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COOPERATIVE SECURITY
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Chapter
- Additional Information
105 COOPERATIVE SECURITY Of the security concepts in use in Asia-Pacific security discourse, this is one of the most popular and ambiguous. While the origins of the concept are unclear and the term is used in very dif ferent ways around the region, this has not stopped numerous scholars and various government of ficials from claiming to have coined or “introduced” the concept. An early reference to cooperative security in the Asia-Pacific region appeared in the title of the 1988 Pacific Basin Symposium. 1 It used the term as mor e or less synonymous with security cooperation. In a 1988 article, John Steinbr uner offered a more substantive discussion of the concept. 2 He consciously used the term cooperative security to dif ferentiate it from common security.3 His article focuses on the need to cr eate strategic stability between the Soviet Union and the United States, and looks almost exclusively at Europe. It does not shed much light on cooperative security as a concept, but instead pr escribes security policies to promote stability. The most important of these include the adoption of essentially defensive military postures. Steinbruner claims that the United States has “long promoted abstract ideas of cooperative security” although he pr ovides no specific examples.4 He went on to develop his ideas in a series of workshops and a confer ence with other leading American 01 A_Pac Security Lexicon 9/24/07, 9:03 AM 105 106 academics and senior of ficials (see below), leading to the publication of the monograph, A New Concept of Cooperative Security, in 1992. Yet cooperative security was not immediately picked up by Asia-Pacific scholars in the United States. 5 Instead, it was a Canadian Government-sponsor ed project, the North Pacific Cooperative Security Dialogue (NPCSD) which made most of the early r unning developing the substance of the concept. The NPCSD, which ran from 1990 until 1993, was one of the first “Track Two” unofficial security dialogues in the r egion. It brought together scholars and of ficials from across the AsiaPacific to discuss a wide range of traditional and non-conventional security issues.6 The Canadian interpr etation of cooperative security set out by Secretary of State for ExternalAffairs Joe Clark reconceptualized security to take into account the end of the Cold War and the new complexity of r egional security issues. 7 The broad objective of cooperative security was to r eplace the Cold War conception of security based on bipolarity , deterrence, and the balance of power with a multilateral pr ocess and framework based on reassurance, a goal it shares with common security. According to Dewitt and Acharya, there are three ideas at the heart of cooperative security .8 The first is the importance of inclusivity — in terms of both participants and subject matter . In terms of participants, cooperative security ar gues for the inclusion of both like-minded and non-like-minded actors in security arrangements. This is “r egardless of a government’s defining characteristics, its place in the international hierarchy of states, its allegiances to other multilateral fora or pr ocesses or its position on any one of a host of international issues”. Similarly , while the concept accepts that states are central to global political life it does not assume they are the only relevant actors. Cooperative security recognizes that non-state actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, and other transnational entities have a critical role to play in managing and enhancing security . Dewitt and Acharya stress that inclusivity does not simply refer to the question of participants. Cooperative security also requires inclusivity in terms of subject matter . Like comprehensive and common security, it argues security should not be conceived simply in narr ow military terms, but should also incorporate less traditional concerns such as envir onmental degradation, demographic issues, and transnational criminal activities that can exacerbate inter-state relations and potentially lead to conflict. COOPERATIVE SECURITY 01 A_Pac Security Lexicon 9/24/07, 9:03 AM 106 [44.192.53.34] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:41 GMT) 107 Second, cooperative security believes in the importance of establishing habits of dialogue between regional actors. States should take part in regular consultations with one another and, ideally, should acknowledge the long-term benefits of establishing formal processes for discussion. The thir d ideal at the heart of cooperative security , as its name suggests, is that many contemporary questions of security (such as transnational crime, environmental degradation, and disease...