Throughout its history, Argentina has developed an international position defined by two traditions: on the one hand, autonomy from the great powers and, on the other, a desire to deepen regional integration with the sister countries of the region. Both are relevant for Latin America’s ability to find its own space in a world in transition, something in which Argentina can and should play a central role. Active Non-Alignment (ANA) represents a path that opens numerous opportunities. And although it was not present at the Bandung Conference in 1955 nor at the Belgrade conference in 1961, when the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was launched, Argentina played a pioneering role in the development of the ideas that would inspire Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and Indonesian president Sukarno, among other leaders of what would be called the Third World in that endeavor.

Juan Domingo Perón’s rise to the presidency in 1946 coincided with the end of World War II and the subsequent start of the Cold War. It was in this setting that Perón drew up the guidelines for his foreign policy under the doctrine known as the Third Position. In a divided world, in which countries aligned with the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or with the United Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR) in the Warsaw Pact, Perón did not understand the Third Position as an equidistant or intermediate policy between two poles of power but as a proposal to overcome two antagonistic ideologies.

On July 6, 1947, Perón delivered a speech that went down in history as the birth of the Third Position. As Fermín Chávez writes: “[…] the Argentine president sent a message to all the peoples of the world, through more than 1,000 radio stations (including the BBC in London), in which he set out objectives of economic cooperation and world peace, discarding capitalist and totalitarian extremisms, whether they were from the right or the left” (Chávez 1985).

The core of this non-alignment or Third Position, as its name implies, is the rejection of bloc politics. It is not a question of denying the existence of these blocs. The problem is that this policy responds to the interests of the great powers.

Introduction

COVID-19 showed the world what many in the public health sphere have been counseling for years: that pandemics coupled with weak health systems not only cost lives but pose some of the greatest risks to the contemporary global economy and security. The effects of health security successes and failures can influence foreign policy, society, and security. Pandemics are a truly global threat. Nations cannot shelter in place and avoid an infectious disease. Pandemics have underscored that treating health security as a niche issue for a small number of stakeholders will fail. It takes a global community to prepare and respond. Traditionally, national security has been viewed and defined broadly in a defense context; however, pandemics can disrupt security as destructively as, if not more so than, a traditional intentional enemy. There are clear, inextricable links between global security, pandemics, and health security, and we have in our arsenal existing health frameworks that we can leverage to plan and prepare against future threats. As this chapter will illustrate, health security cannot be treated as the sole responsibility of national ministries of health and international health organizations, nor can it be considered a secondary issue behind transnational threats that claim fewer lives annually. It must be approached from a multisectoral position and given proper attention and political and financial commitment. Pandemics will recur. The drivers of disease emergence are multifaceted and include environmental, geopolitical, and socioeconomic factors. Data gathered over the last century from a myriad of pandemics emphasizes the enduring risks of additional pandemics as well as the risks of our own behaviors. One need look no further than December 2019 for an example of what happens when only one sector is aware and preparing for a pandemic threat.

Global health security

Trends and drivers of disease emergence, including environmental, geopolitical, and socioeconomic factors, are disrupting the equilibrium of the microbial world. Novel disease threats are emerging at unprecedented rates, disrupting people's health and causing social and economic impacts. Climate change, extreme weather events, wildlife biodiversity, and pathogen and vector ecology are just a few of the key environmental drivers that place humans and animals in closer, more frequent contact, providing ample opportunities for animal pathogens to spill over and infect human hosts. This risk, ever-increasing due to human behaviors and land use changes, has resulted in a number of outbreaks, both localized epidemics and global pandemics.

Introduction

That we are in an era of compounding crises with the most serious global security implications is an established fact. Less clear is how to make sense of those multiple crises, and the extent to which such complex challenges can be treated as discrete issues or are better understood as wicked problems: interconnected, complex, and demanding diverse multilateral responses. This chapter, like others in this volume taking a critical perspective on security studies, argues for the latter perspective. It is primarily concerned with demonstrating how postcolonial perspectives on contemporary security shift the understanding of security challenges from a focus on “great power politics” to a decentered and subaltern view. Like other critically informed perspectives on security, this argument reflects on the ethical dimensions and purposes of understanding security and acting on those understandings, in this instance for a decolonial security studies practice. Finally, the chapter makes the argument that security studies critically informed by postcolonialism offers a far more clear-eyed perspective on the complexities of a multipolar world in the pandemic age; a view free from nostalgic illusions about the “liberal international order,” which is the era of Western domination of world affairs.

As the chapters by Reuben Steff and Adam Bartley in this volume have shown, conventional security studies takes the state as a normative point of reference. Realist and other dominant approaches to security studies think in terms of strong states, and weak and dysfunctional or “failed states,” but the high-functioning strong state is rarely considered as a security problem unless it enters into great power rivalry or the much-cited Thucydides trap. While the domestic order of the state is presumed to be lawful and orderly, conflicts between states in the “anarchic” sphere of international relations are the central security concern, so-called “great power” conflict in particular. This chapter adopts insights and methods from postcolonial studies to interrogate the global security challenges and risks presented by states generally considered stable and secure, particularly Western liberal democratic states. It examines the sources of global insecurity created externally by settler-colonial states with belligerent expansionist reflexes. Additionally, it uses the Australian involvement in the American war of occupation in Afghanistan as a detailed case study.

Postcolonialism

At its simplest, “postcolonialism” is a critical perspective on the world from the margins of global power.

Introduction

The Middle East occupies the minds of policymakers, security experts, and geopolitical pundits arguably far beyond what the region's territorial scope and economic heft appear to warrant. Notwithstanding the significance of hydrocarbon production from the region to the functioning of the global economy, the Middle East's economic output (even when including North Africa, as this chapter does) makes up a small percentage of global gross domestic product (GDP). The region straddles important waterways, not least the Suez Canal, through which an estimated 12 percent of global trade traverses. Yet territorially the Middle East does not hold anything like the same importance to global affairs as the Atlantic zone or, increasingly, the Indo-Pacific, which can now be considered the world's geopolitical center of gravity.

Why the Middle East seems to grab outsized attention can perhaps be pinned to the seemingly imponderable array of security problems occurring in the region. To the casual observer and area specialist alike, the scale of violence can seem bewildering. Stories about the Middle East over the past decade all too often have had conflict at the center. Political violence appears to be on the decline in every region of the world except for the Middle East and North Africa. Indeed, it would be hard to disagree with James L. Gelvin, who characterizes the hallmarks of the “new Middle East” as “rebellion and repression, proxy wars, sectarian strife, the rise of the Islamic State, and intraregional polarization.”

It is also a region, perhaps more than any other, where traditional security challenges intersect with emerging, nontraditional ones. The ongoing civil war in Syria is apposite in this regard. Some of the early demonstrations that triggered the heavy government crackdown were protests at the diminishing livelihoods in agricultural areas plagued by climate change-exacerbated drought. Likewise, the COVID-19 global pandemic has placed added stress on fragile states in the region, exposing poor governance structures and broken healthcare systems. The wealthier hydrocarbon producers in the Gulf have been able to weather these challenges, buoyed as they are by rebounding oil prices. As a consequence, the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” in the Middle East has become increasingly pronounced. Indeed, the region is more heavily characterized today by high wealth inequality between states than possibly at any point in its modern history.

Introduction

The United States and China are the world's two most influential nations. The nature and trajectory of their bilateral relationship will determine whether the twenty-first century is one of stability and relative peace or one of instability and tension—and presently their relationship is deteriorating. Washington, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has replaced the post-1972 policy of engagement toward China with competition across a range of fronts, leading some to charge that a new Cold War is underway. This signals the end of the US's global preeminence and the onset of a more competitive and dangerous multipolar world. To complicate relations further, in early 2020, a systemic “black swan” phenomenon— the COVID-19 global pandemic—emerged, intersecting with, deepening, and intensifying US-China competition as both sought advantage amid the chaos.

The predominant narrative is that China's success in getting COVID-19 under control domestically, relative to the US, has empowered Beijing's rise. Here, a division in the literature exists with some claiming COVID-19 is a “reordering” or “epochal” moment—an inflection point of no return—that confirms China’s rise to superpower status. Others view it as an accelerant of existing trend lines that were already swinging against the US. This chapter relates to this debate by considering how COVID-19 has altered the relative US-China balance of power across traditional hard power metrics (economics, technology, military power, and alliances) and soft power metrics (the appeal of a nation's culture, political values, and foreign policies). While the traditional metrics of state power are open to criticism (the penultimate section of the chapter considers how COVID-19 has revealed weaknesses in traditional concepts) in an increasingly complex and multidimensional international system, word count considerations necessitate a manageable focus on this topic. Recent analyses also show US-China competition tracking along material power lines: the nature of their relationship is changing as the balance shifts between them. It has led China (like previous great powers) to expand its core interests and pursue calibrated revisionism. In turn, this is spurring a US response. Additionally, both the US and China are operating as if traditional metrics are critical to their security, prosperity, and prospects of “winning” their great power rivalry and shaping the 21st-century world order. External observers cannot simply ignore this fact.

Introduction: a new old world?

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of contemporary societies and exposed the limitations and paradoxes of existing security provisions. Pandemics are not a new phenomenon and yet states and societies were highly unprepared to handle the latest one. The number of deaths, the pervasiveness of the impacts, and the deep consequences on people's ways of life are prompting a moment of reflection, making evident the links between the personal and the political, between everyday life and geopolitics, between humans and other species, and questioning the very “subject of security.”

The pandemic is only one of the many challenges humanity is facing: environmental problems, from climate change to biodiversity loss, can have equally devastating consequences. Even if their impacts have not manifested themselves on a global scale, regional impacts, from wildfires in Australia and America to severe flooding from Germany to China, are becoming more evident. The impacts can be even more dramatic in the Global South.

These challenges suggest that we have entered the Anthropocene, a new geological era in which human actions are shaping the planet and its destiny. Growing concerns for energy, food, and water security coexist with new, potentially catastrophic threats, like global extinction of species or abrupt climate change, while old problems like conflicts remain relevant. Paradoxes appear as efforts to secure existing ways of life contribute to creating more insecurity. As Simon Dalby noted, “security continues to be formulated in terms of the perpetuation of the existing political order, precisely the order that has generated such dramatic ecological disruption in the first place.” The Anthropocene, considering human action similar to a geological force, able to change and transform the planet, questions that order and the separation between humans and nature. Nature is no longer a secure, taken-for-granted background against which human actions and history unfold, nor is it the foundation of a positivist epistemology and the security perspectives that rely on it. The debate about environmental security, with different attempts to conceptualize the link between the environment and security, has anticipated much of this debate. As Daniel Deudney warned, back in 1990, environmental degradation is not a threat to national security, but environmentalism is a threat to a specific conceptualization of security focused on the state, on external threats, and on reactive measures, which still characterizes much of the contemporary discourse, and so is the Anthropocene.