Rethinking the 21st Century: 'New' Problems, 'Old' Solutions - Softcover

Laura Sjoberg; Doctor Amy Eckert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848130074 ISBN 13: 9781848130074

Publisher: Zed Books, 2009

Synopsis

Rethinking the 21st Century brings much needed context and perspective to the security problems we face today.

In recent years, the 'Bush Doctrine' - that the security threats we now face are entirely unprecedented - has echoed around the world. Global security and stability is now challenged not only by states and nuclear war, but by insurgency, disease, environmental degradation and military privatisation. Yet this creates a deep sense of disconnect in the way we perceive politics, and can be dangerously stark and ahistorical.

The chapters here show that, far from being a clean break, the 'new' problems faced today might actually have 'old' solutions. What can Locke tell us about terrorists? What does Bentham have to say about sanctions? What are the ethics of outsourcing war to private companies? By looking back to decades and even centuries of ethical analysis and political theory, this book provides fascinating insight into all these questions.

About this title

About the Author

Amy E. Eckert is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Her current research focuses on the growing privatization of war and just war theory. Her work has appeared in journals including International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Global Ethics. She is President of the International Studies Association - West and a member of the executive board of the International Ethics section of the International Studies Association.

Laura Sjoberg is an Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Her research focuses on mainstreaming gender in the field of security studies. She is author of Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006) and (with Caron E. Gentry) of Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (2007). Her work has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, International Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and International Studies Perspectives.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rethinking the 21st Century

'New' Problems, 'Old' Solutions

By Amy Eckert, Laura Sjoberg

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2009 Amy Eckert & Laura Sjoberg
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84813-007-4

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii, 
1 Introduction: 'New' Problems and 'Old' Solutions Amy Eckert and Laura Sjoberg, 1, 
PART I 'New' Issues in War-making and War-fighting, 
2 Popular Support and Terrorism Caron E. Gentry, 22, 
3 Preventive Warfare Yannis A. Stivachtis, 46, 
4 Genocide: An Obligation to Fight? Rebecca Glazier, 70, 
5 Justifying Changes in International Norms of Sovereignty Jennifer M. Ramos, 90, 
PART II Apportioning Responsibility and Blame in the Era of 'New' War, 
6 Honorable Soldiers, Questionable Wars? Frances V. Harbour, 112, 
7 Outsourcing War Amy Eckert, 136, 
8 The Problem of Patriotism Cheyney Ryan, 155, 
PART III 'New' Additions to the Security Agenda, 
9 Sanctions as War Laura Sjoberg, 173, 
10 Pandemic Influenza and Security Christian Enemark, 193, 
11 Natural Disasters Lisa Burke, 211, 
Conclusion Amy Eckert and Laura Sjoberg, 228, 
Notes, 237, 
References, 246, 
Notes on Contributors, 271, 
Index, 274, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: 'New' Problems and 'Old' Solutions

Amy Eckert and Laura Sjoberg

We are in a conflict between good and evil. And America will call evil by its name. (President George W. Bush, quoted in Carver 2003: 1)

In response to this new 'conflict between good and evil,' the Bush administration in the United States implemented a 'new strategic framework' to address 'the new security threats that we face in the twenty-first century' (Bolton 2002). Pundits declared the previously illegitimate tactic of preventive warfare a 'legitimate tool for dealing with new security threats,' which includes the ability to 'kill terrorists, prevent weapons proliferation, halt genocidal killing, or stop the spread of deadly disease' (Daalder and Steinberg 2005). President George W. Bush reached out to the Russian government to which he had previously shown hostility, explaining that 'it's time to work together to address the new security threats that we all face.' These 'new' threats will require new tools and new tactics, 'new and imaginative solutions' for the 'threats that freedom-loving people will face in the near future' (Bush 2001). Bush (2002b) emphasized the newness of twenty-first-century security problems in the 'National Security Strategy of the United States,' even though many of the solutions and strategies contained within that document were borrowed from earlier security strategies and marked as new. The claimed newness of the problems, however, allowed the Bush administration to change the discourse of international security, from a continuous problem with access to both past and new solutions to a 'new' problem that requires radically different strategies. As such, the 'new military-strategic doctrine – sometimes called the Bush Doctrine – contains not a subtle adjustment but rather a radical change that elevates the danger of aggression, militarism, and war to an entirely new level' (Webb 2002). In other words, the new and decontextualized solutions to new security problems have 'frightening' implications for any understanding of international security (Webb 2002). This paradigm of 'newness' has become the dominant way of characterizing and dealing with security problems in the early twenty-first century. The departure of the Bush administration in the United States provides a critical moment to reevaluate and rethink this conceptualization – is newness and decontextualization the right way to think about twenty-first-century security? Or is there another, more fruitful, way?

The Bush administration is not the only government that points to a radical change in the security situation as motivation for a new approach to security problems. Tony Blair called the war in Iraq 'the front line in the battle against terrorism and the new security threat that we face.' He explained that it is 'a new and poisonous evil form of extremism' which threatens the 'basic values of humanity' (BBC News 2004). Russian President Vladimir Putin 'skillfully used a time gap between the [9/11] tragedy and the American retaliatory action to promote a Russian view on how the international community should reorganize itself in the face of a new security threat – thus promoting Russia's status in the international arena' and volunteering a 'new strategic partnership' with a president of the United States who had campaigned on the promise of being tougher on Russia (Chinyaeva 2001). In a 2004 White Paper on national defense, the Chinese government introduced a 'new security concept' which serves as 'the people's call for cooperation and world peace' in times of trouble (People's Daily 2004). Additionally, 'Japan has recently begun a process to transform its security strategy and envision a new role for itself' in response to a 'new security environment,' which includes a Chinese threat, ballistic missiles, terrorism, risk of invasion, and North Korea (Hwang 2005).

To be sure, the twenty-first century has quickly demonstrated that it is a century of very different threats to the one that preceded it. The newness of twenty-first-century security problems is not entirely contrived. The shocking attacks of September ii, 2001, carried out by a terrorist organization, put the US and the rest of the world on notice that the greatest threats could come from unexpected sources. During the Cold War, the United States' attention focused on threats from powerful states like the Soviet Union. The 9/ii attacks, carried out by a handful of individuals armed with box cutters and airline tickets, drove home the realization that the stable, predictable Cold War order had ended. The 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway put the world on notice that the daily infrastructure could be used in terrorist attacks (Litfon 2000). The 2004 tsunami (Huxley 2005) and 2005 Hurricane Katrina (Dyson 2006) brought attention to natural disasters as security issues. The genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s was the most efficient killing spree in history (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). As Mary Kaldor notes, 'in the context of globalization, what we think of as war – war between states in which the aim is to inflict maximum violence – is becoming an anachronism.' This is not to say, however, that security threats are decreasing. Instead, in the place of traditional war is 'new war, a mixture of war, organized crime, and massive violations of human rights. The actors are both global and local, public and private' (Kaldor 1999). In the twenty-first century, threats emanate not only from powerful states but increasingly from less obvious sources; not only from nuclear wars but from terrorism, disease, environmental degradation, military privatization, and other 'new' security issues.

These 'new' problems raise new questions about, and require the adaptation of inherited notions of, justice. A sense that the world is changing has created a state of urgency in politics – to look for new answers to these new problems. In the search for new answers, scholars and politicians alike often resort to stark and ahistorical, perhaps even anti-intellectual, solutions. The Bush Doctrine began by erasing the distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them, and expanded to 'strength beyond challenge' and 'extending liberty, democracy, and security to all regions' (Dolan 2005; Hayes 2007). This doctrine has been characterized as 'without limits, without accountability to the UN or international law, without any dependence on a collective judgment of responsible governments, and, what is worse, without any convincing demonstration of practical necessity' while 'encroaching on highly dangerous terrain' (Falk 2002). Popular culture in the United States has followed suit, popularizing songs like Toby Keith's (2001) 'Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue' ('this big dog gets mad when you rattle his cage ... we'll put a boot up your ass, it's the American way') and books like Samuel Huntington's (1996) The Clash of Civilizations. While some argue that the Bush Doctrine 'represents the realities of international politics in the post-cold-war, sole-superpower world' (Donnelly 2003), others have characterized it as 'ahistorical and apolitical, and therefore warped strategically' (Blumenthal 2006).

This book is an attempt to reappropriate and recontextualize twenty-first-century security problems within traditions of international ethics that hold clues to their solutions. It is crucial to see twenty-first-century 'new' security discourses as a part of and continuation of discourses that have come before. As Nicholas Onuf observes, 'the ground itself is but the rubble of construction. Truths as we take them to be are inextricable from the arguments offered for them' (1989: 35). A language-based constructivist approach sees the 'newness' of these security problems as a discursive rule which creates a state of social rule in a world where there is not 'a sharp distinction between material and social realities' and 'the material and the social contaminate each other, but variably' (Onuf 1989: 40). The act of constructing these security problems as a radical break, 'the co-constitution of people and society, makes history' (Onuf 1989: 42). Accordingly, 'when we speak of order, we choose a fiction to believe in. "Order" is a metaphor, a figure of speech, a disguise. It is constituted by performative speech and constitutes propositional content for such speech' (Onuf 1989: 155). Such performance, however, does not happen in a vacuum – it creates and defines human perceptions of order. Therefore, rules like the 'newness' of twenty-first-century security dilemmas are 'jointly constitutive and regulative' (Onuf 1989: 45). As such, these rules make that newness real, creating space for the perceived appropriateness of solutions unconcerned with political or philosophical history or context.

Scholars have always raised questions about accepted ways of seeing (Onuf 2002). This book questions the accepted way of seeing the twenty-first-century security atmosphere as the political equivalent of a clean break from what came before. It contextualizes new security problems in the problems and practices of previous human experience and analysis. After recognizing 'new' security problems as related in both discourse and practice to the security problems of the past, this volume attempts to rein in the alarmist discourse of newness and to contextualize the analysis of these 'new' problems in a discourse of 'old' solutions, derived from decades and sometimes centuries of ethical analysis and political theory. The book considers twenty-first-century security problems in terms of international ethics, exploring the extent to which ethical traditions can shed light on them, looking for 'old' solutions' to 'new' problems to 're-ethicize' international security. Before we consider these analyses, it is useful to take a few moments to consider the two elements that are the focus of this book: 'new' problems and 'old' solutions.

New Problems

The 'new' problems of the twenty-first century consist both of new variations of old problems and of threats that are emerging, or perhaps being recognized as security problems, for the first time. In other words, some 'new' security situations confront security decisionmakers, and some existing problems are, due to increasing severity or increasing visibility, beginning to be considered security threats where they were previously left out of that realm of analysis.

The boundaries of the field of international security have been a question of some contestation in recent decades. In People, States and Fear (1991), Buzan critiques the discipline of International Relations (IR) for its treatment of the idea of security. Buzan makes the claim that the discipline's thought concerning the term is 'underdeveloped' and 'simple-minded' (1991: 1–2). The crux of his critique faults the lack of coverage and coherency that the discipline has given to 'security.' Buzan relates the elements of his broader, reconceptualized notion of security, including five sectors — military, political, economic, societal, and environmental — where security had been considered primarily a question of military capacity in the past (Buzan 1991: 19). Buzan claims that this broader interpretation of international security is more reflective of the way the world works, is more likely to reach out to people at the margins of global politics, and is intellectually integrative of different perspectives (1991: 370).

Others throughout the 1980s and 1990s supported Buzan's argument for a wider interpretation of what counts as a security threat. Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde suggest that there are also five levels of analysis at which we can see security: the international system, the international subsystem, the unit, the subunit, and the individual (1998: 6). J. Ann Tickner advances the claim that 'the depersonalization of the discipline ... has been carried to its extreme in national security studies,' which allows 'wider security issues, which threaten the survival of the earth and all of its inhabitants, [to] disappear from the agenda when military crises escalate' (1992: 8, 21). A field of study loosely grouped as 'human security' (McRae and Hubert 2001; Thomas 2001) includes 'the protection of individuals and communities from war and other forms of violence' (Human Security Centre 2007). These approaches share an attempt to move national security discourse from using states as the sole referent, to seeking the security of individuals and groups within states.

In addition to trying to include a wider range of subjects of international security, 'wideners' are interested in including a broader understanding of the problems that count as security threats. For example, Tickner contends that feminists see that security means 'safe working conditions and freedom from the threat of unemployment and the economic squeeze of foreign debt ... imperialism, militarism, racism, and sexism' (1992: 35). 'New' security theorists include environmental security (Barnett 2001; Dalby 2002), economic security (Kahler 2005; Cable 1995), health security (Chen and Narasimhan 2004; Mclnnes and Lee 2006), and food security (Rosegrant and Cline 2003).

There are those who have protested the widening of the definition of security, arguing that individuals and their diverse problems do not belong in the realm of international security discourses. Stephen Walt explains that

The main focus of security studies is easy to identify, however: it is the phenomenon of war. Security studies assumes that conflict between states is always a possibility and that the use of military force has far-reaching effects on states and societies. Accordingly, security studies may be defined as the study of the threat, use, and control of military force. It explores the conditions that make the use of force more likely, the ways that the use of force affects individuals, states, and societies, and the specific policies that states adopt in order to prepare for, prevent, or engage in war. (Walt 1991: 212)

Walt's position is echoed by a number of 'traditional' security theorists, who argue that war is the appropriate focus of security studies. These security theorists argue that 'widening' approaches like human security are 'hot air' and likely to pass while security maintains its focus on war between states (Paris 2001).

Even given these protests, the policy world seems to be going the way of the 'wideners,' globally, and even in the United States. In the 1990s, the Canadian and British governments gave special attention to questions of human security and 'good international citizenship' (Cooper 1997; Stairs 1998). The security webpage of President Bush included terrorism, democracy, health, food, and weapons security. Recent resolutions of the United Nations Security Council cover issues of women's health, children's participation, environmental security, and food scarcity. The pages of security studies journals are more and more frequently populated by issues of health, disease, gender, environment, and political structure. This book considers the security agenda as it is presented to the public eye today: as 'widened,' but still centered on state interests.

It is within this context that this book comes to evaluate 'new' security problems. These are of three types: problems labeled as new despite significant continuity with the recent past; re-manifestations of security problems that have been historically significant; and additions to the security agenda. Problems labeled as new despite significant continuity with the past include terrorism, military pre-emption, genocide, and state sovereignty. These are the sort of problems addressed by the first section of the book.

Some 'new' problems are re-manifestations of problems that have been historically significant, but their historical roots are downplayed in policy rhetoric. The discourses about these problems reflect both actual newness (changes to the security environment) and representational newness (as they are described as quantitatively and qualitatively different from all analogical situations), even though there are situations with which they can be compared. Questions of soldiers' responsibility for war, the role of non-state military actors employed by states, and the relationship between citizenship and responsibility for war can be seen in this light.

For example, we can see one dimension of the attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York City as a re-manifestation of the problem of individual and non-state actor influence in global politics. The ability of a small decentralized organization like al-Qaeda to strike the international system's hegemonic power reflects broader changes within the international system. While the state may still be the most significant actor within the international system, other actors are playing an increasingly important role. The state faces competition from private actors not only in terms of economic activity but also with respect to the use of force. To some extent, this diffusion of force – the monopoly of which once defined the state – is consistent with globalization and its premium on privatization. In some cases, states have voluntarily ceded some of their authority to private actors. In other cases, these private actors have carved out their own political space. These transformations within the international system have created an environment in which a private actor can strike a powerful state and that state goes to war with a still more nebulous network of private actors.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1848130074
• ISBN 13: 9781848130074
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Laura Sjoberg, Doctor Amy Eckert