NS&TP 1

MS Social Studies
Fall 2022
Dr. Fiaz Hussain shah
 NS&TP 2

Lec – 3
Understanding Security
 Lec 3 - Dimensions of Security 3

 Political Security
 According to Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, political security
concerns the organizational stability of the social order: state,
system of government, and ideology, the last of which gives the
other two legitimacy (Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New
Framework for Analysis, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder London, 1998 )

 The core of the political sector is made up of threats to state

 Political Security
 From this core, political security issues spread out in two
directions
 First, nonmilitary threats to political units other than states
 Second, beyond political units to areas such as international
society or international law
 Although political security carries an extremely broad meaning,
it can always be considered as a particular – social, military,
economic, environmental, or other aspects
 Dimensions of Security 5

 Political Security
 This suggests that there is no such thing as a political threat per
se, but on the other hand, paradoxically, everything is a political
issue
 Nonetheless, the political sector is regarded as separate from
other sectors to distinguish all concerns related to authority
(government)
 Political security is distinct from politics in general as it is
about threats to the legitimacy or recognition of either political
units or essential patterns (structures, processes, or institutions)
that are components of politics
 Dimensions of Security 6

 Military Security
 The military sector of security constitutes the core of traditional
security studies, although not everything in the military sector
refers automatically to security
 This sector is very closely related to the political sector, as the
military is the ultimate resource when other tools fail, such as
diplomacy, economic sanctions, or trade privileges, for example
 According to Frederick the Great: “diplomacy without force is
like a musician without an instrument.”
 Dimensions of Security 7

 Military Security
 Traditionally, armed forces have been a political tool to ensure
security for the state from outside threats, although serious
threats do not always come from outside the state
 In the military security sector, the state is still the most
important, although not the only referent object, among all
other security actors
 This is not only because states possess greater military
resources than other actors, but also because states have the
legitimate right to use those forces both outside and inside their
domain
 Dimensions of Security 8

 Military Security
 Military security issues arise primarily from the internal and
external processes by which human communities establish and
maintain governments
 In practice, however, the military security agenda revolves
around the ability of governments to maintain themselves
against internal and external military threats, but also can
involve the use of military power to defend the state or
government from nonmilitary threats, such as migrants or rival
ideologies
 Dimensions of Security 9

 Military Security
 While the military sector is important for any approach to
security studies, the various points of view offer different
interpretations as to the nature of threats, i.e.,
threats to national security come from other states’
militaries;
from the perspective of international security, the main
threat is instability and the security dilemma;
and finally, at the global level, the threat is perceived to
come from the power of the military establishment and the
danger of nuclear war
 Dimensions of Security 10

 Economic Security
 The whole idea of economic security is exceedingly
controversial and politicized, and it is not easy to distinguish
what should be thought of as economic security from both
politicized economics and security spillover from the economic
sector to other sectors
 The political and economic aspects of security are so closely
related that it can be difficult to distinguish one from the other
 Lec 2: Dimensions of National 11

Security
 Economic Security
 Economics is at the heart of the entire social fabric, and that the
state’s task is to tame economics toward the social and political
goals of justice and equity
 Both economic and military security are widely accepted to be
the pillars of political security
 Over the long term, however, the economic aspect dominates
the military aspect of security, as a stable economy allows a
state to maintain substantive armed forces according to its
needs
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 Economic Security
 A weak economy will not support costly armed forces for long.
A typical example of such a situation is erstwhile USSR
 Economic security, therefore, should be placed near, if not at,
the top of security priorities, especially at the state level
 Thisdoes not mean that political or military security is not
important at the state level
 Even an economically strong state has to be politically stable
and militarily able to defend its interests
 Economic stability, however, significantly increases all other
sectors of security
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 Societal Security
 Societal security is also very closely related to, although
distinct from, political security, and refers to the organizational
stability of the state and system of government, and of the
ideology that gives the state and the government legitimacy
 The key issue in security of a society is human identity
 Society is about identity, the self-conception of communities,
and the individuals who identify themselves as members of a
community
 Those identities are different from the explicitly political
organizations concerned with government
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 Societal Security
 What constitutes the identity, both of an individual and a group,
is not easy to determine given the differences in the way
individuals are socialized during the course of their lives
 We organize ourselves into various kinds of social groupings:
as members of families, clans, neighborhoods, villages, cities,
countries, professions, social interest groups or even
transnational organizations, in which we work, trade, play,
reproduce and interact in countless other ways
 Consequently, the patterns of human society differ from place
to place and era to era and across cultures, making the world a
very complex and dynamic environment
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 Societal Security
 Social security, refers to individuals and the economic aspects
of their life, whereas societal security refers to collectives and
their identity
 The most common issues concerned with societal security are
migration, horizontal competition, and vertical competition
 Migration as a threat to societal security is viewed as a
possible change in the identity of a people due to a shift in the
composition of the population, i.e., one group of people that has
been overrun and diluted by the influence of newcomers will
not be what they used to be, because these others will make up
a portion of the population. As a result, the identity of the
indigenous people will be changed (e.g., Polish migration to the
United States)
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 Societal Security
 Horizontal competition. People change their ways of thinking
because of overriding cultural and linguistic influence from a
neighboring culture (e.g., Canadian fears of Americanization)
 Verticalcompetition. People will stop seeing themselves as
one group because of the process of integration (e.g., the EU),
or because of a secessionist “regionalist” process (e.g., Quebec,
Catalonia, and Kurdistan)
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 Environmental Security
 Environmental security is very broad and complex, with issues
that range from scarcities (e.g., of clean water, fuel, arable land)
to the degradation of lands, forests, and fisheries, to the impacts
of climate change, migration and population growth
 Environmental factors also cannot be considered in isolation
from geographic, historical, socioeconomic and cultural
variables
 Therefore,the widest formulation of the environmental agenda
includes many issues that are a subject of studies within other
sectors
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 Environmental Security
 This broad sector includes a number of intractable problems:
 Disruption of ecosystems: climate change; loss of biodiversity;
deforestation, desertification, and other forms of erosion;
depletion of the ozone layer; and various forms of pollution
 Energy: the depletion of natural resources such as fuel wood;
various forms of pollution, including management disasters (in
particular related to nuclear energy, oil transportation, and
chemical industries); and scarcities and uneven distribution of
resources
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 Environmental Security
 Population: population growth and consumption exceeding the
earth’s carrying capacity; epidemics and poor health conditions in
general; declining literacy rates; politically and socially
uncontrollable migrations, including unmanageable urbanization.
 Food: poverty, famines, over-consumption and diseases related to
these extremes; loss of fertile soils and water resources; epidemics
and poor health conditions in general; and scarcities and uneven
distribution of resources.
 Economic disparities: protection of unsustainable production
modes; societal instability inherent in the growth imperative,
leading to cyclical and hegemonic breakdowns; and structural
asymmetries and inequity.
 Civilstrife: war and conflict-triggered environmental damage and
degradation
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 Environmental Security
 Looking at this list, it is not clear, however, how the
environmental sector should be defined to deal with all these
problems
 While the distribution of ecosystems is the most purely
environmental issue area, the other issues refer, to a high
degree, to other sectors of security studies
 Nevertheless, environmental security should not be limited to
ecosystems.
 Regardless of the fact that some issues refer to other sectors,
this area should include all aspects concerned with the
environment, including Earth’s atmosphere
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 Human Security
 Human security is the latest in a long line of neologisms including common
security, collective security, cooperative security, and comprehensive security,
which encourage policymakers and scholars to think about international security
as something more than the military defense of state interests and territory
 UNDP identifies seven specific elements that comprise human security:
 economic security (freedom from poverty); food security (access to nutritious food);
 health security (access to health care and protection from diseases);
 environmental security (protection from such dangers as environmental pollution
and depletion); personal security (physical safety from such things as torture, war,
criminal attacks, domestic violence, drug use, suicide, and even traffic accidents);
 community security (survival of traditional cultures and ethnic groups as well as the
physical security of these groups);
 and political security (enjoyment of civil and political rights, and freedom from
political oppression)
 If human security is all these things, what is not?
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 Technological Security
 Proliferation of questionable technologies
 Cyberspace
 Media
 Hybrid
 5th generation of warfare
 Space
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 Terrorism
 The term “terrorism” dates from the Reign of Terror
(1793–94) that followed the French Revolution,
although the term has taken on additional connotations
in the 20th & 21st century
 The meaning of the word “terror” comes from the
French terreur - “great fear,” or further, from the Latin
terror - “great fear, dread,” (verb terrere – to fill with
fear, frighten)
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 Terrorism
 Terrorism is not a new phenomenon
 It has been known for decades, centuries, or even
millennia
 Terrorism has gained increasing attention since the mid-
1970s, as the world got used to it – over a relatively
short time – as a method of gaining “political” goals
used by such groups as the Irish Republican Army
(IRA), Red Brigades, and many, many other groups
 September 11, however, represented a turning point, as
the first time in history this “natural” method of
coercion reached the homeland of the only superpower
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 Terrorism
 Terrorism is often perceived as a political threat,
because terrorists usually harbor political goals, and
also as an asymmetric threat of uncertain nature
resulting from the use of unconventional kinds of
violence
 Here, terrorism is considered separately, since political
goals can be highly subjective
 Although it might have been possible in the past,
nowadays it is impossible to distinguish which
terrorist act arises from political, religious, economic,
or even psychological motivations
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 Terrorism
 Terrorism has its place within security studies, either
in the political sector because of terrorism’s traditional
characterization as a political tool, or in its own sector,
since terrorism has become one of the world’s biggest
security challenges, thanks to new technologies