Introduction

The specter of nuclear weapons and their associated material continue to pose a significant threat to global security deep into the twenty-first century. While many in the international community indolently regard such devices as being remnants of the Cold War with a limited impact on global stability, this assessment could not be further from the truth. Notwithstanding the substantial reductions in nuclear arsenals since the early 1990s, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the risks emanating from nuclear (in)security have actually expanded: more states in more unstable regions have attained such weapons, nonstate actors continue to pursue them, and the command-and-control systems in even the most sophisticated nuclear-armed states remain susceptible not only to system and human error but, increasingly, to cyberattack. Even a limited regional nuclear war would have calamitous global consequences. Moreover, the failure of existing nuclear-armed states to disarm, the inability to impede new states from obtaining nuclear weapons, the potential of terrorists gaining access to such weapons and their concomitant material, and the potential “gaps” presented by the construction and expansion of nuclear energy plants all present serious security challenges in the twenty-first century.

There is a positive. The number of nuclear weapons has declined markedly since the Cold War's demise: down from a peak of approximately 70,300 in 1986 to an estimated 12,700 warheads as of mid-2022. However, their very presence remains a global strategic/ political driver, evident in their storage and possession across ninety-eight sites in fourteen nation-states. Some 9,500 of these weapons are in military arsenals, while the others are either in the process of being retired or awaiting dismantlement. Roughly 3,650 are operationally available, and some 2,000 are on high alert and gauged toward potential use within a very short timeframe. The largest possessors of nuclear weapons are Russia and the United States, which together hold 91 percent of the total global suite. Significantly, the United States “houses” its nuclear weapons on eighteen sites, including twelve sites in eleven states within the United States, and a further six sites in five European countries. Given the recent deterioration of US-Russian bilateral relations and the position of NATO in the US-EU security calculi, the placement and strategic consideration of such weapons remains a source of ongoing consternation.

Introduction

We now live in a world of abiding existential insecurity. Sometimes a particular dimension of human insecurity hits us in the face. Mostly it accumulates behind our backs as an intensifying matrix of nonpalpable threats and risks. Whereas once, people could find sanctuary far from the madding shroud of risk, the risk matrix is becoming increasingly interconnected and globalized. Nuclear winter will not fade off at its edges. Viral pandemics arrive with dramatic virulence, even in ostensibly isolated places. And climate change is globally changing the planet, including in ways that become even more intense at its poles. In short, these threats and risks are representative of ontological changes that are unsettling all social and environmental life across the planet.

In previous work, Manfred Steger and I named this globalizing deepening process the Great Unsettling. But without further explanation this short-hand designation too easily gets reduced to either psychological unease or accumulating physical disruption of planetary systems. What we intend this concept to mean includes and goes beyond the sense of deep agitation about climate change, solastalgia, or the general feeling that all is not right in the world. It is more than the physical disruption of the world by ripping, arming, extracting, polluting, cutting down, and commodifying—all dimensions of a longer-term history. More broadly, it describes the objective and subjective unsettling of the human condition in general that has been intensifying over the last half century or so. This ontological unsettling turns on the relativization of basic ontologies of living: embodiment, time, space, epistemology, performativity, objectivity, subjectivity, and so on. Non-relativizing ways of life continue, as do older forms of exploitation and domination, but they are increasingly drawn into contradictory and disjunctive relations with newer developments.

Disjunctive relations are as true of questions of military and other forms of security as everything else. The increasingly disembodied war fought from the skies over Afghanistan, for example, was nevertheless associated with mortal attacks on the bodies of thousands of combatants and civilians. Similarly, the final outcome of that war was disjunctive as part of a more general trend in which the distinction between winning and losing wars has all but lost its meaning.

Introduction

In the spring of 2020, there were over 3.9 billion people under some sort of stay-at-home order to contain COVID-19. While most people at the time were focused on the overwhelming spread of the virus and the mounting casualties, extremists from across the political spectrum exploited the pandemic for their own objectives. Violent extremists often capitalize on “black swan” events or crises: events such as war, economic downturn, natural disasters, or even a global pandemic open up the political space for malign actors to fill with misinformation, foster mistrust in legitimate governments, or exacerbate people’s fears of “the other.” The crisis led to a litany of new grievances, while exacerbating existing ones: “A growing sense of instability [was] inflamed by the proliferation of disinformation designed to sow chaos and confusion, while exploiting emerging rifts in society—driving further polarization.” This chapter explains how some groups capitalized on the COVID-19 crisis and what the long-term impact is expected to be on democracy, the role played by civil society groups, and how ethnic politics likely shaped government responses.

Definition of terrorism

According to the literature there are as many as 100 different definitions of terrorism and no agreed-upon definition is used by every government agency, let alone across different countries or traditions, or throughout history. While each organization tends to define terrorism in self-interested ways (military definitions include attacks against people in uniform; industry definitions include attacks against economic targets), the definition that is most frequently used is from the US State Department, in which terrorism is “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” In more specific terms, global terrorism tends to be violence perpetrated across borders or by nonnationals inside a state.

During the COVID-19 pandemic militant actors intensified their online propaganda, hoping to influence millions of people confined by the lockdown orders to their homes, where they were compelled to spend more time online and on social media. The pandemic induced an interruption of the daily functioning of society. This was interpreted by jihadist and far-right extremist groups as an ideal opportunity for recruitment, to carry out attacks, and spread chaos and confusion intended to topple governments and achieve the terrorists’ utopias.

Introduction

The human security approach, as an alternative analytical and normative approach to the traditional security lens for identifying threats, to whom and how to address them, is one of those overlooked great ideas that fall victim to their genesis. Although it is a continuation of constructivist attempts to broaden and deepen security studies by moving the referent object from states to people and communities, human security, given its normative agenda and close association with international organizations, has stayed at the fringes of academia. The concept was officially coined in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s Human Development Report 1994. Since then, it has officially served as the umbrella concept for the foreign policy of middle-power countries such as Canada and Japan, and the subject of an international Commission on Human Security co-chaired by Sadako Ogata, the former head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and the academic Amartya Sen. By 2012, after years of lobbying by a coalition of countries under the banner of Friends of Human Security, it became the subject of a United Nations General Assembly resolution.

Despite its noble and logical aim to look at security from the perspective of those for whom it matters, namely people, the human security concept has not been able to gather much political or academic currency. Within academia, an interdisciplinary approach that puts the focus on people has not been able to extensively break into security studies, which continues to be dominated by realism and liberalism. Despite the UN resolution calling it an approach that is defined by freedom from want, freedom from fear, and freedom from indignity, debates still rage about the lack of a precise definition and the virtues of narrow versus broad definitions. Politically, the concept still courts controversy and rejection nearly thirty years after its introduction. Its close association with the notion of the responsibility to protect (R2P) in debates about international interventions has alienated Southern countries that are skeptical about violations of state sovereignty and new conditionalities for receiving aid. No country has adopted it as a goal at the national level, raising skepticism about its utility for domestic policymaking.

Yet the human security concept represents a malleable tool for analyzing the root causes of threats and their multidimensional consequences for different types of insecurities. It can be operationalized through applying specific principles to policymaking.

Introduction

“The United States is a proud part of the Indo-Pacific. And this region is critically important to our nation's security and prosperity,” declared Vice-President Kamala Harris at a speech in Singapore on August 24, 2021. Intended to lay out US strategic resolve in Asia in the wake of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, Harris continued the American practice, established in 2017 by President Donald Trump, of describing the region as the “Indo-Pacific.” Since the end of World War II the US has been the dominant military power in what used to be described as East Asia or the Asia-Pacific. The move by the 46th president's administration to adopt this newer and much more expansive concept—referring to the perceived integrated nature of the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions—is notable and not only because any time the world's preeminent military power adopts a new strategic concept it is inherently significant. That the US and many of its allies and partners have chosen to move away from Asia-centered regional conceptions and toward the bigger Indo-Pacific idea reflects a number of important developments that are key to understanding the security dynamics of this vital part of the globe.

This chapter sets out to provide a survey of the key security issues and dynamics in the Indo-Pacific. It will show that security issues have been the driving force in creating the idea of a new megaregion but also that the security dynamics of the region have become one of the principal fault lines in world politics. While the analogy should not be taken too far, the security matters at the heart of the Indo-Pacific are akin to the military division of Europe in the Cold War: a regional strategic divide of immense global consequence. The chapter is organized in two main parts. The first examines the new strategic concept of the Indo-Pacific, charting its emergence and the role played by security concerns in driving the adoption of this way of imagining Asia's strategic landscape. The second section will discuss the central security concerns within the region. While it has a myriad of issues that acutely threaten the lives and interests of states and societies, this section will focus on the three that are most significant: (1) great power competition between the US and China, (2) transnational security threats and the securitization of economic matters, and (3) the region's longstanding flashpoints, such as the Korean Peninsula and the South China Sea.

Introduction

Feminist scholars have long argued that gender “matters” to understanding world politics and issues of global security. In 1989, Cynthia Enloe famously asked the question: “Where are the women?” in studies of global security, highlighting the profound neglect of gender as a framework for analysis in traditional international relations (IR) approaches. Enloe, in her landmark text Bananas, Beaches and Bases, showed that, far from being absent from the machinations of international affairs—as the silences in conventional IR would suggest— women are in fact present at all levels of world politics and, moreover, critical to their functioning. Charting the multiple and varied roles performed by women in contexts ranging from backroom diplomacy to military brothels and banana plantations, her analysis pointed to the significance of gender, or the “workings of both femininity and masculinity,” in the structures, behaviors, and norms of international relations.

In the years since Enloe first posed her question, feminist inquiry into the subject of global security has grown exponentially. The quantity of feminist work on security produced over the last three decades is such that it is now recognized as its own academic subfield, known as feminist security studies (FSS). It is important to note that the scholarship generated under the banner of FSS is diverse. As Annick Wibben observes, there is “no singular feminist position on security” amid the “veritable explosion” in feminist theorizing on war, violence, and peace that has taken place. Rather, the FSS literature draws on an array of theoretical approaches, with scholars contributing from numerous disciplinary backgrounds (including, but also from outside, mainstream IR), where the aims, subject matter, implications, and methods of study vary, too. The diversity of approaches apparent in FSS means, as Laura Sjoberg cautions, that “there is no one Feminist Security Studies … and

no one on-balance normatively correct way to handle feminist security theorizing around global politics.” Yet, even with the differences (and, indeed, tensions) that exist across the field, it is clear that there is a shared commitment to the concept of gender in the work that is constitutive of FSS, which sets it apart from both traditional and more critical security studies research. In FSS, “gender” operates as a central category for analyzing “security” (however this may be defined) and as a normative standpoint from which unequal and unjust relations of power can be remade.

Introduction

The global COVID-19 pandemic presents multiple challenges for international and everyday security, exacerbating existing security tensions while also producing new security concerns. COVID-19 has produced new realities and modes of being and living as the world experiences the varying and uneven effects of the pandemic and efforts to mitigate it. In some ways, it also represents a new epoch as we increasingly speak of a “pre-” or “postpandemic” world, where time is divided into the world before the pandemic, and what a “return to normal” means or might look like. This chapter considers questions of security in the pandemic age through critical approaches to security. Generally, a critical approach to security questions many of the assumptions found in traditional schools such as realism and liberalism. Critical security studies broadly encompass a wide range of schools of thought and ontological and epistemological concerns. The “capital C” Critical Security Studies (CSS) of the Aberystwyth School embraces wider perceptions of security beyond the state, making human security and emancipation a central focus, while other (“small c”) critical and poststructuralist security approaches focus on identity, securitization, and the referent object of security, language, discourse, and what constitutes “reality”— themes of major significance in an era of “posttruth” politics.

This chapter will explore the ways in which critical security approaches can analyze and make sense of what we mean by “security” in the pandemic era, and how the pandemic has become a “threat multiplier.” Understanding the impact of the pandemic on global security from a range of critical perspectives means addressing human security, biopolitics, language, image, and power. In some cases, the pandemic has solidified existing power relations and given rise to new ones, but it has also prompted debate about how we can or whether we should seek a different type of “security.” Critical security approaches will be used to analyze the global pandemic in terms of how we understand hierarchical relations, identity, bodies, and the relationship between truth and knowledge—who benefits and who is excluded.

The global nature of the pandemic permits an opportunity to take an overview of multiple constraints from an international crisis that affects virtually all states and individuals, albeit differently. This differentiation is a central concern of this chapter because, despite the widespread rhetoric that the pandemic means “we are all in this together,” some have faced greater insecurity than others.

Introduction

Much humanitarian practice now takes place in complex environments, in which humanitarian need is exacerbated by conflict. Conflict causes civilian injury and death, and destruction of housing, critical infrastructure, trading routes and production. This impact is amplified in places where extreme poverty is already pervasive, infrastructure already poor, and extreme weather and natural hazards already creating stress. As such, the intersection of crises creates urgent human need, and is known as a complex emergency. While identification of complex emergencies invokes broad, cross-sectoral responses, it also makes such responses extremely difficult. The challenge of access that characterizes many humanitarian responses is intensified when conflict places humanitarian actors themselves at risk of injury and death. The core principles of humanitarian action are deeply challenged when humanitarians must balance the fundamental right of every person to humanitarian assistance with the need to engage with conflict actors to secure access to the people in greatest need.

This volume looks beyond the pandemic that characterizes the time of writing, to imagine the security landscape that will face us in decades to come. This chapter centers on humanitarianism, which is an area actively engaged with the “inextricably linked” experiences of poverty and crisis, where the intersection of state fragility and poverty magnifies humanitarian crises and disasters. It is also a field in which the COVID-19 pandemic is both a crisis and an amplifier of other crises—and one in which the disproportionate impact of disease on poor nations and people will see significantly increased challenges for a very long time to come. This chapter therefore argues that the lasting impact of the pandemic will be increasing inequality that creates new crises and exacerbates existing ones. In this light, COVID-19's impact on fragility, stability, and poverty will be central to humanitarian practice long after offices and schools reopen and transport and travel resume.

Importantly, the COVID-19 pandemic has not encountered a well-structured and well-financed system serving a minority hit by devastating, life-threatening crises. Rather, humanitarian action was already severely underfunded, and humanitarian crises affect millions of people each year—235 million in 2020—in ways that disproportionally impact those already suffering.

Introduction

This chapter considers the ongoing discussion between the two traditional approaches to security—realism and neoliberalism—and the insights gained from the challenges of US-China great power rivalry and the COVID-19 pandemic. In the post-9/11 security account of international relations the focus has been increasingly on the role of nonstate actors, the prevalence of globalization, and the rise of nontraditional security challenges. These trends have also promulgated critical security approaches, widening and deepening the debate on security and on the important questions of what is to be securitized, how security is to be defined, and under what ontological framework. In some ways these questions have involved a presumptive and concomitant weakening of the traditional approaches. In others, they have precipitated a critical rethinking of the practical, conceptual, and theoretical implications of the state. The strides in these areas have in some cases been profound, but the assertion that the critical approaches have replaced the authority of the state and the value of the traditional approaches, the chapter argues, has been oversold.

The suggestion that we now inhabit what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck has called a “world risk society” explains part of this argument. As scientists, politicians, and observers try to make sense of the prevailing social media misinformation climate, great power competition, ethnic conflict, and technological decoupling, among many other uncertainties in the twenty-first century, the trends toward disruption and insecurity seem vast. Writing in 1998, Beck called this phenomenon a “reflexive modernization.” Greater individual uncertainties in health, economics, and security were driving a questioning of the foundations of society and subsequently the eruption of new social movements, popular political trends, nativism, and a rejection of authority—implying in many ways the decline of traditional assumptions. These arguments remain unconvincing. What is evident rather is that the significance of the state in risk analyses, along with a declining trust in institutions, norms, and narratives, has once again begun to trend despite the overwhelming challenges of nontraditional insecurities.

While not a main focus of this chapter, it is necessary to mention the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on this point, and its potential to exacerbate numerous insecurities around nuclear weapons, refugee crises, war crimes, disinformation campaigns, and nationalism (among others). It is clear that, even as the crisis develops, the ability to resolve the many challenges must begin with the state, starting with the end of conflict.

Introduction

The subject of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and climate change can be viewed from two perspectives: the security implications arising out of humanity's failure to adequately mitigate climate change, and the council's law and practice to date. Viewed from the first of these perspectives, the council has done amazingly little relative to the magnitude of the dangers we are facing, but viewed from the second perspective—and what the founders of the UN envisaged the council would be addressing—it is arguably surprising that the council has even considered what the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) regime has treated as an issue primarily of sustainable development. This chapter reviews what the council has done to date before considering what the global COVID-19 pandemic might mean for any future response by the council to increasing climate insecurity. The pandemic is possibly yet another major world crisis that was made more likely by climate change. Should there come to be widespread acceptance that the pandemic can be attributed to climate change, it may yet trigger a more far-reaching response by the council to the growing security risks posed by humanity's inadequate response to climate change.

The framing of climate change in global governance

There is a politics to how an issue is framed in global governance. Framing may impact the institutional home within which the issue is addressed, the experts and knowledge brought to bear on policy, and, potentially, the degree of seriousness and urgency associated with the response. The Copenhagen School of security studies has raised awareness that the “securitization” of an issue, through a process by which it comes to be accepted as a security issue as opposed to “only” a political, environmental, or economic one, serves to heighten awareness of and garner support for the issue, to lend a sense of urgency to the need to address it, and then to move the policy response beyond “ordinary” politics to be dealt with in emergency mode. In order for securitization to occur, the relevant “audience” needs to accept the “securitizing move” by which the issue is presented as an existential threat to a valued referent object. There is also a normative dimension to the theory; Ole Wæver preferred that a trend toward full securitization be reversed because of the risk that acceptance of more extreme action would heighten the likelihood of armed conflict.

Introduction

Cyber has become the connective tissue through critical state, economic, and social systems. As the newest domain, cyberspace encompasses a vast threat landscape and is characterized by a rapid evolution of tactics and techniques. Cyber incidents, involving both state and nonstate actors with differing motivations, have become “more expensive, more disruptive and in many cases more political and strategic.” The disruption of the information technology that underpins modern systems—whether through malicious intrusion or through data manipulation— constitutes an evolving security challenge. In 2021, a water treatment plant in Florida was hacked through remote access and the sodium hydroxide mix remotely changed to dangerous levels before being caught and reversed in real time by the plant operator. It follows high-profile attacks against state agencies, industries, and critical infrastructure such as hospitals and electoral systems, with the increasing sophistication and severity of cyberattacks elevating cybersecurity on the national security and popular agenda. While cybersecurity was once considered a technical issue focusing on CIA (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) of information systems, the field now encompasses social scientists, national security strategists and other professionals who approach cybersecurity from multiple directions.

What does the threat landscape look like in the immediate post-pandemic era? This chapter examines the role of COVID-19 in accelerating two cybersecurity trends. The first is the targeting of critical infrastructure. While critical infrastructure has traditionally been conceived as comprising public utilities, government agencies, and strategic industries, the pandemic has expanded the list of valuable targets to encompass public health infrastructure. This follows the previous expansion of critical infrastructure to include electoral systems in the wake of cyberattacks in 2016. During COVID-19, hospitals, research centers, and related industries were targeted by ransomware demands, exfiltration of sensitive data, and cyberscam operations. As businesses rapidly shifted to online operations, state and nonstate actors took advantage of weaker security protocols and the proliferation of remote work-from-home devices to infiltrate systems.

The second cybersecurity trend is the use of cyber-enabled disinformation, the latest evolution of cyberattacks in the information ecosystem. Malicious actors leveraging the connectivity of modern communication systems use deliberately false or misleading information to undermine collective action, undercut state response, and damage social cohesion.

Rationale

This edited collection will seek to unpack the key global security issues and challenges the world is facing in the third decade of the twenty-first century. It will consider the extent to which the omnipresent epochal juncture in the form of the global pandemic will redefine (and amplify) the associated security discourse, the applicable theoretical debates, and responses to the new and ongoing threats to our survival.

The intensification of global security across the first two decades of the twenty-first century has seen the old “compression of time and space” adage go to another level. While debates and realities between new and old wars remain in play, the continuance of environmental degradation and the advent of emerging technologies have contributed to what some analysts have described as a new era of “super threat multipliers.” Of course, in 2020 the global security environment entered a stage of heightened and protracted volatility, emanating from COVID-19's multifaceted and pervasive ramifications. The pandemic exacerbated prevalent global challenges, further exposing the fundamental triggers of insecurity and social and economic inequality, along with multiple layers of internal/external tensions. As the title of this book illustrates, the world is clearly going through what can be defined by every measure as a great epochal “age of crisis,” and so it is only logical to presume that it will be a transforming point in global security and, more broadly, modern history.

The tumultuous global response to the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the beliefs of even the most fervent internationalists and optimists. Most states, including the world's most influential, reshifted their focus inwardly, embracing travel sanctions in the initial stages, implementing export controls, hoarding or concealing information, and sidelining the World Health Organization (WHO) and other multilateral institutions. The pandemic appears to have uncovered, or perhaps reaffirmed, that the liberal order and the global community are illusions, while also illuminating the terrible effects of waning global cooperation. In more apt terms, the pandemic has clearly exposed both the limits of the present multilateral system and the gruesome, deadly costs of the broader structure's collapse. The conundrum is, of course, that if the contagion does spur policymakers to presume that multilateralism is doomed and encourages them to incite or fast-track its undoing, they will be establishing a platform where humanity will be poised to encounter a plethora of other costly tragedies.

Introduction

Emerging technologies play a pervasive role across many aspects of everyday life, including in the manufacture of goods and services, global navigation systems, user interface software, and self-driving vehicles (to name a few). In the context of war, the abstraction of violence, and global security more broadly, devices such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used extensively in counterterrorist operations, while lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) continue to pose ethical and reliability questions about the use (and potential for misuse) of military power. Unsurprisingly, the compounding aspects deriving from cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), and the transition from 4G to 5G (and 6G) all have the capacity to engender multiple complexities and disruptions across the state, nonstate, global governance, and security domains.

Other emerging technologies are also developing, such as advanced manufacturing techniques (3D printing), nanotechnology (including miniaturization of military technology), bioengineering (including biological weapons agents and human-machine symbiosis), quantum computing (including the potential decryption of classical information systems), and digitization technologies (including military tools and applications to manage “big data”). Further, it is evident that the most powerful state actors and multinational corporations are investing extensively in the range of such emerging disruptive technologies. While the dangers and security complications of the above-mentioned weapons and devices are not yet fully realized, policymakers will be compelled to address the threats presented by advanced weapons technologies and formulate international provisions to regulate or mitigate their use.

In providing a substantive examination across the emerging technologies “suite”—with specific focus on uninhabited vehicles (drones), LAWS, AI and cyber—this chapter seeks to elucidate the security challenges emanating from their development and at times aberrant advancement. Indeed, just as emerging technologies are disrupting many sectors of domestic economies, they are also transforming the global security arena. The power and pace of modern technologies call for new approaches to preventing a catastrophic conflict or mitigating a devastating miscalculation. However, diplomacy, deterrence, arms control, and direct military action, tools that have long been utilized to safeguard the national interest, are being challenged by precipitously evolving technologies that are presenting new problems with no clearly defined solutions. As the chapter conveys, while some efforts have been undertaken in the direction of regulating the usage and application of such technologies, coherency and agreement on pathways forward across the domains of states, nonstate actors, global governance, and security have been hard to attain.