| 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
For some years, I have been analysing the underlying drivers of global insecurity and developing alternative responses to those threats. Since the horrific events of 9/11, western leaders have held up international terrorism as the greatest threat to world security. However, it is not enough to simply insist that terrorism is the greatest threat to the world, when the evidence does not support this claim. In fact, a true analysis paints a very different picture of the fundamental threats that we all face, with these threats coming from four interconnected trends:
Climate change: Loss of infrastructure, resource scarcity and the mass displacement of peoples, 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 marginalisation of the vast majority of the world’s population.
Global militarisation: The increased use of military force and the further spread of military technologies.
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.
Current responses to these threats can be characterised as a control paradigm – an attempt to maintain the status quo through military means and control insecurity without addressing the root causes. Current security policies are self-defeating in the long-term and a new approach is needed.
This new approach is what I and others at Oxford Research Group (ORG) refer to as sustainable security. The main difference between this and the control paradigm is that sustainable security does not attempt to unilaterally control threats through the use of force ('attack the symptoms'), but rather it aims to cooperatively resolve the root causes of those threats using the most effective means available ('cure the disease'). This will be achieved through developing security policies that employ preventative, rather than reactive, strategies and are global in nature. Sustainable security 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.
Key sustainable security publications include:
Beyond Terror: The Truth About the Real Threats to Our World
Global Responses to Global Threats: Sustainable Security for the 21st Century
Beyond Dependence and Legacy: Sustainable Security in Sub-Saharan Africa
From Within and Without: Sustainable Security in the Middle East and North Africa
Tigers and Dragons: Sustainable Security in Asia and Australasia
An Uncertain Future: Law Enforcement, National Security and Climate Change
Until June 2009, I was developing this framework as the Director of ORG's Moving Towards 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.