Rankings of Matrix

I am going to focus on explaining why the most red blocks/ highest security threats of my matrix are concentrated on humans for States at Risk, Resource Conflict and Pandemics.

I believe that individuals are greatly affected when states fail. The government is no longer able to provide important needs such as education, security or governance. Without these basic functions, people fall victim to competing factions, civil war, poverty, displacement etc. For example, the war in Bosnia which took 200,000 lives and up rooted thousands of people was caused by the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. (Lecture by Professor Andres of PS40) It is the people who suffer the most from a failed government and even though it might not seem like a huge threat to us in the United States but it is a huge threat to more unstable states.

Another area in my matrix where humans on an individual level are threaten the most by is resource conflict. I picked resource conflict as a great threat because as I mentioned in my critique of the Global Security Manifesto, people are being hurt and killed because of the need and want of vital and luxury resources. If the United States is fighting the war in Iraq to safeguard its oil interest, think about how many lives of soldiers and Iraqi civilians are being negatively affected by this? Also, there are so parts of the world like India, China, Philippines, Africa where people don’t have enough water or food and this lowers the standard of living for them and puts safety and well-being at stake.

The last area which I want to discuss is the threat of pandemics to human individuals. We all know that diseases like AIDS and SARS are life threatening diseases, however, they might seem removed or distant threats to a lot of us who have had no interaction with people who have the disease or no interaction with the disease itself. I lived in Hong Kong during the SARS epidemic and experienced it first hand. At that time it was very much a real and scary threat. People were catching it everyday and people were dying every week. I felt that if there was something that was going to hurt me it would have been SARS.

Posted by Brietta Tsang on October 1, 2006 01:22 PM | Permalink

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