The Complexity of Global Security Governance: An Analytical Overview

Abstract

By suggesting predictable and controllable patterns of development, the literature on global governance seems to simplify the world for decision-making tractability. In this respect, security narratives often remain analytically frozen, while the dynamics of global life are not. Relying on complexity thinking, this article both comments on the construction and potential reconstruction of the concept of security as it relates to the question of global governance and engages with the cognitive multiplicity of the notion of global security governance. Such an exploration suggests the need for the complexification of the discourses and practices of security governance through the adaptive contingency of “security as resilience”, which rejects the detachment between human and natural systems and the ability of the former to control the latter. The argument is that the logic of “security as resilience” is more appropriate than the conventional logic of “security as control”. In policy terms, therefore, the complexity of global security governance intimates an ability to cope with vulnerabilities, defy adversity and construct a new proficiency in response to the uncertainty, cognitive challenges, complex unbounded risks and the need for continuing adaptation prompted by the alterations in global life.

Notes

1. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), pp. 267–268.

2. A good instance of this mode of analysis is Bruce Russett's discussion of the “causes” of wars, where he labels the important events as “causes”, while serendipitous occurrences—for instance, the confused chauffer driving the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914—are marked out as “surprises” and, thereby, not as significant (in “Cause, Surprise, and No Escape”, Journal of Politics, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1962), pp. 3–22 and Dylan Kissane, “The Illusion of Anarchy”, HRI Working Paper, No. 16 (2006)). Recently, commentators have reported that the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was “caused” by an Iraqi émigré, who in his drive to fast-track his asylum application in Germany claimed to have information on Saddam Hussein's secret programme for weapons of mass destruction. The subsequent transmission of this information by German authorities to US, British and Israeli intelligence services created a snowballing effect that convinced policy-makers of the need for a pre-emptive strike (see Bob Drogin, Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War (New York: Random House, 2007)).

3. Craig Murphy, “Global Governance: Poorly Done and Poorly Understood”, International Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 2 (2000), p. 792.

4. Margaret Karns, “Postinternational Politics and Global Governance” in Heidi Hobbs (ed.), Pondering Postinternationalism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), p. 40.

5. Thomas Weiss, “Governance, Good Governance and Global Governance”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 5 (2000), p. 808.

6. Lawrence Finkelstein, “What is Global Governance”, Global Governance, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1995), p. 368.

7. James Yunker, “Effective Global Governance without Effective Global Government”, World Futures, Vol. 60, No. 7 (2004), p. 507.

8. In contrast, Keith Suter (in Global Order and Global Disorder (Westport: Praeger, 2003), p. 166) suggests that “most warnings in the name of global security have proved to be false alarms. Apparently created to encourage global governance, these warnings are overstatements of problems. The world can survive without the global governance remedy”. On the development of “global security governance” both as an alternative to and a sub-category of “global governance” see Alice Ba and Matthew Hoffmann (eds), Contending Perspectives on Global Governance (London: Routledge, 2005); Catarina Kinnvall, The Search for Ontological Security (London: Routledge, 2006); Emil Kirchner and James Sperling (eds), Global Security Governance (London: Routledge, 2007); Peter Hough, Understanding Global Security (London: Routledge, 2004); Jennifer Wood and Benoit Dupont (eds), Democracy, Society and the Governance of Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

9. The notion of “cognitive structure” is employed here not with the meaning that it has in psychology and neuroscience (from where it originates), but in the sense that it has acquired in the study of international relations. Scott introduced the concept in the late 1950s as “a matrix of attitudes toward external events”. A decade later, Jervis argued that the insertion of the term into the study of world politics cannot be limited by the “psycho-logic” of its origins. He, thereby, defined it as a “relation” between “incoming information” and the “receiver's already established images”. In the early 1970s, Shapiro and Bonham referred to “cognitive structures” as “maps” of decision-making beliefs. Nearly 30 years later, Herrmann et al. interpreted the term simultaneously as a “representation” and a “mental model” of knowledge about a concept which influences the selection, interpretation, and memory of reality; while Adler and Barnett referred to it as “the shared system of intersubjective meanings”. The most recent addition to this definitional genealogy of “cognitive structure” was made by Ken Booth, who referred to it as “the politics behind a conceptualisation”. William Scott, “Rationality and Non-Rationality of International Attitudes”, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1958), p. 9; Robert Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception”, World Politics, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1968), p. 456; Michael Shapiro and Matthew Bonham, “Cognitive Process and Foreign Policy”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1973), p. 147; Richard Herrmann, James Voss, and Tonya Schooler, “Images in International Relations”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3 (1997), p. 406; Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, “Governing Anarchy”, Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1996), p. 83; Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 109.

10. William Thompson, “Geohistorical Context of Structural Transition”, World Politics, Vol. 45, No. 1 (1992), pp. 127–152.

11. For similar attempts see: James Rosenau, “New Dimensions of Security”, Security Dialogue, Vol. 25, No. 3 (1994), pp. 255–281; David Alberts and Thomas Czerwinski (eds), Complexity, Global Politics and National Security (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1997); Dennis Sandole, Capturing the Complexity of Conflict (London: Cassell, 1999); Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War (New York: Pi Press, 2006); the section on warfare in Tessaleno Devezas (ed.), Kondratieff Waves, Warfare, and World Security (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2006), pp. 136–252; Michael Dillon, “Underwriting Security”, Security Dialogue, Vol. 39, Nos. 2/3 (2008), pp. 309–332.

12. It has to be mentioned (although it is not at the centre of this investigation) that such a contention is premised on an understanding of power as a balance of practices—that is, whose and what practices inform patterns of security governance substitutes the conventional understandings of balance of power. The cognitive aspect of this understanding of power reveals that practices reflect the ways in which different kinds of knowledge constitute distinct political potentials. Power, in this context reflects the abilities of practices (and the ontological assumptions on which they are based) to diffuse in time and space. Thus, power as a balance of practices indicates the way in which theories “translate into tactical action in the name of security”. This understanding of power is informed by Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford, The Convergence of Civilisations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Booth, op.cit.

13. James Rosenau, “Patterned Chaos in Global Life”, International Political Science Review, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1988), pp. 335–340. It has remained an overlooked aspect in the security studies literature that James Der Derian in Antidiplomacy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 166), has “Foucauldianised” the notion of “global life” (and in so doing has indicated why it has remained on the side) by defining it as “heterotopia”—a disturbing term that secretly undermines language, because it makes it impossible to name this and that, because it shatters or tangles common names, because it destroys “syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next and also opposite to one another) to “hold together”.

14. Don Puchala, Theory and History in International Relations (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 208. It can be argued that the notion of “global life” brings together the analytical insights from Marshall McLuhan's observations on the mass-mediated “global village” in The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) and the connectivity and all-inclusiveness of the term “globality” (Mike Featherstone, “Genealogies of the Global”, Time, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, Nos. 2/3 (2006), pp. 387–419).

15. Lesley Kuhn, “Why Utilise Complexity in Social Inquiry”, World Futures, Vol. 63, No. 1 (2007), pp. 156–175; Richard Lee, “Complexity and the Social Sciences”, Review, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2006), pp. 115–134.

16. John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 4.

17. BBC News, “Key HIV Strain ‘Came from Haiti’”, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7068574.stm, 30 October 2007.

18. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, “Globalisation, What's New, What's Not? (And So What)”, Foreign Policy, Vol. 188, No. 1 (2000), p. 112.

19. William Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 24.

20. Myriam Dunn, “Securing the Digital Age: The Challenges of Complexity and IR Theory”, in Johan Eriksson and Giampiero Giacomello (eds), International Relations and Security in the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 87.

21. For a good overview of the “unevenness” of complexity see McNeill, op.cit.

22. For an instance of a prescient “empirical” study (especially in the North American sense of this term) of the problem of establishing causality and predicting or controlling future events see Mark Blyth, “Great Punctuations: Prediction, Randomness, and the Evolution of Comparative Political Science”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 100, No. 4 (2006), pp. 1–6.

23. For a good overview see Neil Harrison (ed.), Complexity in World Politics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006); Emilian Kavalski, “The Fifth Debate and the Emergence of Complex International Relations Theory: Notes on the Application of Complexity Theory to the Study of International Life”, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2007), pp. 435–454; William Thompson (ed.), Evolutionary Interpretations of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2001).

24. John Ruggie, “Complexity” in Todd LaPorte (ed.), Organised Social Complexity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 145.

25. Der Derian, op.cit., p. 136.

26. Graeme Chesters, “Global Complexity”, Voluntas, Vol. 15, No. 4 (2004), pp. 323–342.

27. Robert Keohane, Power and Governance in a Partially Globalised World (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 17. Barry Buzan, People, States, Fear (Hemel-Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1983); Michael Sheehan, International Security (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005).

28. Maria Stern, “‘We’ the Subject: The Power and Failure of (In)Security”, Security Dialogue, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2006), p. 188.

29. A broad definition of life-like properties indicates the capacity for emergence in different kinds of matter/objects that are generally perceived as inanimate (or, at best, as border-line systems) and, thence, not alive. Still one of the best discussions on this issue is N. W. Pirie, “The Meaninglessness of the Terms Life and Living” in J. Needham and D. Green (eds.), Perspectives on Biochemistry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), pp. 11–22.

30. Michael Dillon, “Governing Terror”, International Political Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2007), pp. 15–16.

31. Jan Kooiman, Modern Governance (London: Sage, 1993); George Modelski, Tessaleno Devezas, and William Thompson (eds), Globalization as Evolutionary Process (London: Routledge, 2008).

32. Kavalski, op.cit.

33. Ruggie, op.cit., pp. 129–136.

34. Immanuel Wallerstein, Open the Social Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 61–63.

35. Robert Jervis, System Effects (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 17–24.

36. Matthew Hoffman and John Riley, “The Science of Political Science: Linearity or Complexity”, New Political Science, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2002), pp. 31.

37. Rosenau, Distant Proximities: Dynamics Beyond Globalization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

38. Stephen Krasner, “Approaches to the State”, Comparative Politics, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1984), pp. 240–243.

39. BBC News, “Vaccine Linked Polio Hits Nigeria”, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7037462.stm>,10 October 2007.

40. Dunn, op.cit., p. 95.

41. Emanuel Adler, Communitarian International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 32.

42. Barbara Heinzen, “Surviving Uncertainty”, Development, Vol. 47, No. 4 (2004), p. 4.

43. This claim should not be taken as a denigration of the contributions to global governance informed by such a faith in a makeable world. The scepticism here relates to their continuing ability to deliver a secure environment for human flourishing.

44. Barbara Adam, “Values and Cultural Timescapes of Science”, Cultural Values, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1998), pp. 386–387.

45. For a good overview of the “Enlightenment effect” on statehood see Mathias Albert, David Jacobson, and Yosef Lapid (eds), Identities, Border, Orders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Robert Geyer, “Globalisation, Europeanisation, Complexity”, Governance, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2003), p. 572.

46. Booth, op.cit., p. 327.

47. Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648 (London: Verso, 2003).

48. Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars (London: Zed Books, 2001).

49. Peter Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

50. Didier Bigo, “The Möbius Ribbon of Internal and External Security” in Albert et al., op.cit., p. 99.

51. Jim Whitman, The Limits of Global Governance (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 119.

52. John Lewis Gaddis, “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War”, International Security, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1992/93), p. 7.

53. Trevor Parfitt, “Hylomorphism, Complexity and Development”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2006), p. 421.

54. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 245.

55. Whitman, op.cit., p. 67.

56. Paul Rogers, Global Security and the War on Terror: Elite Power and the Illusion of Control (London: Routledge, 2007).

57. Stern, op.cit., p. 192.

58. Der Derian, op.cit., p. 75; Stern, op.cit., p. 187. It should be borne in mind that the discourses and practices of security as control have also decontextualised human–human interactions. The claim, however, is that these have been accorded significant attention by security studies (see Booth, op.cit.), while the effects of the detachment between human and natural systems remains largely unaddressed.

59. Dunn, op. cit., pp. 96–97.

60. Roy Blunt in an interview with KCRW's “To the Point”, 12 May 2008, <http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp>

61. Dillon, “Governing Terror”, op. cit., p. 11.

62. Richard Ned Lebow, “What's So Different about a Counterfactual”, World Politics, Vol. 52, No. 3 (2000), pp. 550–585.

63. Whitman, op. cit., pp. 61–64. See also the Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of the effect of non-human and non-social factors on human and social differences by Jared Dimond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1999).

64. Robert North, The World That Could Be (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 55. This remark also draws attention to the distinction between contingency and necessity, which has attracted the attention of post-Marxist theory. For instance, in their conversations Bob Avakian and Bill Martin, in Marxism and the Call of the Future (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), pp. 44–45, distinguish between the contingency of the “true ‘existential moment’—when [for example] Lenin was in hiding right before the insurrection and he had to go across [the frozen river Neva] and the ice started breaking up … if he had died, I think that it is probably safe to say, given everything we know, that there would have been no Soviet Union. There would have been no October Revolution … But on the other hand, there were real reasons why the Russian Empire became ripe for revolution at that time. And in that sense there [was] necessity”. Avakian and Martin's conclusion, however, is that “there's always contingency. Nothing is ever pure necessity”.

65. Grosz, op. cit., pp. 248–250.

66. Adam, op. cit., p. 394.

67. Unless specified otherwise, the understanding of resilience follows Ingrid Schoon, Risk and Resilience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Graig Titus, Resilience (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2006).

68. Adler, op. cit., p. 47.

69. Titus, op. cit., pp. 6–11.

70. Dillon, “Governing Terror”, op.cit., p. 11.

71. James Rosenau, “Governance in the Twenty-First Century”, Global Governance, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1995), p. 15.

72. Elke Krahman, “American Hegemony or Global Governance”, International Studies Review, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2005), p. 537.

73. Emil Kirchner, “Regional and Global Security” in Kirchner and Sperling, op. cit., p. 13.

74. Mark Webber, Stuart Croft, Jolyon Howorth, Terry Terriff, and Elke Krahman, “The Governance of European Security”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2004), pp. 5–9.

75. Elke Krahman, “Conceptualising Security Governance”, Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2003), pp. 13–19.

76. Ibid., p. 20; Webber et al., op.cit., p. 5.

77. Whitman, op.cit., p. 42.

78. Webber et al., op. cit., p. 3.

79. Emil Kirchner, “The Challenge of EU Security Governance”, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (2006), p. 948.

80. Dunn, op. cit., p. 99.

81. Leroy White, “‘Effective Governance’ through Complexity Thinking”, Systems Research and Behavioural Science, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2001), pp. 241–257.

82. R. A. W. Rhodes, “The New Governance”, Political Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (1996), pp. 652–667; Gerry Stoker, “Governance as Theory,” International Social Science Journal, Vol. 155, No. 1 (1998), pp. 17–27.

83. Ernst Haas, “Words Can Hurt You; or Who Said What to Whom about Regimes”, in Stephen Krasner (ed.), International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 24–26.

84. Kavalski, op. cit., p. 449.

85. Whitman, op. cit., p. 44.

86. Ibid.; Gabriella Kütting, “Back to the Future: Time, the Environment, and IR Theory”, Global Society, Vol. 15, No. 4 (2001), pp. 345–360.

87. BBC News, “Mosquito Virus Arrives in Europe”, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/6981476.stm>, 6 September 2007.

88. Gwyn Prins, “Notes Towards the Definition of Global Security”, American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 38, No. 6 (1995), p. 819.

89. John Smith and Chris Jenks, Qualitative Complexity (London: Routledge, 2006).

90. Lance Gunderson and C. S. Holling, Panarchy (London: Island Press, 2002).

91. Kavalski, op. cit.

92. John Steinbruner, Principles of Global Security (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2000), p. 11.

93. Adler, op. cit., p. 44.

94. Nicholas Stern, “The Economics of Climate Change: Risk, Ethics, and a Global Deal”, presentation on 14 January 2008 at Princeton University.

95. Heinzen, op. cit., p. 4.

96. McNeill, op. cit., p. 355.

97. Adler, op. cit., p. 69.

98. Doris Brothers, “After the Towers Fell: Terror, Uncertainty, and Intersubjective Regulation”, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2003), p. 69.

99. Dillon, “Governing Terror”, op. cit., pp. 17–18.

100. Blyth, op. cit., pp. 2–5.

101. Dunn, op. cit., p. 102.

102. I am grateful to Reviewer 2 for this suggestion.

103. Prins, op. cit., p. 822.

104. James Rosenau (ed.), Global Voices (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993) p. 122. See also Rosenau's earlier commentary “Muddling, Meddling, and Modelling: Alternative Approaches to the Study of World Politics in an Era of Rapid Change”, Millennium, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1979), pp. 130–144.

105. Kavalski, op. cit., p. 438.

106. Adler, op. cit., p. 75; Edward Morse, Modernisation and the Transformation of International Relations (New York: Free Press, 1976).

107. Whitman, op. cit., pp. 66–105.

108. John Handmer and Paul James, “Trust Us and Be Scared: The Changing Nature of Contemporary Risk”, Global Society, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2007), p. 128.

109. Whitman, op. cit., p. 59.

110. Prins, op. cit., pp. 822–825.

111. Kütting, op. cit., p. 350.

112. Handmer and James, op. cit., p. 125.

113. Whitman, op. cit., p. 64.

114. Rosenau, Distant Proximities, op. cit., p. 214.

115. Nader Elhefnawy, “Societal Complexity and Security”, International Security, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2004), p. 154.

116. McNeill, op. cit., pp. 72–77.

117. Grosz, op. cit., p. 11.

118. Branwen Jones, “International Relations as International Relations”, Journal of Critical Realism, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2002), p. 149.

119. Booth, op. cit., p. 183.

120. H. G. Wells, The Mind at the End of Its Tether (London: Heinemann, 1945), p. 43.

121. Dunn, op. cit., p. 101.

122. Modelski et al., op. cit., p. 238.

123. Adler, op. cit., p. 56.

124. See the preliminary investigation of these queries in Jared Diamond, Guns, Gems and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

125. Jon Barnett, The Meaning of Environmental Security (London: Zed Books, 2005); Patricia Mische, “Ecological Security and the Need to Reconceptualise Sovereignty”, Alternatives, Vol. 14, No. 4 (1989), pp. 389–427; Dennis Pirages and Theresa DeGeest, Ecological Security (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

126. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 277–278.

127. Ole Wæver, “10x10”, Tidsskriftet Politik, Vol. 4, No. 7 (2004), pp. 1–5. Despite his criticism of complexity thinking, Wæver unwittingly confirms its inkling that the cognitive structures of security need to be construed in terms that reflect the requirement “to react as rarely as possible, and to avoid situations and relationships that would condemn one to suspend as it were, one's ‘freedom’ and initiative and to become a mere re-agent”.

128. Booth, op. cit., p. 113.

129. Grosz, op. cit., p. 251.

130. Bo Wiman, “Implications of Complexity for Science and Policy”, Global Environmental Change, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1991), p. 245.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emilian Kavalski

The author wishes to thank Rob Aitken, Robert Geyer, Jim Jose, W. Andy Knight, Jonathon Louth, Stephen Nicholas, James Rosenau, John Tate, Mark Webber, Anna Yeatman, Magdalena Zolkos, and the anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and the students of POLS445 for their engagement. The usual disclaimer applies.