Globalization and security: Much ado about nothing?

Globalization has challenged traditional concepts of security more radically than perhaps any other single contemporary development. Its exponents argue that it has made the traditional paradigm of borders and state interests no longer an appropriate way of thinking about security. The new threats are ‘social threats’, not military threats; they are environmental threats, threats to rights, and threats to ‘food security’. Moreover, the targets are not states, but persons. The new security paradigm evaluates threats in terms of their effects on people, not on their consequences for states. Indeed, the new literature on globalization and security scarcely discusses interstate conflict.1 It has also challenged security studies. Security specialists are advised to leave behind force configurations and capabilities and to focus instead on social developments with adverse outcomes, and the ways in which they might be circumvented. They are advised to join hands with ‘new institutionalists’ to explore institutional developments that might ameliorate such threats. They should be looking at new compliance mechanisms and at transnational actors in the belief that they contribute to the social and political environment within which the new threats arise.