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1 Security in the Age of Globalization Separating Appearance from Reality Mohammed Ayoob I This chapter makes several arguments. First, it contends that the proponents of globalization (those who insist that the free market is now firmly in the driver’s seat and will determine the future trajectory of the international system) and the exponents of a global society (those who advocate solidarist norms for global governance) overestimate the nature of economic, technological , and normative changes that impact the security arena. Second, it maintains that these same groups underestimate the resilience of the state and, even more, its role as the primary provider of security and the preeminent locus of security decision making. Third, it claims that there has been an attempt, deliberate in substantial part, by policymakers and analysts in the global North to portray a basically realist world as a liberal one by conflating rhetoric with reality. Fourth, it suggests that security relations among the countries of the global North have become subject to a different logic from the security relationship between the North and the South as well relations within the South itself. Fifth, it argues that neither of the major paradigms in the field of International Relations—neoliberalism or neorealism—is able satisfactorily to identify and explain the major security problems of the world we live in today. This is because both paradigms draw their data from a geographically circumscribed universe and are not adequately informed by the history of the evolution both of the modern state and the system of states. Sixth, it asserts that since the large majority of the members of the international system as well the overwhelming majority of conflicts in the international system are located in the global South, no adequate explanation of international security issues is possible without focusing on the Third World. Furthermore, that such attention to the Third World must be two-dimensional, focusing both on 9 intra-South relations and the relationship of the Third World with the global North (for details on this argument, see Ayoob & Acharya in Neumann, 1998). Finally, at the most fundamental conceptual level, this chapter argues that the concept of security should not be unduly broadened and made so elastic as to lose all analytical utility. Security is a concept that addresses issues of order and authority and is, therefore, preeminently political in its connotation. The state, as the primary political institution, must, therefore, form the primary point of reference for any security paradigm. Variables from the ecological to the economic may impinge on the security arena, but their influence must be filtered through the political arena in order to become a part of the security calculus. Delinking security from the political realm and from the state does no service either to the concept of security or to other values that particular analysts would like to preserve and promote. The various propositions that this chapter attempts to put forward are so closely interwoven that often it is difficult clearly to separate one argument from another. As a result, the reader may find that more than one argument is made in the same paragraph if not in the same sentence. The reader will have to bear with me on this score because, given the interrelatedness of the arguments , one cannot completely disentangle them. II When discussing the notion of “security,” proponents of globalization and those who subscribe to the notion of a global (rather than international) society make two arguments to which they are wedded in different degrees.1 However , they rarely, if ever, test these arguments against international realities. When they do, they choose their data from a restricted universe and even then distort the data considerably to fit their conclusions.2 The first argument made by the proponents of globalization is that “security ” concerns as traditionally conceived by scholars and practitioners of international relations have become marginal, if not totally irrelevant, to the functioning of international society. Therefore, the study of security should be relegated to a secondary position in International Relations curricula. This argument is based on the assumption that the privileged position occupied by states in the arena of international relations has declined dramatically as a result of globalization. It is also based on the premise that issues of economic exchange and interdependence, resulting from advances in the technology of production, communication, and information, now occupy positions of primacy in the international agenda. Therefore, the argument runs that security issues that had dominated a state-centric world should no...

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