Photo: Cover artwork of The Insecurity Trap: A short guide to transformation.
The insecurity trap: Judith Large on the work that led to a new publication
‘These concerns have been with us for many years.’
In these pressured times of rapid information and misinformation flow, individuals are frequently confused and disempowered. This is the result of negative news and images, which portray a world in turmoil: enduring war, the risks of pandemics, cyber breakdowns, and nuclear proliferation. Many experience at first hand the outcome of ‘global security issues’ in costly energy and food, homelessness, poverty and inequality, or grief or loss due to violence or discrimination and attack. How do we keep a sense of direction in order (as suggested in Advices & queries) to remember our responsibilities as citizens for the conduct of local, national, and international affairs? I have been working with Paul Rogers, who has himself worked for decades to build a solid foundation for understanding and action, to address three overarching issues that must be faced – issues that interconnect and add up to a unique challenge for us all.
The first issue is militarisation, with expenditure increasing worldwide, leading to a total arms spending of two trillion dollars a year and rising. The second is a world economic system in which market forces dominate, leading to obscene levels of wealth alongside the marginalisation of vast numbers of people.
These concerns have been with us for many years, and Friends have been active in seeking to counter the worst of their effects. But beyond these is the third area, the core global challenge, which is getting rapidly more urgent: climate breakdown. This grows more serious by the month, as storms, floods, heat domes, droughts and many other phenomena wreak havoc across much of the world.
All three of the challenges are connected. Military strategists see a need to control the movement of millions of people, desperate to move in the face of marginalisation and climate breakdown. Meanwhile, economists in a neoliberal system are deeply suspicious of the coordinated governance required to prevent climate breakdown, because ‘the market’ is assumed to be the answer.
More than fifty years ago, the economic geographer Edwin Brooks warned of a ‘crowded, glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force yet endlessly threatened by desperate men in the global ghettoes’. We are getting much closer to such a world, and the need for more effective responses is urgent.
When it comes to conflict and peace, we have the specific but deeply-rooted issue of the ‘insecurity trap’. Barack Obama was fond of the phrase ‘if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail’. What this means is that we are in such a militarised system that military answers to security challenges like climate breakdown or mass social unrest are seen as the main ways forward.
The reality is that you can’t close the castle gates in a globalised and interconnected world. The disaster of the 9/11 attacks and subsequent human tragedies of the dreadful wars that followed surely demonstrate this.
What we need urgently to do is to take very different approaches. Our new publication, The Insecurity Trap, aims to do just this, making use of the many initiatives and approaches that are responding to those interconnected issues of security, economy and environment.
For example, there is excellent work going on across the world to find alternatives to violence in international security. Rethinking Security is one example. Even now, at a time of increasing military budgets, there is plenty of good work going on to improve our knowledge and experience of conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Much more could be done, not least in improving the capabilities of the United Nations, bolstering diplomacy and reducing gross inequalities. There is no lack of experience in options for change, and plenty of thinking about better ways forward.
‘You can’t close the castle gates in an interconnected world.’
When it comes to social and economic marginalisation, there is also much going on to explore better ways forward. Across much of the global south, the cooperative movement is far stronger than in countries such as the UK. At home we have the New Economic Foundation and many other campaigning and research groups exploring new ways to fairer economic systems. The UK has considerable potential for tax reform, as well as re-nationalisation of ineffective privatised utilities. The new government also has considerable scope for fiscal measures to encourage rapid decreases in greenhouse gas emissions.
That brings us on to the climate crisis, where there is so much potential for rapid decarbonisation. The past two decades have seen a transformation in our ability to move away from excessive and dangerous emissions, so much so that electricity from renewable energy is now often a lot cheaper than burning coal, oil or gas. Added to this is the huge scope for more effective energy conservation, from well-insulated homes to clean low-cost public transport.
Admittedly the fossil fuel industries and producer countries are intent on retaining their political influence. They will spend hundreds of millions on political lobbying. But time is not on their side, and it is here that changes in public opinion can have a substantial impact.
The task is huge: we need to move substantially towards an environmentally sustainable world within a decade, with rapid progress necessary before 2030. This is best done by many small changes and adjustments, all moving in the same direction, whether the emphasis is on decarbonisation, economic change or rethinking security.
No one person or group can accomplish this in isolation. But what helps to counter depression and despair is the knowledge that many determined people are intent on encouraging and implementing change.
Can it happen? Can we move to a more sustainable, equitable and peaceful world in the short space of time we have? That’s the wrong question. The right question recognises that change is happening anyway because climate breakdown is not under our control. Unless we change soon, things will become hugely violent and uncertain as we are forced to face up to a global system coming apart at the seams. That would risk tens of millions of people dying.
The fallacy of the insecurity trap is that, because societies have thought they could always fall back on military control and the use of force to keep themselves secure, then this would also apply now. That is not so, since responding to climate breakdown cannot be achieved by military force. Instead, societies and peoples need to work together to make the changes.
Cooperation rather than competition needs to be the order of the day, and there are a myriad of different ways we can cooperate to achieve the common good of a more peaceful and sustainable world.
The Insecurity Trap: A short guide to transformation, by Paul Rogers with Judith Large, is published in September.
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