Global security has been declining for some years now. There are many markers of this persistent deterioration – massive loss of life, rising numbers of displaced people (the estimate for 2024 is 130 million, a larger population than all but 9 countries), deepening crisis and confrontation, and unsolved social and ecological problems.
So how do we think coherently about security in these times when there are so many sources of insecurity ?
Continue reading“How easy is it to talk about peace and disarmament today when the world is busy rearming?”
That’s the question that Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s biggest selling daily paper, asked itself, its readers and me in a recent article. About me, it said, “SIPRI’s director says he is a born optimist, but when DN meets him, he describes the world in black and dark grey.”
And yet at the end, the reporter, Ewa Stenberg, managed to find some light amid the dark.
Continue readingIn February 2022, Russia escalated its war on Ukraine with a full scale invasion. Within weeks, Russia increased by more than fourfold the territory it occupied in Ukraine. Then Ukrainian forces pushed it back, retaking half the ground Russia had taken.
The core consequence of the war has been largescale loss of life, suffering and physical destruction in Ukraine. But the war has also had further consequences and repercussions in the ecological, energy, financial, food, geopolitical and humanitarian domains. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has offered assessments of some of the wider implications of the war, summarised and linked below.
Continue readingEcological disruption takes many forms and poses many challenges because it leads to a weakening of the foundations in nature on which human communities and societies are based. One of these sets of challenges is in the security sphere, as set out in the recent SIPRI report, Five questions on ecological security, which I co-authored with Rod Schoonover.
The security challenges of today and tomorrow include some that are unprecedented because they are driven by ecological disruption, the extent and kinds of which are themselves unprecedented. The issues are new and how they combine together is new. It follows that we need some serious thinking and rethinking about security.
I have been pondering and re-pondering what security means in some recent blog posts, and in last week’s post I looked at the policy implications of focussing on ecological disruption. Basically, step one is to find out more about the problems and their likely health, economic, behavioural, social and conflictual knock-on effects.
In this post, I summarise some of the science that lays out the challenge of ecological disruption in the security sphere.
Continue readingBeyond the climate crisis, other related aspects of ecological disruption are bad news for peace. Too little is known about the links between environmental change and its impact on societies, politics and peace, in part because there are many gaps in scientific knowledge about the dimensions and trajectory of disruption. As a result, not only can we not provide all the answers we need in order to know what is unfolding and how to respond, we also don’t know all or even most of the questions to ask. That said, we know enough to know there’s a problem, enough to understand the urgency of knowing more.
SIPRI has just published a report, Five questions on ecological security, which I co-authored with Rod Schoonover. It outlines the issues and begins the task of figuring out what to do about them. This post is a much-shortened version of the policy parts of the full report; my next post will summarise some of the underlying hard science knowledge and gaps. Or, to get it all in one go, turn to the full report.
Continue readingA year after the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine, China has come forward with a 12-point statement of its position on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis. That, at least, is what is called by both the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and
It is widely reported in the international news media as a peace plan. See, among others, AlJazeera, AP, BBC, CNN, DW, Guardian, New York Times, Reuters, Sky, Time (though it calls it a proposal).
But it is not a plan and China does not say it’s a plan – it’s a position according to the government and to CGTN, Beijing’s state-run English-language news channel (though, to be fair, CGTN joined the crowd and called it a plan on the second day of coverage). Further, it does not outline either what a peace settlement could consist of or a pathway for getting there. It is a statement of opinion that stays away from specifics about what its support for dialogue and negotiation could mean in practice.
And I think that in ramping up a statement of position into a peace plan that can then be criticised for lacking specifics, the news media are missing something.
Continue readingOn 21 February, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would suspend its participation in New START, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the world’s two nuclear superpowers: Russia and the United States.
This is a disappointing, unimaginative but unsurprising step from which nobody benefits.
And from which we all may lose. Including Russia.
Continue readingEach February, leaders, policy-makers, thinkers and practitioners in the field of security, broadly defined, get together at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich for a three day international conference. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2019, Germany’s then Chancellor, Angela Merkel, opened her speech by reflecting on the world’s entry into a new geochronological age – the Anthropocene Epoch.
She explained, “This means that we are living in an age in which humankind’s traces penetrate so deeply into the Earth that future generations will regard it as an entire age created by humans.” She briefly touched on different human impacts on the environment and then said, “All of this has implications for global security and for the issues that are being discussed right here, right now.”
Right here, right now, too right.
Continue readingThe facts are simple and brutal: looking back at average global temperatures over four decades,
In short, each decade of the four has been hotter than the previous one. And what it is leading to is what we have seen in 2022 – the year when 35 per cent of a major country was flooded, when another had its worst ever drought, when a continent experienced a once-in-500-year drought, and when, at the end of the year, another major country was ripped into by a cyclone bomb – all that and more, and worse, and harder to bear.
Yes, it’s old news – older than you might think – but it’s worthwhile to keep on recalling it, so the increased awareness of climate change in 2022 does not go to waste.
Continue readingYou know, it is easy to understand how it gets to be a drag, having to think about things in new and different ways.
If you have been working on international development over the past 30 years since the end of the Cold War, in a government, or inter-governmental agencies, or non-governmental organisations, or switching among them, you will know what I mean. First there was development, then you had to add gender and human rights, then environment, and then conflict and peace. Wouldn’t it be great to get back to working just on development? And those folk over there could work on environment or gender or peace and conflict if they want and, you know, just get on with stuff.
Likewise, there are complaints and doubts within the humanitarian community about how their work is complicated by the people who want them to think about development and peace as well as simply meeting immediate human needs.
But watch out. As they say, people who are wise: be careful what you wish for.
In various governments among the traditional donors of international development assistance, things are beginning to unfold that could lead to a distinct narrowing of focus, leaving much of development and peace out of the picture and concentrating on meeting humanitarian emergencies.
This blog post is about one reason – an environmental reason – why that is deeply problematic, why it is essential to grasp the nettle and think about the full range of problems that confront peace and development today. Just one reason among several. The argument swings on the big changes in human impact on the environment that have unfolded since about 1950.
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