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in
Syria’s pre-civil war drought,
2) this drought did not cause truly mass migration,
3) there is no solid evidence linking in-migration with the grievances that brought Syrians
into the streets in 2011
- drought might have contributed due to the strains it placed on population but it being the
cause is a difficult claim to make:
1) arguing any particular conflict was “caused” by climate change is exceedingly difficult.
Multiple motivations are always present among participants, and these motivations are both
stated and unstated. Also, contextual factors affect whether a given climate “shock” results
in violence.
2) slipperiness of causal language, especially when these accounts are picked up and
rebroadcast by the media and policymakers
- Most research on climatic conditions and conflict finds climate shocks raise the probability
of a large-scale event (like conflict onset) occurring relative to some baseline, or increases
the frequency with which smaller-scale events (protests, individual battles or skirmishes,
cattle raids) occur.
- BUT climate shocks are not deterministically causal in the sense that they are wholly
responsible for the outcome.
- Environmental conditions may have exacerbated some of these problems in Syria (food
prices in particular), but they did not create them and were not primarily responsible for
them.
L3 Feminisms
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