ABSTRACT
The early years of a new millennium offer an excellent opportunity for continuing a very important dialogue among scholars and policy-makers over an increasingly obsolete, but deeply entrenched, security paradigm. The security thinking that evolved over the last millennium focused almost exclusively on protecting states and citizens against foreign military threats. In the new millennium this security paradigm already has been modified somewhat to acknowledge the growing importance of new kinds of challenges to human well-being. Intense ethnic conflicts in many countries, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the United States, a series of natural disasters in many parts of the world, and more recently, rapidly rising energy and food prices followed by a global economic collapse, have all played a role in broadening thinking about the nature and causes of insecurity. Furthermore, an ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic, a brief outbreak of a deadly SARS virus, and persisting fears that avian flu or other viruses will mutate into a form that could kill millions of people have focused attention on infectious disease as another important component of a nascent alternative security paradigm.
