Governing risks in international security

ABSTRACT

Risks are omnipresent in contemporary international security. Despite a long tradition in security studies going at least back to Von Clausewitz, we consider that the topic of risk remains under-examined. This forum seeks to advance the research agenda on risk in security studies by showcasing work of scholars using advanced concepts of risk, based on insights from sociology, biology, psychology, and safety studies, to better understand the role of risk in international security. As a way of introduction, this short article sets out the main debates.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk
• security studies
• risk society
• resilience
• uncertainty

Risks are omnipresent in contemporary international security. Despite a brief period of optimism after the end of the Cold War, traditional security risks are not disappearing. In Asia, there is the risk of nuclear conflict on the Korean peninsula and the risk of military escalation in the East and South China Seas. The withdrawal by the United States from the Iran nuclear deal creates new security risks in the wider Middle-East. And Europe, it is regularly observed, is surrounded by an “arc of instability.” Meanwhile, non-traditional security risks have been increasingly dominating the news in the past years. Despite the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the risk of terrorist attacks remains significant as foreign fighters return home. Cyber attacks on businesses and governments are on the rise. Hybrid tactics and the use of social media are an increasing threat for the democratic process. As the impact of climate change becomes more severe, so do the related security risks particularly in conflict-prone regions.

Analyzing risk has long been part of security studies. The Prussian general Von Clausewitz (1831), for instance, stated that “[i]n war more than anywhere else things do not turn out as we expect,” while his disciple Von Moltke (1871/1995) famously noted that “[n]o battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” More recently, some of the leading International Relations (IR) theorists have shown that threats–including the perception thereof and their changing nature–are the key variables when it comes to the formulation of security policy as well as the formation of defensive alliances (e.g., Buzan, 1991; Jervis, 1976; Walt, 1990).

And yet we consider that the topic of risk remains under-examined in security studies. Whereas in other disciplines–notably sociology, psychology, biology, and engineering–risk is conceptualized in an advanced way, the literature on international security lacks behind: The concept of risk is often limited to simple probability-effects calculations, does not distinguish between risks, uncertainty, and indeed threats, or simply quotes a former US Defense Secretary about the existence of “unknown unknowns” (Rumsfeld, 2002). The way risks are defined and dealt with, however, has a crucial impact on the state of international security. Insights from other policy areas are informative in this respect. For example, just as generals tend to fight the “last war,” in the field of chemical risks, we know that the regulatory regime is suffering from an “uncertainty bias” and is mostly regulating yesterday's risks (Versluis, Van Asselt, Fox, & Hommels, 2010). The purpose of this forum is to take stock and to showcase work by scholars using advanced concepts of risk, imported from cognate disciplines, to better understand international security.

A conceptual reference point is the notion of a “risk society,” as developed by the sociologists Baumann, Beck, and Giddens, in which new risks have to be accepted because they can only be managed and never be fully eliminated. For security scholars (e.g., Mythen & Walklate, 2008; Ó Tuathail, 1999; Rasmussen, 2006; Williams, 2008), this has proved to be a useful lens to look at the world and to understand how to address the changing nature of threats and issues such as terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, crime, and migration. The notion of a risk society resonated well, in this regard, with the securitization agenda developed by Buzan and his colleagues (1991; Buzan, Wæver & De Wilde, 1998) and the “new wars” concept of Kaldor (1999).

While the exchange with sociologists and the introduction of the concept of risk society in the area of security was fruitful (during the mid-2000s), there has been little follow-up. In particular, little thought has been given to what it actually means (for international security purposes) to live in a risk society. One of the few serious attempts to consider the implications is the idea of “war as risk management” (Coker, 2009; Heng, 2006; cf. Rasmussen, 2006). Coker (2009), for instance, argues that wars are now fought to manage risks rather than “in the name of ideology, religion and the pursuit of peace” (blub). By disrupting terror networks and safe havens abroad, such wars reduce risks at home. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq provided empirical examples for this idea of expeditionary risk management, but interventions have been more kinetic since.

In addition to managing the risks in “our” risk society, there has also been a paradigm shift in how we can help “other societies” to cope with risks. The key word here is resilience. After two decades of liberal peacebuilding projects–often with limited success–the focus of the international community has shifted to make target societies resilient to “external disturbances.” As a result of the increasing complexity, it is argued, disturbances cannot be avoided. The only thing left to do is to focus on coping strategies. Resilience-building has rapidly become an approach of the international community to humanitarian assistance (e.g., Adger, Hughes, Folke, Carpenter, & Rockström, 2005; Tobin & Whiteford, 2002) and increasingly also to security policy (e.g., Chandler, 2012; Juncos, 2017; Wagner & Anholt, 2016).

In addition to the concept of risk society, and the emergence of new policy strategies, there is also the question how actors address risks when operating in the area of international security. There is once again considerable untapped potential in other disciplines. Even when it comes to simple probability-effects calculations, we know from psychology and behavioral economics that humans do not make fully rational choices. Individuals are, for instance, risk-seeking when confronted with choices between losses and risk-averse when confronted with choices between gains (prospect theory, Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). While this insight has previously been applied to the field of foreign policy crisis management (McDermott, 1998), research about the risk calculations political and military leaders make when sending troops in harm's way is still at an early stage of development (e.g., Friedman, Lerner, & Zeckhauser, 2017; Haerem, Kuvaas, Bakken, & Karlsen, 2011; Kertzer, 2017; Macdonald & Schneider, 2017; Saunders, 2011; Trenta, 2016).

Importantly, many risks in international security cannot be easily calculated. The risk governance literature in sociology speaks of “systemic risks” (Renn, Klinke, & Van Asselt, 2011), which are embedded in the larger contexts of societal processes. The analysis of systemic risk must focus on interdependencies and spillover effects “that initiate impact cascades between otherwise unrelated risk clusters” (Van Asselt & Renn, 2011, p. 436). For instance, what is the effect of intervention on the local economy and the subsequent risk of insurgency? While risk governance perspectives are applied from nuclear to food safety and nanotechnology (e.g., Ansell & Vogel, 2006; Renn & Roco, 2006), we are not aware of academic analyses using this perspective in the area of international security or intervention. The logic seems nonetheless particularly applicable as a result of the high degree of uncertainty and unintended consequences in this area.

The purpose of this forum is therefore to provide new insight on how to govern risks in international security. The four articles in this forum address some of the key themes discussed above and borrow concepts and theories from different disciplines–sociology, biology, psychology, and safety studies.

Heng (2018) starts from the risk management perspective originally developed in sociology. He notes that this perspective was particularly significant to explain some of the international military interventions in the 1990s and 2000s. He wonders whether this is still the case. He finds that risk management ideas indeed continue to shape recent campaigns against Libya, Islamic State, Syria, and the war on terror from Niger, Yemen to Somalia. Juncos (2018) analyses the concept of resilience in peacebuilding, thereby using a concept originally developed in biology. She focuses in particular on uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity in the area of peacebuilding. She points out that the adoption of the resilience paradigm in peacebuilding has opened opportunities for contestation and institutional agency.

Vis and Kuijpers (2018) analyze the potential of prospect theory for foreign and security decision-making. While a landmark theory in psychology, they show that it is not yet fully applied in the foreign policy realm. It is, for instance, difficult for academics to estimate how national leaders weigh risk probabilities when confronted with questions of national security. Similarly it is not straightforward to determine the reference point for decision-makers: gains in the international or domestic agenda? Finally, Van Asselt (2018) reflects on her experience as a member of the Dutch Safety Board during the safety investigation into the downing of flight MH17 above Ukraine. She shows that it is, in practice, difficult to separate safety concerns from security. Yet both in legal and disciplinary terms safety studies and security studies remain apart.

The four contributions show that it is fruitful to bring insights on risk, developed in other academic disciplines, to the field of international security. At the same time, these articles also show how challenging it is to establish a research agenda of governing risks in international security. The four authors all use different definitions of risk. Although this may seem to demonstrate a lack of common ground between them, it also underlines the rationale to continue engaging academics in an interdisciplinary debate of risk in contemporary society. At a time when, non-traditional security risks are on the rise, it is only through complex, and multi-dimensional conceptual and empirical analyses that we may come closer to better understand and cope with contemporary risks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Hylke Dijkstra is the Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Security Policy. He is also the Programme Director of the MA in European Studies at the Department of Political Science of Maastricht University, The Netherlands. He was previously a Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford, where he was also affiliated with Nuffield College. He has published widely on EU security, NATO, and UN peacekeeping.

Petar Petrov is an Assistant Professor in International Relations and EU Foreign and Security Policy at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. He was previously a visiting research fellow at Universiy of Manchetster, UK, where he analyzed the EU state-building capacity in the context of its civilian missions in the Western Balkans. He publishes on EU crisis management and conflict prevention, European defense cooperation in capability development, and strategic culture in security and defense.

Esther Versluis is Professor of European Regulatory Governance at the Department of Political Science of Maastricht University, The Netherlands. She was previously a Fulbright visiting professor at Cornell University, USA, where she analyzed the role of regulatory agencies in risk regulation. She published on how risks are regulated in the European Union, concentrating on the fields of chemical, health, and food safety policies.

ORCID

Hylke Dijkstra http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3637-5296