A complex interplay of discrimination, global poverty, inequality and deepening socio-economic divisions, together make for key elements of global insecurity. While overall global wealth has increased, the benefits of this economic growth have not been equally shared. The rich-poor divide is actually growing, with a very heavy concentration of growth in relatively few parts of the world, and poverty getting much worse in many other regions. The ‘majority world’ of Asia, Africa and Latin America feel the strongest effects of marginalisation as a result of global elites, concentrated in North America and Europe, striving to maintain political, cultural, economic and military global dominance. This is not necessarily a matter of addressing a gap between rich and poor countries but the gaps between elites and non-elites, both within and across national boundaries.

This connection between marginalisation and insecurity is increasingly recognised by security policymakers. The U.S. National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends: 2025 predicts that in the years ahead, “increasing interconnectedness will enable individuals to coalesce around common causes across national boundaries, creating new cohorts of the angry, downtrodden, and disenfranchised.” Similarly, the Chief of the UK Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards has described the Naxalite insurgency that has spread across India as a conflict with a “sense of hopelessness and economic envy at its core.” The effects are no longer merely local, Richards warns that “these are powerful instincts that today can be inflamed and communicated to other similarly dispossessed groups across the world at the touch of a button.”

One of the many consequences of the great improvements made in recent years in terms of increasing access to information technologies in the Global South is that while the great majority of the world’s people are on the economic and political margins, their self-knowledge of this marginalisation is steadily increasing. With these improvements, often comes resentment and anger as well as an enhanced capacity for organised action. Anti-elite sentiments can be a powerful driver of radicalisation and militarisation, and the longer the majority world is excluded from the benefits of global economic prosperity and marginalised from mainstream ‘international society’, the greater the threat to global security.