Jonah Stuart Brundage - Critique of Global Security Manifesto and Matrix

The Global Security Matrix and Manifesto provide an excellent model for understanding what constitutes global security in the world today. The Manifesto’s professed goal of carrying the current dialogue on international politics beyond its myopic focus on terrorism is highly commendable. More generally, by presenting global security as the realm of a heterogeneous set of actors and threats, but also revealing the considerable overlap and common ground between its constituent components, the GSM makes a compelling case for scholars and practitioners of international relations to broaden their conceptions of security.

Nonetheless, despite its professed claim to the diverse nature of security threats, the focus of the GSM remains (with the exception perhaps of the environment and pandemics threats) primarily on the threat of violent conflict, a conception that needs to be broadened further. Although the Manifesto defines human security (3.2) as both freedom from fear (safety) and freedom from want (well-being), the GSM seems to give issues of want short shrift. Poverty, for example, certainly leads to violent conflict but, more fundamentally, it also kills people directly, through malnutrition, famine, and disease. Although these more direct effects of poverty are significantly addressed in the Manifesto under the heading of Resource Conflict (4.3), when it comes to the descriptions found in the Matrix itself, the category of Resource Conflict—as its title would suggest—puts primary emphasis not on the damage caused by the inequitable distribution of resources (i.e., poverty), but rather, that caused by the violent conflicts over their distribution. I would thus propose placing the emphasis of the resource section more on the structural violence of scarcity and inequitable distribution, to complement the emphasis on the explicit violence of conflict that is a corollary to these issues.

Several other actors and threats described in the Manifesto and depicted in the GSM also exhibit potentially problematic ambiguities. The category defined as networks, for example, may be too broad and heterogeneous to adequately assess the threats posed to its security. Nevertheless, the approach of leaving these categories relatively ambiguous is certainly preferable to its alternative—creating a matrix of narrowly-defined, non-overlapping categories. It may render the ranking of threats more difficult, but this becomes less of a concern if we view the process of ranking not as the end goal of the Matrix but rather as one means of furthering dialogue on global security. If we conceive of the ranking component of the GSM as a functional approach to furthering our qualitative—not quantitative—understanding of threats, then ambiguity of and fluidity between categories become not a detriment but a necessity.

In conclusion, the Global Security Matrix and Manifesto provide a highly accurate but certainly not all-encompassing picture of global security threats in the world today. Most importantly, they help to incite a dialogue to broaden our understanding of international relations, a dialogue that may one day render all-encompassing models useless and place an emphasis on an international relations that views and respects the world as a multi-faceted and heterogeneous place.

Posted by Jonah Stuart Brundage on October 10, 2006 04:39 AM | Permalink

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