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A New Concept of Security

Chris Abbott

The issue of where the future threats to our security are likely to come from has become ahighly charged one since the terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid and London. The horrific

events played out in these three cities, and elsewhere, have become iconic moments of ourtimes. Forever burned into the public consciousness, they also seem to have affected manyworld leaders in a profound way: they are now convinced that international terrorism,particularly international Islamic terrorism, is one of the greatest threats to world security.’

This is a dangerous assumption, and has led to the policies and abuses of the ‘war on terror’ – Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, civilian casualties. It is not enough to insist thatinternational terrorism is the greatest threat, when the evidence simply does not support thisclaim. It is far more likely that the fundamental threats to security will come from variousinterconnected social, economic and environmental trends that are currently not consideredas security concerns; with climate change, competition over resources, marginalisation of the‘majority world’ and global militarization being of particular concern.

These are the four trends I focus on in a new book Más allá del Terror , written with two otherBritish security experts. There are, of course, other trends to consider, but these are the onesthat we conclude are most likely to lead to large scale loss of life – of a magnitude unmatchedby other potential threats – and have the greatest potential to spark violent conflict, civil unrestor destabilisation that threatens the international system as we know it.

These trends will be major security concerns in the medium-to-long-term. However, in theshort term, it is actually our response to international terrorism, rather than terrorism itself,that will be a major cause of insecurity.

This is because the ‘war on terror’ is based on the false premise that insecurity can becontrolled through military force, thus maintaining the status quo. It is an example of what wehave called the ‘control paradigm’. This approach essentially aims to ‘keep the lid’ oninsecurity, without addressing the root causes of that insecurity. It is a deeply flawedapproach, and is distracting the world's politicians from developing realistic and sustainablesolutions to the non-traditional threats facing the world, among which terrorism is by nomeans the greatest or most serious.

In Más allá del Terror we propose a new system of ‘sustainable security’. The central premiseof sustainable security is that you cannot successfully control all the consequences ofinsecurity, but must work to resolve the causes. In other words, ‘fighting the symptoms’ willnot work, you must instead ‘cure the disease’. However, key elements of a sustainableresponse will require radical changes: reform of the global systems of trade, aid and debtrelief; a rapid move away from carbon-based economies; bold, visible and substantial stepstowards nuclear disarmament; and a shift in defence spending to focus on the non-militaryelements of security.

With limited resources governments must decide how best to respond to the whole range ofthreats that they are presented with in today’s security environment. So why are they sofocussed on international terrorism? Partly because it is not the actual risk of the threat thatmotivates the policy-maker into action, but the perception of that threat. Psychology, emotion,newspaper headlines and the next election all play their part in creating that perception. Thisis understandable, policy-makers are people after all. Of course threat – and the perception ofthreat – varies from region to region: a United States Senator may place internationalterrorism and rogue states at the top of the list, whereas a Minister in Bangladesh may placefood security or natural disasters at the top. But wherever they are from, on the wholepoliticians will, unsurprisingly, always be more alarmed by large-scale, dramatic threats ontheir doorstep than ones that slowly, but constantly, accumulate over time in other countries.

What is ultimately needed is recognition by governments that current security measures willbe ineffective in the long-term and that a radical rethink of what is meant by ‘security’ is long

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overdue. However, this is unlikely to happen without pressure from below, from ordinarycitizens – as governments are all-too-often focussed on their own narrow national andeconomic interests. The obvious failure of current policies may present the best chance yetfor such a shift in thinking to occur. It is up to all of us to ensure that this change happens.

Chris Abbott is the Programme Coordinator and Researcher at Oxford Research Group

(ORG) and lead author of Más allá del Terror , with Paul Rogers and John Sloboda.

Originally published in Catalan in El Periodico de Catalunya , 10 June 2008http://www.elperiodico.com/default.asp?idpublicacio_PK=46&idioma=CAS&idnoticia_PK=517240&idseccio_PK=1006