BY MICHAEL RENNER
For 50 years, sustained by the cold war, "security" has been defined primarily in military terms. While the East-West ideological and military standoff divided much of the planet into two hostile camps, many issues of the day were subordinated to one overriding goal: striving for global supremacy. Backed by doomsday nuclear arsenals, the cold war adversaries were locked in mortal competition.
But now that the cold war has faded away, a very different struggle for survival is emerging. It is becoming clear that humanity is facing a triple security crisis: societies everywhere have to contend with the effects of environmental decline, the repercussions of social inequities and stress, and the dangers arising out of an unchecked arms proliferation that is a direct legacy of the cold war period. We are at a historic juncture in our understanding of security. The cold war represented the most extreme expression of "national security" - states' desire to protect their borders and territories from foreign invasions, which led over the centuries to the creation of ever-larger standing armies and the development of ever more sophisticated weapons. Concerns about "human security" are now magnified by the unprecedented scale of environmental degradation, by the presence of immense poverty in the midst of extraordinary wealth, and by the fact that social, economic, and environmental challenges are no longer limited to particular communities and nations.
The cold war can be seen as a relatively brief interlude, a curious historical diversion that distracted our energies from the most basic threats to human society. Unfortunately, a lasting impact of that period is the unparalleled and largely uncontrolled worldwide availability of arms of all calibers. The cold war's rigid bipolarity has fallen by the wayside, making room for a more multipolar world in which countries do not automatically rally behind a leader, in which constellations of power and interest seem more transient, and in which diverging interests or rivalries are resurfacing even among old allies. But the cold war structure has not been replaced by any coherent set of multilateral policies, arrangements, and institutions. And it is difficult to marshal the political support and resources necessary to respond to "non-traditional" challenges.
Transformation of conflict
The world has always been more complex than it seemed through the one-dimensional lens of cold war priorities. Yearning for the predictability they had grown accustomed to over the past halfcentury, however, many policymakers and pundits perceive the world to be suddenly more disorderly, even chaotic. The world already experienced a transformation of conflict during the cold war: a shift from war between sovereign states to fighting within societies, so that armed conflict conforms less and less to the preoccupations with fending off foreign invasions that are the concerns of traditional national security doctrines. Far from the traditional image of war - national armies clashing on a well-defined battlefield - violent conflict today increasingly involves protagonists within rather than between countries. The "battlefield" can be anywhere, and the distinction between combatants and non-combatants is blurred.
As many countries may be bordering on war as are actually engaged in it. Highly inequitable social and economic conditions remain in place that trigger cycles of uprisings by the disadvantaged and oppression by the ruling elites: generalized lawlessness and banditry - whether by marauding ex-soldiers (in several African nations), drug cartels (in Colombia), or various forms of organized crime (in Russia) as well as a growing privatization of security and violence - in the form of legions of private security guards, the proliferation of small arms among the general population, and the spread of vigilante and "self-defense" groups.
Failed states
The post-cold war era is increasingly witnessing a phenomenon of what some have called "failed states" - the implosion of countries like Rwanda, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and others. But they are only the most explicit examples of the pressures and vulnerabilities of the current era - victims of an array of underlying forces that many other countries are subjected to but have managed, for the time being at least, to cope with more successfully. The outcome in the case of these unsettled nation-states is by no means preordained: it may be prolonged drift, a gradual revitalization of society, establishment of an authoritarian regime that will crack down hard on any sign of opposition in an attempt to "hold the country together," or a splintering of society.
The outbreak of civil wars and the collapse of entire societies is now routinely being ascribed to the resurfacing of "ancient ethnic hatreds" revolving around seemingly irreconcilable religious and cultural differences, and so forecloses any rational analysis of the roots and origins of contemporary conflicts. Of course, ethnic tensions do play some role. Some 40 percent of all countries have populations from five or more different "nations," roughly half of the world's countries have experienced some kind of interethnic strife in recent years. Yet a multi-cultural society need not involve conflict. Where ethnic tensions do exist, they did not arise in a vacuum. One of the continuing legacies of colonial and imperial rule is that boundaries are often arbitrary. As a result, people of the same culture, language, or ethnicity often found themselves separated by international borders and grouped with people of other backgrounds and origins, irrespective of whether they had previously coexisted peacefully, been at odds, or had no significant contact at all. To steady their rule, colonial administrations typically favored one local group, often a minority, over others - generating a fatal resentment. Following independence, civic life in many of these states continued to be split along ethnic lines, with one group ruling at the direct expense of the other. Given severe economic underdevelopment and undemocratic, often repressive patterns of governance, the competition for power and resources among contending groups became intense. In light of the vulnerable status of minorities in multiethnic states, it is no surprise that separatist sentiments abound. We need to look beyond the easy excuse of "ancient hatreds" and "tribal bloodletting" to detect the underlying stress factors that help cause the fighting: disputes are often sharpened or even triggered by glaring social and economic inequities - explosive conditions that are exacerbated by the growing pressures of population growth, resource depletion, and environmental degradation.
Disparities in wealth and power are growing both within countries and among them, as the rich are gaining at the direct expense of the poor and the middle classes. Environmental degradation and resource depletion are triggering or aggravating internal and international conflict, and are likely to become even more important in future years as climate change exacerbates the situation. Together these conditions turn rapidly growing numbers of people into migrants or refugees, and the magnitude and speed of these population movements in turn makes them a factor in generating conflict. Accompanied by weak political systems that are increasingly seen as illegitimate and incapable of attending to people's needs, these pressures can lead to the wholesale fragmentation of societies. As people turn to ethnic, religious, or other group-based organizations for assistance, protection, and identity, relations with other groups often deteriorate. The social, economic, and environmental trends that are key to human security are increasingly being shaped not only by the fragmentation implied in the rise of "tribalism," but also by globalization. Trade, investment, travel, and communications tie countries and communities more closely together. Although the nation-state is far from being eclipsed, countries and national governments have less and less ability to shape their own destinies. The meaning of borders, community, and sovereignty is in flux, and that in turn makes national (as opposed to global) security a more tenuous concept.
Erosion of the welfare state
Economic globalization is now principally a corporate- driven process, going hand in hand with privatization, deregulation, and the erosion of the social welfare state. Given the relative ease of relocating factories and shifting investment resources across the planet, the pressure on communities and countries to remain competitive and offer an inviting investment climate is tremendous. In part, this means downward pressure on wages, and a trend toward a low-common-denominator world with regard to working conditions, social welfare, and environmental regulations. Increasingly, these pressures affect even the better-off communities and the well-trained workers.
Although global integration also holds promise, there is an enormous gap between the rapid extension of boundary-crossing activities and efforts to create effective, democratic structures to deal with the consequences of vastly increased interdependence and to shape the globalization process so that it benefits human populations across the planet more broadly. While national sovereignty is becoming more circumscribed, global governance structures remain weak. The phenomena of globalization and fragmentation and the nature of the social, economic, and environmental pressures worldwide call for a fundamentally different understanding of the meaning of security - Who is to be secure, and by what means? - and hence for a new set of priorities. Conditioned by a worldview that largely equates security with military strength, traditional analysts tend to regard emerging issues simply as new "threats" to be deterred. By subsuming these new issues under the old thinking of national military security, efforts to address them in effect become militarised: weapons proliferation is countered by developing new weapons for preemptive raids on foreign arms facilities instead of by promoting disarmament; refugees are seen as menacing hordes to be intercepted on the high seas instead of as people forced from their homes by poverty; environmental degradation is seen as simply another item in which national interests are to be protected against those of other nations instead of acknowledging the common challenge; and the proliferation of drugs is tackled through the military eradicating cocaine crops instead of through efforts to provide alternative livelihoods for desperate peasants. But many sources of conflict are simply not amenable to any military "solution." Poverty, unequal distribution of land, and the degradation of ecosystems are among the most real and pressing issues undermining people's security. Soldiers, tanks, or warplanes are at best irrelevant in this context, and more likely an obstacle. The military absorbs substantial resources that could help reduce the potential for violent conflict if invested in health, housing, education, poverty eradication, and environmental sustainability.
The twentieth century has seen the pursuit of "national security" elevated to near theological levels; modern military technology has dramatically increased the destructive power of weaponry, the range and speed of delivery vehicles, and the sophistication of targeting technologies. Yet arms ostensibly designed to enhance security increasingly imperil humanity's survival. An understanding of security consonant with the realities of today's world requires a shift from conflict-laden to cooperative approaches, from national to global security. Instead of defense of the status quo, human security calls for change and adaptation; instead of a fine-tuning of arms and recalibration of military strategies, it calls for demilitarization, conversion of war-making institutions, and new priorities for sustainable development.
