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Flashcards by Amna Tamkin, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by Amna Tamkin
over 6 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| Chapter 17: New security | Hunger, disease and poverty can lead to global instability and leave a vacuum for extremism to fill. So instead of just managing poverty, we must offer nations and people a pathway out of poverty. ~President Barack Obama |
| Introduction | Global issues have been repackaged as ‘security’ issues over the past two decades using the process described by Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver using the language of social constructivism |
| 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 | This agenda has emphasised transnational threats to international peace and security that have traditionally been ignored or dealt with as secondary issues This shift was formally recognised with the publication of the UN Human Development Report in 1994 This made policy-makers aware of the fact that some of the most serious risks facing states in the modern world arise from transnational problems such as poverty, famine, disease and environmental degradation |
| 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 | Non-traditional threats that have been securitised: climate change, human health, resource scarcity, energy security and problems arising from changing demographics |
| Climate change | The ecological consequences of human-induced climate change may represent the most worrying item on the new security agenda Humans have affected the environments in which we live for millennia For the past 500 years, human impact has ranged from the expansion of agricultural land use, to a reduction in forests and wetlands, to a rapid rise in the amount of fossilised carbon released back into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels |
| 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 | This brings with it a host of potential threats to states, non-state actors and individuals Rising sea levels caused by the melting of land-based polar ice caps threaten coastal areas from the small atolls and islands of the Pacific Ocean – where climate change is a very real matter of national interest – to coastal Asia, Europe, Africa and America |
| 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 | While their final impact is unknown, there is no reason to doubt that they will lead to large-scale human migrations as once-fertile regions are left parched, flooded or even submerged by our changing planet |
| 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 | So far, the international community has focused on two parts of the climate change puzzle: mitigation and adaptation Mitigation efforts focus on reducing the amount of carbon entering the atmosphere in the hope of minimising the severity of climate change |
| 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 | This tends to focus on the important parts played by the UN and the EU; the forms of political resistance, led by the USA, Canada and Australia e.g. Rio Earth Summit, Paris Climate Accord |
| 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 theory, everyone can agree about the facts of climate change More practically, many developing states fear that limits on carbon emissions will impair their ability to ‘catch up’ with the developed world Until recently, China has maintained that targets should not be imposed on it while it remains so far behind the West in terms of its per capita income |
| 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 | Even so, both China and the USA have stated their intentions to actively lobby for global mitigation and adaptation targets, to be negotiated through the institutions of the United Nations This great power partnership played a central role in the successful negotiation of a global climate framework in Paris in late 2015 the Obama administration teamed up with the government of President Xi Jinping to push for concerted international action |
| 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 | Human health: a new form of human security threat trade and early forms of globalisation have played a major role in spreading contagions around the world From bubonic plague to smallpox to avian flu, globalisation has carried pathogens and parasites to new parts of the world |
| 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 | In extreme cases, the state itself can begin to lose its grip on its territory and population A number of studies now show a close correlation between the incidence of disease and state failure One disease has been the subject of an enormous amount of intense research is HIV/AIDS |
| 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 | A 2010 UNAIDS report records highly troubling statistics for the region In 2009, it saw around 1.8 million people die of HIV-related illnesses, 72 per cent of the global total Southern Africa is at the epicentre of the ongoing epidemic The 10 countries of the region, which have around 2 per cent of the world’s population, are home to around 32 per cent of people with HIV and over 40 per cent of women with HIV |
| 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 | The past decade has witnessed a spike in the number of global health scares, with nearly annual warnings of potential pandemics caused by one of the many strains of influenza e.g. the Spanish influenza outbreak in 1918 Not only did this pandemic kill more than five times as many people as the war itself – accounting for just over 50 million lives – there was very little that the international community could do about it |
| 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 | What worries many in the field of public health is that with more people and goods travelling around the world every year – a consequence of modern globalisation – the possibility of another pandemic is growing ever greater |
| Resources | The notion that demand for natural resources will lead to scarcity was advanced in the late 18th century by the English political economist, Thomas Malthus In An essay on the principle of population, first published in 1798, he hypothesises that human numbers tend to increase at a geometric rate, while our ability to feed ourselves only increases arithmetically |
| 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 | However, his thoughts about population and resources remain troubling dangers posed by the world’s rising population and the dangers posed to subsistence agriculture by climate change and soil exhaustion Others look at the unequal distributions of power and wealth, which can lead to hunger by failing to get food supplies to poorer parts of the planet |
| 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 | According to this theory, known as ‘peak oil’, the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels will reach their maximum by the middle of the 21st century If and when this occurs, it may lead to intense competition between states seeking to access the most important energy resource in the world economy |
| 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 | In many states, particularly those with weak institutions and corrupt elites, high value resources will actually distort economic development by redirecting investment away from community-level projects in favour of increased, large-scale resource extraction This undermines a population’s socioeconomic development, corrupts the political process and causes domestic conflicts over the distribution of resource wealth |
| 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 | As any decent historian will tell you, energy has posed a problem for IR since the West became dependent on imported oil around the beginning of the 20th century As US writer David Painter shows, two decades of access to cheap oil in the 1950s and 1960s were followed by the production embargo imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the 1970s |
| 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 | One factor above all has pushed energy to the top of a very long list of non-military security issues: the terrorist attacks on the USA in September 2001 Overnight, it seemed that the country had become too dependent on Middle Eastern oil |
| 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 | One surprising change has been the rapid rise in US oil and gas production thanks to hydraulic fracturing – a controversial technique for accessing hard-to-reach supplies underground This has seen the USA go from the largest net importer of oil to a potential exporter, radically redrawing the world’s energy map |
| Demographics | The relationship between demography and international politics is one of the most under researched topics in IR Analysts assume that there must be a connection between population and international affairs, but remain divided on a range of issues |
| 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 first of these issues deals in the most general terms with the presumed connection between state power and trends in population Those who advocate a correlation between population and power argue that the decline of Russia from great power status in the 1990s coincided with a rapid decline in its population growth rate |
| 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 is a new dynamic for Europe, which has historically been a source rather than a destination for immigrants There have been political consequences to this demographic shift, including growing nationalist movements in nearly all European states, and a dramatic rise in vocal political opposition to even the most desperate refugees |
| 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 | This poses no special difficulty when the migrants in question are relatively affluent and come from similar cultures and backgrounds to their new host countries Historical experiences in the Americas and contemporary Europe indicate that issues arise when migrants are poor and have little understanding of their destination’s culture and language |
| 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 | This resurgent nationalism is an interesting counterpoint to the globalism that many identify as a feature of modern international society Demography poses a potentially huge problem in many developing states in the form of an enormous rise in the number of younger people as a percentage of the overall population e.g. Middle East and North Africa |
| 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 | Middle Eastern children generally receive a good education relative to other parts of the developing world Enrollment rates throughout the region are high, with nearly universal access to education at primary level and around 70 per cent enrolment at secondary level This widespread education generates expectations that cannot be met by national labour markets |
| 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? | Upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya during the Arab Spring were led by technologically astute young people, who used social media and mobile cameras to coordinate and record the events that began in Tunisia in January 2011 Of the many demands made by these protesters, the call for jobs was the most consistent Faced with their own youth in revolt, many Middle Eastern regimes have not been able to contain instability by the usual combination of police brutality and short-term economic concessions |
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