The openSecurity section of
openDemocracy was established in 2012 with the support of the Royal Norwegian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (RNMFA). Norway has embraced a peace policy in
international relations, as with the 1995 Oslo accords on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And its government reacted to the most lethal
politically-motivated attack in Europe in the last decade, the Utøya massacre of
2011, not with ‘war on terror’ rhetoric but—as famously encapsulated by its
then prime minister (and now NATO head), Jens Stoltenberg—a commitment to ‘more democracy, more openness and
more humanity’.

But this has, sadly, been the
exception which has proved the rule. On the wider canvas, the end of the cold
war, which promised a world without dividing lines, has instead seen Islamism
replace Stalinism as the ‘other’ to US-led imperial might in an increasingly
Manichean struggle, in which the events of ‘September 11’ look more like a
landmark than a beginning or an end. And the parallel snowballing crisis of
globalised neoliberalism, which could yet issue in a more self-managed,
networked society, has so far been matched only by a ratcheting up of the surveillance of the citizen and the suppression of NGO-led dissent, most dramatically in the bouleversement in the Arab world between
democratic ‘spring’ and dictatorial ‘winter’.

Marx used the analogy of the camera obscura to describe how the world
as observed could appear to be on its head. And if there is one thing
openSecurity has done it has been to show that ‘common sense’ understandings of
‘security’ are often upside-down. Keynes
explained the ‘paradox of thrift’ by which fiscal policies reducing demand,
while apparently obvious reactions to economic shocks, could simply exacerbate
them. And the hundreds of articles published by openSecurity over the years
have demonstrated a ‘paradox of security’, whereby purportedly self-evident
authoritarian reactions to threats to the state have merely fostered a spiral
of violent regression.

Protecting the state over against the citizen doesn't make anyone feel safer. Flickr / Jackman Chiu. Some rights reserved.

This paradox can be captured in ten
theses:

1. The focus of security in a democratic society should be the citizen, not
the state. ‘Terrorist’
is a largely meaningless label, applicable only to those violent organisations
which not only seek to dominate without popular consent but also attempt to
intimidate the public at large by the deterrent effects of egregious violence.
It has become, however, a catch-all concept in official discourse—except,
critically, where one’s own government is implicated—fundamentally as a
legitimisation of the abrogations of human rights and the rule of law
characteristic of states of emergency. Yet states are only legitimate in as far
as they provide collective solutions to problems which individuals cannot solve
on their own—the ‘security dilemma’ being one—and so merely eat away at their
own Weberian authority, as exercising a monopoly of legitimate force, by acting
over and against the citizen, as our Whose Police? series showed
in spades. And these problems must be defined from the standpoint of the
citizen and her needs, not raisons d’état.
This is the key insight of the notion of ‘human security’, which also points us to the
portfolio of policies which can contribute to (or detract from) security, well
beyond the sphere of policemen and soldiers.

 2. Mass surveillance is not only
oppressive—it doesn’t even work. If the globalisation of communications, via the internet,
has been facilitated by satellite and fibre-optic technologies, these have also
allowed an unprecedented potential for mass surveillance, going well beyond
national boundaries, as the Snowden revelations have demonstrated and our Future under Surveillance strand of publishing elaborated.
There has been much argument since about the fundamental incompatibility of
mass surveillance and individual privacy as a human right (not to mention the
presumption of innocence), to which the proponents of the Big Brother state
have wearily responded (in as far as they have felt obliged to do so at all)
that it is only by collecting the ‘haystack’ of available information that the
‘needle’ of the ‘terrorist’ threat can be found. This misses the point that the
best place to hide a needle is in a haystack and the best tool to find it is a
magnet. In other words, as the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
has recognised, targeted intelligence-gathering,
with the proper judicial constraints, is much more effective than collecting
everything just because one can.

 3. A gender perspective is not an optional
extra: security cannot be understood without it. In March 2015, Sweden’s (female)
foreign minister announced that, on feminist grounds, an arms
deal with Saudi Arabia was to be abrogated. While this represented a rare
intrusion of gender considerations, eyebrows were only raised because the
security domain is so suffused by patriarchy—and not just in Gulf autocracies—that
this has become entirely taken for granted. The imbrication of masculinism with
nationalism (state and secessionist), organised violence and violent crime
means none of these phenomena can be adequately analysed in isolation from it.
Equally, the application of ‘men in uniforms’, and their instruments, as the
default response to security challenges—even when sub-optimal or even
counter-productive to do so—can only be properly scrutinised, and better
alternatives advocated, using a gender-sensitive lens. Otherwise, a purblind
pursuit of conflict will follow, making spirals of futile violence much more
protracted and much more difficult to exit than should be the case, as our Conflict in Context: Colombia case study shows.

 4. Social policies may be far more
productive of security than ‘security’ policies. Violence on a social scale is a
product of two phenomena, which face their most severe outworking in
cheek-by-jowl urban milieux, as our Cities in Conflict series spelled out. First is a stretched social
hierarchy (including as stretched by gender), which permits those in elevated
positions to believe violence against the Untermenschen
is necessary or even legitimate to keep them in their place and those at the
bottom thrash out inchoately—often against each other rather than the unreachable
elite. Second is social mistrust, which exacerbates security dilemmas as
individuals club together under convenient ‘ethnic’ banners and aim to get their
retaliation in first. Put the two together, so that members of one ethnic group
dominate the state, and the result is the horror—now recorded courtesy of the
smartphone—of the routine killing of African-American young men by white police officers. Seen in
this context, ‘law and order’ responses which aim merely to shore up a
crumbling hierarchy and do nothing to enhance social glue fail to make anyone
safer. Hence the United States, for all its prosperity, comes 101st
in the Global Peace Index, topped by the egalitarian and
socially-comfortable Iceland and Denmark. Indeed, all five Nordics are in the
top 11 (out of 162—Syria, inevitably, comes bottom). Not only do their
universal welfare states flatten the unequal distribution of market incomes but
also they favour high levels of social trust. Austerity policies across Europe
have not only undermined welfare and reduced security in the labour market—in
the most extreme way in Greece—but have inevitably stimulated street protests and associated
oppressive ‘security’ measures.

5. Building walls to keep humanity out
makes for less security than hospitality. In the face of the collapse of states in Syria, Libya
and elsewhere, massive population movements in search of security are
inevitable. Imagining that this is instead due to the ‘pull’ factor of access
to a hostile Europe has only led to Canute-like efforts to stop the tide. Within Europe
itself, this ‘fortress’ mentality has perversely only fostered insecurity,
exploited by xenophobic movements like PEGIDA in Germany—even though this is
wholly disproportionate to the minor refugee intake, dwarfed by Syria’s neighbours like Lebanon, which has reacted far more equably
with much more modest resources. Even beyond humanitarian considerations,
Europe’s refugees by definition contain a high proportion of ‘entrepreneurial’
individuals, given the resilience and improvisation required to make such a
risky and demanding journey, who have a major contribution to make to societies
willing to welcome them—the dynamism of the US economy in the 20th century was
of course built on those celebrated seaborne ‘huddled masses yearning to
breathe free’.

 6. Impartial public authority is key to
rebuilding collapsed states, rather than ethnicising government. The default approach of the
‘international community’—the most powerful global powers of the moment—to
societies riven by ethnic polarisation following state collapse has, oddly,
been to invite ethnic leaders into government, with the predictable effect that
the latter treat politics as the continuation of war by other means. Hence the
disappointment that ‘peace processes’, such as in Bosnia and Macedonia, have failed to realise
expectations. Worse still, the ‘ancient hatreds’ perspective which often
underpins such approaches leads merely to avoidance of what are then perceived
as intractably ‘tribal’ conflicts in Africa, such as in the Central African Republic and South Sudan—left largely to burn themselves out.
What such collapsed states need, above all, is externally-guaranteed impartial
public authority—such as well-functioning independent judiciaries—so that
ethnic state capture, and its fear, can not continue to sustain antagonism and
violence.

7. ‘National security’ is a chimera in a
world of ‘really existing cosmopolitanisation’. The ‘realist’ tradition in
international relations was based on the same logic as the absence of gun
control in the US—in the former president Theodore Roosevelt’s parlance, ‘speak
softly and carry a big stick’. Far better, of course, to have no guns at all
(as Europe’s far lower murder rate shows) and on the international canvas to
agree to ban nuclear weapons, rather than try to sustain the hypocrisies of the
nuclear powers vis-à-vis the crumbling Non-Proliferation Treaty. Of course if, as in much US
discourse, based on too much exposure to the Hollywood western, violence (by
other people) is just an expression of the inherent ‘evil’ of ‘bad guys’, then
irrational security policies, such as endless bombing, or policies which just prevent
‘good guy’ casualties, such as drones, will be pursued ad nauseum—despite the ‘collateral
damage’ of civilian deaths, which not only breach the laws of war but also act
as a recruiting agent for the very forces under attack. A world of ‘really
existing cosmopolitanisation’ makes such ‘realism’ profoundly unrealistic:
recognition of our interdependence and common humanity is indispensable to
building trust on regional and world scales. Absent such trust, only
fragmentation, factionalism and fundamentalism beckon.

 8. Universal norms are the only
alternative to renewed cold war and a ‘clash of civilisations’. If diplomacy is not merely to be the
continuation of war by other means, it requires a common language that can
transcend cultural relativism and cui
bono considerations. That can only come from universal norms of democracy,
human rights and the rule of law. These are not ‘western’ values: they are not
universally upheld in the ‘west’ (think CIA torture for starters) and nor are they
absent in the ‘east’ and ‘south’ (the world’s largest democracy is India). They
provide the only consistent moral benchmark against which states (and non-state
actors) which believe they can defy accountability for their crimes—illustrated
case by case in our States of Impunity series—can be brought to book. They
are the essential antidote to ‘west versus the rest’ thinking, whether the
alternative be an assertively authoritarian-populist Russia with its masculinist ‘traditional’
values or the misogynist ‘caliphate’ of Islamic State. They are the only basis on which the
International Criminal Court can play its full role—for instance by bringing
the Israeli state, and Hamas, to account for war crimes in Gaza.

 9. Only global citizenship can make for
global security.
Syria, on which openSecurity threw a spotlight in our 2013 conference, Syria’s Peace, represents not only a humanitarian
disaster. It also encapsulates the incapacity of institutions of global governance
to intervene effectively even in protracted conflicts of egregious proportions,
given the mutual vetoes in the United Nations Security Council exercised by the
great powers emerging seven decades ago from the chaos of the second world
war—a process compounded by the retreat into ‘western’ unilateralism embodied
by the illegal, and hugely costly, intervention in Iraq. Reform of the UN to match a more polycentric world
and a global civil society is unavoidable (and the next secretary-general can not just be another man emerging
from a behind-closed-doors deal) if collective solutions are to be found on the
world level to states in vertiginous collapse. And while the international ‘responsibility to protect’ has been sullied by the NATO push
beyond the UN no-fly mandate in Libya to force ‘regime change’ it remains key
to defending civilians under assault from (strictly) terrorist states. If such
global intervention, backed by universal norms, is absent, the vacuum will be
filled—as by the Saudi air assault on Yemen.

 10. Climate justice is key to a safer world—never mind one that remains
liveable. Last but
not least is a critical theme openSecurity would have wished to pursue (along
with the ‘insecurity of austerity’) had funding permitted. The threat of ‘climate chaos’ hangs over the globe and
particularly over the global south, already feeding conflicts like that in
Darfur. The Copenhagen summit of 2009 became a classic, bipolar stand-off
between the US and China, with the rest of the world—including more ambitious
Europe—looking on aghast. This year’s ‘COP 21’ summit in Paris represents
something of a last chance for humanity but the huge demonstrations across the
globe to coincide with the 2014 summit at the UN showed how the notion of ‘climate justice’ can be a key mobilising agent to
unify the global community, too often divided by the co-ordination dilemma of
fairly distributing cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. As with gender
considerations, a ‘security’ discourse which fails to address ecological
questions will lack a complete vocabulary to tell the full story.

openSecurity would like to express
its sincere gratitude to the RNMFA for its repeated funding of the section over
three years. It is also very grateful to the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust
for a further six months of support while attempts to secure successor funding
were exhausted. Alas, these came to nought in the end. But it is evident that,
even in its brief existence, openSecurity has mapped out, in some depth and
detail, a new security paradigm which does not fall foul of the evident
empirical failures and normative shortfalls of the hitherto-dominant discourse.

I would like to pay tribute to the
staff team I enjoyed, as well as my predecessors as lead editor of the section,
the international advisory board and of course the plethora of contributors to
openSecurity across the world. Their work is sufficient unto itself as an
archived body of material. But let us hope that the baton can be picked up
again at some point, as so much more remains to be done.