ABSTRACT
Whatever our perspective on the world, we cannot help wondering whether globalization and the end of the Cold War has not brought us greater insecurity, rather than the increased security promised. The processes of internationalization unleashed by the contemporary intensification of globalization have undermined the once-dominant national security model. However, writers working within the globalization paradigm have not in the main been concerned to map out the new global (in)security dilemmas. Generalized theories of “global risk” (Beck 1999) and wishful aspirations for a “global civil society” (Kaldor 2003) are not sufficient. This chapter thus seeks to develop a fruitful encounter between the globalization paradigm and the new (and old) forms of security and insecurity now becoming manifest across the world. We start by examining the diverse ways in which globalization has redefined
the nature of security. Security threats are now increasingly global-from global warming to global hunger to global terrorism-and thus the national or statist security paradigm is inadequate. We expand on this theme in the next section dealing with the simultaneous “widening” of security (to take on non-military threats) and its “deepening” (to go further than the nationstate into society). This leads us to a sustained review of the new “human security” paradigm seen by its supporters as the replacement for the national security paradigm and by its detractors as vague and unable to be operationalized. Turning to more recent dramatic events in world affairs we consider the notion that we are entering a new era of “permanent war” or “permanent security.” What was once a regime of exception now seems to be the new norm. Finally, we turn to the broader picture of globalization with its winners and losers and ask whether a “global civil society” can be constructed to take us beyond the current state of seemingly limitless insecurity as the dominant human condition.
