As the climate collapses and wars sweep the Middle East, Ukraine and beyond, Diana Francis and Andrew Rigby, two of the founders of Rethinking Security a decade ago, make the urgent case for far more radical action to end the death-grip of militarised security on our politics, economy, environment and imaginations.
Rethinking Security began when a group of individuals and organisations, all working in some way for peace, met to see whether they could work together to further their shared goal of reducing war and violence and cooperating for the common good of mankind. Some were pacifists, others not. When the idea of ‘rethinking security’ was formulated and chosen as the network’s title, our purpose was to question the idea of ‘security’ as military protection and define it more broadly, as its etymology would suggest, as freedom from care or worry, through the meeting of basic human needs.
When representative public opinion surveys were conducted in 2023 as part of our Alternative Security Review by Coventry University, along with Rethinking Security’s staff and members, the responses of a wide spectrum of people vindicated this broad conception of human security, as is clear from the final report. Since those surveys were conducted, however, awareness of the climate threat has increased, as global heating accelerates, and would surely feature more saliently in a fresh survey of public perceptions of the most significant threats to their personal and collective security/well-being.
What does not yet seem to be widely recognised is the terrible contribution that is being made to the climate and ecological crisis by the military around the world, both in ‘peace’ and in war. Abby Martin’s recent film, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, gives a horrific insight into the damage done, in so many countries, by the US military alone: to the land, to wildlife and to the people who live there. The global emissions and other damage occasioned by the mere maintenance of armies, navies and air forces around the world are hard to imagine. Recent research has calculated that the total military carbon footprint is approximately 5.5% of global emissions. If the world’s militaries were a country, this figure would mean they have the fourth largest national carbon footprint in the world.
The spoils and profits of war
But that is not all. The carbon footprint of the arms trade is immense. Though he was no pacifist, in his famous farewell speech, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower focussed on the damage done by the ‘military-industrial complex’: the size and cost of the arms industry and its economic impact on human security: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed”. Nothing has changed there; but now, surely, he would have spoken too about what the arms industry is doing to our planet, the contribution to global heating that is made now, by the energy used in the creation of all the ships, tanks, planes, weapons, ammunition and other equipment, in an ever-expanding arms industry, from the building of factories and the extraction of raw materials to the endless manufacture, transport and delivery of them all. The environmental cost is incalculable.
Then come the wars themselves, now proliferating disastrously, at enormous human and environmental cost, while consuming vast amounts of energy in the launching of the weapons to destroy not only people but homes, buildings of all kinds, land and trees, crops and wildlife. The reduction of Gaza to a sea of rubble, which is a continuing, indescribable human tragedy, encapsulates not only war’s cruelty but what it does to the earth and all things living on it.
Now we have the bombing of oil wells and other installations, in the Middle East, Ukraine and Russia, which the rest of the world laments because of the impact on oil prices – never mentioning the greenhouse gas emissions seen in the terrible black clouds pictured on the front pages of our newspapers. The focus is only on the economic and not the ecological cost – or indeed the cost in human lives – of these wars.
The urgency of radical action
Perhaps awareness is growing now, after the recent, relentless heat waves. At home in the UK, there has been little or no rain in the last month (but a good number of wild fires). In other parts of the world, monsoon rains have caused terrible floods. This is the new ‘normal’, requiring us to recognise the fact that climate change has already taken place and is set to accelerate. The climate crisis is now – we are in the midst of it. If we don’t change, human life on earth will become unsustainable.
We two, as lifelong pacifists, have been in a minority in Rethinking Security, happy to be part of its gentler, more persuasive approach in articulating the need for change. Now that we have reached a point of intense global danger, it seems time for us all to recognise the extreme urgency and the fundamental nature of the change that is needed, and speak out about the immensity of the lethal damage done not only by war itself but the perpetual war machine – and the adversarial mentality it embodies.
If there is to be any chance at all that life as we know it can be saved, the oneness of the human race must come to the fore. We must recognise the immensity of the threat we all face, feel our shared humanity and cooperate as never before. We must dissolve power blocs, stop threatening and fighting each other and stop sinking our wealth and other capacities into wars and their preparation. We need to focus on enhancing our capacities for cooperation through intensive diplomacy, disarmament and peacemaking, while at the same time working together on a common agenda for saving our planet.
The ‘United Nations’ must become just that, with the abolition of the ‘Security Council’ as a first step. And we must transform our economies accordingly, ‘turn our swords into ploughshares’, not because that is an attractive idea but because it is a necessity.
We must work together as a global movement to save our planet, acting upon the recognition of the absolute insanity of thinking a sustainable future for us all is attainable through the continued reliance on ‘militarised security’.
Here in the UK there is no sign yet that our new leader and his government have seen the need for this rapid and radical shift. The military commitments made by Keir Starmer this year, both on spending for new equipment for British troops and basing support for US aircraft attacking Iran, have not been challenged by our new Prime Minister; but now is the time for Rethinking Security to make its voice heard by people and governments alike, with the message that the rethinking must be fundamental and the change that follows rapid. The task is daunting and the urgency is real.
The Labour MP Chris Hinchcliffe contrasted the £15bn to be added to the defence budget with the lack of funding to protect critical ecosystems: “The government can summon billions of pounds for new military hardware when the defence sector calls for it. We need an equally decisive mobilisation of investment to restore the natural world on which we rely for our food, water, and clean air. Without these essentials our country has no future …”
Andrew Rigby is Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies (Coventry University, UK). He has spent most of his professional career teaching peace studies in different locations and institutions, an activity informed by his deep commitment to nonviolence as practice and principle.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Excerpt from a draft of President Eisenhower’s farewell address, delivered on 17 January 1961; US archives via Wikipedia.
Indeed..time for the Terrestrian sapience to emerge and see off the b€$tia£ flat-Earth knuckle-dragger hominids masquerading as human.
Between the extremes of military security and human security, there is another type of security that rarely gets openly discussed due to political correctness. This is cultural security, the fear that our (i.e. white European) culture is increasingly under threat from other immigrating cultures. This fear drives many to support wars against the others and to oppose immigration of the others. The belief that keeping our culture free from influence from other cultures is somehow worth fighting for.
Given that all cultures benefit from adopting elements from other cultures and that there is no such thing as a pure culture, a pure civilisation or a pure race, this belief is a legacy of poor social and cultural education. Unless we educate our children to think positively of other cultures and not be fearful of them, our need for security will remain militarised, at least in the Western core.