Sustainable Security
"Chris Abbott's much-valued contribution to the developing concept of sustainable security is crucial in helping us construct a much-needed and wise response to the challenges we face."
Professor Paul Rogers, University of Bradford
In much of the world, the current security discourse 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. Security policies based on this paradigm are self-defeating in the long-term as they simply create a pressure cooker effect. The most obvious global example of this approach has been the so-called ‘war on terror’, which essentially aimed to ‘keep the lid’ on terrorism and insecurity, without addressing the root causes. 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 non-traditional threats facing the world. A new approach is needed.
This new approach is what I and others at Oxford Research Group (ORG) call sustainable security. The central premise of sustainable security is that you cannot successfully control all the consequences of insecurity, but must work to resolve the causes. In other words, ‘fighting the symptoms’ will not work, you must instead ‘cure the disease’. Such a framework must be based on an integrated analysis of security threats and a preventative approach to responses.
Since the horrific events of 9/11, Western leaders have held up international terrorism as the greatest threat to world security. However, the evidence does not support this claim. Sustainable security instead focuses on four interconnected, long-term drivers of insecurity:
- Climate change: Extreme environmental changes resulting in the loss of infrastructure, resource scarcity and the mass displacement of peoples and leading to civil unrest, intercommunal violence and international instability.
- Competition over resources: Competition for increasingly scarce resources, particularly food, water and energy.
- Marginalisation of the ‘majority world’: Increasing socio-economic divisions (both within and between countries) and the political, economic and social marginalisation of the vast majority of the world’s population.
- Global militarisation: The increased use of military force as a valid instrument of foreign policy and the further spread of military technologies (including weapons of mass destruction).
These factors are the trends that are most likely to lead to substantial global and regional instability, and large-scale loss of life, of a magnitude unmatched by other potential threats. The sustainable security analysis makes a distinction between these trends and other security threats, which might instead be considered symptoms of the underlying causes and tend to be more localised and immediate (for example terrorism or organised crime). It promotes a comprehensive, systemic approach, taking into account the interaction of different trends which are generally analysed in isolation by others. It also places particular attention on how the current behaviour of international actors and Western governments is contributing to, rather than reducing, insecurity.
Sustainable security goes beyond analysis of threats to the development of a framework for new security policies. In doing so, it incorporates and builds upon many elements of previous important attempts to reframe the way we think about security, including comprehensive security, human security and just security.
Sustainable security takes global justice and equity as the key requirements of any sustainable response, together with progress towards reform of the global systems of trade, aid and debt relief; a rapid move away from carbon-based economies; bold, visible and substantial steps towards nuclear disarmament (and the control of biological and chemical weapons); and a shift in defence spending to focus on the non-military elements of security. This takes into account the underlying structural problems in national and international systems and the institutional changes that are needed to develop and implement effective solutions. It also links long-term global drivers to the immediate security pre-occupations of ordinary people at a local level (such as corruption or violent crime).
By aiming to cooperatively resolve the root causes of threats using the most effective means available, sustainable security is inherently preventative in that it addresses the likely causes of conflict and instability well before the ill-effects are felt.
Key sustainable security publications include:
- Abbott, C and Phipps, T, Beyond Dependence and Legacy: Sustainable Security in Sub-Saharan Africa (London/Pretoria: Oxford Research Group and Institute for Security Studies, 2009).
- Abbott, C and Marsden, S, From Within and Without: Sustainable Security in the Middle East and North Africa (London/Alexandria: Oxford Research Group and Institute for Peace Studies, 2009).
- Abbott, C and Marsden, S, Tigers and Dragons: Sustainable Security in Asia and Australasia (London/Singapore: Oxford Research Group and Singapore Institute of International Affairs, 2008).
- Abbott, C, An Uncertain Future: Law Enforcement, National Security and Climate Change (London: Oxford Research Group, 2008).
- Abbott, C, Rogers, P and Sloboda J, Beyond Terror: The Truth About the Real Threats to Our World (London: Rider, 2007).
- Abbott, C, Rogers, P and Sloboda, J, Global Responses to Global Threats: Sustainable Security for the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford Research Group, 2006).
Until June 2009, I was developing this framework as the Director of Oxford Research Group's sustainable security programme. Today, I continue to write on these issues and remain on the programme's international advisory board and hold the honorary positions of Sustainable Security Consultant to ORG and founder and Associate Editor of SustainableSecurity.org.