Photo: The cover of 'The Insecurity Trap: A short guide to transformation'
The Insecurity Trap: A short guide to transformation
By Paul Rogers, with Judith Large
The global order that has dominated our lives since 1945 is breaking down. For many of us, US hegemony and nuclear deterrence constituted a threatening rather than reassuring order. But it did have at its heart at least a rhetorical commitment to democracy and human rights. As US democracy fails, strong men in some of the world’s most powerful countries are seeking to build a new world order that resembles the 1930s, a world of national rivalries and disdain, a world that sets us on the path to inevitable future conflict.
Into this darkening world come new proposals for building a new kind of security, one that foregrounds the demands of equality of all the world’s citizens but combines that with a clear-sighted appraisal of the multiple crises we face, particularly the climate crisis.
Paul Rogers is well known for his work at the School of Peace Studies. He sets himself the task of sharing the world’s resources, while recognising environmental limits to growth, to ensure human security. His co-author Judith Large is a peacemaker with experience in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Balkans. Together they identify key pressure points we can all use to resist the darkness and build a brighter future.
For Friends, the most disturbing evidence of a growing lack of security is the thriving of the industry of death. In 2023, BAE Systems saw its share price rise by seventy per cent while military budgets across Europe rose by thirteen per cent in just that one year, a year in which the death toll in the Ukraine war reached half a million. But even these horrors were dwarfed by the massacres in Israel-Palestine, perhaps the clearest example of a central theme of the book: that injustices left to fester inevitably lead to conflicts.
To find a place to resist and build real security we have to grasp how these individual horrors are symptoms of a system breaking down, and find ways to create a new one, building on the strengths of the old, but acknowledging new environmental and political realities. This is what is meant by ‘rethinking security’ and Rogers and Large argue it must be built on four elements: security as freedom from fear and want; security as a common right, built on mutual understanding rather than a zero-sum game; security as patient practice, since peacemaking is a verb, not a noun; and security as shared responsibility.
Many of the policies necessary to cement these four elements are already part of the public policy narrative: a wealth tax, ending tax avoidance by corporations, serious action on the climate crisis, reinstating international aid and multiplying it to account for climate damage. But it will also take a coalition of nation states that are prepared to leave behind the broken settlement of 1945 but build something stronger, and fairer. Nothing could be more important.
