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Lecture and Reading summary - Global Security - 2024 - Grade 8.5
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Notes – Global Security 2024Seminar 01: 07/02/2024
What is Global Security?
Definitions
- Global
- Issues that happen all around the world.
- Security issues that affect different countries and their people regardless of their location.
- Security issues that affect the whole world (climate change, cyber warfare, etc.).
- Security
- Security, in an objective sense, measures the absence of threats to acquired values, in a
subjective sense, the absence of fear that such values will be attacked.
- The alleviation of threats to cherished values.
- Which values need protection?
- What counts as a threat to these values?
- Is security absolute? -> Can you be totally secure?
- Whose values need protection (leaders vs. citizens, etc.)?
- Overall, an essentially contested concept that creates disputes about its proper use.
- Referent object
- What is that needs to be made secure?
- State, national interest, community, individual, environment, etc.
- Depending on the object, security is conceptualised differently.
- However, different referent objects are not necessarily independent of one another.
Conceptualisations of security
- Narrow vs. broad
- Survival -> freedom from life-determining threats.
- Survival-plus -> freedom to have life choices (do countries have the freedom to set policies, etc.).
- The meaning according to whom?
- Who are the leaders and who is setting agendas?
Key dimensions of security
- Military
- Offensive and defensive capabilities and the consequences thereof.
- Political
- Stability of states and their systems of government.
- Economic
- Resources and welfare (material things and distributional consequences).
- Social sustainability
- Maintenance of traditions and customs.
- Environmental sustainability
- Maintenance of the local and planetary biosphere.
- The environment is above all, as there is nothing else without a liveable climate.
,Notes – Global Security 2024
Security studies as a field of inquiry
- The Golden Age: 1950s – 1960s
- Influenced by the world wars
- Civilian contributions to the study of strategy.
- Long-term strategizing to avoid war.
- The national interest
- Security rather than welfare.
- The nuclear revolution
- Seminal research on deterrence, containment, coercion, escalation, and arms control.
- Belief in deductive and rational thinking.
- The end of the Golden Age: 1960s – 1970s
- Limits to traditional approaches
- Golden Age was not applicable to the war in Vietnam.
- Golden Age had a limited view of politics.
- Golden Age assumed perfect information and constant ability to rationally calculate.
- The public was disinterested in national security.
- The critique of the Vietnam War made security studies an unfashionable subject.
- New focus on international political economy.
- The renaissance of security studies: 1970s – 1990s
- New realities
- End of the Cold War détente, revolutions, Soviet interventions
- New data and methods
Changes due to the end of the Cold War?
- The new wars characteristics of civil wars:
- Civilians are targets.
- Criminalisation of violence.
- Identity-based wars.
- Interstate conflict is characterised by hybrid/ grey zone warfare.
- Researchers disagree on the change of warfare.
Changes after the 11th of September 2001
- The Global War on Terror (GWOT)
- Greater international interventionism?
- Conflicts more complex and multi-layered?
- Growth in multi-party conflicts?
- Challenges to the post-Cold War unipolar balance of power?
Approaches to global security shape what we pay attention to
- Problem-solving theory
- Takes the world as it finds it and tries to understand it (missing normative or ethical judgements).
- Critical theory
- Calls the institutions and social/ power relations into question.
,Notes – Global Security 2024
Abrahamsen & Sandor: The Global South and International Security (2018)
- While the global South has been understudied previously, the countries in the South now take on one of
two main appearances:
- Weak state
- Intervener state
- This is because the global South provides the most soldiers to peacekeeping missions.
- The global South is a symbolic designation which describes the countries which decolonised in the mid-
twentieth century.
- While there were attempts to speak out unitedly (non-aligned movement), this did not work and
there were various leaders with their own policies.
- While, today, the southern countries are still divergent in many regards, they still try to resist the
global North and speak out unitedly in different forums.
- With the attacks on the 11th of September, weak states were seen as harbours for terrorists. Before the
attacks, the global South was not studied through the security lens.
- The interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq with the first goal of eradicating terrorism, have
become long wars against multiple actors.
- Moreover, some countries fight and train soldiers in weak states (Somalia, Yemen, Niger, etc.).
- The three D’s: development, diplomacy, and defense.
- After the Cold War, the traditional study of security came under fire and a more inclusive space was
created.
- The UNDP’s first Human Development Report argued that security requires development.
- While western governments pay the most money for UN peacekeeping missions, the global South
provides most of the troops.
- This creates a lot of decision-making power for the West and more dangers for the South.
, Notes – Global Security 2024
Seminar 02: 09/02/2024
Climate Change
Anthropocene
- The age of humankind (ecological time zone).
- Humanity’s impact on the earth’s ecology.
- The nature cannot be studied isolated from humans, as humans increasingly affect the nature.
- The term Anthropocene was used in Eart system science to emphasize the dramatic scale of
transformations that mostly the rich and powerful parts of humanity have unleashed.
- Anthropocene means that humanity has become a force shaping the planetary system ->
creation of cities and destruction of the natural world.
- The spreading of humanity into the natural world creates climate change but also
diseases like Covid-19.
- Areas of concern
- The earth is in decay.
- Carbon emissions, acidic oceans, ozone layer depletion, etc.
- Levels of consumption of natural energy resources.
- Global population increases are likely to further exacerbate trends.
- The Earth System Boundaries framework
- Suggests that humanity is pushing crucial ecological systems beyond what seem to be safe
boundaries.
- The Holocene provides the conditions for a safe operating space of the Earth for the future of
humanity. It should thus be the priority to maintain these conditions.
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