5.6 Non-Traditional Notions of Security

Up to the late 1980s, "security" in international politics meant almost exclusively traditional, state-centric, military security. The end of the Cold War in 1991 changed many things, and one of the changes was a quiet revolution in vocabulary. As old enemies disappeared, observers and academics began to point out that vast numbers of people were dying every year not from invading armies, but from drought, malnutrition, AIDS, ethnic cleansing, ecological collapse and the violence of their own governments. If security means freedom from threats to core values, then surely such daily threats also count as security threats?

5.6.1 The "Referent" Question — Security for Whom?

Non-traditional notions of security^? begin by asking the same single question that traditional security asks — Security for whom? — and giving a different answer. In the traditional view, the referent is the State, with its territory and governing institutions. In the non-traditional view, the referent is widened: not just the State, but also individuals, communities, and indeed all of humankind. The State remains important — protecting citizens from foreign attack is a necessary condition for the security of individuals — but it is not a sufficient one. Indeed, the NCERT reminds us that during the last hundred years, more people have been killed by their own governments than by foreign armies. A secure state does not automatically mean secure people.

5.6.2 Human Security — The Three Freedoms

Human security^? is the most famous form of non-traditional security. All proponents agree that its primary goal is the protection of individuals. They differ, however, on what threats individuals should be protected from. The "narrow" school focuses on violent threats — what former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called "the protection of communities and individuals from internal violence". The "broad" school argues that the agenda must also include hunger, disease, natural disasters and environmental degradation — because these kill far more people every year than war, genocide and terrorism combined. The broadest formulation also includes economic security and threats to human dignity.

The two halves of human security are summed up in two famous phrases. Freedom from fear covers war, conflict, displacement, repression by one's own government. Freedom from want covers poverty, hunger, disease and underdevelopment. To these, the 21st century has added a third dimension that the 1994 UNDP Report had not fully foreseen: freedom from disaster — protection from cyclones, earthquakes, floods and now, above all, climate-related events.

5.6.3 Global Security and the Era of Cross-Border Threats

Closely related to human security is global security, which emerged in the 1990s as a response to threats whose nature is fundamentally global — they cannot be solved by a single country acting alone. Global warming, international terrorism, and health epidemics like HIV-AIDS, SARS, COVID-19 and bird flu are the classic examples. No country can resolve these problems on its own. And, in some situations, one country may have to disproportionately bear the brunt of a global problem. The NCERT gives a striking example: a sea-level rise of 1.5 to 2 metres because of global warming would flood 20 percent of Bangladesh, inundate most of the Maldives, and threaten nearly half the population of Thailand — yet none of those countries are the major emitters of greenhouse gases. Such problems are global; international cooperation is therefore vital, even when it is hard to achieve.

5.7 Cooperative Security

If non-traditional threats are mostly global, the solutions to them must mostly be cooperative. Cooperative security^? is the principle that, in dealing with most non-traditional threats, cooperation works better than military confrontation. Force may have a role in fighting terrorism or in enforcing human rights — and even there, it has limits — but force does little to alleviate poverty, manage refugee flows, or contain epidemics. Indeed, in most cases the use of force would only make matters worse.

Cooperation can be bilateral (between two countries), regional, continental, or global — depending on the nature of the threat and the willingness and ability of countries to respond. It involves a wide cast of actors: international organisations such as the UN, the World Health Organisation (WHO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF); non-governmental organisations such as Amnesty International, the Red Cross, private foundations, charities, religious organisations, trade unions and social movements; great corporations and businesses; and inspirational individuals — the NCERT names Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela. Cooperative security may, as a last resort, also involve the use of force, but only when sanctioned and applied collectively by the international community rather than by an individual country acting on its own.

5.8 New Sources of Threat

Non-traditional security focuses on the changing nature of threats. The NCERT discusses six categories which together make up the new threat agenda: terrorism, human-rights violations, global poverty, migration and refugees, health epidemics, and environmental degradation. We examine each in turn.

5.8.1 Terrorism

Terrorism^? is political violence that targets civilians deliberately and indiscriminately. International terrorism involves the citizens or territory of more than one country. Terrorist groups try to change a political situation they oppose by force or threat of force. Civilian targets are usually chosen precisely to terrorise the public and to use the unhappiness of the public as a weapon against governments. The classic methods are hijacking aircraft, planting bombs in trains, cafes, markets and other crowded places.

Terrorism itself is not new. Through the twentieth century, most terror attacks happened in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and South Asia. But terrorism became a central global concern after the attacks of 11 September 2001 — when terrorists hijacked four passenger aircraft in the United States and used them as missiles, destroying the World Trade Center towers in New York and damaging the Pentagon. Almost three thousand people died. India experienced a similarly devastating attack on 26 November 2008 ("26/11"), when a small team of terrorists arriving by sea attacked Mumbai's railway station, hospitals, hotels and a Jewish centre over three days, killing 175 people. After 9/11 and 26/11, the world's governments and citizens began to pay much closer attention to terrorism than ever before.

5.8.2 Human Rights

Human rights are commonly classified into three types. The first type is political rights — freedom of speech, assembly, religion, the right to vote. The second is economic and social rights — the right to work, to food, to education, to housing. The third is the rights of colonised people, ethnic and indigenous minorities — the right of peoples to self-determination and to protect their cultures. While there is broad agreement on this classification, there is no agreement on which rights should count as universal, nor on what the international community should do when rights are violated.

Since the 1990s, several massive episodes have intensified the debate. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the international response. Genocide in Rwanda in 1994, where roughly five lakh Tutsis were killed by rival Hutus in the space of weeks. The Indonesian military's killings in East Timor. These episodes raised a fundamental question: should the United Nations intervene to stop human-rights abuses, even at the cost of state sovereignty? Some argue that the UN Charter does empower the international community to take up arms in defence of human rights. Others argue that the national interests of the powerful states will inevitably decide which abuses get acted on and which are ignored. The debate is still alive.

5.8.3 Global Poverty

Global poverty is another major source of insecurity. The world's population, now around 800 crore, is expected to reach roughly 1000 crore by mid-century. Currently, about half of all population growth occurs in just six countries — India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Indonesia. Among the world's poorest countries, population is expected to triple in the next 50 years; rich countries, by contrast, will see populations shrink. High per capita income and low population growth allow rich states or rich social groups to get richer; low incomes and high population growth reinforce each other and make poor states and groups poorer. Globally, this disparity contributes to the gap between the Northern (richer) and Southern (poorer) halves of the world. Within the South, disparities have also widened, as some countries have managed to slow population growth and raise incomes while others have not. Most of the world's armed conflicts now take place in sub-Saharan Africa, the world's poorest region.

Latest figures suggest that around 9 percent of the global population still lives in extreme poverty (under the World Bank's $2.15-a-day line, 2017 prices) — about 700 million people in 2021, with the number rising by tens of millions during the COVID pandemic. Insecurity caused by poverty, in turn, drives migration, and migration drives political conflict.

5.8.4 Migration and Refugees

Poverty in the global South has led to large-scale migration in search of better economic opportunities, mostly to the global North. This has produced friction in destination countries and tension between countries. International law and norms make a careful distinction between migrants and refugees. A migrant is someone who voluntarily leaves home to seek a better life. A refugee^? is someone who flees from war, natural disaster or political persecution. States are generally obliged under international law to accept refugees; they are not obliged to accept migrants. People who have fled their homes but remain inside their country's borders are called internally displaced people — for example, the Kashmiri Pandits who fled the Kashmir Valley during the violence of the early 1990s.

The world's refugee map and the world's conflict map almost perfectly overlap. From 1990 to 1995 alone, 70 states were involved in 93 wars that killed about 55 lakh people; in the 1990s, all but three of 60 refugee flows were caused by an internal armed conflict. The 2010s and 2020s have produced fresh waves: Syrian refugees (since 2011), Rohingya from Myanmar (since 2017), Afghan refugees (after the Taliban return of 2021), and Ukrainian refugees (after the Russian invasion of February 2022). Today, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that more than 100 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced — a number unprecedented since the Second World War.

5.8.5 Health Epidemics

Diseases such as HIV-AIDS, bird flu (avian influenza) and SARS spread rapidly across countries through migration, business travel, tourism and military operations. One country's success or failure in limiting an outbreak directly affects infections in other countries. By 2003, an estimated 4 crore people worldwide were infected with HIV-AIDS, two-thirds of them in Africa. Between 2003 and 2022, the figure grew, peaked, and then declined as antiretroviral therapy became more accessible: the latest UNAIDS estimate is around 39 million people living with HIV in 2022. New drug therapies have driven down death rates dramatically in industrialised countries, but the same drugs were initially too expensive for poor regions.

The early 21st century has produced several fresh epidemics that confirm the pattern. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) broke out in 2003 and forced the WHO to issue its first global travel advisory in 50 years. Ebola outbreaks in West Africa (2014-16) showed how quickly a regional epidemic can become a global health emergency. Above all, COVID-19 (caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus) emerged in late 2019, was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the WHO on 30 January 2020, and a pandemic on 11 March 2020. By the end of 2022 it had infected hundreds of millions of people and caused around seven million reported deaths worldwide. The WHO's response — coordinating surveillance, vaccines (under the COVAX facility), travel rules and treatment guidance — became a textbook case of cooperative global security in action. MPox (formerly monkeypox) followed in 2022, again handled through the WHO's emergency mechanism.

Animal epidemics have major economic effects too. Britain lost billions of dollars during a "mad-cow disease" outbreak in the late 1990s; bird flu has shut down poultry exports from several Asian countries; African swine fever has devastated pig herds across China and South-East Asia. Such epidemics demonstrate the growing interdependence of states, making national borders less meaningful than they used to be and making international cooperation indispensable.

5.8.6 Climate Change and Environmental Degradation

Environmental degradation, and especially climate change, is the largest non-traditional security threat of all. Rising temperatures, melting glaciers, more intense cyclones, longer droughts, ocean acidification and the loss of biodiversity threaten food production, drinking water and the very habitability of low-lying islands and coasts. Within India, the Himalayan glaciers feed the Ganga, the Yamuna and the Brahmaputra; the coastal megacities (Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata) are exposed to rising seas; agriculture, on which two-thirds of Indians depend, is sensitive to even small changes in monsoon patterns. The Maldives, parts of Bangladesh and many Pacific island states face an existential threat from rising sea levels. The international response — the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 1992), the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Paris Agreement (2015) — represents one of the longest-running attempts at cooperative security in history.

5.9 The Limits of Expanding Security

The expansion of security from State to people — and from war to a long list of social, economic and ecological threats — is genuinely useful, but it has limits. If everything is a "security issue", then security loses its coherence as an analytical idea. The NCERT therefore proposes a clear test: to qualify as a security problem, an issue must threaten the very existence of the referent — whether the State, a community, or a group of people — though the precise nature of the threat may differ from case to case. The Maldives may feel threatened by global warming because much of its territory could vanish under rising seas; for countries in Southern Africa, HIV-AIDS is a similar existential threat (in Botswana, at the worst point, one in three adults was infected). In Rwanda in 1994, the Tutsi tribe faced an existential threat from genocide. In each case, the threat is severe enough to count, but it is not the same threat. Non-traditional conceptions of security, like traditional ones, vary according to local contexts.