What are the principal difficulties involved in attempts to define 'security'? How has the concept been extended beyond traditional concern with the military security dilemmas facing states?

At first glance, it would appear that there is little difficulty in defining what it is for a state to be "secure." After all, it is a term that is used almost daily by a stream of politicians, academics, diplomats and military personnel to justify a particular policy or programme of expenditure. Such a widespread use of the term by such professionals as these suggests that its meaning and intention are straightforward, clear, and understood by all. Yet to make this assumption would be a mistake, as is indicated by the amount of literature available on this security issue, or that security imperative. Almost every discussion involving the term begins with an outline of what a particular author's interpretation is, and this varies widely according to the focus of the investigation being undertaken. Moreover, the conditions of the post-Cold War world have forced a reassessment of what security is by all of the actors mentioned above, to look beyond the traditional military sense in which the notion of security has previously been employed. This discussion will look at some of the new emerging strands of thought, after having examined why the notion of security is such a difficult one to define clearly and explicitly.

The concept of security is not new; as an issue, it was addressed as early as Hobbes' Leviathan. In describing the state of nature as "nasty, brutish, and short," Hobbes was arguing for the imposition of an authority that would guarantee the security of all such that individuals would no longer continuously fear one another, and the quality of life could improve. This authority is what we would today term the state. How does the state guarantee an individual's security? The clearest answer (and indeed, the definition of what a state is), is to say that the state has the monopoly on the use of legitimate violence. Thus the vast majority of citizens will recognise and accept this, and in doing so, will be reassured by the state's promise of protection, and abandon their claim to private use of violence to solve their disputes and ensure their own security. In return, Hobbes argues, as security is an absolute, the state has the right to ask the citizen to return this favour by demanding them to undertake any action short of giving up their life. This is, as Ullman points out, rather an extreme view that does not correspond with modern liberal societies' concerns with individual liberty, which stress that the individual's life should be as free from state interference as possible. Furthermore, this view would argue against Hobbes that in paying taxes and even undertaking national service, the citizen is contributing to the means by which the state is able to fund its protection, and thus this is all that the state can be allowed to demand from the citizen. According to Rothschild, security in this sense as a collective good to be secured by military or diplomatic means only became an established concept around the time of the Napoleanic wars.

This entire concept rests on the problems of internal struggle within a state, but also implicitly assumes that the state will provide protection from external threats posed by other states. This leads to the paradox that a state may find itself compromising the freedoms of its citizens and restricting their activities in order to avoid infiltration by adversaries abroad that it views as totalitarian or expansionist, and itself becoming the very same in order to guard its own freedoms. Thus an external security threat mutates into an internal one. This provides a counterexample to the traditional definition of national security as looking to dangers external to the state, which are assumed to be more dangerous than threats arising from within it. Ullman thus provides a new definition of a threat to national security as "an action or sequence of events that threaten to drastically and quickly degrade the quality of life for a country's citizens, and to narrow the range of policy choices [available] to government or individuals." He uses the examples of a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union and a major earthquake in California as two examples of security risks that this definition could serve to ensure support for policies to counter a wider range of security threats than are traditionally provided for by a solely external-looking national security regime. Yet it becomes clear on such an interpretation that both provide threats of such magnitude that it seems obvious that at least as much expenditure should be allocated on such preventative measures that would minimise the impact of an earthquake as that would minimise the impact of a nuclear war. That this is not the case lies in many factors, including the predictability of the events, and the nature of the response that can be put in place as a preventative measure - although of course, it is impossible to prevent an earthquake through acts of deterrence. An acceptance of security as being more than military integrity by government could lead to a reassessment of these priorities in the future, but this will obviously be difficult to achieve given the structures that have grown up around the narrow traditional definition. However, Ullman's examples serve to highlight that a natural, internal threat can be as dangerous and devastating as an external military threat.

Brown and Rothschild have separately extended this new notion of security from state-level interests to international interests that are supra-national. Aiming at the idea of a world security policy, Brown argues for six major policies that should be pursued as being in the "world" interest, namely the assurance of the survival of the human species, a reduction in the level of killing or barbarity between peoples, the provisions of conditions for healthy subsistence to all, the protection of citizens' rights, the safeguarding of cultural diversity, the preservation of the planet's ecology, and the enhancement of the accountability of leaders and governments. Rothschild defines her goals in more abstract terms, maintaining that the concept of "extended" security should incorporate the upwards aggregation of security from the level of the nation-state to that of an international system, and even beyond the geopolitical into the environmental by commitment to preservation of the biosphere, as well as the downwards aggregation from the security of nations to the security of particular groups or individuals who are most at risk from violation given the status quo. Furthermore, such actions would shift the focus of security from military to political, economic, social, and environmental security, which Rothschild claims are the ultimate ends to which the means of military security aspire.

Much as these recommendations sound like a wish-list of a utopian society from a world-government liberal perspective of international relations, there is some evidence that the minds of governments are becoming more open and focused on issues, especially those of environmental significance that transcend national boundaries and thus require international co-operation to resolve - the 1992 Earth summit held in Rio de Janeiro and the 1997 summit in Kyoto demonstrate this. However, the problems that have arisen and lack of consensus that has hampered progress towards more concrete achievements in such accords demonstrate the difficulty with which the transition to focusing on non-military dangers as somehow being as compelling threats to national security as the traditional ones. This is hampered by the continued, indeed some would maintain heightened, global military insecurity in the post-Cold War world. Far from signalling a period where tension and conflict would be banished, local and regional conflicts contained by the superpower stand-off have been given reign to develop into particularly bloody and intractable disputes. As long as such antagonisms persist, it will provide an easy focus and excuse for the continued concentration of resources on military and external threats to security.

Ayoob believes that this is particularly true of the Third World which has become notably free from the influence of the superpowers since the end of the Cold War. In addition, he maintains that a developed world perspective of security cannot be applied to the Third World; his argument rests on the assumption that the emergence of state structures has not been achieved successfully (primarily because of the attempts by developed countries to force their creation in a matter of decades, whereas the structures present in developed countries evolved gradually over the course of several centuries), and consequently the legitimacy of many regimes has been called into question, leading to many more preponderant internal threats to security in these countries. Thus Ayoob redefines security in this particular instance in relation to the vulnerabilities that threaten (or have the potential) to bring down weak state structures and their associated regimes. This insecurity becomes a worrying danger to the developed world considering the large arms build-ups in areas such as the Middle East and South-East Asia, which extends into the realm of nuclear proliferation. These populous, broadly authoritarian or monarchical centralised societies where the military can often penetrate the layers of government may now decide that they now have the means to pursue ancient rivalries or simple balancing policies, especially given the air of desperation that economic calamity may bring to the region.

This assessment does not provide grounds for optimism that a wholesale abandonment of a narrow interpretation of the term security will occur on a global scale in the future. Given the escalation of insecurity, especially in the Third World, but also in such areas as the Balkans, it is perhaps somewhat premature for Western governments to ignore military threats as some authors would have us believe. However, this is undoubtedly a second-best solution; it would surely be preferable for all nations to extend the scope of their definitions of national security as was set out above. The more players there are to convince though, the more difficult it is to create the necessary consensus to achieve such a goal, and the more likely it is that the focal point of security policy will remain very much the traditional military dimension for the foreseeable future.