Security cosmopolitanism: the next phase

Abstract

‘Security Cosmopolitanism’ was published in 2013 with the hope that it might stimulate a dialogue between traditional and critical security studies around an urgent problem: the globalisation of insecurities faced by human communities and ecosystems, along with the manifest failure of state and collective security structures to prevent or address them. This second article reflects on the very welcome debate the theory has provoked and speculates on what the next phase of research might be. These collective lines of research, without precluding others, could include mapping complex systems of insecurity across a wide range of domains; folding such diagnoses into explorations of how systemic change may be achieved in global security processes and governance; research in affected communities that can map how they experience insecurity and push their perspectives into global action; and reform plans for response systems and governance. In response to the many commentaries, this article also provides a deeper explanation of the posthuman and ecological commitments of the theory, of its ethical strategy, and of its commitment to a redefined idea of security for humanity and the biosphere in the Anthropocene. In particular, it addresses the perceived tension between a normative and universalising ethics, on the one hand, and a global project of governance and responsibility that is immanently political and perceived by some to be elitist, on the other – a project that struggles with the problems of assigning responsibility for systemic and anonymous processes and of representing its human and non-human communities of concern through the abstractions, and power relations, of international organisations and policy.

Keywords:

• security
• global governance
• cosmopolitanism
• climate change
• posthuman
• global ethics

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Matt McDonald, Jonna Nyman, Audra Mitchell, Shahar Hameiri, Stefanie Fishel, Richard Jackson, and the editors of Critical Studies on Security for comments on earlier drafts of this article and to Gideon Baker for alerting me to Jacques Ranciere’s essay on the rights of man. My warm thanks also to all the commentators and to Nick Rengger, Karin Fierke, Nick Wheeler, Ian Clark, and Hidemi Suganami for hosting visits to the Universities of St. Andrews, Birmingham, and Aberystwyth in 2013 to present this work.

Notes

1. The closest approximation to the Kuhnian paradigm in International Relations would be our grand sub-field divisions such as realism, liberalism, constructivism, and feminism. In IR and security studies, however, ‘paradigmatic’ structures of problem sets, answers, methods, and theories crystallise into smaller structures that coexist, intersect, and compete, rather than being superseded in a linear model of (irruptive) scientific progress. This occurs, in part, because they reflect different sets of social interests and commitments, and codify, in scholarship, a struggle for power – a struggle not just between actors or groups, but between normative visions of a common world. One can thus argue that, in security studies, different theoretical streams (realism, liberalism, securitisation, constructivism, feminism, critical theory, post-structuralism, and international political sociology, etc.) have paradigm-like features. They have coalesced into settled sets of assumptions, research problems, and procedures and have taken on the features of competing ‘normal sciences’ that ‘discover what [they] expect to discover’ (Hacking in Kuhn 2012, loc. 341), even if getting there has often involved exciting innovations. To the extent that some of their internal rules have become invisible orthodoxies and barriers to innovation, understanding them as competing (mini)paradigms helps to expose their assumptions and limitations to scrutiny, and to open spaces for dialogue, critique, and cross-fertilization (see Browning and McDonald 2013).

2. I do not mean ‘modernisation’ as some kind of inevitable or progressive form of moral, social, or technical rationalisation of society, in the manner of Habermas (or even Beck), for example. I do not see it as having an immanent progressive tendency that might lead us towards the unfinished project of enlightenment. The risk management I am advocating is not part of the dialectic of progress, even if it is normatively informed by moral notions of it. Modernity, rather, is a kind of background fact, a social turmoil of processes with multiple temporalities, that is morally ambiguous and historically dangerous.

3. I am grateful for Audra Mitchell’s advice here.

4. This question, posed by Dalby, Richmond, Sjoberg, Robinson, and Cooper and Turner, was also put to me from the floor by Andrew Linklater, when I gave a lecture at the University of Aberystwyth in December 2013.

5. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas argued in a paper that the costs of the 2007 Wall Street collapse just to the United States were 60–90% of 2007 US output, or between $6–14 trillion. The US Federal Reserve also estimated that US households lost nearly $13 trillion in 2008 and the business sector nearly $8 trillion over the next two years (Scheng 2013). The UK’s Stern Review (2006) on the economic implications of climate change speculated that a 2–3°C warming would cost up to 3 per cent of global output, and that 5–6°C warming could cost 5–10 per cent of global GDP. The enormous human health, mortality and security costs of contemporary economic inequalities are also starkly laid out in Wilson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level (2010).

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Anthony Burke

Anthony Burke is an associate professor (Reader) in International and Political Studies at UNSW Australia. His books include Ethics and Global Security: A Cosmopolitan Approach (with Katrina Lee Koo and Matt McDonald, Routledge 2014), Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (Cambridge UP 2008), Beyond Security Ethics and Violence: War against the Other (Routledge 2007), and Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific (coedited with Matt McDonald, Manchester UP 2007). Forthcoming are Uranium (Polity 2016) and Ethical Security Studies (coedited with Jonna Nyman, Routledge 2016).