With the ultra-infectious Omicron variant looking set to sweep the world, Paul Rogers argues that the greatest global security challenge facing us is to heed WHO advice and ensure rapid world-wide vaccination against COVID to reduce the risk of new, more lethal variants of the virus emerging in future.
In this essay, first published in a new volume by the Foreign Policy Centre and Peaceful Change Initiative, Richard Reeve analyses whether, after an era of catastrophic foreign military interventions and amidst talk of ever wider deployments and campaigns, there are still positive internationalist roles that the British Armed Forces could be fulfilling.
This briefing paper from Rethinking Security and UNA-UK compares the external consultation processes of the recent Integrated Review with previous UK security reviews. It aims to inform better practice and contribute to Rethinking Security’s Alternative Security Review project.
Despite a consensus that preventing violence is better and cheaper than trying to cure or contain it, almost all governments persist in vastly over-resourcing coercive responses. Ashley Macmillan argues for proactive and inclusive peace and security policies to be as normal as preventive measures in public health.
The unfolding tragedy of Afghanistan has eclipsed reporting of the COVID pandemic while a fourth wave of infections is sweeping the Earth. Paul Rogers argues that global vaccine inequality risks those in all countries as the Delta variant tests the limits of current vaccines.
Rethinking Security’s new Outreach Coordinator Joanna Frew and her partner live in Martha House*, a ‘house of hospitality’ in north London with forced migrants who have no other means of support. Here she shares what she’s learnt about the value of a community setting for security over the last seven years.
Ralf Becker reports on how the Rethinking Security initiative in Germany has developed from a scenario for shifting to a civil security policy to a nationwide network with real prospects of helping shape government policy after landmark national elections in September.
Is rethinking security for the common good even possible while a tiny policy-making elite equates security with dominance and control? David Gee argues that our history of change-makers is more powerful than we may realise.
At the heart of human security is freedom from the fear of harm and want, writes Diana Francis. It is something that we owe each other. Yet it is constantly denied to millions by poverty and neglect, war and famine, preventable and treatable diseases, war, oppression, discrimination neglect and individual acts of physical violence.
The UK Government’s Integrated Review sets an ambitious agenda to be a contender in an era of global competition. Unshackled from Europe, everything seems to be a priority. Richard Reeve argues that, for all the talk of its soft and scientific superpowers, the opportunity to save the world and protect and serve its people has been wasted.
Fifteen months on, the COVID-19 pandemic is showing few signs of abating, and is even accelerating in parts of Europe, South America and Asia. In the first of a new series of regular briefings for Rethinking Security, Paul Rogers argues that massive increases in global inequality are as central to this human security crisis as the immediate health impacts.
Between Covid and climate catastrophe, 2021 is a time of intense human insecurity. With neither Government nor Opposition likely to develop a strategy that addresses this, Richard Reeve argues that it's high time the UK had a human security strategy.
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