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 The
Sources of Insecurity network will address key questions and pursue its
aims through
a series of conferences, a web-based database, and fostering researchers who are
working towards uncovering the sources of local,
regional, national and global insecurity.
That work will be carried out under the umbrella
of a series of research themes. Researchers
will not be confined to any one theme—it
is the nature of this network that inevitably we
will be working across these themes—but they make for a productive
organisational and intellectual structure.
Research Themes
Across the world, increasing and often desperate attention is being paid to enhancing regimes of security. In the context of a globalizing world, despite this attention, political violence and other overt manifestations of deep insecurity continue—often becoming more intractable. Many lives have been lost, many communities live in chaos, and many billions of dollars have been spent on failing projects by both government and non-government agencies.
It is an uneven process that seems to evade understanding. Some new manifestations of global-local conflict and insecurity are managed without extended political violence, and others are not. Understanding this issue drives our research agenda, and has important implications for global human security in general. In summary, we suggest that developing a thorough-going research program entails going beyond identifying the immediate threats such as the existence of particular terrorist organizations. It involves exploring the interconnections between globalization, conflict and the threats to human security. It leads to examining the deeper sources of insecurity—political, cultural, and economic—in order to provide a stronger basis for mitigating violence and other forms of insecurity in the world today, and thus to orient policy-decisions in relation to local, regional and global security problems.
In the context of the ‘War on Terror’ these issues have tended to be glossed over, and rarely researched in terms of the grounding conditions of conflict or how those conditions might be ameliorated or managed over the long-term. A key objective of the Network is thus to explore the ground of the burgeoning local-global conflicts and their impact on existing political regimes. This, is effect, entails completely remaking the field, and forging a new interdisciplinary bridge between security studies, international relations, politics and a number of other disciplines including cultural studies and anthropology. The research program investigates the foundations and principles for sustainable human security, and develops a new understanding of the forms of global, regional and domestic governance that may mitigate some of these emerging intra-state conflicts. At a time of intense and increasing violence, both immediate and structural, our aim is no less than the enhancement of human security.
There are three major themes to our work:
1. Social Transformation: Local, National and Global
The now-standard discourse on failed states as against successful states focuses on the symptoms of state failure. Its focus is on the internal features of states. What this discourse radically underestimates is, on the one hand, the impact of global transformation and certain forms of conflict that are unable to be managed by some states, and, on the other hand, the changing nature of social formation, including the changing ways in which people relate to each other. The research program thus employs an interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the conditions of globalization and localization that are masked by the current obsession with so-called ‘failed’ and ‘failing states’. Here our concern not to develop a more complex comparison of how different states fare—important as that is (see Theme 2)—but to examine the complex intersection between external and internal factors accounting for the failures of human security. This task requires moving into terrain that is currently far outside the range of mainstream approaches to security.
2. Political Governance: Local, National and Global
Here we want to investigate how and why different modes of conflict management, post-war reconstruction and reconciliation vary in their effect and outcomes. We want to work out to what extent global transformations are serving to reinforce authoritarian or democratic elements within regimes, and whether this matters to enhancing human security. What makes this research utterly innovative is firstly its commitment to a systematic long-term comparison between different regimes of governance in terms of their different ways of handling local-global conflict. Secondly, the project lifts this discussion into an analytic framework concerned with foundations, principles and the conditions for alternative approaches. This work includes but goes beyond a concentration on state to consider other forms of governance such as local and national Truth and Reconciliation commissions, and the possibility of the need for a ‘Global Truth and Reconciliation Commission’.
3. Subjective Projection: Local, National and Global
Much has been made of the ideological bases of political violence and the importance of ‘soft’ power in combating the appeal of political violence. This is an important issue. However, without also understanding the nature of subjectivities behind political violence, under what circumstances such ideologies appeal, and how the ideologies promoting political violence are disseminated, it is difficult to begin to challenge their influence. We need to explore the nature of the relationship between the impacts of globalization on existing social structures and patterns of authority and the appeal of ideologies supporting or advocating political confrontation and violence.
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2004 |
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