This chapter illustrates the nature of current wars and armed conflicts and explores contemporary responses to them. Whatever criteria are used for war or armed conflict, it is clear that large numbers of people are impoverished by them, and globally the numbers of those affected is not declining. There are characteristics of contemporary wars and armed conflicts that make non-combatants especially vulnerable. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been important initiatives aimed at controlling wars, and at alleviating their effects, but the effects have been limited, and controversial. Particularly since 2001, there are has been a marked tendency for high levels of insecurity to spread across borders and take on global dynamics. In large parts of the world, enhancing security remains a key challenge in alleviating poverty and is a prerequisite for achieving development goals.
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11. War and Armed Conflict
Tim Allen and Tom Kirk
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10. Middle East Security: The Politics of Violence after the 2003 Iraq War
Marina Calculli
This chapter explores contemporary security in the Middle East by highlighting the nexus between the uses and justification of violence. Focusing on the post 9/11 reordering of the Middle East, it shows how state and non-state actors use the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’ to depoliticize military interventions against political rivals. More specifically, it argues that such actors mobilize the politics of shame to contain and undermine their rivals. Such efforts are met with attempts to counter-shame and re-politicize the use of violence, producing a cycle of action and counter-action that seeks to legitimize and delegitimize competing visions of security and order in the Middle East. In this context, security and insecurity are two sides of the same coin that fluctuate according to the prevailing balance of power.
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4. Historical Materialism
Eric Herring
This chapter begins with an overview of the social scientific, philosophical, and political dimensions of historical materialism (HM). This overview is followed by an elaboration of what HM involves, including its diversity, value, and potential but avoidable pitfalls. Key HM concepts are set out and used to show how capitalism generally and in its recent neoliberal form aims to generate insecurity for labour and security for capital. Rather than being a narrow approach to security that focuses on economics, at its best, HM is a holistic approach that provides a way of putting into perspective and relating the many components of security. It goes on to explore the relationships between HM and approaches to security in wider contexts (realism, liberalism, social constructivism, and gender) and then to various perspectives on security (securitization and the sectoral approach, peace studies, Critical Security Studies, and human security). Accompanying the text are Think Point 4.1 on using HM to understand arms production and the arms trade, and Think Point 4.2 on using HM to understand the connections between development and security. The conclusion provides an overall assessment of the contribution of HM to the scholarship and politics of security and insecurity.
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17. Security Insecurity, and the State
This chapter examines various dimensions of security and insecurity within states. It first considers different conceptualizations of security and the range of areas within which it may be applied before discussing security and insecurity in the state of nature. It then explores the impact of security and insecurity on global politics, Thomas Hobbes' ideas about security and insecurity, and collective security as embodied in the United Nations (UN). It also reviews some pressing security challenges in the post-Cold War period and the broadening of the security agenda to encompass more recent concerns such as human security, environmental security, and energy security. Finally, it analyses the ‘war on terror’ that came in response to 9/11, raising further questions concerning how best to deal with nonconventional threats.
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19. Security and Insecurity
Stephanie Lawson
This chapter examines traditional concepts of security and insecurity in the realm of international politics. It first considers Thomas Hobbes’s account of the state of nature and the emergence of the power politics approach to security as worked out by Hans Morgenthau and his successors. It then discusses the evolution of security thinking through to the end of the Cold War, ideas about collective security as embodied in the United Nations and the nature of security cooperation in Europe through NATO. It also explores some pressing security challenges in the post-Cold War period and the broadening of the security agenda to encompass more recent concerns ranging from environmental security to energy security and the notions of ‘human security’ and ‘responsibility to protect’. Finally, it analyses the ‘global war on terror’ and especially how the 9/11 attacks affected the discourse on security and insecurity.
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15. International and global security
John Baylis
This chapter examines whether international relations, especially in an era of increasing globalization, are likely to be as violent in the future as they have been in the past. It asks whether globalization increases or decreases international security, which international relations theories best help to provide an understanding of global security and insecurity, and what are the most important contemporary threats to international security. The chapter first considers existing disagreements about the causes of war and whether violence is always likely to remain with us. It then discusses traditional/classical realist and more contemporary neorealist and neoliberal perspectives on international security, along with a range of alternative approaches. It also explores recent debates about globalization and geopolitics. Case studies in this chapter explore insecurity in the post-cold war world and tension in the South and East China Seas.
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19. Security and Insecurity
Stephanie Lawson
This chapter examines traditional concepts of security and insecurity in the realm of international politics. It first considers Thomas Hobbes’s account of the state of nature and the emergence of the power politics approach to security as worked out by Hans Morgenthau and his successors. It then discusses the evolution of security thinking through to the end of the Cold War, ideas about collective security as embodied in the United Nations and the nature of security cooperation in Europe through NATO. It also explores some pressing security challenges in the post-Cold War period and the broadening of the security agenda to encompass more recent concerns ranging from environmental security to energy security and the notions of ‘human security’ and ‘responsibility to protect’. Finally, it analyses the ‘global war on terror’ and especially how the 9/11 attacks affected the discourse on security and insecurity.
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6. Security and Insecurity
This chapter assesses the general concept of security and the way in which issues come to be ‘securitized’. The security of the sovereign state, in a system of states, and existing under conditions of anarchy, has been the traditional focus of studies in global or international politics. Security in this context has therefore been concerned largely with the threats that states pose to each other. Over the last few decades, however, the agenda for security in global politics has expanded, and so too has its conceptualization. The chapter looks at traditional approaches to security and insecurity, revisiting the Hobbesian state of nature and tracing security thinking in global politics through to the end of the Cold War. This is followed by a discussion of ideas about collective security as embodied in the UN, paying particular attention to the role of the Security Council and the issue of intervention in the post-Cold War period. This period has also seen the broadening of the security agenda to encompass concerns such as gender security, environmental security, cyber security, and the diffuse concept of ‘human security’. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of the ‘war on terror’, raising further questions concerning how best to deal with non-conventional security threats.
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15. Digital, (in)security, and violence
Rocco Bellanova
This chapter studies the connections between security and surveillance in order to discover how (in)security and violence are fostered by the digital. To do so, it is important to understand the digital in terms of datafication, computation, and materiality. These enable us to critically explore security through society and technology and tensions between the local and the global, while asking questions about the growing role of IT companies in our worlds. Datafication is at the core of modern statecraft—techniques for counting things and people allow authorities to maintain control over a population at a distance, imposing and collecting taxes that can be used to reinforce their military power. At the same time, showcasing the development of computing permits us to emphasize the key role of security imaginaries in shaping what is now called the digital age.
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8. Critical Security Studies II —Narratives of Security: Other Stories, Other Actors
J. Marshall Beier
Taking its main cues from Critical Security Studies, this chapter asks some unconventional questions about somewhat unconventional subjects for a field that has traditionally been more inclined to centre states in its investigations. In so doing, it brings to light the concealed political commitments that are a part of any attempt to theorize security and which fix arbitrary limits on whom and what gets foregrounded in the security stories told. Placing particular emphasis on recovering agency and political subjecthood, one can see the crucial part played by other actors in both the everyday practices of security and it has come to be defined. One can better appreciate both the problems and promise of one’s own roles in producing security—and insecurity—in the ways it is approached, as students and scholars.
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11. Gender and Security
Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Sophia Dingli
This chapter examines issues of gender and security. It begins with an explanation of what we mean by gender and explains why issues of gender are central to understanding security. International Relations specialists have over the last three decades explored and interpreted the ways in which men and women have responded to the national and international policies which have governed conflict, terrorism, and war. The chapter demonstrates that through understanding and placing notions of gender at the centre of any debate on security one can unleash a series of interlocking understandings of the way men and women relate to insecurity, violence, and war.
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10. Gender and sexuality
Jennifer Hobbs and Laura McLeod
This chapter assesses the relevance of gender and sexuality for understanding how security/insecurity are distributed in the world. Our ideas about gender and sexuality—that men and women are the only genders, and that each gender has particular bodies, characteristics, and abilities—have been used for centuries to enact and justify the oppression of women and those who do not fit into this gender binary. As such, gender and sexuality form part of the unequal distribution of insecurity and violence we see in the world. The chapter looks at this topic bearing in mind specifically the following critical questions: security for whom, where, how, and at whose expense? To do so, it utilizes three key feminist concepts: intersectionality, the everyday, and transformation. The chapter argues that gender and sexuality help us gain a critical perspective of security/insecurity by revealing new areas of study, and helping us to see traditional security topics in a new light.
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19. Globalization, Development, and Security
Nana K. Poku and Jacqueline Therkelsen
This chapter proposes that globalization is a neoliberal ideology for development, consolidated and promoted by key international financial institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), which deepens inequality between and within nations on a global scale, resulting in increased global insecurity through a growing sense of injustice and grievance that may lead to rebellion and radicalization. It is argued that, ultimately, the globalization ideology for development services the interest of its advocates, the elites of the core capitalist economies that dominate the international financial institutions, at the expense and immiseration of the majority of people in developing economies and the weaker segments of their own societies. The chapter is set out in three stages: first, it presents the case for conceptualizing globalization as a neoliberal ideology for development; second, it provides evidence to demonstrate the harmful effects of the ideology on societies, particularly across the developing world; and third, it explores the connection between uneven globalization and global insecurity through two case studies: the uprising in Egypt in 2011, and the collapse of the Greek economy in 2010.
