Oxford Research Group provides research and analysis on underlying causes of global insecurity and advocates more strategic approaches to security and peacebuilding.
Why this matters
Our greatest security challenges arise not from threats to the ‘global order’, but the damage that this ‘order’ is causing to the social and ecological fabric on which humanity depends to flourish.
We face an existential crisis, manifested as climate change, growing inequality, the rapid depletion of finite resources, and efforts by elite nations to control global affairs through coercive means.
The effects of the crisis on our common security are many, eclipsing the risks that some states like the UK have prioritised: the power of other states like Russia, China, or of non-state groups, to threaten Western interests.
These systemic problems provide no enemy to point at, only mirrors to peer into. In the glass peering back at us are a host of normalised attitudes that are making the world more insecure: individualism rather than solidarity; nationalism and ethnocentrism rather than the principle of the common human good; anthropocentrism rather than ecological responsibility; an economic system that divides humanity between billionaires and paupers; and patriarchal and class cultures of dominance, division and exploitation.
A productive shift in strategy assumes also a progressive evolution of attitude, not least in whose security needs are thought to matter.
More
For more about the principles of sustainable security, see the Rethinking Security discussion paper (section 5.5).
For more about work to turn these principles into policy proposals, visit Oxford Research Group.
References and further reading
Francis, D., 2006. ‘Pacifism and the responsibility to protect’. CCTS Review, Issue 31, pp. 11-14.
Rogers, P., 2000. ‘Losing Control: Global security in the 21st century’. 1st ed. London: Pluto Press.