Traditional Approaches towards International Security
The traditional approaches towards international security have always been under threat. This threat manifested drastically during the Cold War, wherein the utter inability to fathom the dangers of the approaching wars consumed the entire world, specifically the political leaders of the world. The legitimacy of international security came under extreme scrutiny after the events that unraveled during and after the cold war as well as the two World Wars. The traditional theories regarding security burnt to ashes once the entire world almost collapsed under the agonies of the Wars (Mearsheimer, 2018). The present paper aims to provide a thoroughly researched discussion on the ways in which the end of Cold War affected the conceptualization as well as the prevalent traditional practices of international security. It aims to analyze the new reality that has undertaken the entire postmodern and post-war world (Gibbons, et al., 2019).
The traditional approaches towards international securities have been claimed to be outdated by critics as they focused entirely on states and based their entire movements on the ideologies of state security. Critics have claimed that this approach was illogical as it normalized the thought process that state was an entity but the citizens of the state that were displaced or hurt because of the faults in international security were basically treated as ‘collateral damage’ that occurred due to the victim’s insignificant existence in the area affected by wars. Thus, in this new world, it has become imperative to treat these issues from the point of view of both inter-state as well as intra-state wherein the citizens are also treated as valuable entities that should not be hurt ethically in the process of undertaking international security (Lorenzini, 2019).
Some extremely crucial aspects of the postwar world that must be understood while analyzing the impact of the end of cold war are that, there have been numerous instances ever since the end of world war wherein the world leaders have been entirely unable to analyze international security threat and deal with them in a manner wherein the world does not collapse, even though there has been strategic development in the field of security, still, the world lacks extreme international security protocols that can tackle extreme situations. However, the post-cold war era has seen considerable growth in the academic conduct towards the international security building (Mastanduno, 2019).
Coming to the notion of ‘conceptualization’, it is of vital importance that one understands what this entire notion comprises of and all the concepts that it encompasses. Conceptualization, in layman terms, means the formation of idea or a concept. Now, considering the post-cold war world, this term gains crucial traction as it defines the discourse that the entire society started following after the cold war ended. Ever since the end of Cold-war numerous societal values have been ‘securitized’, that is, the traditional values of the society that have become an extremely important part of the global identity are now treated as a concept that needs to be treated as a notion that comes under the process of international security, for instance the trope of European identity and its forever existing threat from the ‘east’. These events and the treatment of various values as per the concepts of world security have helped redefine the discipline of international security and all that it could entail (Sløk-Andersen, 2018).
Impact of the End of Cold War
There has also been significant improvement in the discourse of the analogy that not all the values are grounded or rooted in the western ideology or the western identity. The basic Eurocentric view of the world was forced to come under extreme scrutiny once the east realized its importance in the existence of the world and the concept of a world wherein the colonial past was not given enough importance, rather was contradicted and a highly criticized notion was born (Mamadouh, 2021).
During the World Wars and the Cold War era, the so-called ‘Third world’ and its citizens were abused massively. The post cold war era birthed the notion of the colonized point of view wherein the perspectives of the previously colonized nations and their citizens were given importance and the concept of ‘subaltern’ gave the marginalized people an opportunity to lift the forceful veil that was smothered on their existence by the colonizers and speak out against the centuries of oppression that they had to endure (Chen, 2020). The accommodation of this newly emerged concept of subaltern realism was incorporated in the notions of international security. This notion allowed the concept and the meaning of ‘security’ as well as the ‘threat towards security’ to be refined in a new perspective that respected the colonized world and the east that was left out till now. For instance, this notion allowed the term and the threat towards identity to be reflected under the umbrella term of international threat wherein citizens could actually claim that their identity was at threat. For instance, the identity of colonized people has always been under severe threat and it has never been acknowledged (?anji & Kazharski, 2022).
The field of studies in International Security have always focused on examining the prominent public policy issues, in the age of world wars and Cold war, scholars were in agony regarding the strength of the absolute nuclear weapon and how the world would be able to function if an adversity like that attacks the frontiers of the modern world. In that era, the non-intervention policy in the internal affairs of states started diminishing and fading in the background of all he violence that had engulfed the world (Alcalde & Seixas, 2018). The disintegration of Soviet Empire, the war in Gulf, the rising conflicts in the middle east, the Islamic revival and the cultural as well as social conflicts in America, the fragmentation in Asia and the destabilization of Africa led to the creation of public and global policies that started focusing on establishing peace worldwide and began intervening in internal conflicts as well (Schmidt, 2018). With this, the world saw an end coming to the ancient and traditional concepts of bloc politics and ideological contestation. With the introduction of Democracy in comparatively more nations of the world, the international concepts of identity and power have changed immensely. But it should also be noted that with the arrival of Democracy, the internal conflicts amongst the various diverse communities residing in nations have considerably increased as well (Reid-Henry, 2020).
Understanding Conceptualization
While on one hand the concept of international security had gotten importance in the post cold war era, on the other hand, the threat to international security also considerably increased because now the term security started encompassing numerous meanings and it had become an umbrella term that aimed to incorporate various issues. The postmodern world has been in disarray ever since its dawn. The fragmented notions that engulfed the modernist era, was even more broadened in the postmodern years. Apart from the already existing traumas that had followed the post war eras, the world now had to deal with the issues of the modernity that was smothering the throats of the complex traditional fundamental views, which led to the creation of even more conflicts that focused on an ethno populist point of view wherein different religions, cultures and fundamentalist organizations started believing that they had the opportunity as well as the power to rule as per their will and treat the citizens of the world their subjects. With the expansion of the concepts regarding international security, there has also been considerable amount of expansion in the responsibility towards sharing the communal efforts towards the establishment of peace and harmony in the world (Glaser, 2019).
As the nature of threats increase towards international security, the areas of threat have started spreading rapidly, they now include the diverse economic, environmental, social and regional political aspects as well. International peace establishment bodies such as the United Nations were extremely criticized during the cold war era as they proved to be entirely useless and impotent in maintaining the international security. The failure of the League of the Nations to prevent the World War II from taking place, proved the technical as well as the administrable level lags that were present in international organizations when it came to the protection of peace and establishment of international security. The traditional notion of peace basically meant the avoidance of war, so no one actually considered the aspects that can surround a war and how even their existence can be severely damaging for the maintenance of world peace. The Security Council was largely incapable to do anything concrete when crisis hit internationally during the Cold War era (Ikonomou, 2021).
Another significant concept that was prevalent at the times of Cold War era was the forceful blurring of boundaries, specifically international boundaries. In that period, the world leaders had started to question the notion of international as well as state boundaries as they became a significant obstacle in their quest towards the forced acquisition of the states that they wanted. The amount of threat that was present in those times regarding the acquisition of land was something that resonates with the modern time wherein superpowers of the world are eager to observe smaller states in order to portray their power over the globe. As the world moves on, the threats to security of the world also expand. The defensive ‘container model’ of international security has long been tainted and out of use as the geographical dimensions of the world keep on shifting as time permits and as the flow of power occurs amidst the international boundaries. This has led to a significant fluctuation in the geopolitical models of security policies wherein a realistic approach towards the external security and its linkage with the internal security has been tackled (de Bruyn, 2019).
Accommodation of Newly Emerged Concept
With the emergence of globalization ad with that the formation of new economic powers, the relationships between various aspects of these new worlds find it hard to maintain an environment wherein issues do not affect the fragile ego of nations and world leaders, for instance, the relationship between the economic and the military security has become a far more tangible and prominent issue (Holm, 2019). Additionally with the publication of the Brundtland Report, in the year 1987, the prominent ecological threats to security that were hiding behind the thick veil of the numerous wars, came in front of the human eye (Hajian & Kashani, 2021). More recently though, the issue of climactic change has been started to be addressed with the seriousness that this issue always deserved. But whatever the steps that have been taken in accordance with the concept of fight against the rising threat levels of the ecological; factors are proving to be not enough to tackle the issue and reports have stated that by the year 2030, almost half of the entire world’s population will be confronted with the drastically negative effects of the constantly rising sea level which will in turn lead to an extensive migration of the more fragile and vulnerable population of the world (Ballin, et al., 2020).
The infrastructure of this new world is based on the constant flow of security between the interconnected nations. Furthermore, the conceptualization regarding the notions of human rights has also been improvised and redefined since the end oof 1980’s and specifically since the end of Cold War. The concept of ‘Human Security’ has also emerged amidst the chaos that raided the social norms of the society in the postmodern era. Now, violence does not necessarily mean the structured form of physical violence that follows protocols of international threats, now violence can signify an attempt made to harm the human rights of individual or a group of people, hence, in a way, it has now become extremely hard to cater to this new meaning of international security as it demands the safety of every single individual of the world rather than simply the significant world leaders and their followers (Malik, 2020).
For instance, in the1990s, the humanitarian disasters that consumed the people of Somalis, Bosnia and Rwanda as well as the Civil War in Kosovo fueled the ongoing debate regarding the international communities and particularly the United Nations which basically questioned the ability of these numerous security councils to do anything in order to stop these serious crimes and human tragedies or at least take steps in order to stop this crisis (Kijewski & Freitag, 2018). But this has also helped to enhance the level of security worldwide as well as the quality of this security as it aims to protect the well being of individuals. The Security legions are no longer prevalent only against an armed conflict or aggression by an extensively elaborately conducted party or terrorist organization, now the security councils are geared up against the violence against peace and harmony in any which manner.
Public Policies in the Post-Cold War Era
The dimensions of the concept regarding international security have significantly expanded against the classical notion of the terms and the connotation s that reflected the traditional point of view of danger as well as the need of security against it. It is also interesting to not that this expansion is also not necessarily linear, it has spread out in a non-chronological manner wherein a bipolar concept of power and security has been introduced to the world. This dynamic can be seen in the bipolar concept of power that engulfed the word during the cold war era and the unipolar notion that embraced the world after the end of cold war. The relatively realistic school of thought regarding security has always been state-centric, wherein the priority lies in the security of the nation-state (Y?lmaz, 2020).
Thus, in conclusion, it can be stated that the end of Cold war saw and extreme shift in the prevalent norms of international security and witnessed the emergence of the notion of conceptualization wherein new concepts regarding the identity of the world and international security were introduced. The present paper analyzed the diverse set of concepts that were introduced as new ideas in the post war, postmodern world and then consumed the global thought of the citizens of the world. The paper critically discussed the modern aspects of international security that were introduced post the cold war era. It analyzed the ways in which the meaning of the term international security was widened and expanded in order to accommodate a varying set of threats of international security that were not considered previously due to the classic school of thought regarding the violence against international security that claimed that threats could be only external as physical. The new meaning of international security also signified the importance of human security and the internal peace that take place when the international security council take care of individuals of the world rather than powerful political parties or leaders. It discussed how the post-cold war world saw a considerable amount of decline in the traditional Eurocentric view of the world and the entire word started understanding the importance of the Eastern perspective as well when it came to the formation of the new practices regarding the concept of international security.
References
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