Security in the 21st century

Security is a core value of life and has always been a high-priority issue for both nations and people. Without security, humans can grow but cannot flourish.

As the 17th century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, reminds us: in the absence of security, “there is place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain… no arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Human life in many countries of the Western world is not as brutish as it was in the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’. Thus their citizens tend to take their security for granted unless it is directly threatened by events like the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center or the July London bombings. Sadly, for more than half of the world’s population, life is not fair. For them, deep insecurity is a fact of everyday life and a fundamental preoccupation with daily survival is the foundation upon which they build their collective lives.

Recall for a moment television images we see about life in places like Baghdad, Gaza, Damascus, Mogadishu etc. Unfortunately, human history bears witness to the fact that there will always be some individuals and states that will be seen as threats by other states. The truth is that the problem of security will never go away.

It is due to its fundamental importance that security constitutes the most important scholarly question in many academic disciplines. Being a doctoral student of international politics and non-proliferation in an American university, this author has been preoccupied with the idea of collective security for the past several years.

The desire for security is so overwhelming that for many leading international relations experts the anarchic structure of the international system was the key to understanding world politics. Consequently, the debate on military and non-military means to security relative to other states has held a central place in IR scholarship for much of the 20th century.

There are four principal assumptions which underlie the security concept: security of what, for what, from what, and by what means? These assumptions further lead to divergent views regarding the nature and scope of security. The reason being that there has never been a clear consensus on how to define security. Rather it has become a contested concept between peace- and power-research.

Security is a diverse concept and has to be studied from different angles before it can be properly understood. Yet, scholarly views on the concept of security are tied to three major theoretical paradigms in the IR literature: realism, neoliberalism, and constructivism. Realist scholars maintain a traditional view of security, focusing on the nation state and national interests.

Stressing the importance of military capabilities, realists consider states to be the principal actors in the international arena. This points to an important difference concerning the role of states. Defensive realists like Kenneth Waltz assert that the anarchical structure of the international system encourages states to undertake defensive and reserved policies to maintain global order. In contrast, offensive realists, such as John J Mearsheimer, regard states as security or power maximisers.

According to John Mearsheimer, “uncertainty about the intentions of other states is unavoidable, which means that states can never be sure that other states do not have offensive intentions to go along with their offensive capabilities.” Having a pessimistic worldview, for realists, the world is condemned to a state of perpetual competition and there is no such thing as status quo.

Yet, both defensive and offensive realists think of power in terms of military strength. Realism has been a predominant player in the study of international relations during the cold-war period. But the realist school of thought makes a problematic assumption that states are undifferentiated units seeking to optimise their utility.

Neoliberal international relations theorists allow a broader understanding of security, going beyond military issues and states as primary actors. They stress the importance of free markets in economic growth and worldwide interconnectedness in the economic sphere. Their view of international relations is much more optimistic than the realist perspective because they see states as rational utility maximisers.

In a highly significant shift from the first two approaches, the constructivist school thinks of security as socially constructed, along with capabilities and threats. Constructivism emerged in the early 1990s as a major challenge to the traditional paradigms of international relations. Constructivist scholars argue that perceptions of security vary significantly among actors in the international arena. Consequently, it is not the state that the level of level of analysis, but society as a group of people sharing a common identity.

Based on these three approaches, Helga Haftendorn, a notable German political scientist, distinguished between three notions of security, depending on their proposed solutions to meet the perceived challenges. In her view, each concept of security corresponds to specific threats and values: the paradigm of nations can be traced back to Hobbes’ pessimistic view of human nature and his belief in an absolutist and autocratic form of government.

The paradigm of international security becomes meaningful in the Grotian tradition and the idea of law as an institution of international society. And, the paradigm of global security vindicates Kant’s reflections on universal peace and an attempt to ensure everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law.

The discussion has deepened significantly in the post-cold war period. New approaches to the study of international security highlight the role of globalisation as the critical element in influencing our current thinking about security. Globalisation has not only blurred the delimitation of external and internal security but also enhanced inter-state cooperation at bureaucratic level.

Many American and European scholars believe that realism is dead because the international system’s power structure has changed in fundamental ways. In their view, the emergence of powerful non-state actors has diminished the importance of states as primary actors on the world stage. This point of view has become so pervasive that it has become increasingly difficult for adherents of the realist theory to survive in American academia.

President Clinton became a leading proponent of the anti-realist view in the early 1990s when he said that “in a world where freedom, not tyranny, is on the march, the cynical calculus of pure power politics simply does not compute. It is ill-suited to a new era.”

While Clinton’s rhetorical words were not up to the theoretical standards, he also ignored the only lesson of history – that human beings have never lived in a state of natural harmony, nor can they.

Email: rizwanasghar5@unm.edu