Through the Looking Glass: Creeping Vulnerabilities and the Reordering of Security

Abstract

Although security - as a basic concept - is frequently considered in the study and analysis of policy decisions, its essential meaning ought to be more widely disagreed than agreed upon. Commonly considered a basic concept in policy and academic debates, security is in reality a quantity that is not basic at any register. The couching of emerging ‘non-traditional’ concepts such as environmental security and human security solely on their relationship to potential or real threats, most often within a topology of power, and the use of language that is inadequate to the often nuanced and almost always complex dynamics of such emerging identities imprisons such concepts within ‘traditional’ state-centered, national security paradigms. Moreover, not all security issues involve ‘threats’; rather, the notion of vulnerabilities is as serious to some peoples, and some regions, as the more familiar concept of threat. The issue truly is not one of ‘hard’ traditional security (often based on state-to-state power relationships) or ‘soft’ non-traditional security (which can involve multiple trans-national aspects), but rather the need for a focus on both. Too exclusive a focus on one form of security may cause a ‘boomerang effect’, resulting from failure to recognize, or deal with, other contending forms of security. Recognizing and acting on the best approaches to issues of security will prove the greatest challenge.