Conflict, Security, Foreign Policy, and International Political Economy: Past Paths and Future Directions in International Studies

Security and Peace: Understanding, Production, and Work Style

SECURITY AND PEACE Understanding, Production, and Work Style Davis B. Bobrow The most attractive accomplishment of security and peace studies and policies would be for them to become historical curiosities akin to alchemy, Victorian-era plumbing, or vanquished diseases. A second best would be signs of progress on that road marked by improved understanding and early diagnosis, and-even better-more available and less costly means for prevention and treatment, containment and cure. To extend the medical metaphor, we would then see in the present or in confident prospect reductions in the incidence and severity of insecurity, destruction, casualties, and deaths, and in the opportunity costs of measures to achieve such reductions. From the second-best perspective, these are in some ways the best of times for security and peace studies and policies. In other ways, they are far from that and leave a lot to be desired. These two aspects of our current intellectual and policy situation suggest lessons that are sobering in their implications for the limits on our understanding of security and peace and even more so for the application of our understanding to produce those collective accomplishments. Of no less importance, this duality challenges us to adopt a work style appropriate both to what we have learned and produced and to our continuing limitations-and to socialize successor generations of security and peace experts into it. The following pages begin with a crude summary of what seems to me to be "good news" about the point to which we have come 141 142 Conflict, Security, Foreign Policy, and International Politics and then turn to a II darker side" suggesting how far we have to go. These lead me to identify some persistent realities that should be squarely faced up to and to offer some suggestions on how we should deal with our unfinished agenda.l The Good News We can readily recognize the abundance of intellectual and policy effort devoted to understanding and producing security and peace over the last half century and six now widely accepted expansions in the scope and resources of the field. First, even the most cursory review of our major journals shows in recent decades a cornucopia of "prisms" for considering security and peace that apparently go beyond traditional power-centered and thus competitive (realism) and normatively centered and potentially cooperative (idealism) perspectives. Prominent entrants in the security and peace theory sweepstakes now wear rational choice, institutionalism , critical security, gender, power transition, domestic politics, failed state, democratic peace, and ideational perspective colors. The proliferation of prisms has been accompanied, particularly in the last two decades, by five additional expansions of scope and increases of attention and resources: issue domains, generic types of actors, relevant specific actors with asymmetric agendas and assets, technology-enabled interactions, and information and informationprocessing tools. Discussions of security and peace have come to regularly encompass issue domains other than the political-military such as economic , environmental, demographic, public health, sociocultural continuity, and fundamental political forms. That expansion has brought with it attention to a widening range of generic types of actors inside and outside of governments. Consider the now rather accepted inclusion of central government civil ministries, subnational public authorities, firms and in particular multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations (domestic and transnational), expert ("epistemic") communities, international governmental organizations (regional and global, functionally specific such as international financial institutions or multipurpose such as the G-7). The end of the cold war has also brought increased attention to a larger if changing number of specific actors (with proper noun names) Security and Peace 143 with more asymmetric agendas and capabilities for pursuing security and peace. Those players and purposes often were not, at least in prevailing American frames, important in the bipolar construct or were only considered in relation to it with considerable distortion. Asymmetric agendas now and for the future combine with asymmetric assets and vulnerabilities derived from the expansion discussed next. Technology innovation and diffusion have changed the world in terms of damage-inflicting capacity, communication, mobility, transparency, and financial and commercial globalization. Their joint effects have massively increased the variety, speed, reach, visibility , and relevance of interactions across borders. As a consequence , the behaviors and the perceptions, the independent and intervening variables if you will, that matter for actual and recognized states of security and peace have proliferated. Barriers to entry into and competition in security and peace arenas have been lowered while time...