Security Cosmopolitanism: the next phase

The anthropocene poses a set of conceptual challenges for the study of security in the discipline of International Relations. By complicating the distinction between human and nature, the concept of the anthropocene puts into question one of the key organizing logics of upon which much security discourse is built: what would a security look like whose subject was not modern man? This article offers a reading of environmental and ecological approaches to security as two potential avenues for rethinking security in the context of the anthropocene. This is done in order to demonstrate the dominance and centrality of the nature/culture binary for conceptualizing the environment, ecology and security. Such a common philosophical horizon problematizes and undermines the scope for a critical reorientation of security thinking from either perspective. Drawing on R.B.J. Walker's concept of the politics of escape, the article suggests that in attempting to escape the nature-culture binary, the move to ecology in fact, simultaneously reinscribes and obscures this distinction, thereby limiting the potential of the concept of the anthropocene to offer a critical framework with which to analyse the interplay of nature and culture in contemporary security politics.

Critical Studies on Security, 2013

"Cosmopolitanism in international affairs is a body of thinking and practice committed to building a more just and sustainable international order, but it has never been systematically applied to the question or practice of security. This article argues that both a range of transnational (event-based and systemic) insecurities, and state abuses of security discourse to compromise rights and cause insecurity, create a compelling normative and empirical case for a new security paradigm: security cosmopolitanism. It would aim to critique and reform both national and collective security policies and processes: to put better norms and ends to them, redefine their ontological foundations, and generate guiding ethical principles. It does so in the service of a distinctive understanding of global security as a universal good: one in which the security of all states and all human beings is of equal weight, in which causal chains and processes spread widely across space and through time, and in which security actors bear a responsibility to consider the global impact of their choices. This article lays out the key ontological and ethical frameworks for security cosmopolitanism. These challenge the dominant ontological foundations of national security (and international society) anchored in the social contract between citizen and state. Security cosmopolitanism argues that states cannot contain and immunize the national social body from external threats; rather, insecurity arises in a borderless way from the very histories, choices, powers, and systems of modernity. This generates both a new analytical model for global security and a different – relational, networked, and future-oriented – ethic of responsibility."

The security agenda is going global. Key threats such as weapons proliferation, disease, terrorism and climate change cannot be addressed unilaterally by states, and require a global perspective to both understand and respond effectively to them. There are therefore powerful pragmatic reasons for embracing a global security perspective. This article, however, suggests that a compelling moral case also exists for viewing security in global terms. National and international security discourses are at odds with the realities of world politics and orient towards the preservation of a status quo that is failing much of the world's population, now and into the future. In this context, this article makes a case for cosmopolitan ethical principles underpinning a global security perspective. Only an ethics that does not discriminate between groups is defensible as a general set of principles. A global security perspective should be underpinned by three cosmopolitan ethical principles which dictate, firstly, that all security actors have responsibility (albeit differentiated) to create security for all; secondly, they should act with consideration of the future implications of their actions in mind; and, thirdly, they should proceed as if their actions will become global over time and space. While not without challenges and dilemmas, such a perspective is urgently needed in contemporary global politics.

Security Dialogue, 2014

Harm does not happen to humans in isolation, but rather to worlds composed of diverse beings. This article asks how worlds and the conditions of worldliness should be framed as ‘subjects of security’. It explores three possible pathways: rejecting anthropocentrism; expanding existing ethical categories; and adopting ‘new materialist’ ontology and ethics. Ultimately, it argues for a fusion of the key elements of each of these pathways. This offers the basis for a new concept of harm (‘mundicide’) specifically intended to reflect harms to worlds and the conditions of worldliness. The value of this concept is demonstrated in light of an empirical example: the ‘Rainforest Chernobyl’ case. The article concludes that a worldly approach is necessary in order to capture the full enormity of the harms confronted by international security.

This paper will draw on some of the recent discussions by the post-structuralists and ecofeminists which explore the states’ system ideology (Alger 1984-1985) of security – an ideology which, associated with the institutions and aspirations of modernity as Westernisation, has helped to conceal the systematic creation of multiple insecurities. The environmental crisis has begun to reveal how the industrial and science-led model of modernity has generated a ‘risk society’ which is likely to lead to a radical re-defining of modernity itself. (Beck 1993) It will be shown that critical readings of security reveal a profound anti-ecological bias – one that must be addressed before the term can be meaningfully coupled with environmental values. The paper will also point to the critical social movements (Walker 1988) in the international system as agents of transformation of our understanding of security insofar as they have articulated a concept of security based on a radical reversal of the existing metaphysics of denial which currently underpin the impossible search for invulnerability in the politics of modernity, of which the state system ideology is an expression.

2009

Terms like ‘human security’ try to catch the attention of an audience and to catch the user’s own attention; in other words they aim to stimulate and motivate. Having caught attention they try to organize it: they link to a perspective, a direction for and way of looking. Having caught and organized attention, they aspire to influence or even to organize activity: they provide frames for work. Such terms and the frameworks that they mark seem though to often come and quickly go, to rapidly rise and fall in international usage. A few terms become established but in the process often change or lose meaning. How important, persuasive and durable is a ‘human security’ framework likely to be? I will suggest, firstly, that a human security perspective promotes some necessary prerequisites for serious discussion of issues in global ethics. Prior to entry into any of the detailed debates in global ethics come a series of related choices about how we see ourselves and the world. First, how far do we see shared interests between people, thanks to a perception of causal interdependence, so that appeals to self-interest are also appeals to mutual interest. Second, how far do we value other people’s interests, so that appeals to sympathy can be influential due to interconnections in emotion. Third, how far do we see ourselves and others as members of a common humanity or as members of a national or other limited social community or as pure individuals: is our prime self-identification as interconnected or separate beings? This prior set of perspectives determines our response to proposed reasoning about ethics and justice. Adoption of a human security perspective can influence, even reconfigure, how we see ourselves and others and our interconnectedness, and thereby reconfigure how we think about both ethics and security. Secondly, with specific reference to issues of global climate change, I will suggest that the necessary transition in predominant societal perspectives and personal life-styles needs a language or languages of transition that make vivid and meaningful what is at stake, that unite and motivate groups committed to change, and that persuade enough of those groups who could otherwise block change. If we look at the value shifts identified as necessary by the Great Transition work we see that human rights language and the capability approach’s ‘development as freedom’ while potentially important are not sufficient. By themselves they are too potentially individualistic and compatible with visions of self-fulfilment through unlimited consumption and exploitation of nature. The emphases required—on human solidarity, stability and prioritization; prudence and enlightened self-interest; sources of richer quality of life, felt security and fulfilment; and ecological interconnection that demands careful stewardship—seem to be more fully present in human security thinking. It can be one of the languages of transition.

Climate change is increasingly characterized as a security issue. Yet we see nothing approaching consensus about the nature of the climate change–security relationship. Indeed existing depictions in policy statements and academic debate illustrate radically different conceptions of the nature of the threat posed, to whom and what constitute appropriate policy responses. These different climate security discourses encourage practices as varied as national adaptation and globally oriented mitigation action. Given the increasing prominence of climate security representations and the different implications of these discourses, it is important to consider whether we can identify progressive discourses of climate security: approaches to this relationship underpinned by defensible ethical assumptions and encouraging effective responses to climate change. Here I make a case for an ecological security discourse. Such a discourse orients towards ecosystem resilience and the rights and needs of the most vulnerable across space (populations of developing worlds), time (future generations), and species (other living beings). This paper points to the limits of existing accounts of climate security before outlining the contours of an 'ecological security discourse' regarding climate change. It concludes by reflecting on the challenges and opportunities for such discourse in genuinely informing how political communities approach the climate change–security relationship.

This article examines the manner in which the human security discourse enables a dual exercise of sovereign power and biopower. Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, it argues that human security contributes to this dual exercise by conceptualizing a form of life rendered amenable to biopolitical technologies and rationalities while simultaneously defining the conditions of exceptionality that assist in sovereign power's ability to authorize international interventions meant to secure human life. This frame of reference is then mobilized to read the human security discourse within the broader developments of the concept of security from the immediate postwar period to the post-9/11 moment. It is argued that the human security discourse informs the current biopolitical networks of world order and often works in conjunction with -rather than against -the global exercise of sovereign power made evident by the 'war on terror'. These changes are reflected in the formalization of the human security discourse within the UN, which has also moved away from setting binding humanitarian criteria in favour of allowing the Security Council more discretion in deciding when and where to intervene; see .

Terms like 'human security' try to catch the attention of an audience and to catch the user's own attention; in other words they aim to stimulate and motivate. Having caught attention they try to organize it: they link to a perspective, a direction for and way of looking. Having caught and organized attention, they aspire to influence or even to organize activity: they provide frames for work. Such terms and the frameworks that they mark seem though to often come and quickly go, to rapidly rise and fall in international usage. A few terms become established but in the process often change or lose meaning. How important, persuasive and durable is a 'human security' framework likely to be? I will suggest, firstly, that a human security perspective promotes some necessary prerequisites for serious discussion of issues in global ethics. Prior to entry into any of the detailed debates in global ethics come a series of related choices about how we see ourselves and the world. First, how far do we see shared interests between people, thanks to a perception of causal interdependence, so that appeals to self-interest are also appeals to mutual interest. Second, how far do we value other people's interests, so that appeals to sympathy can be influential due to interconnections in emotion. Third, how far do we see ourselves and others as members of a common humanity or as members of a national or other limited social community or as pure individuals: is our prime self-identification as interconnected or separate beings? This prior set of perspectives determines our response to proposed reasoning about ethics and justice. Adoption of a human security perspective can influence, even reconfigure, how we see ourselves and others and our interconnectedness, and thereby reconfigure how we think about both ethics and security.