A Critique of the Global Security Matrix and Manifesto

I do not think that you will find very many people who will argue with the concept of the Global Security Matrix. Any time a scholar can take a large number of complex concepts and clearly reduce them to a visual representation, it makes information more presentable, which is undoubtedly a good thing. For my part, I found this project to be the most inclusive and understandable piece of work I have seen on global security. If we do find anything wrong, then the project has served, at the very least, to get us thinking of this topic. The issues that arise from the GSM are those of content. Do the categories make sense? Are the methods of ranking as readily apparent as their graphical representations? Does this project over simplify? Because I only have 500 words to write here, I picked two categories to examine.

Resource Conflict, under 4.3, defines risks to security only under the banner of essential resources such as food, water and energy. Non-essential goods such as gold, diamonds and drugs, which are luxuries, can be equally important as we examine global security at all levels. I understand that human security is defined in part by this manifesto as freedom from want. One can think in those terms, but this is a myopic view of how natural resources affect actors at any level. Because of non-essential resources, people are enslaved, states are toppled or coerced, wars are fought, networks are forged and destroyed among many other changes to global security. We can go back to the founding of Jamestown in 1607 as English colonists sought gold in North America, but eventually found themselves farming tobacco. The Jamestown settlement, founded in hopes of securing luxury items and maintained through the farming of a non-essential crop, led to genocide, slavery and many other changes to the global system. It is easy enough to observe how such resources have negatively affected states such as Sierra Leone, Colombia, Peru and Afghanistan.

I was intrigued to read the section on cyber-terrorism. Although such crime is uncommon now, it seems highly likely that it may become a serious threat to economic and social stability in the future. The authors hint at weapons that could destroy electronic devices, ala Escape From LA, and anticipate a rise in cyber attacks on internet infrastructure. The authors’ foreboding makes a lot of sense given the nature of internet attacks. Such assaults would be cheap, bloodless and able to cripple a major power’s economy if executed correctly. For now, I understand why cyber-terrorism is included under the label of general terrorism, but in the future is likely that it will split with that association and become several fields that differentiate between attacks in cyberspace and those that physically disable electronic devices.

Posted by Joshua Rosenthal on September 30, 2006 04:05 PM | Permalink

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