Interpretation of the "Threat" Rankings by David Kennedy

The IR135: History and Theory of International Relations class welcomed Professor David Kennedy of the Harvard Law School last Thursday. The class, led by Professor James Der Derian, requested that Prof. Kennedy perform a "threat ranking" within the Global Security Matrix. Kennedy contested the fundamental nature of threat ranking, an action which may or may not further the GSM's progressive goals of rethinking global security, and presented his own opinion on the subject of security. For Kennedy, the concept of absolute threat represents an abandonment of the culture of "tolerated insecurity" embodied in our legal system. This, in turn, undermines the spaces and practices enabled by this tolerated insecurity, such as our ability to engage in uncertain behavior that we perceive to promise a greater social good (e.g. innovate). As such, he was somewhat skeptical of the utility of the rankings, the validity of their criteria, and the [implied] methodology for completing a ranking. He did not, however, seem to comprehensively apply his conception of security within his rankings, likely due to the manner in which the rankings were completed (a back-and-forth intellectual exchange between the two professors).

Professor Kennedy performed his rankings by assuming the position of the various actors (columns). It is interesting to note, however, that he was not entirely methodologically consistent with this perspective, often explicitly acknowledging the large magnitude of the perceived threat while simultaneously discrediting it with expert knowledge. For example, Kennedy said that while people perceive terrorism as a major threat, in reality one is unlikely to be affected. In contrast, he described resource conflict as a major "threat" to humans because one always has to worry about "what the Jones' have."

At the level of the state, Kennedy concluded that the largest dangers were warfare, resource conflict, and the environment (particularly in the case of small island states). Kennedy described systems as "agnostic" in that they do not care about their current state. Thus, systems do not fear transition, just as individuals do not fear religious conversion because conversion presupposes a new belief system in which the end-state (post-conversion) is correct. He then concluded that terrorism, pandemics, WMD, and, to a lesser extent, the environment were threats to systems because they challenged their very being (but not their state). Kennedy imagined networks not as Slaughter's description of transnational NGOs and judges, but rather as a realistic total of all network activity (he also initially ignored networks as physical). This led him to conclude that networks, which are "cooly rational," should fear terrorism, pandemics, and WMD proliferation. Meanwhile, they would simply reroute around failed states, and be mechanisms for, rather than victims of, infowar. This actor-based analysis supposedly extends to the global level, where Kennedy asserted that warfare, pandemics, and the environment were the largest threats (followed closely by resource conflict and terrorism). However, one must wonder how these rankings were rationalized, as terrorism was given a high value despite being written off elsewhere. It is probably wise to assume that Prof. Kennedy did not strictly follow his earlier goal of positioning himself as the actor for this portion of the GSM, in part due to the incredible difficulty of imaging oneself as the "global level," and the implicit debate that would have to take place over exactly how that actor should be imagined (Gaia, a cold dead planet, the sum total of living things, the sum total of humans, etc.).

In conclusion, Professor Kennedy's rankings are illustrative of the difficulty in performing a threat ranking within the GSM framework. Exactly how, and from where, one should evaluate threats makes individual expert rankings vary markedly. However, this is not a demonstration of the failure of the GSM. Rather it is a demonstration that the GSM is not a tool for understanding which threats must be addressed and when, but a mechanism for understanding the contentious nature of global security.

Posted by Nick Greenfield on October 16, 2006 04:26 PM | Permalink

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