E3G

Security trends and threat misperceptions

By Nick Mabey

Given the very strong links between badly managed resource extraction, corruption and conflict, this probably represents one of the UK’s most effective conflict prevention and security initiatives. However, it is still primarily seen as a development policy (and though created in the Cabinet Office is now led by the Department for International Development), which reduces the political priority given to engaging countries such as China, which are essential to its long term success but have yet to cooperate.

Following the spate of civil wars in the 1990s there was political pressure in the USA, the UK, Germany and others to invest in new forms of preventive security capability. However, this political push has disappeared since 9/11 and many of the reform processes have stalled. The failure to produce sustainable stability in Iraq and Afghanistan and potentially Congo is also leading to a louder call from “neo-realists” to retreat to a mainly reactive approach, avoiding “nation building” and merely intervening on a short term basis to attack perceived threats. But events in Somalia show the danger in taking a short-term approach to building security, as this allows the creation of “ungoverned spaces” and weak governance, which undermines a range of security objectives – not least, the attempt to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world.

It is unsurprising that there have been failures, given our weak capacity and short experience of stabilising countries and building governance systems; but this has been a failure of implementation, not strategy. The emerging successes in the Balkans, Aceh, East Timor and Sierra Leone, among others, show that with concerted long-term effort by the international community, security and stability can be achieved in these areas. The task is to move forward with a more ambitious and balanced security agenda, which will require some fundamental reforms in the security architecture.

The danger is that current proposals to combine and centralise UK security architecture around anti-terrorism strategy will result in only strengthening capability to deliver hard security and intelligence cooperation. While important, this will further marginalise and weaken the UK’s ability to anticipate, prevent and respond to more complex and long-term threats driven by the trends above, and will undermine our ability to deliver a long-term strategy towards global Muslim extremism. The UK should reinvigorate its role in pioneering new approaches to facing these threats, as it did through leadership on the International Criminal Court, the “responsibility to protect” agenda, and increasing global peacekeeping capability.

The coming years also give the opportunity to reshape the EU’s security capability, as the revived constitutional debate brings back discussion of a strengthened security architecture, including a new EU external action service. As enlargement has shown, if deployed imaginatively the political and economic scale of the EU provides a unique ability to promote stability and good governance; particularly important in North Africa, the Caucasus and Central Asia and through partnership with the African Union into Sub-Saharan Africa.

Terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are core security threats, but they often obscure the importance of other threats to the UK’s security and prosperity. In an interdependent world, a security strategy must of course address short-term hard security threats, but must also be able to motivate the long-term investment in cooperative institutions, relationships and governance needed to tackle underlying drivers of insecurity and conflict and the negative side of globalisation.