The Changing Definition of Security

by Stephen E. Sachs (International Relations, Merton College, Oxford Week 5, Michaelmas Term 2003)

 

What are the principal difficulties involved in attempts to define ’security’?  How has the concept been extended beyond traditional concern with the military security dilemmas facing states?

 

A traditional definition of the state, often attributed to Max Weber, required as a necessary condition the effective monopoly on the use or licensing of violence within a given territory.  The security of states was therefore threatened by any change that might threaten that monopoly of violence–whether through external invasion or internal rebellion.  In the Westphalian world of (internally) strong states, there is less danger of internal conflict, and the international system is marked by conflicts among states rather than within them.  Since 1945, however, many of the most significant threats to state security have been internal, rather than external, a shift which has only accelerated and which may have profound consequences for the conduct of international relations.

As the predominant concerns of security strategists have changed, however, there has also been a more fundamental rethinking of the very framework of state security.  If many of the newly created states of the formerly colonized world are still quite weak, perhaps the security of the state apparatus–which may, after all, be the oppressive tool of an elite–ought not to be as significant a concern.  A new concept, at times given the name of “human security,” has been suggested to express the need of individuals for safety in other arenas of basic need–access to clean food and water, environmental and energy security, freedom from economic exploitation, protection from arbitrary violence by the police, gangs, or domestic partners, etc.  However, while this concept may be useful in indicating the variety of human needs that must be satisfied, it is far too expansive to be an effective policy goal, and does not offer an appealing alternative to traditional conceptions of security.

The need for a new understanding of security is revealed by the changing nature of war over the last 250 years.  In the 18th and 19th centuries, wars were generally short, lasting only two years or so between the declaration of war and the signing of the peace treaty.  Since the experience of the two World Wars, however, the nature of conflict has changed. Cross-border war has become a primarily “small- or medium-power activity,” and thus the attention of great powers has been focused on other types of conflicts.[1]  Wars are often conducted ‘unofficially,’ without formal declarations of their beginning or end, and such conflicts may drag on for decades (as in the case of Ulster).[2]  Kalevi Holsti notes that security between states in many areas–the Third World, the former Soviet Union, etc.–”has become increasingly dependent on security within those states.”[3]  In the Third World, the security threats to the state apparatus are far more frequently internal than external, especially given that many decolonized nations were formed containing substantial linguistic, cultural, or ethnic minorities with few ties to the state.

Many of the intrastate wars we have witnessed therefore concern questions of national liberation, unification, or secession–questions “of statehood and the nature of community within states.”[4]  These “people’s wars” often make no distinctions between soldiers and civilians, and thus result in extraordinarily high civilian death tolls.  Moreover, because they are not conducted by states which have limited goals and a strong interest in self-perpetuation as an organized group, the “ordinary cost-benefit analyses that underlie wars as a ‘continuation of politics by other means’ no longer apply.”[5]  In some areas, the breakdown in order has been so severe as to create conflicts reminiscent of the Thirty Years’ War, when “warfare seemed to escape from political control; to cease indeed to be ‘war’ in the sense of politically-motivated use of force by generally recognized authorities, and to degenerate instead into universal, anarchic, and self-perpetuating violence.”[6]

Comprehensive Security and the European Security Space: Sun Tzu meets Kant(*)

by Prof. Dr. Gustaaf Geeraerts and Men Jing

 

Paper prepared for the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, 26-31 March 1999, Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung Workshop 7. Towards a Stable Peace in Europe: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations.

 

Introduction

With his work ‘The Art of War’, Sun Tzu was not only the first military strategist in the history of mankind, but also the first to develop a comprehensive conception of security.⁽¹⁾ Besides a military dimension, such a concept also contains a non-military or politico-economic one. While most students of Sun Tzu regard the non-military dimension as the focal one, others like Johnston (1995) stress the military aspect of his work. In our view, both the military and non-military security notion have their legitimate place in Sun Tzu’s idea of the security of the state. Together they constitute what we nowadays call ‘comprehensive security’. One should not favour a priory either notion. In our view Sun Tzu’s work is all about the subtle dynamic between power and welfare. Combining Sun Tzu’s idea of comprehensive security with Wendt’s continuum of security systems, we shall argue that the relative importance of power and welfare at any given moment depends on how the states in the system are disposed towards each other, i.e. whether they identify negatively, indifferently or positively with each other.

The present article has affinities with the work of a small but steadily growing group of Chinese scholars, who attempt to stimulate the scientific study of international relations in China. Contrary to their senior colleagues, these scholars do not focus on ‘Chinese characteristics’.⁽²⁾ Instead they concentrate on applying traditional Chinese ideas to the development and enrichment of a universal theory of international relations. In doing so, they explore the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western philosophical traditions (Song, 1997: 50-51). In the same vain, we think that a close study of Sun Tzu may shed light on current international relations; the more so when combined with insights from Western international relations theory. Following this lead, we attempt to show that Sun Tzu’s work can serve as a guide for exploring stability implications of the emerging global and regional structures of international politics. After exploring Su Tzu’s comprehensive security concept and linking it to Wendt’s continuum of security systems, we apply Sun Tzu’s notion of comprehensive security to the unfolding European security space, and in doing so hope to demonstrate his timeliness and universality.

Beyond Security in the Middle-East: An Ethics for (Co)Existence

Anthony Burke

University of New South Wales

 

Abstract

Since the beginning of the second Palestinian Intifada in mid-2000, violence and alienation between Palestinians and Israelis has steadily gotten worse and is now symbolised—in literally concrete terms—in the vast ’separation wall’ snaking its way through the occupied territories. This essay interrogates the political, historical and conceptual dimensions of this process through a critical analysis of the idea and practice of security in Israel and in western political thought. Refracted through the settler-colonial experience, security is premised on effacing the dramatic internal divisions and conflicts within Israel, in magnifying hostility and difference with Palestinians and Arabs, and in performing and entrenching such divisions with vast instrumental exercises of strategic violence. This essay—an abridged version of a chapter in my Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence—challenges such visions of security and, via a critical engagement with the philosophy and political writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber, imagines an alternative ethics that can acknowledge the tangled web of interdependence between Jews and Palestinians, and might form a platform for a more sustainable and decent political vision of co-existence in the same land. Written before the Israeli war on Lebanon of July 2006, and published here a few weeks prior to mooted peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the United States, it argues that sustainable peace requires a move beyond diplomacy and tactics to a deeper renegotiation of each group’s identity and relationship with the Other.

 

Introduction

1. How does security connect with life? In 1979, in an article about the first wave of settlers into the ancient Palestinian town of Hebron, the Israeli writer Amos Elon quoted one of them explaining his commitment to forcibly enacting the vision of ‘greater Israel’ on land seized in the 1967 Six Day War. The man, a former Tel Aviv lawyer named Eliakim Haetzini, explained: ‘Sovereignty is like a woman. Do you share your wife with someone else?’ (Elon, 2001: 63). I first read these words in Jerusalem in 2004, a day after two terrible suicide bombings in Be’er Sheva that killed 16 people and wounded a hundred. The bombers had come from a Hamas cell based in Hebron, and the press was saying that they had in part been successful because Be’er Sheva was an ‘easy target’ given that the formidable security wall under construction since 2003 had not yet extended that far south. Indeed the foreign minister stated that the bombing ‘proves the necessity of speeding up the separation barrier’s construction’ (Schiff, 2004). I had seen this wall a few days before, in ‘Arab’ East Jerusalem, from the other side: eight metres of ugly prefab concrete slabs slicing across a roadway, dividing neighborhoods and shops, before vaulting the next hill and disappearing into the landscape. Young Palestinians had painted its lower part white, then sprayed it with graffiti in Arabic and English, like a Middle-Eastern echo of Cold War Berlin. Here and there, impressionistic screen-printed portraits of Yasser Arafat appeared, symbolizing both the undimmed force of Palestinian nationalism and a darker—more organized and selfish—political force in their lives.

2. The wall has many purposes, and means many things. One understandable purpose is to provide Israelis with better security against the deeply immoral, politically misguided and strategically disastrous Palestinian campaign of suicide attacks waged inside the pre-1967 borders of Israel—attacks that most often strike the innocent, even the sympathetic, and that have done so much to set back the Palestinian campaign for self-determination and hand the agenda to Israeli conservatives who wish to hang on to the territories forever. These conservatives have in turn sought to re-route the wall deep into Palestine, separating farmers from their land, workers from employment, families from hospitals, and communities from each other, while seeking to use the wall to achieve the virtual annexation of conquered land now host to extensive Jewish settlements. Even more profoundly, the wall separates peoples—Jewish and Palestinian—in a way that the ‘two-state solution’ imagined in the Oslo or Geneva accords would not have (given the accords’ provisions for ongoing cooperation and longer-term reconciliation) (see Beilin, 2004: 326-62). This is a wall of separation as much existential as physical, mirroring and solidifying the mutual hostility and alienation that has deepened since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began in September 2000. Ironically the wall, which is supported by a large majority of Israelis, may provide them with greater short-term security only to undermine it over the long-term—by emboldening the champions of the occupation and further embittering Palestinians for whom its meaning is utterly different, yet another fact of colonisation and control. How does security connect with life?

A Critical Approach To The Study Of Conflicts: Lessons From The ‘Critical Turn’ In Security Studies

By André Barrinha (University of Kent, Canterbury, afd3@kent.ac.uk)

 

Conference on Conflict and Complexity Tuesday 2^nd – Wednesday 3^rd September 2008 University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

 

Introduction

            Until the 1980s, Strategic Studies was seen as the discipline responsible for the study of security issues, back then reduced to military affairs. Since then, Security Studies has become, particularly in Europe, a more widespread label to indicate the discipline responsible for the study of security. Such turn was largely informed by a ‘critical’ approach, where classical paradigms were put into question and new ways of thinking about security advanced. Underlying the vast majority of these new approaches was the idea that security is not a mere technical issue that should be left for experts to discuss, but rather a deeply politically embedded practice in need of careful look.

            One of the main compliments towards Peace and Conflict Studies has been, since the 1960s, its capacity to go beyond the mainstream, often to the very deep margins of academia, without fearing academic discredit. The ‘critical turn’ in Security Studies was, to some extent, inspired by the boldness of Peace and Conflict Studies. And still, such inspiring role was not enough for the field in itself to accept and integrate that ‘critical turn’ into its own works. The main argument of this paper is that such critical turn has still to take place within the Peace and Conflict Studies field, and that the fact that it has not, deserves to be carefully studied. 

            In that sense, this paper will start by discussing what Peace and Conflict Studies exactly mean, and then proceed to its historical evolution in parallel with the most relevant moments in the history of Security Studies. The paper will then focus on the links between the two fields until the end of the Cold War. How divergent/convergent  the paths of both fields have been since then and the relevance of the critical turn for the study of conflicts will occupy the last part of this paper.