Security in the Contemporary World Ncert Upsc Notes

OVERVIEW

• The terms ‘security’ and ‘national security’ are frequently encountered in world politics and are often used to stop debate and discussion under the pretext of being too important, shadowy, dangerous, or secret for open public scrutiny.
• In a democracy, security cannot be considered something outside the business of ordinary citizens, requiring citizens to understand its meaning and India’s security concerns.
• The chapter introduces two distinct perspectives on security—traditional and non-traditional—and underscores the importance of situational contexts in determining views of security.
• The 1994 UNDP Human Development Report articulated concern regarding human security, stating: “the concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly… It has been more related to nation states than people… Forgotten were the legitimate concerns of ordinary people who sought security in their daily lives.”
  

WHAT IS SECURITY?

• At its most fundamental level, security implies freedom from threats.
• Because human life and state existence are surrounded by numerous everyday threats, security studies restrict their scope only to extremely dangerous threats that endanger ‘core values’ beyond repair if left unaddressed.
• Determining what constitutes core values raises critical questions regarding whether they represent the country as a whole, ordinary citizens, or government interpretations.
• Security remains a slippery, context-dependent idea because societies and global conditions change constantly over historical periods.
• Diverse global populations (nearly 650 crore people organised into nearly 200 nations) do not share an identical conception of security.
• The notions of security are broadly classified into two categories:
  • Traditional conceptions of security.
  • Non-traditional conceptions of security.

TRADITIONAL NOTIONS: EXTERNAL

• Principal Danger: The greatest threat in the traditional conception comes from military threats originating from another country.
• Core Values at Risk: Military action imperils the core values of sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity, while also threatening the lives of ordinary citizens, who are often targeted to break public support for war.
• State Responses to War: A government confronted by the threat of war has three basic choices:
  1. To surrender (though governments will not advertise this as national policy).
  2. To prevent attack by promising to raise the costs of war to an unacceptable level (deterrence).
  3. To defend itself when war breaks out to deny the enemy its objectives and turn back or defeat attacking forces (defence).
• Balance of Power:
  • Governments closely observe the military strength of others, especially neighbours or countries with which they have historical conflicts or differences, as power disparities indicate potential future aggression.
  • Countries work hard to maintain a favourable balance of power primarily by building military strength, supported by economic and technological capacity.
• Alliance Building:
  • Coalitions of states coordinate actions to deter or defend against military aggression, usually formalised in written treaties based on clearly identified threats.
  • Alliances are constructed to boost effective power relative to rival states and are governed by national interests, meaning they shift when interests shift.
  • Example: The United States backed Islamic militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, but later attacked them after Al Qaeda (led by Osama bin Laden) executed the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.
• Absence of Central Global Authority:
  • In the traditional perspective, external threats dominate because the international system lacks an acknowledged central governing authority capable of regulating behavior, unlike domestic systems where governments regulate violence.
  • The United Nations is not a super-state; its authority is determined entirely by what member states permit and obey, leaving each country ultimately responsible for its own security.

TRADITIONAL NOTIONS: INTERNAL

• Post-WWII Context of Powerful States:
  • Internal security was largely taken for granted by the world’s most powerful nations after the Second World War.
  • The United States and the Soviet Union appeared united internally, and Western European nations faced no serious internal community conflicts, focusing their primary attention on external Cold War threats.
  • Western powers nevertheless faced external colonial concerns, such as the French fighting in Vietnam in the 1950s and the British fighting in Kenya in the 1950s and early 1960s.
• Challenges Facing Newly-Independent Third World Nations:
  • The Cold War was responsible for approximately one-third of all post-WWII wars, most of which were fought in the Third World.
  • Newly independent Asian and African states faced distinct challenges compared to Europe:
    • External military conflict with neighbours over borders, territories, populations, or cold war alliance rivalries, alongside fears of imperial wars from former colonial powers.
    • Internal military conflict, particularly separatist movements seeking to form independent countries.
  • External and internal threats often merged when neighbouring states instigated or aided domestic separatist groups.
  • Internal armed conflicts make up more than 95 per cent of all armed conflicts fought worldwide.
  • Between 1946 and 1991, the number of civil wars increased twelve-fold, marking the largest jump in 200 years.

TRADITIONAL SECURITY AND COOPERATION

• Limits on Violence (Ends and Means): Traditional security recognises the possibility of cooperation to limit violence in both purpose and conduct.
  • Countries should only resort to war for just causes, primarily self-defence or the protection of populations from genocide.
  • Military means must be bounded: armies must avoid harming non-combatants as well as unarmed or surrendering soldiers, avoid excessive violence, and only apply force as a last resort when all alternatives have failed.
• Disarmament:
  • Mandates that all states surrender specific categories of weapons.
  • 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC): Acceded to by more than 155 states, banning production and possession of biological weapons.
  • 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC): Acceded to by 193 states, banning chemical weapons.
  • Both conventions included all great powers, though the US and Soviet Union refused to relinquish nuclear weapons.
• Arms Control:
  • Focuses on regulating the acquisition, testing, or deployment of weapons.
  • 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty: Attempted to stop the US and USSR from using ballistic missiles as defensive shields to launch nuclear attacks, stopping large-scale deployment.
  • Strategic Arms Treaties: Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II (SALT II) and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) signed by the superpowers.
  • 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT): Regulated acquisition by allowing nations that tested and manufactured nuclear weapons before 1967 to retain them while requiring all other nations to give up the right to acquire them.
• Confidence Building:
  • A collaborative process where rival nations share ideas, military intentions, plans, and force deployment data to demonstrate they are not preparing surprise attacks, thereby avoiding war arising from misperception.
• Traditional Security Core Feature: Force is treated as both the principal threat to security and the principal instrument for attaining security.

NON-TRADITIONAL NOTIONS

• Non-traditional notions expand the scope beyond military dangers to include conditions affecting human existence, re-examining the referent (Security for whom?), the threats involved, and the approaches required.
• While traditional security designates the sovereign state and its territorial institutions as the referent, non-traditional security expands the referent to individuals, communities, and humankind, known as ‘human security’ or ‘global security’.
• Human Security:
  • Prioritises the protection of individuals over the protection of state apparatuses.
  • Secure states do not automatically create secure citizens; during the past 100 years, more individuals have been killed by their own governments than by invading foreign armies.
  • Narrow Concept: Focuses on violent threats directed against individuals and communities from internal violence (as articulated by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan).
  • Broad Concept: Argues that threats must encompass hunger, disease, and natural disasters, which kill far more people than war, genocide, and terrorism combined.
  • Broadest Formulation: Encompasses economic security, human dignity, ‘freedom from want’, and ‘freedom from fear’.
• Global Security:
  • Emerged in the 1990s to confront planetary threats that no individual country can solve alone, such as global warming, international epidemics, and international terrorism.
  • Global Warming Impact: A sea level rise of 1.5 to 2.0 metres would flood 20 per cent of Bangladesh, inundate most of the Maldives, and threaten nearly half the population of Thailand.

NEW SOURCES OF THREATS

• Terrorism:
  • Defined as deliberate and indiscriminate political violence targeted against civilians to cultivate fear and use public distress as leverage against governments or rivals.
  • International terrorism involves citizens or territory of multiple countries.
  • Classic tactics include airplane hijackings and bombing crowded public venues (trains, cafes, markets).
  • While historically prevalent in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and South Asia, worldwide government and public focus heightened dramatically following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in the US.
• Human Rights Violations:
  • Classified into three broad categories:
    1. Political rights (e.g., freedom of speech and assembly).
    2. Economic and social rights.
    3. Rights of colonised populations or ethnic and indigenous minorities.
  • Global consensus is lacking on which rights are universal and what actions the international community should take during abuses.
  • Events since the 1990s (Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Rwandan genocide, Indonesian military actions in East Timor) sparked fierce debates regarding whether the UN Charter authorises armed humanitarian intervention, or whether interventions reflect the selective national interests of dominant states.
• Global Poverty and Inequality:
  • World population (at 760 crore) is projected to reach nearly 1000 crore by mid-21st century.
  • Half of current world population growth is concentrated in six countries: India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.
  • Population is projected to triple over the next 50 years across the poorest nations, while rich nations face population shrinkage.
  • High income combined with low population growth makes rich states richer, while low income combined with high birth rates reinforces poverty, widening the North-South divide and sharpening disparities within the South.
  • Sub-Saharan Africa represents the world’s poorest region and experiences the majority of armed conflicts; at the turn of the 21st century, war deaths there exceeded the rest of the world combined.
  • Disparities in infant mortality and health: under-five child deaths make up 50% of total deaths in the developing world compared to 5% in the developed world. Infant mortality stands at 3 per 1000 in Sweden, 1 in 100 on average in developed countries, 1 in 7 in the Indian subcontinent, and 1 in 5 in parts of Africa.
• Migration and Displaced Populations:
  • Economic distress in the South drives large-scale migration towards the North, generating international political frictions.
  • Migrants vs. Refugees: Migrants voluntarily leave home for economic opportunities (states are not obligated to accept them); refugees flee war, natural disaster, or political persecution (states are generally expected to accept them).
  • Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs): People fleeing violence who remain within national borders (e.g., Kashmiri Pandits who fled violence in the Kashmir Valley in the early 1990s).
  • Between 1990 and 1995, 70 states engaged in 93 wars resulting in 55 lakh deaths, generating millions of refugees; in the 1990s, all but three of 60 refugee flows coincided with internal armed conflicts.
  • Distribution of hosted displaced persons globally (2017): Africa (30%), Middle East and North Africa (26%), Europe (17%), Americas (16%), Asia and Pacific (11%).
• Health Epidemics:
  • Rapid transmission across borders via migration, tourism, commerce, and military deployments of diseases like HIV-AIDS, bird flu, SARS, and Corona, alongside poorly understood diseases (ebola virus, hantavirus, hepatitis C) and drug-resistant mutations of tuberculosis, malaria, dengue, and cholera.
  • By 2003, approximately 4 crore people were infected with HIV-AIDS worldwide (two-thirds in Africa, one-sixth in South Asia); expensive drug therapies lowered death rates in North America in the late 1990s but remained out of reach in Africa, deepening poverty.
  • Severe infection rates: HIV-AIDS affects 1 in 6 adults in Southern Africa and 1 in 3 in Botswana.
  • Animal epidemics also inflict huge economic losses, such as Britain losing billions of dollars during mad-cow disease and bird flu disrupting poultry exports from Asian nations.
• Criterion for Inclusion: To prevent the security concept from losing coherence, an issue qualifies as a security problem only if it threatens the very existence of the referent (a state or distinct population group), varying according to local context (e.g., rising sea levels for the Maldives, HIV-AIDS for Southern Africa, or the 1994 genocide where roughly 5 lakh Tutsis were killed by Hutus in Rwanda).

COOPERATIVE SECURITY

• Non-traditional security threats necessitate international cooperation rather than military confrontation, as military force cannot resolve poverty, manage migrations, or contain epidemics, and often aggravates them.
• Military force in cooperative security is confined to a role of last resort (such as countering terrorism or enforcing human rights against regimes slaughtering their own citizens) and is most legitimate when sanctioned and applied collectively by the international community.
• Cooperation operates across bilateral, regional, continental, or global tiers and involves diverse actors:
  • International organisations (UN, WHO, World Bank, IMF).
  • Non-governmental organisations (Amnesty International, Red Cross, charities, foundations, trade unions).
  • Businesses and corporations.
  • Prominent personalities (e.g., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela).

INDIA’S SECURITY STRATEGY

India’s security strategy integrates four broad components deployed in varying combinations:

• 1. Strengthening Military Capabilities:
  • Driven by historical conflicts with neighbours: Pakistan (1947–48, 1965, 1971, and 1999) and China (1962).
  • Situated in a South Asian region surrounded by nuclear-armed states, India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974 and tested weapons in 1998 to safeguard national security.
• 2. Strengthening International Norms and Institutions:
  • Supported international conflict resolution via the UN, promoted Asian solidarity, decolonisation, and disarmament under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
  • Campaigned for universal, non-discriminatory non-proliferation regimes across weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, chemical).
  • Advocated for an equitable New International Economic Order (NIEO).
  • Utilised non-alignment to carve out peace outside superpower bloc politics.
  • Ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol alongside 160 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
  • Contributed substantial troop contingents to UN peacekeeping missions abroad.
• 3. Meeting Internal Security Challenges:
  • Addressed separatist and militant groups seeking secession in regions such as Nagaland, Mizoram, Punjab, and Kashmir.
  • Preserved national unity by maintaining a democratic political structure that allows communities to freely voice grievances and share political power.
• 4. Economic Development and Poverty Alleviation:
  • Focused on lifting the vast majority of citizens out of poverty and misery while resisting extreme economic inequality.
  • Democratic political pressure compels elected governments to combine economic growth with human development, demonstrating that democracy serves as an active instrument to provide security.

Reference Ncert Documents

https://ncert.nic.in/textbook/pdf/leps105.pdf