Bridging the North-South divide: Sustainable Security for all
Issues:Climate change, Competition over resources, Global militarisation, Marginalisation
For some years, the Oxford Research Group (ORG) has been analysing the likely underlying drivers of global insecurity over the coming years, and ways to develop sustainable responses to these threats. This analysis has focused on four trends that are expected to foster substantial global and regional instability, and large-scale loss of life, of a magnitude unmatched by other potential threats. These are climate change, competition over resources, marginalisation of the ‘majority world’ and global militarisation.
What has become known as a ‘sustainable security’ paradigm rests on an understanding that we cannot successfully control all the consequences of these threats, but must instead work to resolve the causes.
The current security discourse in the West is dominated by what might be called the ‘control paradigm’: an approach based on the false premise that insecurity can be controlled through military force or balance of power politics and containment, thus maintaining the status quo. Such approaches to national, regional and international security are deeply flawed, and are distracting the world’s politicians from developing realistic and sustainable solutions to the most pressing threats facing the world.
Sustainable security focuses on the interconnected, long-term drivers of insecurity, including:
• Climate change: loss of infrastructure, resource scarcity and the mass displacement of peoples, leading to civil unrest, intercommunal violence and international instability.
• Competition over resources: competition for increasingly scarce resources – including food, water and energy – especially from unstable parts of the world.
• Marginalisation of the majority world: increasing socio-economic divisions and the political, economic and cultural marginalisation of the vast majority of the world’s population.
• Global militarisation: the increased use of military force as a security measure and the further spread of military technologies (including chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons).
In a globalised world in which no nation’s security is independent of their region or of the wider international community, the opinions of the majority world can no longer be neglected by global powers who seek to dictate global security policies. The likely future drivers of insecurity do not respect national boundaries, and will not be sustainably addressed by unilateral approaches. For example, as competition over energy resources increases with depleting supplies of fossil fuels, it will become more vital that positive collaboration between consumer nations in the West and resource-rich nations in the South occurs.
It is in the interests of all parties, including Western superpowers, for the voices of the majority world to be brought to the table. To this end, ORG initiated four consultations to explore the reactions of analysts in the global South to the sustainable security framework: one each covering Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and Australasia, the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper synthesises the results of these four consultations, uncovering areas of commonality, and highlighting issues peculiar to their regional context.
Read the full article here.
Author: Hannah Brock
Image source: WorldIslandInfo.com
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Posted on 13/01/11
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