Prof. Kennedy's Rankings Analysis

Professor David Kennedy of the Harvard School of Law visited IR135 on Thursday, August 12 and participated in ranking the threats in the Global Security Matrix. As a guest, Professor Kennedy had both an interesting take on the Matrix and a unique way of assessing threats.
One of the most (literally) eye-catching aspects of Professor Kennedy’s assessment is the wide range of results. Unlike most other participants in the Matrix, Professor Kennedy had a group of “Medium” to “High” ranked threats and another group of basically non-threatening scenarios. This is most likely a result of Dr. Kennedy’s point of view, which was how he perceived the various actors to perceive their threat in a given scenario. For example, under “Human” and “Warfare,” he was looking at how humans perceived the threat of warfare to humans, not as how he perceived the threat to be to humans. Additionally, Professor Kennedy did not use the typical definition of “threat” in making his rankings. Instead, he chose to base his rankings on the amount of acceptable damage. It was thus not as much how threatening something was perceived to be, but rather how much damage a certain actor would be willing to sustain in a certain scenario.
Under the Human ranking, the only truly worrisome threat was that of “resource conflict.” Prof. Kennedy viewed resource conflict as something that was an inescapable aspect of daily existence, presumably from basic survival to “keeping up with the Jones.” Threats such as warfare, terrorism, and states at risk were largely written off as they were not particularly threatening unless an individual was involved himself in such a threat.
At the state level, the largest threat was that of warfare, reflecting the traditional state-centric view that survival of warfare is the basic threat that the state faces. Terrorism, on the other hand, was something that Dr. Kennedy viewed as an element that potentially allowed the state to gain greater domestic control and was thus a rather small threat. Keeping in line with Dr. Kennedy’s viewpoints about the prevailing structural anarchy, resource conflict, the environment, and pandemics were somewhat threatening to the state as they are elements that could lead to warfare.
Moving up to the system level, Professor Kennedy disagreed with Professor Der Derian’s take on the system by proclaiming that “there is no system.” Defining the system as “agnostic,” threats such as warfare, states at risk, and resource conflict were largely unimportant as the state system would survive them, even if it were a different state system that emerged as a result. On the other hand, elements such as terrorism and crime, the environment, pandemics, and WMD proliferation could actually destroy the state system, making them more threatening.
Prof. Kennedy presented the network level as calculating and relatively easily self-sustained. Warfare could actually destroy networks, thus making wars the biggest threat to networks. Pandemics, environmental issues, and infowar all make use of networks, meaning that they are, if anything, mostly beneficial to the survival of networks. He also commented that networks simply reroute themselves around failed states.
On the global level, the environment proved to be the biggest threat, closely followed by warfare and pandemics. This is easily justified – those things could all lead to the end of the globe. Dr. Kennedy’s inclusion of states at risk is somewhat puzzling on this level, as they seemed to be insignificant to him under all other actors.
Overall, Dr. Kennedy’s assessment was largely rational and easily understood. While often taking a different stance from Professor Der Derian, both had solid viewpoints that were well-supported.

Posted by Christopher Keys on October 16, 2006 10:15 PM | Permalink

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