Chapter 17: New security

Introduction

The end of the Cold War
and the apparent end of a military threat to the West led to new ways
of thinking about international issues and threats

Though states remain
key players in the international system and the great powers maintain
their lofty positions of relative power, security has become less and less
concerned with classic, Clauswitzian interstate conflict

A new security
agenda has evolved, driven in part by IOs, NGOs and TNCs

Not everybody agrees that these issues
constitute a security threat in the traditional sense

Still, the new security
agenda has undoubtedly influenced the way that states and non-state
actors behave around the world

Climate change

Until recently, only a few scientists were
willing to commit to the theory that human resource use – particularly
the burning of coal, oil and gas – is having an appreciable effect on the
Earth’s natural systems

Though a few writers, sometimes funded by oil
and gas companies, continue to reject the idea, anthropogenic climate
change is an accepted fact among the overwhelming majority of scientists
and experts in the field

Increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere are
leading to rising global temperatures and increased climate variability

Rising sea temperatures are
affecting weather patterns and fish populations, increasing the likelihood
and intensity of storms, shifting rainfall patterns and promoting droughts
and flash floods

These threats are already having an impact in several
parts of the world

For IR, the key question in this debate is not whether climate change is
anthropogenic or the result of some unobserved natural cycle

That is a
matter for ecologists

IR needs to deal with international consequences of
climate change’s immediate effects

Adaptation efforts focus on protecting ourselves from its worst
effects by protecting coastlines, building more resilient communities and
ensuring a sustainable source of food and power

There is a very extensive
literature on the efforts that culminated with the signing of the Kyoto
Protocol in 1997

IR has contributed to the climate change debate by identifying
international constraints on actors’ ability to deal with environmental
issues

One of these constraints relates to the great divide that still
separates the economic ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’

In a competitive and growth-oriented world economy, many sovereign states are suspicious of efforts to regulate what they can and cannot do

This is less of a concern for the EU and Japan, given their already-high levels of economic development

It has proved a more
difficult issue in the USA, however, where TNCs have privileged access to the lobbies of Congress, allowing them to mobilise political opposition
to environmental regulation, and where suspicion of international
agreements that limit the country’s freedom of action remains a potent
national urge

Ever-louder
warnings from the international scientific community, obvious signs of
instability in the planet’s natural systems and growing calls from nonstate
actors and individuals have pushed China and the USA – the world’s
two biggest polluters – to jump on the climate change bandwagon

The
USA changed its policy following the election of President Barack Obama
in 2008, stating that climate change has ‘risen up to the top of the US national security set of priorities’

Health

Thanks to shifts in rainfall and temperature, regions once free
of mosquitoes, ticks and other parasites are now their feeding grounds,
threatening human life and challenging states’ capacity to respond to
health crises

With disease comes increased strain on states’ health-care
and emergency response systems

This can stretch state resources to their
breaking point, e.g. 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea

Driven by the inability of poor states to provide their
citizens with information and medical care, this pandemic has made itself
felt across the less developed world

In sub-Saharan Africa, it has achieved
terrible proportions

This area holds just over 11 per cent of the world’s
population, but almost 70 per cent of all HIV infections – 25 million cases

Causes range from individual-level explanations, stressing sexual promiscuity
and a lack of contraceptive use among African men, through unit- and
system-level explanations linked to poverty, colonialism and the failure/
refusal of Western companies to supply needed drugs at affordable prices

On one point, however, there seems to be general agreement: states are
more likely to be unstable and less likely to function so long as this disease
continues to ravage their populations and undermine their political and
economic stability

People are generally
healthier than they were in the first half of the 20th century, medicines
are more powerful and more plentiful, and international regimes are
more robust

Moreover, the world is not coming out of a terrible four-year
conflict that drained it of manpower and money

Resources

this is bound to lead to profound human and economic crises when our numbers outpace our supplies

Malthus’s ideas
have been challenged in the centuries since

Advances in technology,
improvements in productivity and the opening of new agricultural lands
have increased the resources available to us and allowed us to make
better use of what we have

This creates a socially constructed
type of hunger, described by Amartya Sen; a type driven by inefficient
distribution instead of natural shortages

A third type of study focuses on
water scarcity, including fears that shortages will give rise to new conflicts
between and within states

Some researchers even believe that oil will also
become increasingly scarce over the next few decades

The ‘resource curse’ describes a situation in which high-value
resources – oil and diamonds, for example – have a detrimental effect on
the societies in which they are found

Under normal circumstances, states
are assumed to benefit from high-value natural resources

They add to a
state’s store of wealth, can be used to promote balanced economic growth
and provide revenue that can be used to improve people’s living standards

This does not just impact
on countries like Nigeria, where the benefits of the country’s immense
oil wealth is often nowhere to be found in the communities where oil is
located

It also has consequences for oil-rich states in the Middle East and
for resource-rich sub-state actors like the province of Alberta in Canada

In these places, an abundance of oil might fill state coffers in the short
term, but it also creates uneven economic development and potentially
undermines democratic practices in the long term

Energy security

This led to major
price rises that played a crucial – and often unexplored – role in the
conduct of the Cold War

One as-yet-unmentioned theory of the end of the
Cold War focuses on the impact of falling oil prices in the 1980s

These put
a major squeeze on the troubled Soviet economy, which received most of
its foreign currency from exports of oil and gas, eventually pushing it into
bankruptcy and political collapse

It was at this crucial juncture, when fear ran headlong into the USA’s long-standing relationship with Saudi Arabia –
which possesses over 25 per cent of the world’s known oil reserves – that
the US debate about energy security began in earnest

Even President G.W.
Bush, an experienced operator in the oil industry, began to muse that it
was high time for the USA to find alternative sources and forms of energy

Demographics

These include the relationship between
population and power, the link between migration and stability, and the
connection between the age structure of a society and the stability of its
socio-economic system

The same commentators
might argue that the USA is in more robust international shape because
its population is on the rise, driven by a combination of domestic growth
and immigration

Europe stands somewhere in between

Its domestic
population growth is on the decline, but the shortfall is being made up
by large-scale immigration

This has been encouraged by many politicians and media outlets,
who portray refugees from the Middle East as potential security threats,
thereby securitising what used to be a humanitarian issue

Migration raises all sorts of international issues

The world has never
seen so many people on the move, with global migration accelerating
over the past two decades

Until recently, IR has dealt with such concerns
as domestic problems to be handled by the countries to which people
are immigrating

Since 9/11, however, it has become an increasingly
securitised issue, with fears rising in many host countries that at least
some of their new immigrant communities might represent a threat to
public safety

There, demographic changes have produced a ‘youth bulge’, with over 30 per cent of Middle Eastern populations aged between 15 and 29

This represents over 100 million people, and is the highest proportion of youth in the region’s history

Many of these young
people have expectations that cannot be met by the local labour market

Youth unemployment in the Middle East now stands at around 25 per cent –
the highest of any region in the world

To make matters worse, the duration
of unemployment for new graduates is extremely long, lasting, for example,
up to three years in Morocco and Iran

will ‘youth bulge’ lead to regime change in the Middle East?