Major Issues in International Politics

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Major issues in international politics
major issues in international politics (Università degli Studi di Trento)
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Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)
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1. Introduction – International Relations Theories and the International System
Chapter 1 – Sovereignty
Sovereignty has been the capstone concept and operational principle of the international order since the
Peace of Westphalia. Sovereignty is a controversial concept, in that its logical extension justifies armed
violence and can be a shield behind which atrocity is sometimes committed. Defined as “supreme
authority,” it is the operational base of both international and domestic political life but it has been a
controversial foundation for world affairs: its location, its extent, ecc…
Concepts have changed over time; disagreements about sovereignty are prominent parts of some of the
debates about the evolving international order. Despite all this, sovereignty is an attribute that all
governments cherish and guard jealously.
Questions of political authority at the time of the Peace of Westphalia revolved around whether people
owed their ultimate loyalty and even existence to sectarian authority represented most prominently by
the Catholic Church or to secular monarchs in the locales where they resided. One of the most important
elements of the Peace of Westphalia was to wrest political control from the Church and to transfer that
power to secular authorities. The first outcome of this marriage was to associate sovereignty with
territorial political jurisdictions. Since those territories were essentially all ruled by absolute monarchs,
the conjunction effectively created the precedent that the power of the sovereign was absolute.
With the rise of democracy, sovereignty was a characteristic of not only the ruler but the ruled as well
(popular sovereignty).
The heart of sovereignty is territorial supremacy; it does provide the basis for order on a domestic
level, but between sovereign states there is not order: there is anarchy.
Jean Bodin was the first to introduce the link between sovereignty and territory in an attempt to
consolidate the authority of the king of France over his realm, unrestrained by law. The extension of
the implications of sovereignty to international affairs occurred as the state system evolved and the
structure of the modern state emerged and was solidified in an increasing number of European states;
Hugo Grotius viewed state sovereignty as a fundamental principle of international relations.
The question of the locus of sovereignty was a product of greater citizen participation in the political
process within evolving countries, and especially with democratization; John Locke and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau: the people were sovereign, and that that they voluntarily bestowed parts of that sovereignty
to the state to legitimize state power and to ensure domestic order
Applying changing conceptions of sovereignty to the relations among sovereign states has been a more
difficult proposition. Sovereignty as the basic principle of international relations remains largely
conceptually intact. Some countries are more jealous of the protections from outside interference that
their sovereignty bestows upon them.
The nature and implications of sovereignty remain controversial in contemporary international politics
for different reasons. Three of them are worth noting as examples:
1. connection between sovereignty and war: there is no authority to enforce international norms.
States have vital interests, conditions on which they will not voluntarily compromise, and are
thus unwilling to empower any authority that could dilute that power. One form that power can
take is the threat or use of military force to gain compliance
2. degree of control it gives states over their citizens (Holocaust);
3. countries can and do regularly penetrate and interfere with the affairs of other countries;
The US gives great importance to sovereignty for two reasons: restrictions on sovereignty would
encourage groups within the United States to prosecute claims against the United States and a reason
based on the precedent set by sovereignty-restraining actions on the overall notion and basis of state
sovereignty.

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In order to be a fully participating member of the international community, a country must possess
sovereignty; a sovereign state has four characteristic:
1. territory and population;
2. accepted jurisdiction and legitimate authority;
3. autonomy from outside control;
4. recognition by other States;
The concept retains considerable force as conditioning parameters about how countries deal with one
another and even if they interact: e.g. Yemen is characterized by political instabilities, how can you
interact with it?
The Islamic State is a case of study since ISIS not only is a terrorist organization, but it wants to be a
caliphate, so a place characterized by sovereignty and control over e territory; but ISIS has many
problems:
● it cannot control the territory it claims/conquer because of a lack of people able to do so;
● it has no recognition;
● it cannot defend its own territory;
So the Caliphate broke into the “sovereignty wall”, so the factors requested by a state in order to be
considered as one.
Chapter 2 - National Interest and Conflict
“Interests”, in the international system, refer to values held by the state that must be secured, protected,
and advanced for the state to remain secure or safe and preserve itself. The base of the concept comes
from the French term raison d’état (reason of state). The idea that there are conditions that serve national
values is virtually unassailable; what those conditions may be in general or in the context of often
ambiguous situations is quite another matter, and is the basis for debates about national interest that are
subjective in nature and thus difficult to resolve. Interests also come into conflict in two ways: one of
these is when an individual holds incompatible interests in a particular case. Not always state interest is
equal to state security: the problem is stated by intersubjectivity or objectivity (can everyone see the
situation the same way?).
A question of national interest starts from a statement of truth that gets enriched by two other elements:
is it, in fact, a matter of interest? What is the action that can lead a state to that interest?
The realist interpretation of the international world recognize two types of interest:
● Vital Interest (VIs);
● Less than Vital Interest (LVTs);
Vital Interests are the baseline of the security of a State and they are those interests a State would use
violence for.
There will always be disagreement about the worthiness and appropriateness of force in a given
situation. Donald Nuechterlein’s matrix → basic interest and intensity of an interest
National interest is misleading in one important sense: stated by itself and out of context, it implies that
there is a national interest that is shared by all the citizens.
Sovereignty helps explain how conflicts of interest differ at the two levels: the resolution of conflicts
occurs within the context of a higher authority, the state has vital interests, individuals and groups accept
that the content of that interest is overriding. The situation is more complex at the international level:
interacting sovereign states also have differing and sometimes irresolvable national interests.
National interest, like sovereignty, should be as supreme and overriding as it is; the supreme authority
of the state means that the state has vital interests that are superior to those of any other entity.

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The obvious implication of the elevation of national interest to conceptual supremacy is that as a result,
interests at other levels occupy a lesser priority, but many argue that other levels of interest are of equal
or arguably even greater importance; at one extreme are individual interests, at the other international
interests. The pursuit of national interest as the supreme value may endanger or preclude the pursuit of
individual or international interests. The concept and pursuit of national interest are a natural and central
element of realist academic theorizing and the actual practice of international relations. The major
consequence is a formal state of anarchy in the political realm that both describes the pattern of
interactions between the members and provides the contrast between domestic and international
relations: a realist world is, in other words, a place where power is the major lingua franca; the pursuit
of national interests remains a central, and highly complex, part of international relations.
Russia oil and US - Russian relations; question: how the United States (and the West in general)
should deal with a resurgent Russia that shows revanchist tendencies?
Russian ascent to great-power status has always been clouded by the performance of its economy. The
chaos and emergence of a kleptocratic state during the 1990s only made matters worse. The fall of
communism left a regulatory void that encompassed most aspects of life, including the economy. The
explosion of the energy sector also contributed to the continuation of corruption.
The exploitation of its fossil fuel wealth has fueled Russian prosperity across the board in the last
decade, but it has done so at costs to Russia’s place in the world and to how Russia operates. The
expansion of oil sales worldwide helped lift Russia from the post-Soviet doldrums and its precipitous
decline as a world power. It provided revenues that could be applied to solving discontent within the
population and funding to rebuild a Russian military establishment that had both shrunk and deteriorated
in the decade after the end of the Cold War.
In the process, however, Russia has been transformed into a classic petrolist state (a petro-State):
energy revenues are utilized to finance growing parts of the economy and provide prosperity to the
population, but the revenues were used to support Putin’s dream of returning Russia to a position of
greatness. Dependent as they are on petroleum revenues, they cannot visibly cut back production
without making matters worse; Russia is depleting its exploitable energy reserves at an alarming rate,
and unless the Russians can expand their access to their reserves, Russians will lose the ability to be
anything like the world’s second-largest exporter.
Russian dependence on petroleum revenue as the “fuel” of its economic and national security efforts
creates a strong Russian national interest in maximizing this segment of its economy. If the Russians
gain the ability to exploit all of their energy supplies, they will become at or near the top of energy
sources worldwide. Russian energy technology is inferior to that of the West; the Russians have
enormous stores of energy resources that could underwrite their place in the world for the foreseeable
future, but they cannot gain commercial access to it without substantial help.
The idea of national interests is a bedrock principle of international relations; the erosion of absolute
sovereignty and the emergence of interests at other levels like that of the individual or humankind may
attenuate that centrality and create a more complex reality in international life.
Studying national interest is made more complex by the elevated way in which people think about it.
USA-RUSSIA QUESTION: Russia has limited technology for energy distribution (eg. difficulty to
reach arctic areas like Siberia), USA has them but there are 2 possible ways if US helps Russia:
● Russia as a State-cushion to contain China
● Russia becomes more powerful and can be a threat
So, USA has power in this situation as it possesses technologies
Chapter 3: Non-traditional Security and World Politics

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Worldwide, people witness devastation caused by natural disasters, deaths due to infectious disease
outbreaks, nuclear disasters, piracy, economic crises... These crises create widespread political and
economic instability in both the developed and developing worlds and continue to illustrate that security
can no longer be limited to traditional concerns of maintaining and protecting national borders against
external military intervention, but must also include non-traditional security (NTS) threats. These
NTS threats are defined as challenges to the survival and well-being of societies that arise out of
primarily non-military sources, such as climate change, resource scarcity, infectious diseases, natural
disasters, irregular migration, food shortages, trafficking in persons, drug trafficking and transnational
crime. These dangers are often transnational in scope, defying unilateral remedies and requiring
comprehensive – political, economic and social – responses as well as the humanitarian use of military
force.
NTS issues are not new but understanding them as a security threat emerged in the post-Cold War era
when global leaders acknowledged the multidimensional nature of security. The 1994 UNDP Report
identified four characteristics of human security:
● it is a universal concern
● the components are interdependent
● it is easier to achieve through early prevention
● it is people-centered
The report included seven categories which formed the main list of threats to human security: economic,
food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security. Emanating from the UNDP,
the Human Security framework involves a more holistic and longer-term approach to security that
focuses on the individual or societal level of analysis.
The development of the NTS concept bridges the divide between these competing conceptions of
security. The approaches taken by scholars broadly fit within the paradigms of realism (state-centric
approach), liberalism (human security approach) and critical security studies (critical security
approach).
We’re going to see 4 different NTS issues. The following sections will answer four key questions:
● How can the NTS threat be distinguished from other features of world politics?
● Why is it of particular salience?
● How has its history shaped its contemporary form?
● How can we make sense of the issue?
Each section will conclude by examining the issue’s dynamics and its future in world politics.
Infectious diseases
After the end of the Cold War and the spread of neoliberal ideas, advances in technology and the ease
of travel and trade increased the movement of people and goods across the world, which heightened
states’ and societies’ vulnerabilities to the spread of infectious diseases and the emergence of bio-
terrorism. These vulnerabilities were particularly acute in developing countries where national
sovereignty was closely guarded, state capacity was weak and there was an existential threat to societal
well-being and the stability of the state.
The prominence of health security as a concept became particularly salient in the 2000s, but there are
many other earlier cases of disease outbreaks affecting the security of states and societies (HIV,
smallpox…). However, it was not until the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic
in Asia that health security came to prominence in its own right in world politics. SARS illustrated the
weakness of the global health system and the vulnerability of increasingly globalized societies,
particularly in Asia. In the aftermath of the SARS epidemic, the international regulatory response was
to put a much greater emphasis on building the capacity of national surveillance and verification
systems.

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This global prominence of health security in the early 2000s prompted a shift towards a more
cooperative approach among many states and organizations. Typical of this was the World Health
Organization’s (WHO’s) decision to reorientate its strategy from ‘health work’ to ‘global health
security’. This shift saw a move away from state-centric priorities to an international health security
framework of standardized core capacities to prevent, or at the very least, minimize, the severity of an
infectious disease epidemic. Many other epidemics occurred, but Ebola virus affected workforces so
badly that it curtailed the ability of the government to carry out its core functions. It also showed how
the response could disrupt societal relations when particular social, political, religious or ethnic groups
were prioritized or discriminated against in receipt of treatment. With the increase in global travel, it
became apparent that a transnational approach to NTS was needed as all these outbreaks were framed
as potential or actual threats to global health security.
However, while infectious diseases are now firmly framed as global security threats, the number of
deaths due to infectious diseases, including parasitic diseases and respiratory infections, fell from 12.1
million in 2000 to 9.5 million in 2012. Furthermore, the proportion of deaths due to infectious diseases
fell from 23% to 17%. Yet, infectious diseases remain a major global health security concern for several
reasons:
● infectious diseases disproportionately affect younger people than do other diseases
● infectious diseases weigh more heavily on certain regions than others
● emerging infectious diseases – of which 60% are zoonotic, that is they have origins in animals
but are transmitted to humans – impose a significant burden on both health systems and
economies
● the global health security threat of infectious diseases is compounded by increased
antimicrobial resistance further challenging efforts to control them
The emergence of health as an NTS issue over the past 30 years was consolidated when the direct causal
link was made between infectious diseases and state and societal instability. During this time,
HIV/AIDS, SARS, H1N1, cholera, ERS and Ebola outbreaks have highlighted both the causal links to
state and societal stability and the transboundary nature of the threat, which raised the profile of health
into an NTS issue firmly in security discourse and on the global policy agenda as having a significant
impact in world politics today.
The emergence of health security has not generated a uniform approach but rather two broad competing
approaches:
● the geopolitical, geo-strategic or state-centric approach, which can be characterized as a
health sovereignty approach, sees health security as a means to reassert national boundaries and
to use the threat of infectious disease to impose strict border controls, as well as to empower
security and military personnel to monitor and administer domestic control
● second, the global health security approach, which contests the health sovereignty approach
and instead argues for the need for greater cooperation across and between different levels of
global governance, the need to empower an international agency to regulate health security (in
this case the WHO) and the need to build capacity at the national level for more effective
infectious disease surveillance measures
However, the second approach is the most salient, but it has been contested for the democratic deficit
generated by the international institutions “controlled” by technocrats.
Transnational crime
Transnational crime has emerged as a key issue in world politics and is now firmly part of the global
security dialogue as states and societies face irregular migration and maritime security threats among
other issues. The transnational element is broadly defined as an offence committed in more than one
state, crimes in one state committed by groups that operate in more than one state, and crimes committed

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in one state that has substantial effects in another state usually committed by ‘organized crime groups’
with profit-driven nature and seriousness of the crime. This has been described in the United Nations
Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (2000) and the UNODC (United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime) has identified 18 crimes:
money laundering, illicit drug trafficking, corruption and bribery of public officials and of party
official and elected representatives as defined in national legislation, infiltration of legal
business, fraudulent bankruptcy, insurance fraud, computer crime, theft of intellectual
property, illicit traffic in arms, terrorist activities, aircraft hijacking, sea piracy, hijacking on
land, trafficking in persons, trade in human body parts, theft of art and cultural objects,
environmental crime, and other offences committed by organized criminal groups.
The UN Convention against Transnational Crime shows the severity of transnational crime, the need
for international cooperation and its clear identity as a global NTS threat. Within the security and
international relations IR discourse, there are two main approaches to combat transnational crime. The
first and most dominant approach focuses on ‘multi-crime groups of professional criminals’ (focus on
law and order through empowering national institutions), and the other focuses on the role of the ‘illegal
market’ (focus on the movement of people and money around the world), it’s holistic in nature and
looks at the root causes for the transnational criminal activity and attempts to address them through
focusing on vulnerable communities. Indeed, critical security scholarship argues against further
securitization or criminalization because it pushes people affected by the crime further into the black
market.
Trafficking in persons is one of the high-profile transnational crimes that has widespread public
awareness, the two most common forms are sexual exploitation and labor. There is also an increasing
trend in trafficking for other reasons such as the trafficking of children for armed combat, for petty
crime or forced begging.
Sea piracy constitutes a second key transnational crime and NTS issue because the threat is from a non-
state actor outside a state’s territory. The results of this threat include: loss of life, physical harm or
hostage-taking of seafarers, disruptions to commerce and navigation, financial losses to ship owners,
increased insurance premiums and security costs, increased costs to consumers and producers, and
damage to the marine environment.
Energy security
Nation-states have long framed energy as a security issue. However, energy understood from an NTS
perspective broadens the understanding of energy security to include the implications for society and
people. Historically, many wars have been fought between states over access to natural resources to
fuel economic development. The securitization of energy has a long history of being framed solely as
a geo-political or statist security issue. However, the construction of energy security as an NTS issue
uncovers the implications it has for both state and society.
Given the location of the birth of human security in the UNDP, it is firmly linked to the notion of
sustainable development. As such, this alternative understanding of energy security seeks to address
more fundamental questions over the longer-term challenges to more equitable energy access.
Let’s take in consideration the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA): both these institutions were created out of a sense of state insecurity, in the first
instance felt by developed countries that were dependent on oil imports to maintain their economy and
that faced economic collapse should access dry up. In the second instance, it was felt by countries who
were insecure about the dual use of the development of nuclear energy for both civilian and military
purposes, or, simply put, the development of nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons.

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However, the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED)
published ‘Our Common Future’ in 1987 in which the term ‘sustainable development’ was coined to
mean development that meets today’s needs without compromising future generations to meet their
own needs (WCED 1987). It was at this point that the understanding of energy security broadened and
actors began to offer a non-traditional approach by linking energy to other ‘new’ security issues. Then
five years later the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) committed
signatories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on the premise that global warming exists and
man-made CO2 emissions caused it. It was followed two years later with the 1994 UNDP Report that
launched the concept of human security, taking in consideration the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.
Throughout the 1990s the link between energy security and environmental security became
interdependent through sustainable development. Many developing states saw the pursuit of alternative
energy sources to fuel their economies as inadequate to achieve their development goals.
As states and societies pursue energy security, its interdependence with other security issues, most
notably here with environmental security, and its transnational dimension will shape the debate on
energy security in world politics.
In concurrence with other NTS issues, the dominant approaches to energy security revolve around
geopolitical, geo-strategic or state-centric and transnational approaches. Realist arguments are often
articulated as energy independence in contrast to the more global security or liberal internationalist
approach, which promotes energy interdependence, interdependence with other security issues and the
need for international cooperation.
Food security
Food emerged as a NTS issue in the aftermath of the Cold War and was identified as one of the seven
pillars of human security. In the 1994 Report, Mahbub ul Haq defined food security as ‘the means for
all people at all times to have both physical and economic access to basic food’ and that food security
is an entitlement. Ul Haq further pointed out in the 1994 report that the overall availability of food in
the world is not the problem; rather the problem is often poor distribution and lack of purchasing
power by people and communities.
However, the substantive meaning of food security emerged after the Second World War with the
establishment of the UN system. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
(FAO) was established in 1945 as a permanent organization for food and agricultural development. In
1963 the World Food Programme (WFP) was also established as part of the UN system with the aim
to provide food. Alongside the WFP, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)
was established by the UN in 1977 as a major outcome of the 1974 World Food Conference to finance
agricultural development projects primarily for food production in developing countries. The
conference also recognized that famine was not solely created by inadequate food production but was
rather a consequence of structural problems relating to poverty and recommended adoption of an
international undertaking on food security in the Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger
and Malnutrition.
While the ground was laid for the global governance of food security at the UN, food security per se
was not fully defined until the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, Italy, which resolved that food
security was a condition ‘when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to
sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and
health life’; three basic dimensions:
● food availability
● physical and economic access to food
● food utilization (diversity or nutritional value)

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In the 2007–2008 Food Price Crisis, food prices increased by 1.5% a month and saw the number of
people with chronic hunger in the world rise by an estimated 75 million. This brought the number of
undernourished people to a staggering 923 million mostly in the developing countries of sub-Saharan
Africa and the Asia-Pacific (FAO in Teng and Lassa 2016). As a result, a series of food riots broke out
in over 40 countries which demonstrated the acute impacts that chronic food insecurity can create for
states and societies. The Food Price Crisis of 2007–2008 also highlighted the high levels of
interdependence of world food trade and the absence of substantive cooperative arrangements to
ensure food access and supply. It also demonstrated the impact of other NTS issues on food security
such as the impact of biofuels on food production in the developing world.
2. What Kind of World Do We Live In?
The Myth of the Liberal Order - From H\istorical Accident to Conventional Wisdom (Graham
Allison)
Alarm about the fate of the liberal international rules-based order has emerged.
Vice President Joe Biden's call in the final days of the Obama administration to "act urgently to defend
the liberal international order," this banner waves atop most discussions of the United States’ role in the
world.
About this order, the reigning consensus makes three core claims.
1. The liberal order has been the principal cause of the so-called long peace among great powers
for the past seven decades.
2. Constructing this order has been the main driver of U.S. engagement in the world over that
period.
3. U.S. President Donald Trump is the primary threat to the liberal order-and thus to world peace.
Although all these propositions contain some truth, each is more wrong than right. The "long peace"
was not the result of a liberal order but the byproduct of the dangerous balance of power between the
Soviet Union and the United States during the four and a half decades of the Cold War and then of a
brief period of U.S. dominance. U.S. engagement in the world has been driven not by the desire to
advance liberalism abroad or to build an international order but by the need to do what was necessary
to preserve liberal democracy at home. And although Trump is undermining key elements of the cur-
rent order, he is far from the biggest threat to global stability.
CONCEPTUAL JELL-O
The ambiguity of each of the terms in the phrase "liberal international rules-based order" creates a
slipperiness that allows the concept to be applied to almost any situation.
“Rules-based order" is redundant. Order is a condition created by rules and regularity. What
proponents of the liberal international rules-based order really mean is an order that embodies good
rules, ones that are equal or fair. The United States is said to have designed an order that others
willingly embrace and sustain.
Many forget, however, that even the UN Charter, which prohibits nations from using military force
against other nations or intervening in their internal affairs, privileges the strong over the weak.
Enforcement of the charter's prohibitions is the preserve of the UN Security Council, on which each of
the five great powers has a permanent seat-and a veto. When they decide it suits their purpose, they
make exceptions for themselves.

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COLD WAR ORDER

The claim that the liberal order produced the last seven decades of peace overlooks a major fact: the
first four of those decades were defined not by a liberal order but by a cold war between two polar
opposites.
During the Cold War, both superpowers enlisted allies and clients around the globe, creating what came
to be known as a bipolar world. Within each alliance or bloc, order was enforced by the superpower.
Order emerged from a balance of power, which allowed the two superpowers to develop the constraints
that preserved what U.S. President John F. Kennedy called, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis
of 1962, the "precarious status quo."
They modulated their competition with mutual constraints that included three ‘noes’: no use of nuclear
weapons, no overt killing of each other's soldiers, and no military intervention in the other's recognized
sphere of influence. And to ensure that Western Europe and Japan remained in active cooperation with
the United States, it established NATO and the U.S.-Japanese alliance.
Each initiative served as a building block in an order designed first and foremost to defeat the Soviet
adversary. Had there been no Soviet threat, there would have been no Marshall Plan and no NATO.
Nonetheless, when the United States has had the opportunity to advance freedom for others-again, with
the important caveat that doing so would involve little risk to itself-it has acted.
It was no accident that in reconstructing its defeated adversaries Germany and Japan and shoring up its
allies in Western Europe, the United States sought to build liberal democracies that would embrace
shared values as well as shared interests.
The prospect of Europe falling under Soviet control through a series of "'settlements by default' to Soviet
pressure" required the "creation of strength throughout the free world" that would "show the Soviet
leaders by successful containment that they could not hope to expand their influence throughout the
world."
UNIPOLAR ORDER
The adversary on which they had focused for over 40 years stood by as the Berlin Wall came tumbling
down and Germany reunified. As the iron fist of Soviet oppression withdrew, free people in Eastern
Europe embraced market economies and democracy. U.S. President George H. W. Bush declared a
"new world order.”
American politicians were following a script offered by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his
best-selling 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama argued that millennia of
conflict among ideologies were over. From this point on, all nations would embrace free-market
economics to make their citizens rich and democratic governments to make them free.
Few in Washington paused to note that the unipolar power was using military force to impose liberalism
on countries whose governments could not strike back. Since the world had entered a new chapter of
history, lessons from the past about the likely consequences of such behavior were ignored. As is now
clear, the end of the Cold War produced a unipolar moment, not a unipolar era. Today, foreign policy
elites have woken up to the meteoric rise of an authoritarian China, and the resurgence of an assertive,
illiberal Russian nuclear superpower, which is willing to use its military to change both borders in
Europe and the balance of power in the Middle East.
THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

During most of the nation's 242 years, Americans have recognized the necessity to give priority to
ensuring freedom at home over advancing aspirations abroad. Among the hardest questions the
Founding Fathers confronted was how to create a government powerful enough to ensure Americans'

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rights at home and protect them from enemies abroad without making it so powerful that it would abuse
its strength.
Their solution was not just a "separation of powers" among the executive, legislative, and judicial
branches but "separated institutions sharing power” ฀ the purpose was "not to promote efficiency
but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power."
The American experiment was close to failure on more than one occasion, but it has demonstrated a
capacity for renewal and reinvention. But in choosing when and where to spend its blood and treasure,
the U.S. government focused on the United States.
Only in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II did American strategists conclude that
the United States' survival required greater entanglement abroad.
SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY

Among the current, potentially mortal threats to the global order, Trump is one, but not the most
important. Long before Trump, the political class that brought unending, unsuccessful wars in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, as well as the financial crisis and Great Recession, had discredited itself.
These disasters have done more to diminish confidence in liberal self- government than Trump could
do in his critics' wildest imaginings, short of a mistake that leads to a catastrophic war. The overriding
challenge for American believers in democratic governance is thus nothing less than to reconstruct a
working democracy at home.
As Kennedy said in 1963, it will be enough to sustain a world order "safe for diversity"-liberal and
illiberal alike. That will mean adapting U.S. efforts abroad to the reality that other countries have
contrary views about governance and seek to establish their own international orders governed by their
own rules.
What kind of world do we live in? Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry. “Liberal World:
The Resilient Order.”
The leading patrons of the liberal world order have chosen to undermine their own system (UK with
Brexit, US with Donald Trump), while authoritarian states like Russia and China have strengthened
their authoritarian systems.
So, across the world, the new rise of illiberal forces has established a new nationalist mindset in which
international institutions are seen as threats to national sovereignty. Despite this, the liberal vision of
nation-states cooperating to achieve security and prosperity remains as vital today as at any time in the
modern age.
As long as interdependence continues to grow, peoples and governments everywhere will
cooperate to solve worldwide problems → by necessity, these efforts will build on and strengthen
the institutions of the liberal order.
The liberal vision

Modern liberalism holds that world politics requires new levels of political integration. Liberals argue
that a world with more liberal democratic capitalist states will be more peaceful, prosperous, and
respectful of human rights.
Like realists, they recognize that it is often human nature to seek power. But unlike realists, who see
history as cyclical, liberals are heirs to the Enlightenment project of technological innovation, which
opens new possibilities both for human progress and for disaster. Liberalism is essentially pragmatic.

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Modern liberals embrace democratic governments, market based economic systems and international
institutions since they’re considered as the best arrangements to realize human interests →
interdependence: global institutions are now necessary to realize basic human interests.
Institutional innovations are vital for responding to such emerging challenges as artificial intelligence,
cyberwarfare, and genetic engineering.
It enshrines the idea of tolerance. Although the ideology emerged in the West, its values have become
universal, and its champions have extended to encompass Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, and
Nelson Mandela.
After the Cold War, that order became a global system. But as free markets spread, economic
inequality grew, old political bargains between capital and labor broke down, and social supports
eroded. The benefits of globalization and economic expansion were distributed disproportionately to
elites.
Many democracies turned out to lack the traditions and habits necessary to sustain democratic
institutions. And large flows of immigrants triggered a xenophobic backlash. Together, these
developments have called into question the legitimacy of liberal democratic life. Its solution: a return
to fundamentals of liberal democracies, to the social democratic policies (invest in education and
infrastructures, more progressive taxations)
Rather than deeply challenging the first principles of liberal democracy, the current problems call for
reforms to better realize them. Liberal democracies have repeatedly recovered from crisis resulted from
their own excesses:
ex. 1930 = overproduction + integration of financial markets → rise of fascism → solution: New
Deal and social democracy.
After WWII, liberal democracies joined together to create a new international order that reflected their
shared interests. Despite the high expectations they generate, revolutionary moments often fail to make
enduring changes. It is unrealistic today to think that a few years of nationalist demagoguery will
dramatically destroy liberalism. Liberal democratic capitalist societies have expanded because they
have been particularly adept at stimulating and exploiting innovation and at coping with their spillover
effects and negative externalities. But Human progress has caused grave harm to the planet and its
atmosphere, yet climate change will also require unprecedented levels of international cooperation.
The international order is also likely to persist because its survival does not depend on all of its
members being liberal democracies. And many of its institutions are not uniquely liberal in character.
Rather, they are Westphalian, in that they are designed merely to solve problems of sovereign states,
whether they be democratic or authoritarian. And many of the key participants in these institutions are
not liberal or democratic at all.
More recently, countries of all stripes have crafted global rules to guard against environmental
destruction. The signatories to the Paris climate agreement, for example, include such autocracies as
China, Iran, and Russia. The Montreal Protocol (1987) has thwarted the destruction of the ozone layer
and has been actively supported by democracies and autocracies alike. Such agreements are not
challenges to the sovereignty of the states that create them but collective measures to solve problems
they cannot address on their own. Most institutions, indeed, require that they be status quo powers and
capable of fulfilling their commitments. The persistence of Westphalian institutions provides a lasting
foundation on which distinctively liberal and democratic institutions can be erected in the future.
Another reason to believe that the liberal order will endure involves the return of ideological rivalry
→ autocratic and fascist competitors. After World War II, they built the liberal order in part to contain
the threat of the Soviet Union and international communism. The bad news of renewed ideological
rivalry could be good news for the liberal international order.

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Despite what the backers of Trump and Brexit promise, actually effecting a real withdrawal from these
long-standing commitments (NATO; NAFTA; UE) will be difficult to accomplish. That's because the
institutions of the liberal international order, although often treated as ephemeral and fragile, are
actually quite resilient.
For instance, abandoning NATO, as candidate Trump suggested the United States should do, would
massively disrupt a security order that has provided seven decades of peace on a historically war-torn
continent and doing so at a time when Russia is resurgent would be all the more dangerous.
Even though Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal
lives on, with the 11 other member states implementing their own version of the pact. Similarly, Trump's
withdrawal from the Paris agreement has not stopped dozens of other countries from working to
implement its ambitious goals.
The liberal order may be losing its chief patron, but it rests on much more than leadership from the Oval
Office. The solutions to today's problems are more liberal democracy and more liberal order.
Throughout the course of history, evolution, crises, and tumultuous change have been the norm, and the
reason liberalism has done so well is that its ways of life are so adept at riding the tumultuous storms
of historical change.
The liberal order and its democracies will prevail.
Sthepen kotkin. realist world: the players change, but the game remains
Great power politics will always drive events and international rivalries will be decided by the
relative capacities of the competitors (their material and human capital and their ability to govern
themselves and their foreign affairs). In the coming centuries this process of managing power resources
will clearly involve China and the USA. The US let China, as it did with Germany, to grow freely not
fearing for its position but the US administration could have got it wrong: China will soon have an
economy substantially larger than USA and it won’t bring any democratization about, cause the
communism’s institutional setup doesn’t allow it. Authoritarianism didn’t mean stagnation as it did for
Russia, since Chinese institutions mixed meritocracy and corruption, competence and incompetence
getting the country moving upward. In the meantime, USA and Western democracies have fallen into
domestic dysfunction after an age of globalization, social mobility and human progress. The system
survived the 2008 financial crisis but the measures implemented (bailouts for banks, etc.) revealed its
internal contradictions. The US-China conflict has old origins: China accounted for 40% of the global
GDP and entered a long period of decline while USA was raising to become the world’s largest
economy (US dominance of Asia was essential for American primacy so it couldn’t happen without
China decline). In the same way China comeback couldn’t happen without USA’s provision of security
and open markets.
Beware of what you wish for: to understand the world of tomorrow, look back to yesterday. In the
1970s, the United States and its allies were rich but disordered and stagnant; the Soviet Union had
achieved military parity and was continuing to arm; China was convulsed by internal turmoil and
poverty; India was poorer than China; Brazil, ruled by a military junta, had an economy barely larger
than India's; and South Africa was divided into homelands under a regime of institutionalized racism.
Four decades later, the Soviet Union has dissolved, and its successor states have embraced capitalism
and private property. China, still politically communist, chose markets over planning and has grown to
have the world's second largest economy. Once-destitute India now has the sixth-largest economy.
Brazil became a democracy, experienced an economic takeoff, and now has the eighth-largest economy.
South Africa overturned apartheid and became a multiracial democracy. All these changes originated

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from the US (and its allies) hard work to create an open world with free trade and global integration
(globalization entices rich countries to invest abroad and this reduced inequality enabling millions to
rise out of poverty; in western countries, on the other hand, it exacerbated inequalities between the
winners and the losers of the process, causing a mass political challenge based on the majoritarian
nationalism they had abandoned).
That was then: the geopolitical picture today resembles that of the 1920s, with one exception.
Diminished but enduring Russian power in Eurasia? Check. Germany at the core of a strong but feckless
Europe? Check. A distracted U.S. giant, powerful enough to lead but wavering about doing so? Check.
Brazil and South Africa dominating their regions? Check. Apart from the stirrings of older Indian,
Ottoman, and Persian power centers, the most important difference today is the displacement of Japan
by China as the central player in the Asian balance of power (thanks to its industriousness and the global
security/economic openness provided by the USA as a liberal hegemon). The fragility of a system
dependent on the might, competency and image of the USA has been exposed with the diminishing of
its relative power. Will the 2 superpowers find a way to manage their contest without stumbling into
war? If not, it might be because of Taiwan (Beijing insists on reclaiming all territories as historical
possessions and defining Taiwan as core interest, with the People’s Liberation Army amassing the
capability to seize the island by force).
This is now: both Russia and China currently have corrupt authoritarian regimes but they both proved
adaptable and capable of good governance. Xi’s decision to centralize power has multiple sources but
one was the appreciation of how huge the problems in China still are: the natural response of
authoritarian regimes to crises is to tighten their grip at the top (allowing greater manipulation of events
and impressive results, at least is the short-term). Still, for now, China, backed by its massive economy,
is projecting power in all directions, from the East China and South China Seas, to the Indian Ocean, to
Central Asia, and even to Africa and Latin America. Wealth and consistency have combined to yield
an increasingly impressive soft-power portfolio along with the hard-power one, enabling China to make
inroads into its opponent's turf. The aim is building a Grand Eurasia centered on Beijing, perhaps even
turning Europe away from the Atlantic.
Still, the USA is the greatest power in the international system by far (military and economic strength).
The USA allowed China to rise but also facilitated the growth of the EU, JAP, India and Brazil (all
major powers that will certainly prefer to maintain the order like that). The questions are now 2: can
China expand its sphere of influence without undermining the US-led international system? And can
the USA transit from hegemonic hyperactivity to more selective global engagement on core interest be
peaceful and unchallenged?
4 things to avoid war are necessary:
● western policymakers have to find ways to make large majorities of their populations benefit
from and embrace an open, integrated world
● chinese policymakers have to continue their country's rise peacefully, through compromise,
rather than turning to coercion abroad, as well
● the United States needs to hew to an exactly right balance of strong deterrence and strong
reassurance vis-à-vis China and get its house in order domestically
● some sort of miracle will have to take care of Taiwan
3. Energy Security

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The Concept Of Energy Security: Beyond The Four As Di Cherp.
In this article we examine the four As of energy security (availability, accessibility, affordability
and acceptability) and we analyze the question “security for whom?”, security for which values and
what are the threats?
As a policy problem, energy security has emerged in the early 20th century for supplying the armies.
We can divide the studies about it into classical (1970s in which energy security meant stable supply of
cheap oil under threats of embargos and price manipulation) and contemporary (energy security
challenges go beyond oil supplies and encompass a wider range of issues + it is entangled with climate
change and other contemporary concerns).
Why and how to conceptualize energy security? → Energy security means different things since
energy varies from one place to another which gives rise to different energy security problems.
Secondly, the ‘energy security’ term is sometimes extended to other energy policy issues ranging from
energy. This though doesn’t mean that there can’t be a unique concept, just that it is used for many
different things. We should start from a very general definition of security: Baldwin defines security as
a “low probability of damage to acquired values”.
History of the 4 As and related thinking: two of them were already featured in the classic energy studies
and are still part of the IEA’s mainstream definition of energy security “as the uninterrupted availability
of energy sources at an affordable price”. The other two are more recent and discussed and linked
majorly to the economic and environmental impact of energy (the first two are linked to the human
source of risk). Many studies have then personalized the 4 As adding or modifying dimensions
(sustainability for example) getting even to 20 of them.
Analysis of the 4 As:
1) security for whom? In the classic energy security studies the referent objects were clearly the oil-
importing industrial nations. The scope of contemporary energy security studies goes beyond OECD
oil importers to include nations of all levels of development that extract, import, export and use a variety
of energy sources and carriers. It also addresses perspectives on energy security of non-state actors
ranging from global production networks to individual regions, consumers. Finding a clear referent
object is fundamental for affordability (must it be affordable for the State or the consumers? Or does it
mean that there must be productive investments in the sector?) and acceptability since otherwise it loses
meaning.
2) security for which values? Classical studies made self-evident connections between national values
and political independence, territorial integrity and a particular energy system. Contemporary studies
include in the values also economic welfare, internal political and social stability. A central question
for contemporary energy security studies is to identify and explore connections between energy systems
and important social values. Protecting values of different nations means protecting distinct energy
systems of those nations, not energy in general.
3) from what threats? Policies on public services (including energy) are concerned with either
attaining desired standards (e.g. extending energy or health care access to new areas or groups) or
maintaining these standards by the most effective means (e.g. unbundling electricity generation and
transmission to increase competitiveness). Naturally, a concept of energy security cannot list all possible
risks or vulnerabilities, but it should provide a framework for identifying, measuring and managing
vulnerabilities.
Alternative approaches: some recent conceptual developments concerning energy security and most of
these insights proceed from defining energy security as the low vulnerability of vital energy systems.
The question “what to protect?” is answered by the vital energy systems which are those energy systems
(energy resources, technologies and uses linked together by energy flows) that support critical social

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functions (‘acquired values’ in security terms). Examples include supply to the army, energy
infrastructure, renewable energy resources, energy services and revenues. Different energy systems
allow better measurement and better targeting of energy security policies.
Vulnerabilities: these are a combination of exposure to risk and resilience of the vital energy systems.
Risk can be of different nature: shocks are the short-term ones and stresses are the long-term ones;
physical or economic risk (prices are affordable if they stop short of causing severe disruption of
normal social and economic activity”). Studying the origins of threat we have 3 distinct perspectives:
● the sovereignty perspective sees the origins in the action of foreign actors;
● the robustness perspective sees the origins in natural and technological phenomena such as
resource scarcity, aging of infrastructure;
● the resilience perspective sees the origins in largely unpredictable social, economic and
technological factors .
Referent objects and securitization: Both vital energy systems and their vulnerabilities are not only
objective phenomena, but also political constructs defined and prioritized by various social actors (the
importance of the energy systems depend on the context).
GOLDTHAU THE HANDBOOK OF ENERGY SECURITY

Chapter 2 The entanglement of energy, grand strategy and international security
American energy future has drastically changed in the last few years from a heavy importer of oil and
gas to an exporter thanks to the development of the tight oil in the Bakken formation in North Dakota
and the Eagle Ford in Texas (technology and innovation deserve the credit: hydraulic fracturing and
horizontal drilling). These domestic advances are complemented by new energy developments among
America’s neighbors like Canada (oil sands) and Brazil (subsalt deep water oil resources). The
economic benefits for US are major: less imports to shrink the trade deficit and strengthen the dollar,
oil and gas revivals will bolster (rafforzare) employment but the strategic position was the biggest
advantage (energy security with its 3 main concepts aka Access, supply and affordability were
fundamental for US in the international politics). Gas imports dropped from 4.3 billion cubic feet in
2005 to 3.5 in 2011 and oil imports from 12.5 to 8.5 million barrels per day (and the 49% of the crude
oil imported and the 89% of gas comes from US neighbors).
Security concepts have included more dimensions through the years: security of demand for main
energy exporters, security of transit linked to infrastructure and transport routes (oil from Canada is
definitely gonna be less vulnerable to disruption than the one coming through Bosporus or the Straits
of Hormuz). But a more sophisticated idea of energy security is the access to affordable energy without
having to contort one’s political security, diplomatic, or military arrangements (these new resources
would make American substantially secure if they allowed it to scale back its military presence in the
ME or allow it to pursue in a freer way its foreign policy goals).
Energy Security And The Grand Strategy Of Countries
A grand strategy framework reveals how energy factors into a whole host of interactions between
countries, actors, and global institutions (guides a country in its effort to combine its instruments on
national power in order to shape the international environment and advance specific national security
goals). It has 3 parts: 1) a vision of a desired outcome or set of objectives 2) ways to pursue the goals
3) resources available to the effort (help the country prioritize scarce resources). To make an example
Japan would focus its grand strategy on the near complete dependence on energy imports and Brazil
would see energy as a great asset and develop a strategy for advancing other, non-energy objectives in
the international and regional domain. So energy can be either the ends, ways or means of a country
grand strategy.

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Energy As An End/Objective Of Gs
The energy imperative is so central to the prosperity and stability of a country that it will use whatever
instruments at disposal to ensure energy security (most of countries can rely only on market to ensure
energy security and thus the GS may revolve around generating enough foreign currency to purchase
needed oil and gas; but some countries have considerable tools to extend to the pursuit of energy and
for them often political, economic, diplomatic or military strategies are employed to ensure the energy
goal).
Blood for Oil?
Many people think that countries go to war to meet their energy needs (Axis in WW2 wanted to have
physical control over oil fields). But from then on relatively few international wars have been fueled by
this desire: Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 is the best contemporary example of war to
control resources (Saddam Hussein wished to terminate the alleged Kuwait practice of drilling across
the international border into the Rumaila oilfield). Some would also include the 1991 and 2003 Iraq
wars waged by America into this category (control Iraqi oil and make American enterprises dispose of
it). It is important to distinguish between commercial and strategic interests: the second refers to the
desire of US to directly control Iraqi oil and bring US companies in and this was not really the case
since it relinquish the territory it gained in southern Iraq very easily and ceded sovereignty back to the
Kuwaitis (country south to Iraq) with no condition. The strategic interests related to oil were instead
very strong and motivated the US to use military force to oust Saddam from Kuwait (with Kuwait
Saddam had 19% of the world’s oil reserves under his control and the percentage would have grown at
44% had he continued its push into Saudi Arabia). This would have shifted the regional balance of
power toward Iraq and away from states more aligned with the USA and given the possibility for Iran
to blackmail other Arab States, threaten Israel and destabilize international oil prices. Same for the 2003
war since commercial interest could have been reached just bargaining with the Iraqi government for
access to its oil wealth for the lifting of the sanctions. The approach of the Coalition Provisional
Authority (US-led body governing Iraq under the occupation) is further proof of this theory: it stated
that energy matters should have been decided by the legitimate government and didn’t pass rules about
the matter. Also strategic interests were lower this time: with the wavering of the international support
for sanctions, Saddam’s ability to circumvent them heightened US concerns that he was amassing
sufficient resources to advance a destabilizing agenda in the region. Furthermore unseating Saddam
didn’t look so awful since the oil resources could pay for Iraqi reconstruction.
Conflict as a product of competition over resources
In several cases, the quest to meet a country’s energy needs is creating tensions that could be precursors
to violent conflict (particularly if countries believe that the world is closing in on the limits of its energy
endowment). The current situation in the South China Sea is a good case in point, an area of particular
interest for the world and especially the six Asian countries of Brunei, China, Malaysia, Philippines,
Taiwan and Vietnam because 1) the South China Sea and the adjacent Strait of Malacca are key oil
transit waterways: 30% of the shipped oil transited through there in 2019 2) the area is supposed to
house significant oil and gas deposits around 213 billion barrels. China claims the largest portion of
the SCS and has used its military and paramilitary to intimidate other countries seeking claim over
different areas of it but all of these countries are investing in maritime military assets to protect their
interests. In 2011, 3 Chinese vessels cut the survey cables of a Vietnamese ship exploring for oil and
same did with Filipino exploration vessels. So the potential for conflict is very high even though none
of the countries has in its interests a conflict.
Impediments to preventive or punitive action
The pursuit of energy as an end of a grand strategy can have significant security implications by
undermining or impeding the ability to address important, non-energy national security dilemmas. It’s

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in this domain that China’s approach to Africa is most relevant: in 1993 China shifted from being an
exporter of energy to being a net importer and in 2011 its dependency from imports reached 55%. Thus
China concluded that relying on the market wasn’t enough to meet its energy demand, particularly in a
time of future conflict and it developed the “going out” strategy: it increased the appeal of national oil
companies by providing the host government with much needed loans, direct investments and
infrastructure development. Chinese engagement in Africa has fueled a construction boom of
railroads, highways and ports but may also undermine the international community and Africans’ efforts
to promote governance, transparency and accountability. Many African states have foregone financial
assistance from international institutions preferring the one without any conditions from China (in 2004
Chinese aid undercut IMF effort to advance economic and political reform in the wake of the civil war
in Angola). But our real concerns lie in the security realm: does the going out strategy in Africa create
serious security challenges? Some critics worry that China is locking up African natural resources and
that this aggressive approach will escalate in a US-China resource rivalry. These worries might be
exaggerated: China oil companies are responsible for only 3% of total energy investment on the
continent and Chinese production in Africa in 2006 was only 7% of the Algerian NOC (Sonatrach)
which is the largest energy producer on the continent (and Chinese NOCs tend not to conflict over same
concession ad the West and opt for not appealing areas for their political risk and the oil produced is
sold into China and not exported). These reasons make superpowers conflict improbable. More valid
security concerns arise from the immunity that Chinese involvement gives some African countries from
international pressure (it can neuter international efforts to address genocide, repression and civil war
and protect them from UN censure (biasimo) and stricter action). Efforts to penalize Sudan in 2004
were weakened at the insistence of the Chinese government.
Energy as a way/tool of achieving security objectives
1) Energy as a political weapon: 1973 Arab oil embargo was an attempt to exact political concessions
by withholding energy. In 1956 Saudi Arabia cut off sales to the UK and FR and continued its embargo
on Israel in response to these countries seizing the Suez Canal after Egyptian nationalization of it but
none experienced shortages. In 1967 Arab Countries froze oil exports to the US, DE and UK to make
them stop supporting Israel in the Six Day War but none suffered again. However in 1973 the
Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) embargoed oil sales to US,
Netherlands, Portugal and South Africa in response to US decision to restock Israel’s depleted armory:
international prices rose dramatically and global economic growth was launched in recession with
stagflation rousing. This attempt was successful because OAPEC coupled its embargo to specific
countries with progressive cuts in production and the market was characterized by a tightening oil
market before the embargo. This shows how countries can use energy as a weapon, even though we are
not sure that the measure did change the foreign policies of the countries; furthermore the generalized
attack on the global economy can boomerang on the instigators since the revenues of oil producers
plummeted with the recession. This episode also motivated consumer countries to develop new
institutions to mitigate the dangers: the launch of the International Energy Agency meant greater
coordination among consumers and strategic petroleum reserves. 3 factors are important for using
energy as a weapon: state of the market, willingness of producers to curtail production and the risks
producers are prepared to take to their own well-being. Considering these factors successful campaigns
are improbable since high prices spur consumers to find alternatives (this is why OAPEC must calibrate
its production and they need revenues to use high social spending to mitigate domestic demands and
protests against the regime). One exception is Iran and his threat to wreak havoc (scompiglio) on the
global oil market in response to international pressure to abandon the pursuit of nuclear weapons
(threaten to terminate its oil exports or close the Straits of Hormuz). Still these courses of action would
come at its cost since losing its revenues in a moments of international sanctions would be inconvenient
and closing the Straits would take Iranian oil off the global market (the US would probably free the
Straits in no time). Gas producers might be in a better position but they as well don’t want to ruin
partnership. An example is Russia’s cut off of gas to Ukraine (the confrontation started in 2005 when

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the Orange Revolution in Ukraine brought a westward looking government who asked higher prices to
Russia for the transit of energy). This reached a climax in 2009 when Russian gas exports to Europe
stopped for 15 days and Russia accused Ukraine of theft and the other accused the cutting of gas supply
but in the midst Europe has no gas with no alternatives in winter. Still the results are uncertain as they
always have been with gas embargoes (like for Georgia who sought to diversify suppliers other than
Russia). Also consumers can use their buying power to influence foreign policies (with sanctions, by
stopping to buy oil coming from certain countries like US did in 1990 for Libya, Iran and Sudan and
finding easily other sellers). But to really influence the producers must be a group of states cutting down
purchases. Sanctions, though, can be effective even when unilateral since extraterritorial sanctions
threaten to exact a price on third parties for doing business with Iran or entities like the Iranian Central
Bank (when force to choose between processing oil transactions through the Iranian Bank and losing
some forms of access to the US financial system, many banks have steered clear of Iran). In 2012,
though, a tight market and high geopolitical risk has led policy-makers to seek ways of imposing
sanctions on Iran without harming global oil supply and risking major price spikes (limit but not
eliminate the countries willing to buy so that they can ask for great discounts and so reduce Iran
revenues.
2) Energy as Cement in alliances: energy used to shore up alliances and to build support for certain
ideologies and national security positions, provide discounted energy to maintain a country in the our
own orbit or sphere of influence like did URSS to the members of the Warsaw Pact during the late
1970s; Saddam Hussein’s Iraq provided cheap oil to Jordan; Venezuela is doing it right now to Bolivia
and Cuba to shore up support for President Chavez’s anti American, revolutionary stance in Latin
America. The ability of oil to secure loyalty of countries though isn’t really high (Yemen sided with
Iran against Kuwait in the first Gulf War despite they had received cheap energy from Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia).
Energy As A Means/Resource For National Security Strategies
The last way in which energy can be part of grand strategy is when it provides the means or resources
with which countries can advance their foreign policy or national security interest (in short energy
often provides large proportions of a country’s revenues and national budget). High revenues from
energy are not in themselves a determinant of destabilizing international behavior (look at Canada with
its 7% of GDP coming from energy but still a model democracy, same for Australia, Norway, Brazil,
Mexico, Angola, China with none of them as instigator of global disorder). And you don’t have to be
energy exporter to seek disorder (Syria, Sudan, North Korea, Cuba are all on the list of terrorism
sponsors). Still without its energy revenues Iran would still try to expand its influence regionally and
globally but would be far less successful (money spent on developing nuclear weapons, sponsors Shia’s
militia…). Same for Chavez who used his revenues to promote governments close to his anti-American
ideology (financial support for the elections of like-minded politicians in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and
Paraguay; financial support to FARC aka a group seeking to destabilize neighboring Columbia.
Concerns are also about the possibility that energy revenues encourage development of repressive
regimes (rentier states use revenues from oil and gas to construct societies beholden by the ruling group
(they can avoid demanding taxes thus people will not complain).
Chapter 3 Sustainability, Climate Chang e And Transition In Global Economy

We study how the current energy system is unsustainable and the policy challenges that must be
overcome to bring about a transition to a more sustainable system (climate change is one of the major
drivers of global energy policy). The Rio+20 United Nations on Sustainable Development that took
place in 2012 (2 decades after the original Rio Earth Summit 1992) identified 7 key critical issues that
need priority attention. In Parallel, the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon set 3 interlinked objectives

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to be achieved by 2030: universal access to modern energy services, doubling the rate of improvement
in energy efficiency, and doubling the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix (since these
matters were missing in the Millennium Development Goals). The 1992 Earth Summit is also of
significance as it opened the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for signature
and today 195 states are Parties to the convention. The first World Climate conference actually took
place earlier in 1979, the fist Intergovernmental Panel on climate change in 1988, the first Conference
of Parties (COP-1) too place in Berlin initiating a process that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol being
adopted at COP-3 in 1997 (expired in 2012 but the commitment on the states is still there, then extended
to 2020). The UE has its own deal on climate change and its commitment to reduce GHG emissions of
20%, increase 20% the share of renewable energy and energy efficiency (Copenhagen pledges).
In the last years energy security has become a matter of concerns for state due to the plateauing of non-
OPEC production, a surge in resource nationalism with almost all the oil and gas reserves becoming
public, the rising costs of sustaining production, surge of new demand from non-OECD countries
(struggle to match production and demand with the fear of oil closing its peak and barrels being paid
27$ in 1990s to the 56$ of the 2000s getting now to 100$). This brought great transfers of wealth from
importing to exporting countries, empowered oil-producing states and has complicated global economic
recovery and thus the International Energy Agency concluded that the currents trends were
unsustainable (fossil fuels energy system causes environmental degradation, GHG emissions are main
causes of climate change; from an economic point of view the high costs contribute to poverty). The
importance of a New Energy Paradigm is shared by almost everyone. Energy security doesn’t only
include supply and affordability but also equity, environmental sustainability.
Global Energy Dilemmas
Can we have secure and affordable energy services that are environmentally benign? This stresses the
fact that the impact goes beyond pure climate change (Macondo oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010,
Fukushima nuclear power plant’s explosion following the 2011 Tsunami in Japan, gas leak at the Elgin
platform in the North Sea in 2012…). Fossil fuels are not the only problem since biomass can bring
deforestation about, hydroelectric schemes have impacts as well and also wind farms create visual and
noise pollution (both hydrocarbon and low carbon energy resources have negative impacts but these are
usually local and it’s the degree that matters).
Energy and climate change: industrial revolution and the 200 years of fossil fuels-based economy
development coincide with a substantial increase in the levels of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere
but we have no proof that the emission of GHG is the cause of the warming trend we experience. Still
the widespread opinion is that the impact of human activity has to do with climate change, warming
and rising of sea, melting glaciers and so on and in 2004 the IPCC accounted for fossil fuel use for
56,6% of total GHG emissions and fossil fuel combustion for 80% of total CO2 emissions. Climate
change-policy makers have identified 450 part per million (ppm) as a critical level below which
emissions must be stabilized to reduce chances of catastrophic climate change by reducing energy
related GHG emissions. Today the global energy mix is dominated by fossil fuels (in 2010 coal 29%,
natural gas 23 and oil 33% with the remaining 13% of renewables) with differences among regions (in
Asia coal accounts for the 52%). Major differences exist also in the emissions of the fossil fuels when
burnt with the coal as the most emitters of GHG (92 g CO2/MJ) and conventional gas the last (52,4 g
CO2/MJ). Unconventional sources of energy as tar sands and shale gas are even worse since a lot of
energy must be used to extract the bitumen and then turn it into a synthetic fuel. This is why the UK in
the last 20 years replaced carbon with natural gas as the main element of its energy mis.
The Globalization Of Energy Demand And Carbon Emissions
The concentration of historical emissions in the industrialized world with US and Europe accounting
together for 55,8% of the cumulative emissions between 1850 and 2002; growing emissions in the

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developing world starting from the 1990s and a fall in the industrialized one (The share of the so called
“basic economies like Brazil, China, India, South Africa has grown to 20,6% with China passing US as
the world’s top emitter in 2007). We can see a change in trends with the developed world contributing
always less and the developing/Post-socialist/emerging states contributing always more in percentage
(China share in 2009 was 24%, triple what it was in 1990; the developing world or better the poorest
countries still account very little confronted to the emerging states). What about future projection of
energy use and carbon emissions? International energy outlook, a view to 2040 and many others
describe a significant increase in global energy demand (40%) covered majorly by fossil fuels (80%),
in particular in developing countries as they industrialize and their population grows (China, India and
ME). This scenario falls well short of what is required to put the global energy system on a path that
would constrain global warming to 2 degrees. The world cannot afford the non-OECD countries to
develop in the same fossil fuels-intensive way that OECD countries did.
Global energy transitions: both existing and new demand must be met from low carbon sources and
that will require a transition in the nature of the system (in order to find sustainable ways for developing
countries to raise their well-being without destroying the planet). According to Grubler an energy
transition is “Change from one state of an energy system to an another one, for example, from
comparatively low levels of energy use relying on the non-commercial, traditional, renewable fuels to
high levels of energy us relying on commercial, modern, fossil-based fuels” (represents the industrial
revolution that changed the use from natural flows like water, wind, sun to carbon). 3 transitions have
happened:
● phase dominated by biomass or natural flows
● phase dominated by coal and steam power
● coal and steam power replaced by oil and gas.
In 2030 nuclear power, hydroelectric and renewable energy will only account for the 20% of energy
demand which can hardly be called a low carbon transition (transitions take decades to happen and there
are limits to the rate at which new technologies can be deployed and the increase in efficiency is not
easy to achieve). One thing that is motivating this transition is the growing amount of energy needed to
extract energy resources from always more difficult places since the easy ones have been consumed.
One way adopted to reduce emissions is subsidizing renewables to make them be sold easier and raise
the price of fossil fuels (a thing that does though increase poverty and obstacles energy access).
The challenge of the low carbon transition: we’ll use the Kaya identity to disaggregate the key
elements that drive energy demand and emissions (indicator that deals with CO2 from energy). An
important thing to say is that policy makers, especially during recession, are not willing to give up
economic growth so easily and that’s why the new matter is sustainable development (economic
growth is indeed a driver of energy demand). Another important driver is population growth even
though the management and control of population as an energy policy is not in view: improving female
education and workforce could be useful for the climate as well! The two remaining elements are:
energy intensity (amount of energy to produce a unit of output in a particular national economy
influenced by economic structure, primary energy mix, climate, level of economic development,
technical energy efficiency) which could be improved with energy efficiency and the maturing of
societies (which move toward the 3rd sector of services so pollute less). The other measure is carbon
intensity of energy use (CO2 per unit of energy consumed) obviously influenced by the energy mix.
One possible solution is to deploy technologies to capture and store the CO2 emission coming from
large industrial facilities (Carbon Capture and Storage technology). To conclude, the Kaya Identity
makes it clear that to promote a more sustainable system we need: demand reduction, improved
energy efficiency and decarbonization of energy use (objectives present in the EU and UN programs)

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Chapter 4: The Development Nexus Of Global Energy

Energy has been one of the key drivers of human development since prehistoric times (fire used for
melting Iron, animals’ traction for transport, wind power for sailing). But the global economic growth
has been made possible thanks to an increasingly massive consumption of cheap fossil fuels and fossil
materials. The thermo-industrial revolution in EU and North America opened new frontiers for
industrialization, speeded up mobility and boosted trade. Immediately after came oil that spurred a
massive leap in the development process. In this article we focus on 3 clusters: relationship between
access to energy and development; energy security, food and water policies; the impact of energy
resources on development prospects in producer countries (since many developing countries joined the
ranks of energy producers like China, Chad and Uganda and many others are exploring like Tanzania,
Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya).
Energy poverty, inequality and development: use of energy per capita data shows a correlation with
human development as measured by the Human development index (HDI) that combines monetary
income with health and education indicators. Martinez and Ebenhack observe a steep rise in human
development relative to energy consumption for energy poor nations, a moderate rise for transitioning
nations and zero rise for countries consuming large amounts of modern energy. Access to modern
energy is very unevenly distributed with the least developed countries that account for 10% of the
world’s population, consuming 1% of the global energy. On the other hand, the USA only consumes
24% of the world’s energy. According to the International Energy Agency, 1.4 billion people do not
have access to electricity and 2.7 billion people rely on traditional biomass for cooking and heating
(premature deaths for air pollution, accelerate deforestation). Africa’s situation is paradoxical since it
needs better access to energy for poverty reduction and development and yet it is a net exporter of
commercial energy (it exports 12% of the world’s exports and just 3% of global consumption).
Improving access to energy for people in rural areas should be a development priority. Achieving
universal access to energy, though, would increase global electricity generation by 2.5%, demand for
fossil fuels by 0,8% and CO2 emissions by 0.7%. Government policies in developing countries play a
key role in setting a national energy agenda: Dominican Republic subsidized natural gas in the 1990s
and released pressure on wood as primary source of energy (vs Haiti where charcoal still covers 85%
of energy needs).
Energy security, food and water: linkages between energy security and geopolitics, food and
agriculture policy, and water policy (policy coherence is lacking and today energy policy must integrate
social and sustainable development and vice versa).
Geopolitical reconfiguration: the scramble for African Resources
With rising global energy demand, in particular from Asian emerging countries, energy security policies
result in a scramble for energy resources: in this context African countries have gained renewed
geostrategic significance. The Gulf of Guinea has become an important source of oil supply particularly
for the US that imports a quarter of its oil from that region (AFRICOM). Also Chinese, Indian, Korean
and Malaysian engaged in Sub-Saharan Africa (China considers Africa as not only a source of raw
materials but also a potential market for its products, becoming an important investor and aid donor and
maintaining good relationships with the ruling elites).
Food and energy: this relationship has grown with the increasing energy intensity in agriculture and
competition between food and energy production for land use (both trends pushed food prices upwards
affecting the poor in developing countries. More and more crops are diverted toward the production of
biofuels resulting in a reduction of global crop supplies and cereal stocks (in the bid for seeking new
energy resources). The International Food Policy Research Institute estimates the increase of demand
for biofuels between 2000 and 2007 has contributed up to 30% of the increase of weighted average
grain prices (even though this effect is bound to decrease with second generation biofuels). The

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correlation between agriculture and fossil fuels make the two prices very interconnected (energy for
crop management, pesticides, machinery production). As long as agriculture will depend on fossil
fuels, food prices will be coupled with energy prices and food production will be linked to GHG
emissions. Increasing the productivity of smallholder farms in developing countries and closing the
yield gap are critical to improve food security. Changing diet patterns toward more meat and dairy
products in emerging and developing countries following urbanization and the emergence of a growing
middle class may lead to a more energy intensive agriculture, with an increasing use of synthetic inputs
(fertilizers, chemicals) and mechanization. Some argue that genetically modified crops could reduce the
reliance on such inputs. But starting by reducing food losses could save much energy, reduce CO2
emissions and increase food security.
Energy and water security: water is required for energy production and it depends on energy for
transport, treatment, purification, pumping etc. (many energy plants are water-cooled, withdrawing
trillions of cubic meters of water from streams and lakes and often contaminating them). Over 50
countries rely primarily on hydroelectric dams to generate power and still 60-80% of the potential in
developing countries remains unexploited (many dams are now planned in Asia and upstream countries
like Nepal and Bhutan could benefit from selling electricity to India). Dams are also a source of tensions
since they can cause displacement of population and damage the hydrology of the area + downstream
water users could feel threatened like Pakistan is preoccupied about the Indian Baglihar dam.
Impact Of Resource Extraction On Development In Producing Countries.
Changing landscape in oil production: the number of oil and gas producing countries has increased
since more investment went into exploration over the last decade; this was triggered by growth of
demand, renewed interest in nuclear energy, and rising price. Former net importing countries are
becoming exporters like Sudan and Chad, Ghana and Uganda. The growth of demand comes from
developing Asian countries like China, India and Korea. All three have formulated explicit
internationalization strategies to secure access to energy resources through their state-owned extractive
industries venturing abroad. This increased the foreign direct investments (FDI), competition and raised
the risk of bottom standards in the extractive sector in environmental sustainability, human and labor
rights especially where governmental regulatory capacity is low.
Turning energy extraction into development: it is known as the “resource curse” which indicates
the lower economic growth of resource-rich countries than that of resource-poor countries. This has
been explained with corruption, the authoritarian nature of the regimes or prolonged civil wars/
human rights abuses correlated with high natural resource dependence (but why don’t governments
take corrective measures?). Jonathan Di John (2011) finds that the resource impact on a country – the
extent to which mineral and fuel abundance generate developmental outcomes – depends largely on the
nature of the state to appropriate mineral rents, the ownership structure in the export sector, and the
ability of the state to implement a dual-track growth strategy where a ring-fenced sector promotes the
emergence of a competitive industry to drive the diversification of the economy.
There are 3 main clusters of arguments to explain the phenomenon: 1) rents deteriorate institutions 2)
importance of the quality of institutions prior to windfall revenues 3) important role of “impartiality
enhancing institutions”. It’s fundamental to have checks and balances to limit the government power
(The decisive question for the performance of resource dependent economies is: how are (policy)
decisions being made and how is power exercised with impartiality as the organizing principle).
Policy options and development impact: the state defines the conditions under which national and
international industries can extract and sell energy resources (Ownership of the subsoil). States have
behaved in 2 different ways: the neo-liberal model focuses on attracting FDI, minimizing taxes and
royalties, and no conditions. This approach has indeed attracted investors but development results were
low. The opposite approach is the nationalist where domestic state-owned companies have a great role/
full nationalization (this was the main one in the 70s, then replaced in the 80s).

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Revenues management: this is crucial in a bid for avoiding resource curse and it has been made more
difficult by price volatility (caused by speculators). The World Bank has actively promoted national
revenue funds to compensate for price fluctuations and save for future generations, once the fuel or
mineral reserves are exhausted. Resource-rich developing countries should focus investing in assets
yielding high social returns (basic infrastructure, public health and human capital as only ways to
continue prosperity beyond resource extraction). Concerns about doing business with authoritarian
regimes are rather the exception than the rule, and very few instruments have been developed so far to
address the resource curse. This is the case with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI)
and the Voluntary Principles on Human Rights and Security, which were introduced as a response to
civil society pressure and are structured as voluntary governance mechanisms. The eventual
effectiveness and outcome of such voluntary multi stakeholder regimes remains to be evaluated in a
rigorous manner. This cannot help to improve accountability on the allocation of revenues by producer
states, which, in the end, is the decisive factor for development. The only attempt so far to regulate
revenue allocation was tried out by the World Bank in the case of the Chad–Cameroon pipeline. It fell
victim to the traditional obsolescing bargain problem once investments were made and the Chadian
government enjoyed a steady flow of revenue.
4. Energy Security, Sovereignty and Conflict
Goldthau, Andreas. Handbook of Global Energy Policy

Chapter 10 Global Resource Scramble And New Energy Prontiers
Introduction
Oil Schizophrenia: bivalent relationship with the major source of energy because we use it and benefit
from it but we don’t like it because it is scarce and very polluting.
Still crude oil is the most efficient, easily transported and stored energy resource and it has been
essential in the 20th century for transportation, exchange of goods, industrial specialization and
productivity gains that have permitted higher standards of living (and oil disruptions have caused social
distress and economic setbacks). Security of oil supply has become a major concern for many world’s
capitals (secure volumes and prices) and some capitals are sometimes willing to use military force to
secure access or money to gain preferential access. The result in the last few years was the “Peak Oil”
debate emphasizing economic consumption, political implications and strategy options.
The peak oil controversy

The former proclaim that the extraction of finite oil resources is heading toward an imminent shortage,
and the latter assert that supply and demand of oil adapt dynamically to shifting oil prices so that oil
shortages will not occur, provided prices correctly reflect the supply potential and the cost of substitutes.
From this perspective, an eventual shortfall of oil would imply that oil is underpriced in relation to the
supply potential, substitutes, and its utility to consumers, meaning a market failure. Many fear that this
shortage is nearby, and this will force changes in living and social conditions (financial crisis,
unemployment, lack of growth as a consequence of shortage and consequent higher energy prices).
Apart from these economic aspects, it’s claimed that commercial energy is essential to basic human
needs.
The sources of controversy

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Starting from 1970s many international institutions published articles about oil scarcity and the
imminent disaster for economy, politics and society describing it as a fatality impossible to stop,
regardless human and technological development and efficiency (demand surpassing supply before
2000s, Hubbert’s curve and the peak of oilfields, new discoveries weren’t enough and almost all the
oilfields were already been discovered). All of this turned out to be false and dramatic for no apparent
reason, since Canada, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Norway, Russia and Saudi Arabia have large prospective areas
that have not been explored yet and the same for the US that prohibits drilling in many areas.
Oil supplies are dynamic

Technological development continuously lowers costs; a globalized oil industry disseminates
innovation. New technology and lower costs make new resources available. Smaller and more
difficult available prospects become economical. New sites with potentially large resources open up, as
in the Arctic and in deep waters of the Atlantic off Angola and Brazil. Experience lowers costs for
equivalent fields and enables new, smaller, and less accessible fields to replace mature fields (North
Sea was once geological and economic risk, now is central). Estimating an end of oil supply is definitely
premature also considering the fact that technology and knowledge can enhance recovery rates, volumes
and lifetimes. This proves wrong the Hubbert’s theory that rests on six key assumptions (knowledge of
the world’s oil reserves is complete, reserves estimates are constant, extraction inevitably takes the
shape of a fairly symmetric curve, technology is constant, oil prices do not matter, all oil producers have
the same profit motives and goals) and all of these assumptions are false. A static approach is not suited
to understand today’s dynamic oil industry since many parameters are dynamic like costs, reserves,
prices, profits, competitions and regulations. Presently, governments are the owners of the bulk of the
world’s oil reserves; in many cases they do not maximize short-term volumes and income but instead
seek the greatest ultimate long-term recovery.
The Erroneous economics of “Peak Oil”

One of the mistakes of this theory is that it overlooks the price mechanism since a shortfall would mean
that the price is too low to restore balance and supply surplus would mean that prices are too high for
the market (both events have happened respectively in 1970s and early 2000s; 1980s and late 1990s).
In recent years, the volume of financial oil transactions has increased significantly, and it is an open
question to what extent financial agents have caused oil price rises and volatility. When financial
markets perceive an oil undersupply, they rally to buy; when they perceive an oversupply, they rally to
sell.
Prices matter
The oil price is the bridge between supply and demand = if the price is too high for consumers the
supplies will diminish due to unsold oil and the contrary (short-term price elasticity). The prerequisite
for oil demand is that consumers benefit more from using oil than from not using oil at available prices
(otherwise the market will invest in something with a higher utility). It’s important to study oil also as
a behavioral and sociological aspect: economic growth raises incomes and consumers’ time costs and
therefore raises the cost of not using oil to save time by quick transportation and raises consumers’
tolerance for high oil product prices (this makes oil prices unstable since it all depends on the incomes
and the willingness of the consumers’ to buy oil products and also the quantity offered in the market by
suppliers). Higher prices, instead, make other resource categories available, inciting technology
development (shale gas and oil for example were made cheap by high costs of conventional oil).
Important to underline the fact that the market of oil is not a perfect competition so the few producers,
usually working together, can decide the level of prices (like OPEC). Leaving the oil in the ground
sometimes can bring about more revenues and it’s certainly more convenient than foreign investments

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or domestic use. Producers, though, need to be cautious when they decide quantity/prices: the historical
precedent is that of the massive oil price increases of the 1970s, followed by a protracted period of
declining real oil prices from the mid-1980s to about 1999, only interrupted by the first Gulf War in
1990/1. During this period, oil lost its position in stationary uses such as heating and power generation
to coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Unusually high oil prices for a decade triggered a wave of
substitution as well as efficiency measures and investment in hitherto marginal oil provinces such as
Alaska and the North Sea.
Technology matters
As investment picks up, experience accumulates, and technology develops, costs will fall and
competition will build up, adding to the downward price pressure. As prices fall, the economic
resource rent from conventional oil will diminish, adding to pressure for cost cuts also in established
oil provinces (opposite of the Peak Oil theory that forecasted rising marginal costs and diminishing
volumes). Important to say also that not all the time the conventional economic resource theory is right
since sometimes lower prices will mean higher volumes due to the income needs of the producers.
Policies matter
Hubbert’s model and the “Peak Oil” theory ignore resource policy and government intervention, and
consequently fail to grasp the political framework and the economic realities of today’s oil industry.
Hardly any country gives an unqualified green light to petroleum exploration, development, and
extraction (policy tends to stretch the lifetime of their reserve by limiting access and controlling volumes
for example). Iraq has 98 prove reserves with just 21 effectively producing; Venezuela has enormous
reserves and still much to explore; Libya has Africa’s largest proven oil reserves; Norway has limited
the oil industry with high taxes and public participation and strict environmental safeguards even though
the Norwegian Sea has estimated reserves as big as those in Gulf of Mexico (with higher costs of
extraction though); Brazil has seen a quick growth in oil production. The exploitation of pre-salt oil
deposits in deep offshore waters represents a major technological breakthrough with worldwide
ramifications.
The perilous politics of peak oil

As has been argued above, this is a simplistic notion that overlooks basic features of the oil market. The
short-term price inelasticity of oil demand and supply and long lead times, imperfect competition due
to the concentration of oil reserves relative to oil consumption, and the growing role of financial
markets, slow down the response of the market. A perception of oil scarcity can inspire a militaristic
strategy to secure access to oil by force, eventually to deny access to others. The European imperial
powers, Britain and France, in the twentieth century used military means to secure their oil interests
(e.g., in Iraq and Algeria).
New perspective for oil policies and strategies

Natural gas is emerging as a winner in the last decades since the costs are lower as is the pollution
impact and it’s also more reliable than wind and solar and available in large quantities in many sources.
The self-sufficiency of the USA in regards to energy has reduced pressure on natural gas prices
worldwide. Prospects for higher volumes and lower oil and natural gas prices weaken the
competitiveness of nuclear power, coal, and renewable energy. This is particularly important in an
economic recession. In the late 1970s, with the perception of ever-rising oil prices, many countries
opted for nuclear power, but the oil price decline in the mid-1980s and the Three Mile Island and
Chernobyl accidents caused nuclear investment to decline (lower oil and gas prices will outtake solar
and wind power as well). The dilemma for the US is whether to continue to secure access to oil by force

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and a militaristic strategy or by more mercantilist means. In relation to the Middle East, which has a
food deficit, the US has a favorable position as the world’s major food exporter (oil is not the only
driver in the politics in ME, Israel often seems more important= pro-Israel lobby powerful in USA).
Since 2000, China has become the major trading partner and investor for many countries in Africa, the
Middle East, and South America. China is the largest buyer of Saudi crude, the major investor and
trading partner for Iran, and the largest investor in Iraq’s oil industry. It is also the major trading partner
for Angola and Brazil. Capital, investment, and trade give China international influence and strong
positions in key countries without using military power. China’s oil imports grow as US oil imports
recede. This may reduce tension and the conflict potential over access to oil. As the centre of import
gravity in the oil market shifts from the North Atlantic to South and East Asia, important economic and
political consequences follow. The flows of manufactured goods from China to compensate for the oil
flows are shifting the patterns of world trade in general, not just oil and other raw materials. The flows
of investment and payment are shifting the patterns of international finance, likely to be reinforced by
the gradual internationalization and convertibility of the Chinese currency. Finally, the flows of oil,
manufactured goods, and money are creating new patterns of political allegiances. China is already the
leading economic power in the Middle East, with growing political influence. The drive by the US and
the EU to impose harsher sanctions on Iran serves China’s interests well.
Chapter 11: Cooperation And Conflict In Oil And Gas Markets
The development of the international oil and gas industries in their respective international markets has
been formed through cooperation and conflict among key political and commercial actors.
Patterns of conflict and cooperation

These patterns appear in the oil industry in both the vertical (stages of refinement of the product from
raw materials to the final product to the end user; in the oil market we usually call exploration and
production of crude oil the upstream segment of the market and transportation, refining, marketing and
sales the downstream) and the horizontal market structure (relationship between companies in the
various stages of the vertical structure). The upstream segment and so the access to oil reserves is
fundamental and it’s usually controlled by governments as owners of the resources (relationship
between states and companies who have the know-how and seek opportunities for foreign direct
investments: first are the companies who have the upper hand since they can choose where to go but
once they have made the investments they are hostage of the government). The importance of this
resource has motivated political interference in energy industries at the local, national, regional and
international levels (bargaining and military power to secure access).
The political importance of energy supplies means that the conflict and cooperation takes place (1)
among countries, like the producer cooperation among OPEC countries and the consumer cooperation
in the IEA; (2) among companies, like the historic case of the Seven Sisters and today’s various types
of collaboration between companies both in the vertical and horizontal market structure; and (3)
between governments and companies, like when the Church commission of the US Congress attacked
the US oil companies for contributing to the oil price rise of the early 1970s (these patterns illustrate
the so called triangular diplomacy).
The HISTORY of cooperation and conflict in the international oil market

The strategic importance of access to the oil resources in the Middle East triggered a conflict among
the victorious Allied Powers of World War I with direct implications for the private oil companies.
Britain tried to make Mesopotamia a British mandate to have control on the oil reserves but, for the
Treaty of San Remo 190, 25% of the territory was French. Also the US joined the dispute and they

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found an agreement in 1928: the US companies got ¼ of the Iraq Petroleum Company concession and
as soon the US companies arrived in the region that included Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Turkey shut
the doors to any others, setting the rules of the energy game in the area only with Britain and France.
By 1928 more than 50% of oil production outside the US was controlled by Exxon, Shell, and British
Petroleum. Then they brought their cooperation further: an agreement to keep the respective percentage
market shares of sales in various markets and thus not challenge each other’s positions. Another
important point in the agreement was the “Gulf plus pricing system,” according to which crude was
to be priced as if produced in the Mexican Gulf regardless of actual origin. Later the companies also
agreed to control production.
After World War II the international oil market was totally dominated by seven companies, popularly
known as the “Seven Sisters.” They were integrated companies in the sense that they controlled the
entire production chain from exploration to sale of the refined products. The integrated structure
created high barriers to entry for other oil companies, also called the newcomers. The Sisters informally
organized their operations in the Middle East through a consortium in which all the major companies
were engaged in at least two countries (to avoid being made hostage of the taxation or other measures
of the hosting country). The Sisters’ solidarity made very hard for governments to take control of the
production of oil in their very territory (this shows how cooperation among multinational companies
can define the rules of the game in a vital economic sector and this lasted until 1971 when with an
agreement the control changed from the IOCs to members of the OPEC). With the emergence of Libya
as a new energy power (much energy and it was not needed to transport it through the conflict area of
the Suez Canal), the fact that other independent US and EU companies had the control here and a new
radical regime (the Muammar al-Qadhafi one that traded only with singular companies and not with
blocs) everything changed. After the Libyan affair, Iran and Venezuela increased their share of
profits and a “game of leapfrog (cavallina) began”. After some internal differences, the companies
united in a common front and sought to negotiate with OPEC in two rounds of negotiations: one with
the Gulf exporters and one with the Mediterranean exporters. The Tehran agreement was signed in
1971 and covered tax and price increases, inflation compensation, and a fixing of such rates for future
years. The effects of the agreements were a 21% price increase for Saudi Arabian crude (from $1.80 to
$2.18) and an increase in revenue of 38.9%. What was more important, however, was the fact that the
producer countries had now gained control over the price. By these agreements, the distribution of
market power in the international oil market changed dramatically. After 1971 the role of the IOCs in
governing the market diminished and a new group of companies emerged: the national oil companies
(NCOs) which were governments’ attempts to gain control of their resources (nationalization of the oil
industry of many countries as a consequence). Then in the 1980s the market changed again with NCOs
going abroad, many of them are allying with each other, the oil industry has become more fragmented
with the outsourcing of technology, contractual relations between oil-producing governments and IOCs
have emerged (they were previously kicked out), wide varieties of alliances between NOCs and IOCs.
Vertical cooperation and conflict among oil companies

The OPEC countries dominated the upstream segment from the 1970s but the IOCs still controlled
the horizontal segment. From the early 1980s some of the major oil-exporting countries have made
downstream investments in Western Europe and the US, gaining partial or total control over companies
that can refine and distribute part of their crude oil exports in the main consuming countries, with the
aim of securing outlets for sales and thereby more stable revenues in an increasingly volatile market.
The exporters also bought tankers, harbor and storage facilities, and petrochemical plants in consuming
countries. Among the largest downstream investors were Kuwait, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and
Norway. By 1990 Kuwait and Venezuela had refining capacity (domestic and foreign) covering 90–
100% of their production capacity. In the upstream segment of the market there were similar problems.

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Between 1985 and 1987 the seven largest majors replaced only 40% of oil consumed in the US and
59% outside the US through new discoveries, extensions, and improved recovery rates in existing fields.
When revisions of oil reserves and purchases are taken into account, the majors’ replacement was still
11% short compared with production. The majors – primarily Exxon, Shell, and BP – purchased
reserves from smaller companies that were either cutting back their oil activity or dropping out of the
industry completely. OPEC countries, instead, struggled with the increase in their capacity of
production since they had no money to invest. Many OPEC countries revised their policies and opened
up for production-sharing agreements with foreign firms. In the 1990s these developments created a
new order based on a convergence of interests between the IOCs providing technology and financial
resources for exploration and production and producing countries controlling the access to the resource.
International Governmental organizations (OPEC and IEA)

Cooperation among states depends in part on institutional arrangements (provide info about the
partner, reduce costs of transactions providing negotiations framework, provide an arena for issue-
linkages mediating between states, provide instruments for verification of the abidance of the partner).
The biggest cooperation in the last decades has been the one of OPEC countries that started behaving
like an operative cartel in 1982, adjusting production levels to sustain prices. The consuming
countries tried to counter the market power of OPEC by creating the International Energy Agency
(IEA) in 1974. The core aim of the IEA was to handle future oil supply disruptions using an emergency
oil crisis management system, originally triggered by a 7% reduction in daily oil supplies, but in 1979
a more flexible system of crisis cooperation was adopted, and this was used again in the Gulf War in
1991 and following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. IEA still has a limited power and authority in rule
creation and enforcement but it might contribute to coordinate consumer behavior by other means such
as info and statements regarding the market situation and proposal for joint actions. In 1991 a gathering
of ministers from both oil-producing and oil-consuming countries met in Paris. Such meetings have
continued every two years and grown into a semi-formal organization called the International Energy
Forum.
Cooperation and conflict in international gas trade

There is no global gas market but it is divided into 3 markets in the world (the North American, the
European and the Asian). The only way to create gas-to-gas competition between the three regional gas
markets is by liquefied natural gas (LNG) (since for the not liquefied you need stable pipelines and
permanent cooperation). Total global traded LNG constitutes less than 10% of world gas consumption
and about 30% of total traded gas. In 2001 some of the countries with large gas reserves created the
Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF). The 11 member states account for 42% of gas production
and 70% of world gas reserves (this is not as coordinated as OPEC but it shows signs of cooperation
for the future gas market, that could be reached only with the increase of traded LNG and investments
in its infrastructures). A case of cooperation and conflict comes from Europe (cooperation in the energy
policy of the EU, conflict with the main exporter aka Russia). EU and Russia are both dependent on
each other since Europe needs its gas and Russia needs to sell it (even though Russia has the upper
hand here since gas is used to fulfill basic needs like heating and it’s not replaceable in the short term).
When Russia temporarily suspended its flow of gas to Ukraine in January 2009, it became apparent
how vulnerable certain European states are to disruption of their gas supply (a shut-down would hurt
more certain states than other and this creates a competitive situation between them, undermining the
objective of the European Commission to create a common approach to external energy relations).
Bargaining individually makes some states dependent on Russia’s gas and some are very fond of their
role in transit countries (Poland is very worried about the new direct pipeline Russia-Germany). The

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general goal of diversification of energy imports remains an important aim of all European
governments (the case of Ukraine made it look always more necessary).
The future of cooperation and conflict in global energy markets

Today, the set of influential actors in the oil industry has increased, and the structure has become more
complex. It is unlikely that this “network” structure will imply a shutout of the traditional IOCs.
However, their role is changing, and will continue to do so in partnerships with NOCs of both producing
and consuming countries. The future system is unlikely to see a market power like those of the seven
sisters and it will be more connected since producers and consumers have shared interests. Institutions
will need to be renewed. The system will also register a transition and a global energy transformation
(sooner if the environmental degradation requires it or later if not but what is sure is that the transition
will create conflicts among companies and countries once again and it rests all in their capacity to find
cooperative arrangements since they’re all in the same boat.
Chapter 12 The Gs And The Future Of Energy Governance In A Multipolar World.
Various multilateral fora (G8, G20 and G77) have lately prioritized different issues than the energy
sector like the financial collapse of 2008. As a result, international energy- or environment-related
policy prescriptions deriving from such meetings have been limited in scope. The apparent schism
between emerging and industrialized economies (developed economies majorly think about economic
recession and developing countries have their own fora and think more of regional problems)
foreshadows a limited but still productive future for policy-making within multilateral settings. While
this may not result in sweeping agreements, it will result in significant multilateral research, financing,
and cooperation, all of which will help ease some of the uncertainty and volatility in the international
energy market.
History of the Gs and international Energy Policy (G8)

In November 1975, the leaders of the governments of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the
US met and they discussed majorly about the price shock of 1973 and the importance of energy to
develop. Canada joined the group in 1976. With the second price shock of 1979 the group gained
importance and at the Tokyo Summit they decided to reduce consumption and hasten the development
of new energy resources (even though they weren’t able to agree on how to actually cut consumptions:
intervention of the State or not and so on). As 1979 ended and 1980 saw further rises in oil prices there
was real concern about the stability of the international financial system (+ showed the dependency
on Persian Gulf oil for Western countries). In the months following Tokyo the world was thrown into
convulsions by the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the seizure of the American hostages in
Iran, the attempted takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the assault on Mohammed’s tomb in
Medina, riots among the Shiite oilfield workers in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, a serious
deterioration in Iraqi-Iranian relations and an ongoing stalemate in Israeli- Palestinian peace
negotiations. As a result high prices went on in 1980 and the G7 and the members of IEA couldn’t
discuss but about it. The Summit leaders agreed to reduce oil’s share in their economies from 53 to 40%
and develop non-oil energy resources. To meet these goals, the Summit leaders called for a “large”
increase in coal use, “enhanced “ use of nuclear power, and in the longer run the development of
synthetic fuels, solar power, and other renewable resources. After this period the energy topic became
secondary with the downfall of the prices in the 1980s and 1990s and the G8 (Russia joined in 1997)
started focusing on other matters. In 1997, at the 5th Conference of Parties of the United Nations
Framework Convention for Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol was created, binding signatory nations

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to caps on carbon dioxide emissions (and the main energy topics in G8 began to be about climate
change, global warming and renewables). It was not until the Gleneagles Summit in 2005 that energy
regained a prominent place on the G8’s agenda. In the several years prior to the Summit, oil markets
had tightened considerably as OPEC limited production, a second war in Iraq was under way, and the
major exporters of Venezuela and Nigeria experienced internal political and social strife that curbed
production. In the following years, though, energy focused discussions were once again all about
climate change, reducing emissions and carbon use (G8 Summit in Japan in 2008 adopted the UN
Framework Convention on climate change and agreed to cut emissions by 50% by 2050). Finally,
the G8 has made efforts to expand its representation in some energy areas. The G8+5 emerged as a
forum in 2005 as part of the Gleneagles Plan of Action on Climate Change, Clean Energy, and
Sustainable Development. The addition of the G5 – Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa –
represented a significant step as it was the recognition that action on climate change required dialogue
between the industrialized powers and new, emerging economies (also Indonesia and South Korea were
the admitted to the talks but Saudi Arabia and Turkey were not).
G20
Although it is typically viewed as a forum for resolving financial issues, the G20 is more representative
of the changing energy order than its G8 and G8+5 counterparts. Unlike the G8, the G20 includes many
of the major energy exporters, consumers, and emerging consumers, such as Saudi Arabia, India,
China, and Turkey. It was founded during the Asian financial crisis in September 1999 and meant to
reinstate financial and economic stability in an ever more interconnected world. It started talking about
energy during the rise in oil and commodity prices between 2005 and 2008 and they started trying to
find a way to smooth the volatile nature of commodity price fluctuations. Then, once again, with the
downfall of prices energy came back to its environmental side in the Pittsburgh G20 where the
resolutions regarded market transparency, data collection, regulation of commodities trading, energy
efficiency, renewables development.
How has the G20 done?

Regarding energy, the G20 has focused on six core issues: oil market stability and relatively affordable
oil prices, international climate change negotiations, international energy data transparency, commodity
financial markets, clean energy and energy efficiency promotion, and fossil fuel subsidies. But the
success comes almost exclusively from the area where the consensus is higher: seeking a more stable
and affordable market, encouraging transparency and data collection. In other areas instead it’s
more difficult: the phasing out of coal in the West wasn’t corresponded by the East, same for carbon
emissions and energy subsidies (many issues are linked to the voters’ consensus and thus the local level
obstacles more international agreements).
An Accord on climate change

The prospect for a comprehensive agreement on emissions reductions, the ultimate goal of the
UNFCCC, remains bleak (even though small programs have found consensus like the creation of the
Green climate fund). There is still disagreement between developing and developed economies (China
and India state that the amount of cut to emissions should not be shared equally by developing and
developed countries). Much of the standstill is due to conflicting interests between G20 nations that
have differing views of the appropriate balance of economic development and responsibility for
mitigating climate change. Another issue that the G20 has raised is tackling the energy subsidies,
particularly in developing countries (subsidy rationalization). The 4 biggest subsidizers of fossil fuels
consumption were G20 nations: Saudi Arabia, Russia, India, China. The inability of the G20 to
successfully encourage the move toward a rational energy pricing structure, which would benefit all

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parties, illustrates a growing divide within the group that is scarcely addressed but is the result of a shift
in the global energy landscape that has occurred in recent years.
The changing global energy landscape

Concurrent to the G20’s rise as a central economic forum for the world’s leading policymakers were
three major trends that would help transform the global energy landscape: the emergence of new energy
consumers, the stagnation, if not absolute peak, in Western energy demand, and the “revolution” in US
hydrocarbon production. Asia’s and non-OECD countries' demand is going to account for 93% of the
global energy demand in future, with OECD countries demanding always more and producing their
own energy always more. The consequences of this tectonic shift in traditional energy producers–
consumer relations are profound. They include a potential change in the US presence in the Middle
East, a change in the definition of “energy security,” and a reexamination of the role of governments
and markets in energy consumption.
Potential changing role of the US in the ME

Three concurrent trends are limiting the US reliance on energy imports from the Middle East: flat or
declining oil consumption, increasing domestic production, and increased production in the
Western Hemisphere. Its demand, thanks to growing energy and vehicle efficiency, is decreasing as
its hydrocarbon production is spiking, helping boost production of shale oil. Finally, the resurgence in
US production is being paralleled by increasing production from near neighbors, most notably Canada
and Brazil (oil sands and pre-salt oil reserves). The US though has substantial major non-energy security
interests in the ME that are likely to justify a continued presence both militarily and diplomatically.
Whether China and others act to complement or compete with the US as security guarantors for Middle
East oil and gas will have wide-ranging strategic implications for the region and for global energy
markets.
New definitions of energy security

To the governments of China, India, and other countries in emerging Asia, energy security is
underpinned by a focus on “energy access” – ensuring at least basic energy services for all citizens.
The new rationale for energy security is already shaping relations in the multilateral arena where major
developing economies see emissions caps as a limitation on their right to pursue industrialization and
economic growth, and in geopolitical negotiations, where Westernled restrictions on oil imports from
Iran are facing opposition from China and India. For Middle East producers, energy security is defined
primarily as security of demand (since they have to rely always more on the more volatile emerging
countries' demand).
Reexamination of the respective roles of State and market in shaping energy flows and
consumption patterns
When the primary centers of energy demand were the US and Western Europe, energy consumption
was largely market-driven, and energy was viewed as a commodity for efficient consumption. In
developing countries, many of which subsidize fuel to promote economic development and stability,
energy is viewed as a vital good that must be secured and supplied by the state at any cost. China and
India are skeptical of free markets and both engage in differing types of subsides regimes to ensure the
domestic population has affordable access to energy.
The rise of the ME as energy consumer

By 2020, the Middle East will account for roughly one-third of the world’s oil demand growth, as it
continues to fuel economic and population growth. As a consequence of the Arab Spring, many

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governments enacted social measures to ensure public favor but this brought up the price per barrel to
break even in their domestic fiscal budgets (looking to stabilize the global price around $100 per barrel).
What do these changes mean for the future of the GS and energy policy?
They will make it more difficult for Gs to find international consensus, the growing role of developing
countries in shaping the energy market fractured the traditional, convenient balance between
industrialized energy importers and developing energy producers. The consequences are that G8 is no
more relevant and G20 is more disjointed. In order to still be important for governments talks and
interest-linkage it must focus on 3 areas of improvement: the industrialized nations in the G20 must
recognize the shift in global energy consumption and the priorities of the new major energy consumers
if the G20 is to overcome the schisms that exist today (accept more governmental control and the new
concept on energy security for economic development and poverty alleviation); second, the G20 should
be more targeted and realistic in its goals when tackling energy issues (focus on the area of more
consensus like transparency and not capping carbon emissions); the G20 needs to develop a plan for the
emergence of the next tier of major energy consumers. A number of countries, including Vietnam,
Pakistan, and Nigeria, do not currently belong to the G20 but are projected to become large energy
consumers within the next decade (how to integrate them in the energy global governance). G20 will
still be very important as economic and financial institution but to guide the future of energy governance
needs to work on these 3 topics
Goldthau, A., & Sitter, N. (2020). Power, authority and security: the EU’s Russian gas dilemma.
Journal of European Integration, 42(1), 111-127.
The European Union has considerable power and authority in energy policy. Although the sector
features shared competences between the EU and the member states, the EU has limited financial
resources, and no control over how member states choose to exploit natural resources.In the 1990s and
early 2000s, the Commission directed its regulatory power mainly at building energy markets and
improving their workings.
In the decade following the Russian-Ukrainian gas disputes of 2006 and 2009, the central question was
how the EU could and should use its regulatory power in pursuit of the goal of ensuring affordable
and reliable external gas supplies. The central theme that unites the articles in this special issue is how
authority is contested in EU energy policy. In the EU context, this means that even when legal
competences are established, authority can be contested.
Since the Commission embarked on its quest to build a single European energy market in the early
1990s, three main issues have caused debates about the appropriate limits of EU competence, and have
been the source of overlapping claims of authority in the energy field:
1. the appropriate balance between member state and European Union competences
2. the balance between the priorities of competition policy, environmental policy, and security of
supply
3. the strategic dimension of energy policy
Energy is not simply as good as any other. It is a mixed good in that it has some of the characteristics
of a private good (it is rival and excludable in consumption) and some of a public good. The stable
supply of energy at socially acceptable prices is one aspect of the public goods dimension, and it has
strategic implications. The security of supply question is most salient with respect to natural gas. A
substantial part of the natural gas trade is still conducted in terms of bilateral agreements. Russia is the

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dominant supplier for many states. With the Russia annexation of the Crimea in 2014, security of gas
supply became a core issue in the strategy for an Energy Union adopted by the commission in 2015.
This article is divided into 4 parts:
● Commission’s competences and authority with respect to the EU’s external gas trade
● How authority has been contested in the gas sector
● Commission’s options in the face of open contestation between liberally and geopolitically
oriented member states
● How the commission has used regulation to try to avoid this dilemma, and tried to strike a
balance between a regulatory power strategy and a market power strategy
Power authority and consensual decision-making in EU gas market policy

The allocation of power, authority, and policy-making in the energy sector is the outcome of a gradual
process that has involved both hard bargains between the member states and a gradual extension of the
Commission’s formal competence. What makes energy policy – and natural gas policy in particular –
somewhat exceptional is that it also involves compromises between three very different policy goals:
free trade, sustainability, and security of supply. Both UK and Nordic states have been more market
oriented since the early 1990s, while Poland and Hungary are more skeptical toward the free market
dimension of EU energy policy.
The commission won acceptance for the principle of market liberalization. Over the next decade, the
Commission persuaded the member states to adopt follow-up legislative packages that pushed market
liberalization in the gas sector forward, at the same time as the boundary between national and EU
competence was elaborated more clearly in the 2007 Lisbon Treaty.
The Lisbon Treaty reflects the fact that national governments have traditionally regarded the
management of natural resources and policy decisions about the use of energy resources as strategic for
national welfare and/or economic development. Articles 192-94 explicitly protect the member states’
rights to choose their own energy mix. On the other hand, as gas markets were liberalized after 1998,
energy firms and utilities were subject to ordinary EU competition law as well as the specific rules laid
down in the three energy packages of 1998, 2003 and 2009.
These directives established:
● third party access (TPA) to pipelines
● legal and ownership unbundling of distributing and transmissions activities
● set up the independent Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER)
From the Commission’s perspective, this was a triumph of the idea of a liberal internal market.
Even though environmental policy emerged as a very important policy area and directly affects energy
markets, the main principle remains liberal. From the early years of the European Economic Community
until the mid-1990s, the member states effectively kept control of their energy sectors largely by
keeping areas such as gas and electricity outside the scope of EU competences and resisted efforts by
the European Commission to change this.
Since 1998, the member states have maintained considerable influence of their gas sector through
national regulation and ownership, and by ensuring that EU-level decision-making is consensual. As
gas market liberalization proceeded, the European Commission and the member states elaborated new
mechanisms for maintaining consensus and sharing power.
Key mechanisms for managing member state heterogeneity in the gas sector include:
● temporary derogations
● delegation of power to independent agencies (which operate consensually),
● a degree of national control over implementation (including state ownership of energy
companies)

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● the Commission adopting a pragmatic stance towards accommodating member state

preferences
Consensual decision making was essential to produce outcomes that the states could accept as legitimate
and to establish the commission’s authority in the sector.
Contesting EU authority in the gas sector

Eu gas market integration was not a linear process. The main challenge to power-sharing as a
mechanism for securing legitimacy and enhancing authority has come with the increased salience of
energy security. This issue is rooted in a deeper division between states that take a liberal approach to
gas markets and those that see gas primarily through a geopolitics lens.
Since the turn of the millennium, a political cleavage has developed between:
● the liberal EU and European Economic Area states that view gas mainly as a private good with
some of the ordinary public goods characteristics of a network industry (Germany, UK, the
Netherlands, Norway, the Czech Republic)
● those that see gas as an important strategic good and fear that Russia might deploy the ‘energy
weapon’ (Poland, 3 baltic states)
Disputes over the desirability of the North Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany through the
baltic sea = it has reflected this political cleavage. It has 3 dimensions:
1. the nature of the Russian threat to the EU
2. what should be the main concern for EU energy policy (Security or growth) = liberal states
distinguish the 2 issues, while the more geopolitically oriented ones see these as inseparable
3. how the EU should use regulatory tools at their disposal.
Managing contested authority in the gas sector: The European Commission’s policy options
In the gas sector, the EU has the tools to manage diffuse authority as far as the internal dimension of
energy policy is concerned. It does so by power-sharing between the member states and the EU level,
using various ways of delegating power to specialized agencies. In the 1990s the Commission’s
principled push for energy liberalization (driven by a series of its Competition Commissioners) was
tempered by a pragmatic approach to gas markets (advocated by Energy Commissioners). In the
2000s, this pragmatic liberalization continued.
As long as Russia was seen as a reliable energy supplier, the security dimension of the EU’s gas trade
with its big neighbour had low salience. However, this began to change with the Russian-Ukrainian
gas disputes of 2006 and 2009, both of which affected gas supply in south-eastern EU member states.
In 2014 the Crimea crisis increased the salience of this issue dramatically. Reports of Russian
interference in the US elections and the Brexit referendum of 2016 hardly reduced concerns about a
resurgent Russian imperialism.
In addition, both the EU and NATO suffered internal stress, the former linked to the populist
challenges to the rule of law in countries like Hungary and Poland, and the latter when the new US
president questioned his commitment to collective defense. In this deteriorating geopolitical context,
gas trade was just one of many dimensions of EU security that rose to the top of the political agenda.
There is a fundamental difference between management by compromise and power-sharing, on one
hand, and management by way of stark choices on the other. In the gas market liberalization process,
power-sharing went hand in hand with delays, compromise and de-politicization.
The Commission can either use its regulatory authority for a wider set of political ends, or it can limit
it rather narrowly to making the EU gas market work better. As far as the external dimension of gas
regulation is concerned, managing problems of authority means choosing one strategy or another.
There are four ways the EU can wield external power in energy affairs:

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● classic neutral power of regulation (to build markets and manage them): it relies on a broad
agreement on the desirability of international rules-based governance
● regulatory power entailing a bias toward consumers (shifting the balance between exporters
and importers, for EU consumer benefit) = EU has proven very successful in regulating the
energy market.
● market power (featuring a selective use of regulation, notably for political purposes)
● hard economic power = very limited circumstances (The Iran sanctions)
From 1 to 4: market approach → geopolitical approach
Confronting the security of supply policy dilemma: regulatory power or market power?
EU member states that subscribe to a liberal model and a pro-growth agenda tend to advocate the
regulatory power approach when it comes to addressing security of supply concerns. Still, their
preferred approach to dealing with Gazprom, the state-owned gas monopolist, and Russian gas more
generally, is one based on Single Market rules. From a regulatory power perspective, Gazprom becomes
subject to the entire body of EU energy regulation the moment the company’s energy services enter the
SEM. Gazprom will be forced to comply with the EU’s rules. So, the way the Russian gas exporter
would be treated is as a dominant market player – not as Moscow’s foreign policy arm.
Regulatory power = he sole regulatory bias consisted in favoring (domestic) consumer interests over
(foreign) producer interests.
Nord Stream 2, owned and built by Gazprom, will double the capacity of the existing Nord Stream
link, thus possibly cementing Russia’s dominant position in the European gas market, and put in
question future transit of Russian gas through Ukraine = The project is politically contested.
The Council and the European Parliament in February 2019 agreed on a compromise de facto extending
EU TEP provisions to offshore pipelines, but ensuring legal oversight remained with the Member State
in whose territorial sea ‘the first interconnection point with the Member States’ network is located’.
It is fair to argue that the rationale underpinning the legal debate in the EU was to stop the project on
grounds of not being compatible with EU energy laws, rather than to ensure its lawful operation. The
stated objective of such a market power approach is to prevent the project in favor of a politically
preferred supply route – across Ukraine – and to strengthen the Strategic Partnership on energy with
Kyiv (European Commission 2015). More generally, it reflects a broader, geopolitical motivation, in
which Russian-sponsored pipeline infrastructure becomes a mere proxy for reacting to Moscow’s
assertive foreign policy. With this, EU energy regulation is meant to serve national security goals, not
necessarily market-related ones.
Competing claims of authority, and competing views on how EU authorities should wield their power,
may to a certain degree reflect both geography and the paradigm typically represented by it (North-
Western Europe representing a more market-focused, liberal outlook, Eastern and South-Eastern
Europe a more security-focused one).
Conclusion
Great power brings great responsibility. In energy security, the main challenge for the EU in terms of
competing claims to sovereignty and authority is about the goals and means of energy policy. For the
Commission, authority means legitimacy, and this depends on the responsible use of power.
This contestation culminated in the debate around Nord Stream 2. The Nord Stream case 2 speaks to
two central elements of the horizontal contestation outlined by the sovereignty element, i.e. the formal
authority of the Commission to act in the case of an offshore pipeline; and the substance-related element,
which essentially is about redefining the purpose of EU regulation inspired by geoeconomics rather
than being an exercise of market-liberalism.

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3 conclusions:
1. as gas trade is becoming highly (geo-)politicized, this puts an end to fuzziness as the workhorse
of EU gas politics. The deep division over how to cope with Russian gas cannot be managed
by power-sharing and a measured accommodating of member state preferences. The
Commission faces a real policy dilemma: it will be called upon again and again to use regulation
to keep in check projects that some governments see as a geopolitical problem. The
Commission faces the choice between a regulatory power or a market power strategy. The 2019
amendment opens the door to the Commission openly using regulation in an attempt to halt the
pipeline, or linking (the threat of) regulatory action to its effort to broker a Russia–Ukraine gas
deal.
2. there is a risk that a market power approach to gas regulation undermines the central purpose
of regulation – to build and manage a single market for energy and a level playing field, broadly
acceptable to all member states. The contestation around the main purpose of EU energy
regulation – market creation or geo-economics – goes straight to the heart of a very normative
question: the nature of the EU as a polity. The EU, like all states, has a grand strategy: it is a
liberal actor. Regulatory power, both as a normative concept and as it is practiced, is compatible
with this grand strategy; this involves questions of legitimacy. Member states that favor
contested Russian pipeline projects view the role of the EU as limited to ensuring market
functioning, and tend to question the legitimacy of EU authorities’ interfering in these projects
for security reasons. States that oppose these pipelines view the role of EU authorities as going
beyond market aspects, and EU energy regulation as a perfectly legitimate means to address
geopolitical challenges.
3. as a consequence, the EU might be well advised to address security problems by means of
security policy tools, rather than dealing with such challenges through regulation.
5. Environmental Security
Handbook of Global Environmental Politics - Dauvergne
Chapter 3: Garrett Hardin and tragedies of global commons
The impact of Hardin’s writings is partly attributable to the parables he uses to explain his concern
about the human proclivity to abuse the environment. In his essay ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’
(1970), he does not have much faith in self-restraint as in most communities there will be one or more
users of a commons who persist in pursuing their individual advantage, even though their actions
further aggravate the environmental tragedy that is unfolding. These irresponsible members of the
community are referred to as ‘free-riders’, because they take advantage of the restraint of those who
are trying to conserve the pasture (metaphor of a village producing pasture). Those who act responsibly
become disillusioned as they see that their sacrifices will fail to save the pasture, while their income
falls relative to that of the free-riders. In Hardin’s words, ‘ruin is the destination toward which all men
rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons’,
those who voluntarily exercise restraint for the common good become self-eliminating over time.
In his original essay, Hardin suggests that adopting and enforcing rules that coercively impose limits
on the use of common resources can avoid environmental tragedies. In his essay ‘Living on a Lifeboat,’
Hardin (1974) likens the other overcrowded lifeboats to overpopulated countries that are unable to
feed their populations adequately. He counsels the richer countries with food surpluses to resist the

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temptation to be altruistic and bail out these countries, either by providing food assistance or by allowing
the excess people to immigrate to the richer countries. Believing that additional food assistance will be
available indefinitely into the future, the governments and peoples of overpopulated countries would
see no need to restrain their fertility rates, leading to further population growth and even greater food
needs that would eventually overwhelm the food-producing capacity of the developed countries. If
denied food assistance, even in times of emergency, the poorer countries would be forced to become
more demographically responsible, or nature would run its course in the form of a population dieback,
as it does with other species whose numbers overshoot the food that is available in their habitats.
Hardin’s ‘lifeboat ethics’ incorporates a second strategy for avoiding a tragedy of the commons, doing
away with the commons arrangement for managing a resource by privatizing or nationalizing it.
The concept of the commons

A jumble of related, but distinctive, concepts have been used to discuss issues pertaining to common
resources, including commons, common property, common pool resource, common heritage of
mankind, collective good and public good.
First, a commons is a ‘resource domain’ in which there are ‘resource units’ that may be useful to human
actors. Resource domains could be a geographical space, such as a parking lot or a collectivity of
resources, such as a fish stock. The resource units may be physical objects, such as trees that might be
removed from a forest, or a medium in which objects or substances can be placed or discarded, such as
a garbage landfill.
Second, a commons is available to multiple users to exploit for their individual gain. Commons may
be open-access in the sense of being available to anyone who wishes to use the domain, or limited-
access in being open only to a certain community of users.
Third, the resource units of commons are both finite, meaning that there are limited amounts of them,
and subtractive, implying that, when a resource unit is consumed by one actor, it is no longer available
to others.
Ownership of commons
It is often assumed that the commons are owned collectively by the users, but this is not necessarily the
case. The owner, if there is one, can presumably establish the rules for the use of a commons. Some
intriguing issues have arisen in regard to the ownership or jurisdiction of global and international
commons. Thus the resource domain that comprises a commons can be looked upon as having res
communis status (eg. oceans), while the resource units are treated as res nullius resources (eg. fish).
Preventing environmental tragedies

There are five basic approaches that may be used to try to avert overuse or misuse of a commons in
ways that would deplete or degrade its resources:
● voluntary restraint in using the commons may be encouraged by appeals to the users to
limit their activities in order to conserve the resources → soft law (eg. UN resolutions), while
compliance with the provisions of these resolutions is in most cases voluntary, such documents
can be cited in an effort to use moral suasion to encourage states to act responsibly
● restrictions or rules may be placed on the use of the commons: temporary or permanent bans
on use of the commons, limits on the amount of use that will be permitted, or rules on the types
of equipment or technologies that may be employed in making use of the commons…
● market incentives, such as taxes or fines, can be assessed to make it less profitable to overuse
a commons

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● some domains may be divided into sections that can be assigned to individual users for their
exclusive use
● use of the commons could be socialized, with use of it being limited to a community enterprise,
which would distribute the resulting income to the members of the community
Three of these strategies have been most widely adopted in efforts to avert environmental tragedies in
the use of international and global commons: voluntary restraint, limits and regulations, and division
into sections.
Besides voluntary restraints, there are numerous examples of rules and regulations that have been
imposed on the use of global commons, most of which are set forth in international treaties. Other
international agreements establish limits on the amount of use of global commons. In some cases,
restrictions have taken the form of rules on how an international commons is used or exploited. There
are few examples of international commons being divided up with jurisdiction over sections of the
resource domains being given to individual states.
These strategies have not been especially successful in averting the overuse or misuse of international
commons. Appeals for voluntary restraint usually have little impact on the governments of states, who
normally are much more responsive to what they perceive to be the national interests than to appeals to
make sacrifices to achieve a global good, the success of international rules is mixed.
Global warming as a tragedy of the commons

The atmosphere has long been an open-access commons that humans have used freely for disposing
of gaseous or aerosol pollutants. When human populations were much smaller and less industrialized,
the atmosphere had the capacity to disperse these pollutants in a relatively harmless way, with the
exception of some of the more highly urbanized areas where air quality has threatened the health of the
residents for centuries. By the mid-19th century it was becoming apparent that air pollutants such as
sulphur dioxide from the burning of coal were significantly harming human health and the environment
locally. If present trends continue, the panel projects a global average warming of 1.4 to 5.8°C for the
period 1990 to 2100.
Global climate change illustrates the dynamic of the tragedy of the commons in several ways. Human
communities have adjusted in complex ways to the climates that have prevailed in the regions where
they reside. As a global commons, the atmosphere has been an open-access resource domain that is
available to all humans for the disposal of carbon dioxide and other GHGs. Humans derive private
benefits from the activities that generate these GHGs, primarily the burning of fossil fuels to produce
energy.
It was not until the unusually warm global temperatures of the 1980s that the prospect of human-
induced global climate change became a major public issue. International efforts to address the threat
of climate change commenced in the late 1980s, culminating in the adoption of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was adopted at the Earth Summit in
1992. As a strategy for averting an environmental tragedy, this treaty could be classified as one calling
for voluntary restraint. The Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in 1997 at the Third Conference of the
parties to the earlier framework convention, went a step further in that the developed countries agreed
to differentiated mandatory targets. The European Union and several other European countries made a
commitment to reduce their GHG emissions.
There are several shortcomings of the Kyoto Protocol as a strategy for averting a global environmental
‘tragedy’. The first has been the refusal of the United States to follow through on its commitment at
Kyoto. The United States will in effect become an enormous ‘free-rider’ that enjoys whatever benefits
result from the sacrifices of others in the form of a slightly more stabilized global climate, while not
contributing to this global public good.

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A second problem with the Kyoto Protocol is the absence of any specific expectations that the
developing countries will curb their GHG emissions, which are expected to rise rapidly, especially in
the nations that have immense reserves of fossil fuels and are industrializing rapidly, such as China and
India.
A third limitation of the Kyoto Protocol is that, even with full compliance by the Annex I countries,
including the United States, it would only be a small step toward the reductions that would be needed
to stabilize global climate change over the long run.
Conclusions
Hardin’s model of the dynamic of the tragedy of the commons is applicable to the impact of human
activities in international and global commons, with the overharvesting of marine fisheries and the
emissions of large quantities of GHG into the atmosphere being two notable examples. The potential
for such tragedies is especially great because of the multitude of users deriving private benefits from
these commons, who lack a sense of community because they reside in numerous states. In the cases of
the fisheries and climate, the tragedies were well advanced before international efforts were initiated to
ameliorate them.
Rules that would avert, or at least lessen, environmental tragedies are especially difficult to create and
enforce at the global level. Negotiating international treaties among as many as 190 sovereign states is
inevitably a drawn out and contentious process. Thus even the ‘mandatory’ rules that are written into
international treaties are in effect a voluntary form of restraint for states, and accordingly those over
whom they have jurisdiction.
It is noteworthy that significant steps were taken in accordance with the ‘precautionary principle’, which
calls for corrective actions to be taken to address potentially serious problems even before the science
on the nature of the threat is conclusive.
Chapter 4: Studying the global commons: governance without politics?
In Hardin’s fable the solution is to institute private property rights (enclosure) or to import some
external authority to regulate access and use. When applied (the tragedy of commons) to air transport
the problem is not the congestion of international airspace but the high levels of carbon dioxide emitted
by aircraft and their contribution to the enhanced greenhouse effect and thus to climate change. The
atmosphere cannot be enclosed (atmospheric quality has the characteristics of a public good) and
neither, at the moment, is there an effective way to relate the price of aviation to its ‘externalities’ in
terms of the costs of climate change. Regulation by a government is apparently foreclosed by the
anarchic nature of the international system and the unwillingness of users of the commons to be placed
at a competitive disadvantage. Global commons are subject to desecration and collapse if the
individualistic behaviour of users and national authorities is left unregulated. However, such regulation
unfortunately requires the incorporation of sometimes obstructive and self-interested international
organizations as well as an awareness that no progress can be made without responding to the
development demands of the ‘global South’.
The governance of the global commons

The ‘tragedy of the commons’ model captures the underlying structure of a particular class of
international problem involving the management of resources beyond sovereign jurisdiction. It thus
relates to one of a handful of key functions to be performed by international environmental cooperation
alongside the reduction of transboundary pollution, the promulgation of common environmental

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standards and norms and the regulation of trade in environmentally harmful goods. This is the function
of providing governance or, more precisely, common property regimes for the global commons.
With empirical findings based upon the close study of local commons regimes it has arrived at the clear
conclusion that Hardin’s ‘solutions’ are far from exhaustive. Instead there are many examples of self-
organizing and sustainable local commons regimes that have avoided both enclosure and the imposition
of centralized authority. The comparative picture that emerges through regime analysis of global
commons regimes is a variegated one. It ranges from areas where there are so few international
standards and such an absence of collective decision making that it is difficult to speak of anything
more than a proto-regime, for example for the management of space debris, to others which are heavily
internationalized and institutionalized.
Undertaking ‘cross-scale comparisons’ relies upon the assumption that there are analytical similarities
(or isomorphisms) between local and global commons. The essential structure of the problem is
recognizable at both levels. Stylized comparisons between local regimes, often with a long history and
embedded in a local ecosystem, and formal international regimes portrayed as arrangements between
state authorities may miss an essential point. This is simply that all regimes at whatever scale involve
human interaction. Thus the significant community for international regimes may not be the
‘community of nations’ but rather the restricted human communities of individuals, usually government
employees and experts, who are charged with developing and managing the regime. Many of the same
social dynamics found at the local level operate, for example, in dealing with problems of cheating and
‘free-riding’.
As well as the analytical similarities between global and local institutions the actual connections
between institutions, both horizontally and vertically, have come to prominence in the study of
‘governance’ rather than government.
The politics of the global commons

If the tragedy of the commons is about the distribution of property rights and conflicts over the
enjoyment of resources it does, by definition, have an essentially political character. Individual actors
proceed by rational calculation in ways that may be considered collectively irrational and common
institutions serve to moderate behaviour through reordering such utility calculations (governance
without the politics). Critical scholarship portrays this, not as an objective social science of institutions,
but as a particular and inherently political ‘framing’ in which institutions are depoliticized and local
commons opened up to privatization.
Thus we may also regard the ‘tragedy of the commons’ itself as a powerful construct, albeit with a
dubious historical basis and one that, when employed, has significant consequences for ‘who gets what,
when and where’ and more especially for who is excluded.
Global commons governance and international politics

Too often commons institutions are studied in isolation. At the local level this may be justifiable, but
for global commons institutions it clearly cannot be. It is an obvious, but underemphasized, point that
they remain subject to the vagaries of the international political system and the shifting priorities of
powerful state governments.
In national politics (and in the politics of the European Union) environmentally beneficial policy is
habitually trumped by security or economic priorities. The real significance of the ‘environment–
security’ debate that occurred in the developed world during the 1990s is that securitization of an issue
will serve to increase its political salience, and for some time there was evidence that this was occurring.
The sustenance of the global commons and a recognition of the long-range threats posed by climate
change, water shortages, desertification and sea level rise had started to appear on national security
agendas.

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The observation that the effective governance of the global commons is frequently subordinated to the
short-run economic and security priorities of governments and public opinion should not obscure the
fact that commons regimes are also moulded by some of the deeper characteristics of the international
system. It would not be too far-fetched to speak of a profound ‘ideational’ change that has enveloped
the system since the end of the Cold War. In essence it may be represented as a shift from a global-scale
competition between collectivism and market-based capitalism to a situation where a single liberal
orthodoxy prevails. This has left its imprint on development policies and indeed on the globalization of
economic activity, but it may also be read in the evolution of the principles underlying commons
regimes.
Global commons regimes will be affected by the prevailing power structure. The possibility of
centralized authority is envisaged in theoretical discussions of solutions to the tragedy of the commons
and aligns, in studies of international regime formation, with the hegemonic stability thesis. The mantle
of leadership in climate change and number of other regimes has fallen upon the European Union. It
has attempted to operationalize the Protocol and to develop its own emissions-trading system for the
atmospheric commons. Whatever else it is, the EU is an unlikely hegemon and it remains to be seen
whether the very limited provisions of Kyoto can be achieved in the absence of cooperation from the
largest carbon dioxide-emitting non-party.
Commons (mis)management at the local level does not seem to have been seriously disrupted by
economic inequality. However, if this dimension of commons use is scaled up to the international level,
the situation is quite different. The international system is characterized by extraordinary and increasing
economic inequalities, as are many individual societies. But at the international level the demands of
the dispossessed can receive serious political expression through the actions of a majority of states,
especially within international organizations. Construction of the climate change regime was predicated
on the recognition of the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ of members and the
controversial duty of the developed Annex I parties to take the initial steps in greenhouse gas emissions
reduction. The relationship between environmental degradation of the commons, poverty and
sustainability is a very complex one and, for some, observing the 2002 Johannesburg Summit, it may
appear that the development and poverty reduction agenda has overtaken and subsumed the strictly
environmental agenda.
A further important difference between local and global commons management is that the former are
not obliged to operate through international organizations. Here it is important to make the, often
neglected, distinction between institutions and organizations. Institutions and organizations are not
the same – and governance is not a synonym for organization, although it often seems to be so. Local
commons regimes, like global regimes, can be portrayed and compared as social institutions performing
equivalent governance functions. However they will not exhibit the same degree of formal organization.
International organizations (IOs) have a peculiar politics of their own. They appear to be almost
impossible to close down as they acquire secretariats, budgets and their own set of interests.
Governments, too, may often be more concerned with their rights and status within organizations than
with the issues that are formally on the table. Even nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been
known to become overly concerned with their own rights of access to IOs. Organizations provide the
framework for and the arena within which the politics of the global commons are conducted. They are
necessary for the international production and legitimation of scientific knowledge and for the provision
of multilateral funding, but they also add a great deal of complexity.
As well as causing complication and delay, the internal processes of IOs can also represent a source of
organizational power for the otherwise weak. A characteristic of some key global commons regimes is
that they reflect high levels of interdependence among users. In consequence, new avenues of
organizational power are open to those who can threaten to block or impede the working of a valued
regime.

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Chapter 19 of the Routledge’s Handbook of Global Environmental Politics
Environmental security: international, national and human

Like all animals, we Homo sapiens evolved within a web of relationships among species, some of
which constitute our food, others are our predators, others recycle our wastes, others provide us with
shelter or with resources, and still others compete with us for those same resources or service. Such
communities of species (also called biotic communities), together with their abiotic environment,
make up ecosystems of all sizes throughout the Earth’s biosphere. An ecosystem is a dynamic complex
of plant, animal, and microorganism communities and their nonliving environment interacting as a
functional system. The most macroscopic ecosystem is represented by the global ecosystem of the
biosphere, sometimes referred to as Gaia. The Gaia theory states that this system exhibits certain
characteristics that make it resemble a living organism. Embedded in this web of interactions and
dependencies, each species contributes to the stability and resilience of its ecosystem, and in turn the
system provides the basic requirements for each species in the form of so-called ecosystem services
(food, water, regulation of floods, drought, land degradation, disease, recreational activities and
supporting services like soil formation and nutrient cycling). This ecological context provides the basis
for environmental security. Environmental security is defined as security from “critical adverse effects
caused directly or indirectly by environmental change”. Phrased in terms of human agency,
environmental security threats can be defined as “behavior directed against the environment [which]
might be seen as a threat to the security of the people or political entities associated with that
environment”.
Forces that threaten environmental security

A characteristic feature of humankind is the colonization of environments by adapting them to our needs
(by development and technology). Now this process is no longer working in our favor: the crafting of
ecosystems, habitats, landscapes and climates has driven thousands of species into extinction and it’s
threatening our own security with pollution affecting climate, habitat quality and public health. Other
crises refer to ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, freshwater overuse, land
mismanagement, chemical pollution, CO2 accumulation etc. All of them are associated with human
overpopulation and overconsumption. Five causative and self-reinforcing processes have been
identified: economic growth, population growth, technological expansion, arms races, and the growing
inequality between rich and poor. One important problem is that we developed tech aiming at exploiting
the most possible ecosystems features instead of thinking about a way to preserve them. Generally, the
environmental impact (I) of a human population on local ecosystems is described by the I = PAT
formula, where P means population size, A stands for the affluence or economic means per capita, and
T represents the technological impact per capita. When a population exceeds the maximum sustainable
impact it enters into overshoot, where the services of the local ecosystems are being overtaxed and,
depending on their fragility, they may undergo irreversible structural changes. Inevitably the
consequence of overshoot for the population is that various biological regulatory mechanisms lead to a
decrease in population health and eventually a drop in population size, below the system’s carrying
capacity (diseases, predators, malnutrition, infertility). The environmental impact of a human
population can also be expressed in terms of the area of productive land required to support a
population’s lifestyle. This is referred to as that population’s ecological footprint (if it exceeds the
amount of accessible productive land there’s an overshoot going on). A comparison of humanity’s
collective global footprint with the Earth’s bio-productive capacity suggests that we first entered
overshoot in the mid-1980s and that it has steadily increased since then to a current level above 140

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percent (with a minority consuming an obscenely excessive amount at the expenses of the majority).
No animal species can maintain this extent of biomass appropriation, environmental impact, and species
displacement for significant lengths of time, even though the regulative process hasn’t yet started.
Studies of regional precedents indicated that, as a secondary consequence of overshoot, the ecological
carrying capacity gradually decreases because of irreversible damage to ecological support structures.
In other words, the Earth will be able to support fewer and fewer people while overshoot last.
The international dimension

At the international level, environmental security must address threats that act across national
boundaries and globally. As those threats can also constitute reasons for armed conflict, they are also
threats to international peace and should as such be considered grounds for United Nations (UN)
intervention according to the Charter (since it allows intervention when a generation destroys the means
of survival for future ones). Because ecosystems come in a large variety of sizes, overshoot can assume
local, regional, or global dimensions. Local or regional overshoot by human societies is often masked
by the import of goods and services from other regions that offer a surplus, even though this is not
possible in places like islands where local overshoot caused invasions, natural disasters, and cultural
collapse. At the international level, then, the symptoms of regional overshoot are nowadays often
masked by global trade, and by neo-colonialist dependency relationships between “developed” and
“developing” countries. In that sense, the current globalized economic and political order represents a
threat to global environmental security because it renders less likely the timely rectification of local
overshoot through measures towards efficiency, restraint, and adaptation. Besides numerous bilateral
and multilateral aid agreements among governments and NGOs, the United Nations has effectively
assumed the responsibility for environmental security at the international level (UN 2000), even though
environmental security is not mentioned among its purposes in Article 1 of its Charter. The UN sets
goals and targets for global development, plans strategic development projects through subsidiaries
(UNDP, UNEP and UNHCR). Even though the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment mapped the
worsening health of the planet, the answer was really the one environmentalists hoped for: among the
eight MDGs (“end poverty and hunger; universal education; gender equality; child health; maternal
health; combat HIV/AIDS; environmental sustainability; global partnership”), only one (Goal 7)
mentions the environment even though at least four others are now largely influenced by environmental
factor; the political commitment was lacking and, as we know, UN’s capacity depends on the political
support for its measures.
The conventional development paradigm misleads on sustainability

Goal 7 of the MDGs, “Ensure environmental sustainability”, consists of 4 targets:
● “Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and
reverse the loss of environmental resources”
● “Reduce biodiversity loss, achieving, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss”
● “Halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking
water and basic sanitation”
● “By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum
dwellers.”
These are all laudable objectives but they don’t take into account the overshoot which makes them
unachievable (there are physical limits to growth and reaching efficiency of consumption cannot solve
the problem). We should let aside development for a moment and rethink sustainable development as
that does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The belief that the
growth of populations and economies can continue forever, unencumbered by physical limits, is referred
to as cornucopianism and it derives from the denial of more responsibility, lack of moral scruples,

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inability to think critically and holistically, wishful thinking, groundless optimism. With
Cornucopianism as principle an escalation of the major control mechanisms – epidemics, malnutrition,
and violent conflict – seems inevitable. Another conceptual problem is represented by
Anthropocentrism and the ideas of humans being the center of the universe. This is often accompanied
by the commodification of nature and the idea that ecosystems are useful only when they can serve
humans (their utility is only expressed in monetary figures).
The national dimension

The importance of the national dimension arises from the considerable extent to which the principle of
sovereignty overrides international regimes (UNCED Agenda 21 action plans must all be implemented
nationally and are all subject to government approval). Effective policies at the national level
presuppose a functioning civil society as well as mechanisms to prevent the tragedy of the commons.
In situations where those prerequisites are absent the active influence of NGOs becomes a vital factor
in decisions about environmental security (governments cannot really take action without peoples’
support). Government intervention in favor of environmental security can be justified on the basis of a
human rights theory of fundamental rights to clean air, safe potable water, adequate nutrition, shelter,
the safe processing of wastes, and adequate health care (even though distributive justice loses much of
its benefits when the resulting per capita footprint is too small to adequately support human welfare).
While those contingencies often weaken legislative efforts to promote sustainability and environmental
security (e.g., through tariffs, rationing, taxation), one area remains where national governments can
make a huge difference: education (transmitting values, beliefs, ideals and standards of behavior). The
UN offers its support in the context of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005–
14.
The human dimension

Since it was first mentioned in the UN’s Human Development Report in 1994 (UNDP 1994 ) the
concept of human security has attracted increasing attention. One reason for the growing popularity of
human security lies in the fact that the value priorities that inform its diverse components are shared
widely, priorities that focus on the continued security and well-being of human individuals. Human
security has been conceptualized as consisting of four pillars: the traditional area of military/strategic
security of the state; economic security, particularly as described by heterodox models of sustainable
economies; population health as described by epidemiology and the complex determinants of
community health; and environmental security that is primarily determined by the interactions
between human populations and the source and sink functions of their host ecosystems. Another
strength of the human security approach is its comprehensive coverage of interdependent sources of
insecurity that were traditionally considered under the purview of different academic specialties
(comprehensive approach highlights synergistic effects and multifactorial causation). Our discussion of
environmental security above showed that in many respects it provides the requisite conditions for the
other three pillars of human security, affirming Myers’s ( 1993 ) thesis of environmental security as the
“ultimate security”. The dependency of human security on environmental prerequisites has contributed
to the growing acceptance of the principle of environmental justice (sustainable development,
intergenerational equity and the precautionary principle). Those ramifications into diverse aspects of
human security give particular poignancy to the problem of overshoot. As environmental security
erodes, any hope of ensuring human security in other areas diminishes. Secondary effects, such as the
erosion of the rule of law and of civil Society, as well as the threat of more widespread armed conflict
over diminishing resources add to the urgency of the problem.

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.6. Environmental Security, Sovereignty and Conflict
Chapter 10: Climate Change
In late 2015, one of the largest diplomatic meetings in global history concluded in Paris. Over 40,000
delegates from countries, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations (IOs),
research institutes, business organizations and many more, had been there to discuss climate change.
This meeting was scheduled to produce a treaty that might enable states and other actors to improve a
global response that has so far proved highly inadequate.
Climate change is the result of the emissions of a small number of gases – carbon dioxide (CO2),
methane, and nitrous oxide principally as well as other trace gases – and their accumulation in the
atmosphere; from the mid-nineteenth century on there has been a rapid build-up of GHGs (greenhouse
gases, gas serra). GHGs have extraordinarily diverse sources, principally because CO2, which accounts
for around 75% of climate change, is emitted from almost any activity using energy based on fossil
fuels, which remain at the base of the vast majority of economic activity worldwide, and thus all
economic sectors and social groups have some sort of stake in climate change: this is one aspect of why
climate change has achieved such salience on the international agenda.
The consequences include significant sea-level rise, changes in rainfall patterns that increase the
probability of both drought and flooding, the frequency and/or intensity of extreme weather events
(windstorms, heatwaves, rainfall), and shifting global patterns of disease. All have the potential to
produce massive disruption to human societies round the world, through increased mortality, radical
changes in agricultural zones, increases in migration from areas that become uninhabitable, and perhaps
conflicts over key resources like water. Delaying action to limit emissions will both reduce the chance
of avoiding this sort of outcome (since positive feedbacks in the climate system are likely to kick in at
some point), and increase significantly the economic costs of achieving those emissions reductions,
since large amounts of existing infrastructure will need to be simply abandoned.
The other key aspect that has kept the salience of climate change high on the international agenda is the
particular quality of global inequalities involved. Emissions levels vary enormously across the world
on a per capita basis, leading to significant diplomatic conflict over the responsibility of different
countries to limit their emissions.
From collective action to complexity and transformation

The opening two sentences of the chapter on international cooperation in the most recent report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s scientific advisory body on the issue,
states that:
Due to global mixing of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere, anthropogenic climate
change is a global common problem. For this reason, international cooperation is necessary
to achieve significant progress in mitigating climate change.
It is the formalized version of the popular environmentalist slogan ‘the earth is one, the world is not’.
Technically, the common problem that the IPCC refers to above means that it has two types of
conditions, known as ‘jointness of supply’ (no one can individually solve the climate problem) and
‘indivisibility of benefits’ (no one can be excluded from the benefits of a stable climate). In
combination these qualities produce a collective action problem since, while it requires the
participation of all actors to resolve it, or at the very least a great many of them, there are powerful
incentives for actors to free ride on the actions of others.

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The term ‘actors’ became ‘states’, as the framing of climate change as a collective action problem leads
us to look for a single type of actor that interacts with another; ‘cooperation’ becomes the goal, treated
as an end in itself. In particular, over the last decades two related terms have become commonplace in
discussions of climate change, and established themselves as important for understanding climate
change politics: complexity - system comprised of complex interactions between multiple and diverse
agents, and between agents and the broader social, economic, cultural and physical systems in which
they are embedded - and transition - not a minor adjustment, but rather what is the most radical
overhaul of the sociotechnical fabric of the global economy and everyday life ever self-consciously
pursued by human societies.
The notion of complex systems has been long used to understand the character of the climate system
itself. But it has been used over the last ten years or so also as a frame for thinking about the dynamics
of the social system that has generated climate change and the political problem of responding to climate
change. In fact, the problem of climate change is the product of a relatively stable ‘sociotechnical
regime’ centered on fossil fuel use. If the challenge is to generate tipping points to a different socio-
technical regime not premised on fossil fuels, the social system is itself nevertheless characterized by
complexity.
The central implication for thinking about climate policy and governance is the need to generate policy
tools that ‘constrain our future selves’. Because of the ‘irrational discounting’ problem,
interventions need to be able to work even despite future irrational decisions by policymakers or other
social actors, and thus generate path-dependent processes favoring low-carbon development.
Each actor within the complex system sees the problem from their own perspective, has certain types
of resources or capacities, is subject to specific types of political pressure, and, when they seek to act
on climate change, does so in specific ways. They are not in a position to act as ‘sovereigns’ and because
of the complex nature of the system, cannot be sure of the effects of their actions.
From international to global responses

During the last 15 years we’ve seen a shift from a multilateral regime centered on the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to what has been termed variously a ‘regime
complex’, ‘transnational climate change governance’ or a ‘global climate governance landscape’.
Climate change got onto the political agenda during the 1980s because of the interaction between two
distinct processes: an ‘epistemic community’ of climate scientists connected via IOs warning about
the risks of global warming and saw a large number of devastating weather-related events. In the
early 90’s the IPCC was formed and produced its first report confirming the previous scientific
consensus; at the same time many of the principal political faultlines that persist today were established:
between industrialized and developing countries over responsibilities to reduce emissions, as well as
flows of finance and technology; between energy exporting countries and others; between those
countries particularly vulnerable to climate impacts and others; and between industrialized countries
over how to organize their response in an international treaty.
The UNFCCC (1994) has since become the cornerstone of the interstate response to climate change. It
remains the only site where international climate change law is established, even if other treaties
produce rules relevant to climate change. The most important key norm is the principle of ‘common
but differentiated responsibilities’ which expresses the North–South debate mentioned above and
resolves it by establishing that industrialized countries (‘Annex I countries’) have the responsibility to
take the lead in addressing climate change.
Soon after UNFCCC entered into force in 1994, parties agreed that the provisions of the convention
regarding emissions reductions were ‘inadequate’, and began to negotiate a further agreement to reduce
emissions more aggressively: the parties agreed to negotiate such an agreement by the third COP
scheduled to be in Kyoto in 1997. The key dynamics of the negotiations that produced the Kyoto

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Protocol were on the one hand about whether or not the obligations of Annex I countries would be
focused on quantitative emissions targets or on the introduction of specific ‘Policies and Measures’, and
on the other hand about the proposals for various ‘flexibility mechanisms’ such as emissions trading
and carbon offsetting. The result was that Kyoto was organized around emissions targets, preferred by
the EU, but contained the flexibility mechanisms that the US bargained strongly for. Kyoto obliged
the Annex I countries collectively to reduce their emissions by 5.2% by between 2008 and 2012, but
allowed them to trade these emissions allowances among themselves or invest in projects in other
countries to count against their emissions obligations.
It was at this point that the project of governing climate change via a multilateral treaty started to falter.
First, the US refused to ratify. Second, while Kyoto contained novel institutional features, notably the
flexibility mechanisms, the details of implementing these took four years to finalize. Third, many states
faltered or failed outright in their implementation of their obligations. Further attempts to create new
agreements collapsed.
But while multilateral negotiations stalled, many other actors stepped in to fill the void: smaller
partnerships between states and the private sector. Subnational political units established their own
targets and emissions trading systems to implement them, or developed means of collaborating through
voluntary networks. In other words, the response to climate change shifted from being international
to being global. There are many elements in this transnational governance of climate change:
● investor-led governance: institutional investors have developed a set of initiatives designed to
govern the companies they invest in, which were specifically companies worried about the
increase in frequency and severity of extreme weather events that threatened their business, eg.
the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP); now the CDP works by surveying the world’s largest
companies annually about their exposure to these sorts of climate risks and their strategies to
respond to them
● cities: cities and city-networks have emerged, in the shadows of national and inter-state
inaction, as important sources of experimentation and global leadership over the past two
decades; they’ve come to approach climate change as a global problem that both poses a distinct
threat to urban ways of life and represents an opportunity to link together local objectives with
global ones; they have done so by reframing urban development and growth as inherently
intertwined with the issue of sustainability, by positioning climate change as an opportunity as
much as a threat, ‘cities act while nations talk’
● NGOs and carbon market governance: this activity was stimulated by provisions in the
Kyoto Protocol and state policies (not by their failures); there was demand for forestry projects
from companies who sought to use these investments in high visibility projects for their ‘green
marketing’; NGOs worried about the quality of these offset projects, both in the CDM (Clean
Development Mechanism) and the voluntary market, and decided to intervene to try to remove
their worst effects
The future(s) of climate politics

There could be three general trajectories along which global climate governance might proceed into the
future, and three associated points of political contestation that will contribute to setting the trajectory
along which it will travel. The first is a trajectory of consolidation and coordination, the second a
trajectory of incoherence, and the last a trajectory of coming apart and conflict.
Can, in other words, the panoply of governance initiatives undertaken by cities, corporations, and
individuals align so as to create either the political pressure and public support needed to drive national
policy and legislation into conformity with international commitments or disrupt the socio-technical
system in which we find ourselves currently ‘locked in’?

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In one possible future, the answer is yes. The transformative potential of governance experimentation
is corralled and coordinated, harmonized with the interstate system in such a way as to produce
meaningful and timely collective effects.
Another possible future is one in which experimentation and innovation proceed rapidly – or even
increase in terms of either the number of actors involved or initiatives undertaken – but remain incapable
of adequately disrupting the status quo. In such a future climate governance is likely to remain, or
become more, fragmented. The politics of climate governance can, at a fundamental level, be
conceptualized as a struggle to redefine the basic practices, values, and institutions of global capitalism.
We may, in addition, expect a continued, albeit somewhat altered, politics operating in and around the
equity implications of climate governance. If a future of coordinated climate governance is possible, it
raises important questions with respect to whom, exactly, is orchestrating such coordination. There is,
as well, an ongoing debate around the relationship between democracy and global climate
governance and whether some degree of democratic accountability or representation is likely to (must?)
be sacrificed in the name of efficacy.
A final future possibility is the complete breakdown of the experimental and inter-state systems and the
regression into a state of anarchic inter-state conflict and consolidation around beggar-thy- neighbor
practices redolent of the mercantilism of the eighteenth century. If the level of ambition, and the
translation of rhetorical commitments into practical and effective action, are not augmented
considerably or soon enough (a distinct problem inherent in a bottom-up governance approach) states
are likely to face the prospect of dealing with increased instances of climatic crisis (drought, famine,
flooding, extreme weather events) that may in turn fuel or aggravate underlying or latent governance
problems via climate migration or competition over access to scarce resources leading to instances of
conflict and violence. On the other hand, while the mood at the moment within the climate regime is
largely one of conciliation and compromise, there remains a possibility that tensions arising in other
issue domains (such as those taking place in the South China Sea, for instance) may spill over.
Climate science, the politics of climate change and futures of IR
The basic argument is that, among an array of national and international actors, it remains the state
that can drive a successful politics of climate change in a situation of coexistence of nationalism and
internationalism → fierce optimism on the role of International Relations
Introduction
The special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October 2018
confirmed two close relations at this historical juncture: the relation between global warming and
anthropogenic emissions, and the relation between climate science and the need for political action to
resolve the former relation. The IPCC special report accelerated a broad social movement asking for
‘climate action now’: foremost in the northern hemisphere, student climate strikes, led by the Swedish
activist Greta Thunberg, and Extinction Rebellion. The present global pandemic, COVID-19, is also
being increasingly tied to climate change and climate action. A consensus may also have begun to form,
during a period of populism in which emotions have trumped rational argument and decision-making,
that the authority of science has again become the most trustworthy. There is, finally, a growing sense
that the government is still able to deliver a political response to a global challenge that is appropriate
in time and scale to the nature of the challenge. In sum, from the autumn of 2018 to the spring of 2020,
the vital nature of the relationship between climate change and political action has been put in diverse
ways to the foreground of societal concern.

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The call of climate science and its implications

If the minimal increase of 1.5°C is not achieved within this century, the IPCC 2018 special report
predicts existential harm to biodiversity and to human life, following soaring temperatures, drought,
excess precipitation and severe flooding, with increasingly overlapping energy, food and water risks.
The regions of main attention are West Africa, the Sahel, and Southeast and West Asia with an
estimation of 450 million people, at most, at risk of death, or, at least, as dramatically more vulnerable
if an increase of 1.5°C (rather than 2°C) of average global warming is not secured. The conclusion to
the scientific report therefore maintains that the only way to begin to reach 1.5°C is systemic change
now. Activists also state that a large-scale coordinated action is required now because the long-term
future of the planet exists already in our human and non-human present, “our present is already the
future”.
The global challenge of climate change reorganizes modernist distinctions between ‘North’ and ‘South’
and materially places all countries in one common, if highly differentiated process of development.
There remain huge disparities and inequalities between advanced and developing countries, it is the
poorest countries in the world that are most vulnerable to climate change and need development aid that
is targeted at one and the same to poverty and climate change.
The politics of climate change

Climate action requires political action simply because, without political action, the scale of the
challenge as well as the time within which this action must be achieved cannot be met. If the shutting
down of the global economy during the first 4 months of COVID-19 led to an 8 per cent annual decrease
in carbon emissions, and this decrease is required yearly for the next 10 years, nothing short of
coordinated national and international action can be effective. As the logic behind the CoP15 Paris
Agreement understood, in a world structured by a system of states, the state remains, in relation with
other states, the effective focus for these national and international acts of coordination; we should turn
to, not turn away from, the state as an agent of change, the primary vehicle of a politics of climate
change.
At a national level, it can organize and steer fiscal, monetary and sector-policies like those of energy,
transport, agriculture, the communications industry and housing in such a way that both businesses and
consumers are motivated to shift behaviour towards a carbon-neutral society. This model of the state
is one of a regulated market economy that uses the coordination of state direction with market dynamism
to effect broad social change. If the timeline to a 50 per cent reduction of carbon emissions is 2030,
then the state must so organize and steer that solutions to climate change are integrated. Attention to
‘the climate emergency’ alone will not lead to the necessary change.
To focus on the capacity of the state to respond to the scalar and temporal challenge of climate change
by fostering deep social change at national and local levels answers also to the internationalist brief.
Under the present climate regime, a state is internationalist if it is able to set a best practice and offer
leadership in climate action that other countries can follow, major progress on the international climate
agenda can come, and perhaps can only come, through progressive state action.
Fashioning a just transition to net-zero societies requires enormous political ambition and imagination.
This ambition is channelled towards creating a society of limits in which the wellbeing of human beings
is predicated on the lesser violence and self-restraint. Catastrophic climate change will happen, and
carbon neutrality will require negative emissions. A politics of climate change that has vision and
execution around a set of integrated climate solutions must, therefore, motivate many sections of society
to behave in a self-limiting way and in a common direction.
‘The necessary normative consequence’ of climate change is represented by the sustainable
development agenda. Within this agenda, solidarity between nations presents a necessary moral

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response to an empirical reality that concerns at one and same time the peoples of other nations and
one’s own. If, under unintended processes of interdependence like global warming, the fates of countries
become inextricably entangled, then a political vision as well as its terms of execution are required that
respond to, are responsible for, the entangling of these fates, and the agenda begins to assume this
vision.
The politics of climate change and the futures of IR

A state-focused perspective on international politics must continue to be embraced in the discipline of
IR for the coming decades. From this perspective, continued engagement with the state as an agent of
change requires that the discipline as a whole re-engages with the legacy of Weberian realism (the state
and the state system), the legacy of classical realism (the ethics of the lesser violence in world of
limitation) and the legacy of the English School (state responsibility and state leadership), together with
the insights of constructivism, in order to reconstruct domestic and foreign policies in tight relation to
climate change and its effects. Only, perhaps, as a result of this reconstruction can something like a
reinvigorated liberal internationalism emerge that has authentically cosmopolitan aspirations:
that is, aspirations that do not redound to the national interests of the more powerful states, but seek to
organize, amid the risks of regression, conflict and the greater violence, a global order of sustainable
development and sustainability that transcends the conceptual and practical ‘North/South’ divide.
In the context of climate change’s challenge for IR, a fierce optimism is nevertheless now required: an
optimism no longer harnessed to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century terms of liberal progress, but a
mindset of purpose that is focused, deftly aggressive and sustained within the logics of sustainable
resilience. In this sense, fiercely optimistic, bearers of the discipline of IR should assume a strong
intellectual, pedagogical and social role in the three coming decades.
Conclusion
Climate science has put society as a whole in front of an unprecedented empirical challenge: to reduce
carbon emissions by 2030 and attain carbon neutrality by 2050 if catastrophic harm is to be avoided and
the human species is to remain in basic control of its planetary environment.
At this moment in history, visionary and integrative policies can only be led by the state and by the
political agency of the state: first, it is the only social organization that has the monopoly of violence to
effect strong fiscal and monetary policies; second, at national and sub-national levels, it is the only
social organization that can help mobilize other social actors and steer society as a whole within a
common national direction of economic and social transformation; third, at the international and global
levels, it is the only political organization that can lead other states into the virtuous circle of
international cooperation that has a common global direction.
The absence of great power responsibility in global environmental politics
Despite the rise in the importance and centrality of global environmental concerns, especially climate
change and issues covered by the new Sustainable Development Goals, norms or institutions that
demand or recognize great power responsibility are notably absent.
Introduction
Norms or institutional arrangements that demand or recognize great power responsibility for the global
environment do not exist. This absence comes despite great powers routinely facing demands for,
gaining special rights or status in recognition of, and taking on special responsibilities for other
prominent concerns in global affairs, but their absence in the environmental area is especially puzzling.

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The formal recognition of the environment as a global concern has led English School (ES) scholars to
argue that “environmental stewardship” is a “primary institution” in international society, which
means that the “good-willing” states try to induce other countries to follow and respect environmental
standards. Yet, even informal recognition or acceptance of great powers’ individual and collective
responsibility is weak and, if anything, on the decline.
This article will explain the failure to entrench great power responsibility and identify the weaker and
more diffuse ideas of responsibility that prevail instead. The failure has resulted for the following
reasons: a lack of congruence between systemic and environmental “great powers”, weak empirical
links between action on the environment and the maintenance of international order, and no link to
special rights.
Why great power responsibility for the environment?

Great powers bear some responsibility for both order and the provision of collective goods. Since the
Congress of Vienna, great powers have been trying to maintain stability and order. There is both a
demand for and good reasons to want great powers, however defined, to take on differentiated
responsibilities for ensuring the environmental integrity of the planet or avoiding dangerous
environmental change to planetary ecosystems.
First and foremost, great powers, by virtually any definition, have a disproportionate ability to address
or mitigate the most serious global environment problems because of their greater capabilities. Failures
to take on responsibilities would not only create collective action problems, but could also easily
undermine collective efforts. In other areas of major global concern (eg. humanitarian crises, financial
crises, and peace and security) there is not necessarily a link to “greater responsibility for causing
the problem,” while such a link is apparent in the environmental area.
Second, special environmental responsibilities for great powers would be desirable to support,
encourage, and legitimate an international order that reflects in practice a commitment to
environmental protection and sustainability. While a hegemonic power is not required for
environmental cooperation, great power leadership and resources, individually or collectively, can
significantly contribute to action in pressuring, persuading, or providing side payments to other states
to take up policies or goals. Conversely, the lack of great power responsibility for supporting a particular
order, even when others are willing to lead, can make action difficult.
Great powers and responsibility in IR theory

ES scholars understand great power responsibility to stem from their duty to maintain the order and
norms of international society since they enjoy special rights and privileges that violate the formal
equality of states on which the sovereign state system rests. So, a great power has special rights and
duties, and the resources to lead; social recognition by others grants legitimacy to the special rights and
authority claimed by great powers, and, in turn, their obligation to shoulder an extra burden.
Constructivists have picked up and expanded on the idea of great power responsibility as a social
relationship. The constructed character of special responsibilities means that the social domain dictates
the conferring of great power responsibilities by virtue of both material and ideational elements.
In the environmental domain, responsibility is framed not only in terms of protections from the
externalities of other states and universal planetary interests, but, for many actors, as a moral obligation
that falls on countries that benefited from industrial pollution as they developed, whether or not they
gained great power status. The values that underpin international society are assumed to be those of the
great powers and to serve their material and ideal interests.
Systemically oriented liberals also posit an alignment between the great powers’ interests and the
benefits that international order and stability provide, which suggests that taking on special
responsibilities is both materially necessary and shores up legitimacy for that order. Similarly, great

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power scholars in the realist — and especially neorealist — tradition argue that special responsibilities
stem from the preponderant material, especially military, capabilities of states.
To summarize, IR theory identifies three broad reasons and/or conditions that would lead to great power
responsibility for the global environment: the congruence of systemic and environmental powers
(realism, ES, constructivism); clear linkages between environmental integrity and the preservation of
international order (realism, ES, liberalism); and linking the assigning of special responsibilities to
special rights or privileges (ES, constructivism).
Great powers and environmental responsibility: The missing links

● lack of congruence of systemic and environmental “great powers”: responsibilities don’t
always come with leadership → an “environmental” great power to which responsibilities
are assigned is defined by some combination of historical and contemporary contribution
to environmental harms and the capacity or capability to address it
● weak empirical links to international order: the link between environmental stewardship
and broader international order remains weak in international society, the bonds of interest
to great power responsibility for the environment remain weak → a greater reliance on the
normative side of the great power responsibility equation is necessary to create a strong
sense of duty or obligation rather than a simple projection of self-interest; the idea of
differential responsibility has not been aligned with the interests of the great powers or seen
as central to their leadership or status, or the legitimacy of the international order
● no link to special rights: failures to claim any special rights or privileges, or the need for such
rights, in the environmental case, this situation could change in the future if governments start
to perceive climate change as an emergency
The assigning of responsibility in practice

International environmental norms identify states, individually and collectively, as the holders of
responsibility and, like in other areas of international law, pair responsibility with external sovereignty
understood vis-a-vis other states.
States have the:
“sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental policies,
and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause
damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national
jurisdiction.”
In sum, responsibility is framed as “state responsibility” internally, with some limited notion of liability
for external environmental harms that directly result from domestic pollution. Similarly, the norm of
common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities (CBDR), the most directly relevant
norm for the assignment of special responsibilities for the environment, applies to states vis-a-vis
obligations to one another, and it’s based on a principle of differentiation of treatment related to the
level of development.
In sum, the practices of assigning responsibility in the environmental domain depend almost wholly on
current contributions to a specific problem and the capacity to address it.
Trajectories of environmental responsibility

● the decentering of state responsibility: “environmental responsibility to protect” would shift
the focus of responsibility onto states not vis-a-vis each other, but for the well-being of people
and vulnerable groups

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● from external to internal responsibility?: a shift is underway from external to internal

responsibility (i.e. country ownership), where states are increasingly responsible for their own
environmental and developmental outcomes
Conclusions
The environmental governance domain is currently ill-suited to generate meaningful great power
responsibility. Rather, evidence suggests a decline and diffusion of responsibility. Great powers taking
on differentiated responsibilities for ensuring the environmental integrity of the planet is desirable, the
preceding analysis suggests that institutionalizing such responsibility, especially if attached to special
rights, is not only unlikely, but also a poor fit practically and morally with what is needed to address
global environmental problems.
While some areas of environmental protection may look like classic global management and collective
action problems (e.g. ozone depletion or declining high seas, or straddling, fish stocks), others are much
more about societal transformation where multilevel change and wider ranges of actors are equally as
important. There may also be benefits of directing attention to promoting a broader sense of
responsibility and improved accountability as ways to pressure and support greater and more
widespread transformative action and a just transition that might also eventually bring great powers
along, although work is needed on how to develop those links.
7. Water Security and Conflict
Bruce Lankford, Karen Bakker, et al.., ed. Water Security: Principles, Perspectives and
Practices
Chapter 4 - Debating the concept of water security

Water security has come to the fore of some domestic water management agendas in the past decade,
particularly associated with (bio)terrorism concerns, leading some to characterize it as ‘a key objective
of a range of governmental and nongovernmental agencies across the spectrum of governance levels’.
Framing of water security across the physical and social sciences

Recently, the concept of water security has been more explicitly linked to food security and energy
security in the articulation of a ‘nexus’ of related concerns.
Increasing use of water security across the disciplines

Water-security’s link: as a basic life resource, water has long been connected to security for humans.
Searches of academic databases find the term water security first emerged in the early 1990s in the
context of Middle Eastern geopolitics. Different disciplines have a tendency to focus on different
scales: development studies tend to use nation-state scales, hydrologists often focus on watershed
scales, and social scientists most frequently work at the local community scale.
The relative frequency of words used in the 198 academic articles in our sub-database suggests
convergence around a set of core concepts: agriculture, areas, climate, change, countries, development,
environmental, food, global, health, management, model, policy, region, resources, and system. It’s a
debated concept. A diversity of definitions of and approaches to analyzing water security are deployed
across the natural and social sciences.

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Defining water security

Contemporary framings of water security are highly diverse:
● from a legal perspective, water security has generally been associated with allocation rules that
seek to secure entitlements to desired quantities of water
● from an agricultural perspective, protection from flood and drought risk is generally
considered a key determinant of water security
Within this diversity, some common themes and trends can be identified. In general, the definitions of
water security used in the 1990s were linked to specific human security issues, such as military
security, food security, and (more rarely) environmental security. This changed with the Second World
Water Forum in 2000 that introduced a new definition: access and affordability of water, as well as
human needs and ecological health.
Four interrelated themes dominate the published research on water security:
1. Water availability and quantity often related to water security assessment tools. One of
the best known assessment tools to date combines 2 indices: 1) it evaluates the ratio of water
use to availability and estimates demand-driven scarcity by measuring how much water is
withdrawn from river and aquifers; 2) estimates population-driven real water shortages by
measuring the number of people that have to share each unit of blue water resource.
For an individual, water security exists when he or she has access to sufficient safe and
affordable water to satisfy individual needs for drinking, washing, and livelihood
2. Human vulnerability to hazards: for example, the UNESCO-Institute for Water Education
advocates an infrastructure and systems approach to water security that ‘involves protection of
vulnerable water systems, protection against water related hazards such as floods and droughts,
sustainable development of water resources and safeguarding access to water functions’
3. Human needs (access, human development related concerns, with an emphasis on food
security): ‘a sufficient quantity of water at a quality necessary, at an affordable price, to meet
both the short-term and long-term needs to protect the health, safety, welfare and productive
capacity of position (households, communities, neighborhoods, or nation)’. Within the human
needs approach, there is a tendency to frame water security as a component of food security, in
which water security was the ability to provide adequate and reliable water supplies for
populations living in the world’s drier areas to meet agricultural production needs (FAO)
4. Sustainability: ‘when every person has access to enough safe water at affordable cost to lead
a clean, healthy and productive life, while ensuring that the natural environment is protected
and enhanced’ → meeting basic needs, securing the food supply, protecting ecosystems,
sharing water resources, managing risks, valuing water, and governing water wisely.
There is relatively little emphasis in the water security literature on military security or on the concept
of environmental security (‘green wars’), a concept that emerged in the 1990s to refer to the links
between violent conflict and environmental degradation. The only exception is the middle east and north
Africa where early uses of the term water security explicitly focused on geopolitical security concerns.
Discussion
The potential compatibility between these approaches raises a series of questions:
● How does water security overlap (sovrapporsi) with Integrated Water Resources
Management (the dominant water management paradigm in international water policy)? Like
IWRM, water security offers a paradigmatic approach to the analysis that includes both quality-
quantity concerns and integrates across scales (local-global). Both water security and IWRM

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suggest the need to balance human use and development with ecosystem needs. The two
concepts appear to be complementary;
● How might the concept of water security be coherently implemented in both scientific
research and water management? the diversity of potential variables and methods → narrow
framings would be usefully allied with broader, integrative framings of water security;
‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ framings of water security are complementary rather than mutually
exclusive.
Conclusion
The concept of water security emerged in the 1990s, and has evolved significantly since then. Until two
decades ago, the term was rarely used. When introduced in the 1990s, it was linked to other types of
security, especially food and military security. Since the Second World Water Forum in 2000, where
the Global Water Partnership introduced an integrative definition of water security, a variety of scholars
and policymakers have taken up the term and given it various meanings.
Broad and integrative conceptual framings of water security are useful for establishing priorities and
facilitating analysis of tradeoffs between competing uses and users, whereas narrower framings of water
security will be essential for implementation.
Capitolo 17. The Strategic dimension of Water. From national security to sustainable security
Water as a strategic issue
Given the central importance of water to human survival, it is clear that this particular resource has
received a great deal of attention within a strategic context. Much of the current policy discourse around
current and future global security threats emphasizes water as a strategic resource linked to issues of
stability, peace, and conflict. The earliest recorded case of an armed dispute over water dates back
almost 5,000 years to ancient Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (first recorded case
of water being used as a military tool).
There is a strong tradition that considers water as a simple object of political action. Such thinking
clearly underpinned the decision by the former Libyan leader Colonel Gadhafi’s forces to attempt to
cut off the water supply to Tripoli in their retreat in August and September of 2011 by, according to UN
reports, vandalizing the pumps that provide three-quarters of Tripoli’s supply of water from the so-
called Great Man-Made River.
There is a wealth of evidence for cooperative arrangements being used to help increase information
flows, reduce transaction costs, and increase levels of trust between potentially conflictual parties over
shared water sources.
Despite the trend in recent years to emphasize the likelihood of cooperation rather than conflict over
transboundary water resources, a brief survey of some of the most prominent studies and policy papers
from the national threat analysis of a number of western states demonstrates an enduring preoccupation
with water and conflict. Both in terms of scarcity-induced conflict and the use of water as a weapon,
the projections in this discourse for future stresses on water supplies produce an image of increasing
complexity, risk, and opportunity for conflict.
2 crucial factors in the framing of water issues:
● projected increases in the global population = over the next decade from 6.83 to 7,7 billion;
● 30% increase in demand for water, 50% for food;
By 2040, the population will increase to 8.8 billion, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle
East that already suffer from stresses on food and water. When shortages are threatened, the adoption
of export restrictions for food, and disputes over water flows, are likely to increase

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The physical impacts of climate change

Under conditions of potentially greater water scarcity at a global level, not only are the material
conditions of unequal access to water a potential trigger of conflict and instability, but just as, and
sometimes even more important, are perceptions of unequal access to water.
Water security research and national threats assessments

One reason for the divergence between the academic literature and the national threat analysis produced
by defence, military, and intelligence analysts relates to changes in the character of modern warfare.
The vast majority of the literature that has rightly pointed to the flaws in the water wars thesis has taken
warfare to mean traditional interstate war, which has declined steeply over the second half of the 20th
century. Since the late 1990s, a new concept of hybrid warfare emerged - a dangerous and complex
combination of insurgency, civil conflict, terrorism, pervasive criminality, and widespread civil
disorder. This lowering of the threshold (soglia) in terms of the kind of disputes, conflicts, and other
actions short of interstate warfare that are of concern to defence and security policymakers greatly
affects the way that water is treated in questions of strategy and defence → links between water and
intrastate conflict and political violence.
A second reason is the tendency in the academic literature on water security to follow the liberal
institutionalist position; scholarly research is characterized by an uncritical treatment of the power of
international institutions in mitigating security dilemmas, and an over-reliance on empirical data from
previous historical periods (in which population and climate pressures had far less impact), will produce
overly optimistic results.
A third reason may be that the vast bulk of the literature on transboundary water cooperation relies on
a set of rationalist assumptions better suited to international political economy (IPE) than to national
threat analysis. There is little doubt that concepts such as ‘virtual water’ have done much to illuminate
the complex political economy of water use.
The global trade in virtual water has always been politically feasible due to its invisibility, it only occurs
when it is economically feasible. For example, if national water security is reliant on virtual water trade,
sustainable, long-term solutions are therefore hostage to the same barriers, asymmetries, and
inequalities that exist across the global trade in almost all commodities. This matters in security terms
because the poorest and most fragile states of the international system (who also suffer from relative
economic disadvantage globally) are in the worst position to effectively solve their water scarcity
problems ‘outside of the river basin. In such countries, a diverse economy cannot be taken for granted.
The challenges to economic diversification are many and include a lack of investment and trade,
macroeconomic stability, a competitive exchange rate, good governance, and an absence of conflict.
The standard response: National Security

National security approach stands out 2 main features:
● a major tendency towards reacting to the symptoms of insecurity, but still minimal efforts at
strengthening security and defense policies.
● control paradigm: the preference for attempting to ‘control’ the symptoms of global insecurity
The most likely result of a standard national security approach to water security based around the control
paradigm is two-fold: one is the securitisation of the issue (placing it in discursive terms into the
modality of threat/ danger), and the second is an overly militarised response. This latter gives
preference to the zero-sum nature of realist strategic thinking.
An alternative: Sustainable security

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A ‘sustainable security’ approach is more likely to encourage cooperative outcomes rather than
falling into the traps of escalation, misperception, and miscalculation, and even all-out conflict. A
sustainable security approach does not guarantee harmony in policy coordination on water issues, but
rather decreases the likelihood for conflict by focusing specifically on addressing the causes of
insecurity at the source.
The concept of sustainable security is a relatively new one that is gaining increasing ground with
governments, NGOs, and analysts. It includes issues such as development, macro-socioeconomic and
environmental trends and water management and use. It prioritizes the resolution of the interconnected
and underlying drivers of insecurity and conflict, with an emphasis on preventive rather than reactive
strategies. The central premise of the approach is that it is impossible to successfully control all the
consequences of insecurity, and so efforts should instead be focused on resolving the causes.
4 standout characteristics:
1. underlying drivers of global insecurity rather than its symptoms. A sustainable security
approach prioritizes the analysis of long-term global trends with a particular focus on trends
that have the capacity to cause large-scale instability, such as climate change, increasing
competition over resources, and increasing socioeconomic divides
2. an attempt to address these drivers of insecurity at the source. For instance, if a warmer
global climate change will exacerbate conflicts, this approach tends to make effective
mitigation strategies at the heart of national, regional, and international security policies.
3. it emphasizes the interconnections between the underlying drivers of global insecurity. For
example, water security is, therefore, to be treated as being intimately connected to competition
over other resources, as well as trends such as climate change and the security implications of
a socioeconomically and politically marginalized majority world.
4. it places a great emphasis on long-term and equitable solutions in addressing the factors that
drive insecurity.
Priorities for a Sustainable Security Approach to Water

Local-level water management, dispute resolution, and conflict prevention measures lie at the
heart of a more sustainable approach to water scarcity and conflict. Particular attention must be given
to addressing local-level perceptions of inequality and injustice, particularly in conflict and post-
conflict situations → efforts at local level = sustained dialogue and attempts at trust-building, even
amongst parties already in conflict.
Regional and global approaches are equally important. It is imperative that major powers, as well
as regional and international organizations, coordinate to create genuinely global approaches to
addressing the links between resource competition, climate change, and socioeconomic and political
marginalization in order to mitigate conflicts over water at the global level. They can both be a powerful
way of addressing perceptions of marginalization and insecurity.
Nationally as well, greater efforts need to be made on making the connections between what are often
divided into separate policy areas.
A deeper engagement between the impressively interdisciplinary water security scholarly community
and defence and security policy community based on a greater understanding of some of the issues
discussed above should assist in this task. A key first task in this will be the creation of avenues for
regular dialogue between academics, NGOs, and others working on water security issues and defense
and security policymakers and analysts. They can provide an opportunity for highlighting both the
differences in each scholarly/policy community’s respective approaches (and the reasons why,
including the issues discussed above), as well as the commonalities that are not always readily apparent.

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This is now the central challenge for governments and civil society alike. A greater engagement between
the academic water security community and their counterparts in the defence and security community
on the most sustainable ways of addressing the strategic dimensions of water will be a useful first step.
CAP 14 - Resource Scarcity Securing Access to Water and Energy - Snow
This case examines the changing general parameters of the problems of water and energy security. They
are related but different challenges qualitatively and quantitatively. The need for access to adequate,
usable water supplies is existential: water is literally necessary to life. Energy is similar but more
geopolitical: energy is necessary for survival in the world’s coldest climates but is also considered the
lubricant of economic activity and geopolitical applications. Conflict over the ability to control,
monopolize, or deny access to valued resources is as old as human history.
As has always been the case, resource scarcities are politically important, because domestic and
international political decisions help define scarcities and responses to them. Where resources are in
short supply, the political, including geopolitical, competition between those who have adequate or
surplus supplies and those who do not has acrimonious consequences for the relations between the haves
and the have-nots.
Scarcity is the key concept. It exists whenever all claimants to a resource cannot simultaneously have
all that resource they need or want. When scarcity exists between sovereign states, there are three
possible ways to allocate the resource. First, if some method can be found to increase supply so that all
claimants can have more of the resource, scarcity abates and so does the basis for conflict. The second
approach is to decrease demand for the resource by using less and thereby lowering demand closer to
available supply. la terza? lol
Water resources
Water scarcity is not uniformly experienced geographically. Hydrologists categorize scarcity among
three kinds:
● physical scarcity where inadequate supplies are available,
● economic scarcity where resources, expertise, or will is inadequate to maximize availability,
● imminent scarcity where environmental changes could precipitate scarcity
The result is that water scarcity selectively affects many people in the world. There are three degrees
of water scarcity that are often cited in describing its extent. The least severe are water shortages,
which are selective crises often caused by weather patterns, pollution, and overuse of water for non-
necessary purposes. Water stress refers to conditions where it is difficult to obtain adequate amounts
of freshwater due to availability or economic scarcity. The Middle East is the most water-stressed part
of the world. The third category is water crisis, the situation where there is inadequate supply to meet
the needs of the people who live in a region.
The problem of water scarcity is less well recognized personally in the developed than in the developing
world. The inelasticity of water adds to the difficulty and frustration of dealing with it. On the demand
side, there are bare minimums of water that people must have, and if they do not, they will perish. As
world population increases, that demand can only increase and put further stress on water supplies. The
only demand-side alternative is population control, preferably reduction from a strictly hydrological
perspective. The supply side is slightly more optimistic if still very difficult. Supply can be increased
by converting some of that six-sevenths of the world’s water that is unusable for human purposes
potable.
Energy resources

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The energy crisis is structurally different from water and has received much more attention than water
scarcity, largely because it has strong salience globally in both the developed and developing worlds.
Water scarcity is, in important ways, a humanitarian problem with some geopolitical ramifications.
Energy scarcity is largely a geopolitical problem. Energy is also different because, unlike water, it can
come from various sources. World dependence has become so great that two basic trends important to
this century have emerged:
● one has been fluctuation in estimates of availability of this non-renewable resource
● the other trend has been to create a changed element in the world power map. Countries and
regions like the Middle East that would not otherwise have great geopolitical significance
gained such status because they are significant petroleum repositories.
There are five sources of energy production for the future. All are currently in use at various levels
and with different prospects. Three involve the burning of fossil fuels, with the inevitable byproduct of
carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere. These three sources are petroleum, natural gas, and
coal. They differ in quantity available, geographic distribution, and contribution to environmental
degradation. The other two source categories are nuclear power generation and renewable energy
sources, a cover designation for a variety of specific energy-generating technologies. These sources
share the characteristic of being non-carbon burning and thus producing no carbon dioxide emission.
Petroleum
Although oil has been used primarily as an energy source for economic activity (its conversion to
electricity) and transportation, its uses go well beyond the production of energy. Petroleum is the basic
commodity used in the petrochemical industry, and thus most of the plastics industry. There are no
ready alternative substitutes for petroleum in making plastics, so it is arguable that using oil to produce
energy is a waste of a resource indispensable for other, more important purposes.
Traditional petroleum remains the dominant source of energy worldwide, but its geopolitical
consequences and pressures from the climate change community are creating pressure for the
exploration and marketing of other energy forms. Both ecological concerns and price affect these
decisions, and energy use appears to be entering a transition from petroleum to some other base.
Candidates include natural gas, coal, nuclear, and a variety of renewable sources.
Natural Gas
The major contemporary change agent in the energy equation has been the expansion of availability and
usage of natural gas. It has been part of the energy equation since the transition to petroleum as the
world’s most favored and used fuel, because natural gas is found essentially everywhere there is oil.
The major reason for this change, of course, has been the emergence of shale oil and gas production,
which is becoming a transformational factor in the global energy picture. The United States has been
the leader of this development and likely will continue to be at the forefront of this technology. The
other great attraction for the United States is geopolitical, specifically as a substitute for dependence on
foreign petroleum and thus as a contributor to greater energy security, even overall sufficiency. The
United States is becoming a net energy exporter, and shale oil and gas are major drivers in this shift.
The other country that can benefit greatly from the shale oil and gas “revolution” is China. China's need
for energy is growing rapidly, as economic development and higher standards of living in the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) occur in energy-intensive ways. To meet its increasing needs, China is
attempting to increase its access to all energy sources.
Shale oil and gas may provide a useful alternative for both the Chinese energy need and pollution
problem.
Coal

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Coal is the third major CO2-emitting fossil fuel. Coal currently produces about 22 percent of American
energy through the operation of coal-powered electrical energy plants. China has been the world’s
leading coal consumer. Coal mining is relatively cheap in China, and its exploitation relieves
dependency on foreign energy resources. In economic and security terms, a growing reliance on coal
for power generation has made sense. Coal is rapidly becoming the energy source of the past. It remains
a source in countries such as India that lack obvious viable alternatives. Coal use is, however, dirty and
increasingly economically uncompetitive, as the decline in the U.S. coal industry testifies to. China has
cancelled the construction of more coal-powered plants and is moving away from coal-generated power.
The rest of the world is following.
Nuclear energy
Power generation using nuclear rather than carbon-based fuel is an alternative. It has both advantages
and disadvantages. Its primary advantage is that nuclear power generation does not contribute to carbon
dioxide overload in the atmosphere and is thus an environmentally friendly source of energy. Its primary
disadvantages are disposal of spent nuclear fuel, dogged questions of plant safety, facilities security,
and the expense of building nuclear power plants. These disadvantages have combined to make nuclear
power a relatively small contributor to worldwide energy, and its contribution is unlikely to grow
markedly in the foreseeable future. The United States is the world leader in overall nuclear power
generation with over 100 nuclear power plants in operation. The disadvantages of nuclear power
continue to depress its expansion as an energy source. The costs of nuclear plant construction are much
higher than those of other forms of power generation because of the requirements to protect against
radioactive leakage at nuclear sites and to make plants impervious to attack or hostile penetration.
Several problems create public resistance to nuclear power. One of these is the problem of waste
disposal.
Renewables
Problems and controversies surround most traditional energy sources and create interest in alternative
sources of energy generation, and particularly sources that are non polluting and that are not depleted
by use for creating energy. There has been greater enthusiasm for so-called renewable sources such as
wind power captured by powerful wind turbines and converted to electricity, and solar energy, using
solar panels to capture the sun’s heat and store it for use as energy. Sizable industries have developed
in both the United States and China to develop and commercialize these efforts, and their potential to
deal with the energy crisis is raised in the next section.
Application: securing access to Water and Energy
Water security
In both a conceptual and existential sense, the problem of water security is more important and difficult
than is the question of energy. It is also a more difficult problem to solve because there is no alternative
to water to sustain life. Water shortage is, for most inhabitants of the developed world, an abstract
problem, because relatively few people in the Western hemisphere or Europe suffer from current or
imminent water crises such as those that afflict swaths of Africa and Asia. The developing world is
more naturally vulnerable, both because of geography (being the site of most of the world’s greatest
deserts, for instance) and having the greatest population explosions placing additional strains on existing
supplies. In addition, in places such as central Africa, the technology of water extraction is least
developed and least applied. Moreover, attempts to develop economically can have adverse effects on
water supply: exploitation of shale formations involves the utilization and fouling of very large amounts
of water, for instance. Climate change is also a factor, as monumental storms disrupt the water cycle.

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There are available supply-and-demand methods to deal with the growing crisis of water. The most
prominent (and arguably humane) deal with ways to increase supply. Since there is a finite amount of
water on the planet, these tend to concentrate on more optimal means of using the water that is already
here. They tend to be of two kinds: expanding the availability of usable water by converting more of
the world’s six-sevenths of currently non-potable water to usable status, and making more efficient use
of existing freshwater supplies. Desalinization is the obvious method for converting unusable into
usable water, but it has been a relatively expensive process that the least wealthy states have not been
able to employ.
Conservation also plays a role. Storage dams stop excess flow from running unused into the oceans,
where they become saline and unusable. Better forms of distribution of water through enhanced
irrigation play a role, as does restricting use in drought-prone areas to non-water-intensive forms of
agriculture.
There is a demand side to the equation. While a good deal of the water problem is distributional, it is
first and foremost a problem of increased human demand for water. Population growth is thus, in a
very real sense, the root cause of water shortage and security, and as long as population continues to
increase, water scarcity alleviation will be a catchup enterprise. There are ethical, humanitarian, and
religious objections to the implications of this observation, but they cannot be ignored if the problem is
honestly to be addressed.
There are geopolitical implications as well. It is not clear what the pace of increasing supplies of
potable water by desalination, more efficient use, or conservation will be, and it seems fair to assume
that shortages will continue to build, and with them so will demands for greater supplies.
Energy security
The traditional composition of energy use and security is changing in two basic ways. The first is
changes in demand and includes who will make increasing demands and how this will change the level
of demand for different forms of energy. The second, and related, change is in the forms that energy
demands will take. The countries that will make the greatest demands for increased energy are China
and India, while the United States are reducing their needs for foreign oil and moving toward non fossil
sources.
Among the more intriguing prospects is the rising trend toward renewable sources such as solar and
wind. These technologies have long been derided as marginal and economically infeasible, but recent
breakthroughs have included a lowering of the costs of production to the point that these technologies
compete economically with some fossil-based sources. The decline of coal, for instance, is largely
because both wind and solar and shale gas are cheaper to exploit and use than coal for providing energy.
This structural change could be the leading edge of a more general energy transformation, with the
prospects of some ultimate solution such as fusion from seawater at the end of the process.
The pursuit of energy security has been one of the highest priorities of the state system since petroleum
became the dominant source of world energy and changed important dynamics of how the world
operates. The power map associated with traditionally derived petroleum energy may also be changing.
The transition also affects the rocky relationship between the champions of energy security and the
supporters of environmental imperatives. The conversion of power-producing plants from coal to shale
gas has already allowed the United States to reduce its CO2 footprint (a factor that softens the blow of
quitting the Paris agreement), and China’s decision to stop building new coal-powered energy facilities
indicates that President Xi, at least, has similar inclinations. Shale conversion is, of course, an interim
solution to climate change, because shale gas is still a fossil fuel, if a less polluting one. A major
movement toward shale-based energy could, however, be a first step in the transition to a non fossil-
fuel future of energy production that could ease pressures to reduce CO2-caused climate change.

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Conclusions
Resource scarcity of one kind or another has been a recurring feature of human history. Humankind has
always wanted or needed resources that not all claimants could possess simultaneously in the amount
they desired or needed - the definition of scarcity. The coveted resource in question has changed at
different points in time, but the basic problem of scarcity seems perpetual.
Energy may be scarce, but there are multiple sources and methods for its exploitation. The basic
problem surrounding water is the maximum utilization of a finite, inelastic supply. Energy can come
from many sources; the problem is finding and exploiting acceptable sources.
Several factors help frame the water security problem. One is the volume of water available. If one
includes water unfit for human consumption (salt water), the water supply is more than abundant. For
water scarcity to decline, there are three clear mandates. First, the expansion of the potable water supply
must occur, which means converting more ocean water to a form consumable by humans. Second, the
other aspect of supply is distributional. If human demand and supply are to be in juxtaposition, water
availability and location must be matched. Unfortunately, supplies of water are not distributed
uniformly: there is more water in some places and not enough in others. The challenge is finding ways
to increase supply to areas that are deficient. Third, these efforts can be made increasingly difficult by
how water is treated as a geopolitical commodity.
Energy scarcity is currently the more publicized global resource problem. The pressures of a growing
global population, increasing portions of which demand a greater and more reliable supply of energy,
and finite, dwindling reserves of traditional sources of energy combine to create this problem. Energy
consumption is tied so closely to economic productivity that demand is both a matter of survival and
the symbol of an increasingly prosperous physical condition for people.
There is a unifying possibility hidden within both these sources of resource scarcity and their alleviation
- the world’s oceans. As noted, desalinated water is a major component of adequate water supplies for
many water-deficient areas, principally those that wash the ocean’s shores. This leaves the formidable
task of getting water to other places that need it but are too far from saline sources to gain access given
current technologies. For energy purposes, science has not yet mastered the controlled fusion process it
requires. Scientists have long believed that the ultimate solution to energy production is through nuclear
fusion utilizing the abundant deuterium and tritium of ocean water as the primary source. Advocacies
of fusion that surfaced a decade or more ago have proven to be premature, but using the ocean’s
vastness may be the key to an energy and water scarcity solution.
Global Water Security, chapter 3: Addressing Water Challenges and Safeguarding Water
Security: China’s Thought, Action, and Practice
China has very complicated water regimes:

● low per capita water resources
● uneven distribution of water resources in time and space: of the precipitation and river runoff,
60–80% is concentrated in the flood season
● complex river systems
● frequent floods and droughts
A marked increase in extreme weather events makes disaster prevention and mitigation very hard.
Due to the impacts of climate change and human activities, China’s climate situation is becoming even
more complex and variable. Local rainstorms, super-typhoons, unusually high temperatures, drought,
and other extreme weather events are markedly on the rise, while water and drought hazards are growing
in abruptness, abnormality, and uncertainty. At the same time, climate change has led to the accelerated

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melting of glaciers and rising snow levels, adversely affecting the overall situation and future trend of
water resources.
Faster industrialisation and urbanisation are leading to increasingly acute conflicts between water
supply and demand. More than 400 cities suffer water shortage to varying degrees. The combined
problem of population growth, land reduction, and water shortage is intensifying, while the
development of farmland water conservancy lags behind. Overexploitation of water resources in some
localities has caused drying-out of river courses, drying-up of lakes, shrinking of wetlands, land
subsidence, and other ecological problems.
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, China has made a series of
major decisions and deployments to safeguard national water security from a strategic view of the
overall national situation, and explicitly put forward guiding principles for water work in the new era:
‘prioritising water saving, spatial balance, systematic governance, and simultaneous functioning
of both hands (government and market mechanisms)’.
Constantly Improving Flood Control, Drought Relief, and Disaster Mitigation Capacity
Flooding and waterlogging constitute the most hazardous and damaging natural disasters in China, and
pose significant risks to China’s economic and social development. Floods and waterlogging in China
are:
● extensive in impact
● high in frequency
● various in type
● high in economic costs
The Chinese government insists that ensuring the safety of people’s lives is the primary task of flood
prevention and is firmly committed to the concepts of risk management and integrated disaster
reduction. In practice and at all times, it combines prevention, defence, and rescue efforts, and makes
comprehensive use of structural and non-structural measures to ensure flood control security:
● the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters (SFCDRH) is responsible for
organising and leading the national flood control, drought relief, and typhoon response efforts,
and locals governments above the county level have also set up flood control and drought relief
headquarters
● improving the system of flood control works: to date, China has built and reinforced river,
lake, and sea dikes of a combined length of 413,000 km
● strengthening flood monitoring, forecasting, and early warning: the implementation of the
national flood control and drought relief command system and other projects has given rise to
the preliminary shape of a nationwide multilevel full-range system for monitoring rainfall and
water regimes as well as forecasting and early warning of floods thanks to the building of more
than 100,000 stations across the country to monitor water and rainfall conditions
● scientifically scheduling flood control works: it has realised multiple benefits in flood control,
water supply, power generation, irrigation, navigation, and ecological restoration
● organising timely evacuation for risk mitigation: the philosophy is putting people first and
always assign top priority to protecting people’s lives, the government organises and guides
localities in their jurisdictions to implement flood prevention and defence responsibilities,
specify evacuation and escape programs, and define evacuation routes and escape locations
● persevering in scientific flood control according to law: China has promulgated and
implemented laws and regulations to guarantee the rule of law in flood prevention and control
and in compensating for the use of flood detention and storage areas

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Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, flood control has reduced arable-land inundation
and grain losses by 192 million hectares and 781 million tons, respectively, generated RMB 4.94 trillion
in economic benefits, and reduced the proportion of flood-induced losses in the GDP to 0.5%,
drastically reducing also the death toll of floods and loggings.
Consolidating and Improving the Conditions of Urban and Rural Water Supply
Supply security is an important basis for and at the same time one of the greatest challenges to
safeguarding water security in China. These are the main problems:
● insufficient natural endowment and coexistence of resource-based water shortage, water
quality-related water shortage, and structural water shortage
● growing demand for water as a result of accelerated urbanisation and industrialisation
● rural drinking water security is a complex issue, rendering security of water supply very
difficult to achieve
● increasingly acute threat and extensive impacts of droughts due to global climate change; while
the northern water-scarce areas experienced frequent droughts, the water-rich south and south-
west also recorded continuous severe droughts
Given the severe situation confronting water supply security, the Chinese government has implemented
the Most Stringent Water Resources Management System: control total water use, improve water
use efficiency, and restrict water pollution in water functional zones (“Three Red Lines”). China is
applying measures to construct a modern water supply security system, such as protecting water
sources, increasing infrastructure investment, reasonably arranging water transfer and diversion,
developing and utilising unconventional water sources, and cultivating the market for trading of water
rights. So, the aims are:
● strengthening the protection of drinking water source areas: improving compliance of
important drinking water source areas, cleaning up and rectifying pollution sources and
discharge outlets in drinking water source areas, shutting down and relocating enterprises that
seriously affect the safety of drinking water sources and are unable to control their pollution,
and developing emergency response plans for unexpected environmental incidents in drinking
water source areas
● optimising the layout of water resources allocation: major water diversion and transfer
works, large reservoirs, and networks of backbone irrigation and drainage channels and
networks
● improving infrastructure to safeguard urban and rural drinking water security: China has
basically solved the rural drinking water problem, and started implementation of a new
programme to consolidate and elevate rural drinking water safety
● enhancing development and utilisation of unconventional water sources: desalination and
recycling of the water
● vigorously cultivating the market for trading of water rights
With a combined annual water supply capacity of 700 billion m3, these water structures basically meet
economic, social, ecological, and environmental demand for water use, and have effectively responded
to multiple severe droughts and minimised drought-induced losses. In terms of safeguarding urban and
rural water supply, China has addressed the drinking water security problem for 570 million rural
residents cumulatively since 2005. Some 82% of China’s rural population has access to centralised
water supply, tapwater (di rubinetto) penetration in rural areas is 76%.
Expanding and Renovating Agriculture Irrigation and Drainage Infrastructure

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To feed its 1.3 billion people is always a top priority for China in its attempt to achieve good governance
and social stability. In safeguarding food security, China faces the following challenges:
● agricultural production in China relies heavily on irrigation
● water use efficiency in agriculture needs to be improved
● systems and mechanisms for irrigation development are inadequate
Safeguarding the sustainability of water resources for food production is the basic condition for
food security. By actively expanding effective irrigation areas, promoting high-efficiency irrigation,
and strengthening farmland water conservancy construction, China has ensured bumper grain harvests
in consecutive years with no increase in agricultural water use.
China has taken positive steps to develop water-saving irrigation. Measures such as canal lining,
pipeline water transmission, and sprinkler, drip, and micro-irrigation, as well as land levelling, are being
adopted to improve water use efficiency. Through scientific and proper scheduling, irrigation is being
carried out with the right timing and quantity, so that available water resources can meet the needs of
crop growth and increase yield per unit of water use.
In recent years, the Chinese government has regarded farmland irrigation and drainage systems as a key
measure for increasing grain output, responding to natural disasters, and improving the water
environment. China will vigorously promote the ownership reform of small water conservancy works,
and encourage and guide social capital to invest in farmland water conservancy.
As people’s living standard improves, China’s consumption of grains, milk, and beef products keeps
growing. Adhering to the concept of ‘building small oases to protect the large ecology’, the Chinese
government has stimulated the development of irrigation systems for forage land, developing 1 million
hectares of irrigated forage land in pastoral areas.
The Chinese government is actively promoting a reasonable agricultural water pricing mechanism, that
is, to reasonably determine agricultural water tariffs so that prices reflect the scarcity of water resources
and thereby enable sound operation and maintenance of agricultural water-saving irrigation systems
and waterworks.
By developing agricultural water conservancy facilities, China has safeguarded food security for 21%
of the world’s population, with only 6% of the world’s freshwater resources and 9% of the world’s
arable land:
● developed a large number of irrigation systems composed of water sources, water transfer and
distribution facilities, and field irrigation works
● substantially increased agricultural water use efficiency
● significantly boosted agricultural production capacity
Promoting Water Ecological Civilisation Development and Water Environment Protection

With the rapid economic and social development and population growth in China, economic and social
demand for water use is rising fast, and wastewater discharges keep increasing. New challenges are
emerging with respect to water ecological security:
● the water ecological environment is fragile
● control of water pollution is very difficult
● soil erosion is severe
● water ecological functions are deteriorating
The Chinese government attaches great importance to the construction of water ecological civilisation.
It has strengthened top-level design, made institutional and mechanism innovations, vigorously
promoted various governance and protection measures, and striven to build a system for safeguarding
the security of water ecology.

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In 2015, the Chinese government issued the Action Plan on Control of Water Pollution, which put
forward ten measures for prevention and control of water pollution. Then, in 2016 the river chief system
was brought in, the main tasks of a river chief include protecting water resources, preventing and
controlling water pollution, improving the water environment, restoring the water ecology, managing
and protecting shorelines, and supervising law enforcement.
China has implemented soil and water conservation projects and ecological restoration projects,
practised comprehensive control of soil erosion on sloping land and actively promoted the construction
of clean watersheds in important headwater areas, peripheral areas of cities and towns, and the eastern
region. While boosting comprehensive control of soil erosion, China also practises enclosed protection
and cultivation, with a ban on grasing and rotational grasing.
China has completed a national assessment of areas suffering groundwater overexploitation, and will
complete a national groundwater monitoring project and has scientifically planned and implemented a
project to connect the water systems of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs under the premise of ecological
protection and based on the natural water systems of rivers and lakes, plus water storage/scheduling
works and water diversion/discharge projects.
In terms of water pollution control, in 2016, the combined length of all rivers with Grade I–III water
quality took up 76.9% of the national total, 12.7% points more than in 2011. In terms of controlling soil
erosion, to date, more than 70,000 small watersheds have been brought under comprehensive
governance, and an area of over 800,000 km2 has been closed to cultivation. In terms of ecological
governance of rivers and lakes, comprehensive governance of the water environment in Taihu Lake has
had early fruits, seen in the marked improvement of major water quality indicators. In terms of
groundwater governance and protection, overexploitation of groundwater is being effectively curbed
nationwide, with the situation in excessively overexploited areas undergoing a preliminary reverse.
Conclusion
The World Water Council plays an important role in creating the World Water Forum as a dialogue and
exchange platform and in committing the world to addressing issues such as global water security.
Thanks to the advocacy and influence of the World Water Council, the topic of water security has
aroused close international attention at important international water events. Looking forward, the
Chinese government will uphold the new development concept of ‘innovation, coordination, green,
open, and sharing’ and build on the international cooperation opportunities presented by the Belt and
Road Initiative to actively build a community of shared future for all humankind. China would like to
conduct multi-layer, multi-area exchanges and cooperation in the field of water resources.
8. Food Security
Food politics: what everyone needs to know
Chapter 1: An overview of food politics
What is food politics?

Since biblical times, the policies of governments have shaped food and farming. Governments in Africa
today often burden farmers with taxes nearly as large, usually imposed indirectly through price
manipulations by state-monopoly marketing agencies, or through overvalued currencies that implicitly
tax the producers of all tradable goods. Meanwhile, governments in wealthy industrial countries usually

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provide direct and indirect subsidies to farmers, typically at the expense of both taxpayers and
consumers.
The food and farming sectors of all states, ancient and modern, foster considerable political activity.
Rural food producers and urban food consumers have divergent short-term interests, so they will
naturally compete to use the far-reaching powers of the state (e.g., collecting taxes, providing subsidies,
managing exchange rates, regulating markets) to pursue a self-serving advantage. We describe such
struggles over how the risks and gains from state action are allocated within the food and farming sector
as “food politics.” The distinctive feature of food politics is not just social contestation about food, but
political competition to shape the actions of government.
Is food politics driven by material interests or by social values?

Food politics is driven by both. In poor countries where a preponderance of all citizens still work in
the farming sector and where large numbers of citizens still find it difficult to afford enough food,
material interests will tend to dominate. In these societies, food and farming are still a large part of
material welfare for all. In wealthy post-agricultural societies, however, farmers have become few in
number, and most consumers are easily able to afford an adequate diet. In these societies, material
conflicts around food and farming will persist, but social values - such as values regarding the natural
environment, or toward animal welfare, or toward the preservation of traditional culture - will begin to
play a larger role.
Industrialization brings rapid productivity growth to farming as well as manufacturing, but it also
results in a rapid loss of farm jobs, as fewer people are needed to produce food. Meanwhile, urban
population and income growth boosts the demand for food and brings a rapid expansion of food-
processing companies, private food transport and distribution systems, supermarkets, and food service
restaurants. At every step in this process, politically motivated groups of farmers and non-farmers,
private companies, and non-governmental organizations struggle to shape government policy in a
manner consistent with their preferences: “food movement” advocates push hard to bring their
alternative preferences into the mainstream.
Political struggles over food and farm policy within democratic societies are divisive and polarizing
because the opposing positions incorporate conflicting social values, which always makes compromise
difficult. Yet the policies that emerge in democratic states are typically more successful than those
within authoritarian or one-party systems.
Is food politics a global or a local phenomenon?

According to one widely quoted legislative leader in the United States, Representative Tip O’Neill, “All
politics is local.” This holds true for much of food politics. Analysts like to talk about the “world food
system,” but to a large extent the world remains divided into many separate and highly diverse national
or even local food systems.
Despite the growth of international food markets, roughly 90% of all food never enters international
trade. It is still consumed within the same country where it was produced. The heaviest users of world
food markets are today’s rich overfed countries, not poor underfed countries, and much of what the rich
import is feed for animals, not food for direct human consumption. In addition to being highly
compartmentalized, the world’s food system is one in which nutrition outcomes diverge dramatically
country by country, and also person by person within countries. When it comes to food and agriculture,
the world is not flat: different distribution, salaries and number of undernourished people.
In some institutional settings, the politics of food and farming is being addressed within a global frame
of reference. Yet national and local food and farming systems remain significantly separated and
divided, thanks to geographic distance, weak transport infrastructures, divergent cultural and dietary
traditions, and large gaps in purchasing power.

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Who are the most important actors in food politics?

In every setting where food politics takes place, organizations with divergent preferences will compete
for influence. Eg. organizations representing consumers will usually want food prices to be low, while
advocates for farmers usually want high prices. In countries with democratic political systems, each of
these groups will cultivate its own special friends and supporters inside the government, especially
within elected legislatures.
Has the politics of food and agriculture recently been changing?

In today’s advanced industrial and post-industrial societies, especially in Europe and North America,
the politics of food and agriculture is undergoing significant change. There was a time when food
consumers in these societies wanted just four things: foods that were safe, plentiful in variety, more
convenient to purchase and prepare, and lower in cost. Now consumers in these countries are beginning
to demand other things as well, such as foods with greater freshness and nutritional value, foods grown
with fewer synthetic chemicals, foods grown with a smaller carbon footprint, foods that are locally
grown, and foods produced without harm to farm animals; markets are now growing rapidly for foods
that are local, organic, “sustainable,” or “humanely produced.”
In commercial terms, the food systems of the world remain imperfectly integrated; the terms of our
food politics discussions and debates, however, have been globalized at a surprising pace.
Chapter 3: the politics of high food prices
When did high food prices become a political issue?

Most recently high food prices became an intense political issue in 2007–2008, when international
market prices for rice, wheat, and corn all spiked sharply upward at the same time. Riots broke out in
a number of developing countries, and it seemed that hunger was certain to increase as well. A global
financial crisis in 2009 soon caused international food prices to fall, but then in 2010 wheat prices
increased sharply once more. Just as this second food price spike seemed to be passing by early 2012,
a severe summer drought in the United States sent international corn prices spiking upward yet again.
This unusual series of international food price spikes between 2007 and 2012 reset global expectations
and debates on food. The spikes were not just disruptive on their own terms; they called into question
what had been a comforting assumption among most economists that over the long term agricultural
commodity prices would fall rather than rise, thanks to continued farm productivity gains.
What caused these spikes in international food prices?

The cause of these international price spikes remains disputed to the present day:
● the most powerful explanation was a simultaneous change in the trade policies of countries
exporting food into the international market
● a more fundamental supply-and-demand shift within the food sector, as low reserve stocks
around the world were combining with high consumption growth in the newly wealthy states
of Asia
● the price shift came from beyond the food sector, specifically from higher fuel costs (the price
of petroleum was also spiking in 2008), which drove up farm fertilizer costs and led to an
increase in biofuel production, such as ethanol from corn, which diverted crops away from food
markets

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● the spike came from speculative behavior on the part of international investors, who were
moving their money into commodity markets because investment bubbles in stock markets and
real estate were starting to deflate
● a slowdown in food production or in the growth of agricultural productivity
From inside the food and farming sector, the single biggest driver behind the exaggerated price spikes
of 2007–2008 and 2010–2011 were export restraints, or fears of such restraints. The price spike of
2012 was less severe and was driven not by export bans but instead by an actual production shortfall,
namely a severe drought that reduced total corn production in the United States by 13 percent.
How many people became hungry when prices spiked in 2007–2008?

On this important issue experts also disagree. While the crisis was under way, the World Bank
produced a hasty estimate which said that the higher international food prices were pushing an added
100 million people around the world into poverty. The media carelessly reported this as documenting
100 million more people going hungry. In the following year, however, the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) produced a calculation specifically asserting that the number of
undernourished people worldwide had been pushed from 873 million in 2004–2006 up to 1.02 billion
in 2009 (+130 million).
Several years later, after the panic had passed, the FAO decided to reexamine its estimates, and in 2012
it published a remarkable revision. These estimates implied that before, during, and after the peak of
the crisis, the percentage of the world’s population that was undernourished had actually fallen, from
14 percent down to 13 percent, and finally down to just 12 percent in 2010–2012 despite continued
high prices and despite continued global population growth. Most of the world’s poorest people, those
most vulnerable to hunger, were not well connected to international food markets, so price movements
on the international market were not an especially powerful driver of human hunger.
If the price increase is temporary, it may not produce much in the way of actual undernutrition, but it
will immediately generate social and political unrest. Even if it does not lead to hunger, it will be
certain to lead to anger, and urban anger is typically more dangerous to governments than rural hunger.
Do international food price spikes cause violent conflict?

After the outbreak of many riots in Africa and South America after the 2007-2008 price event, some
analysts concluded that international food price spikes had become a dominant new cause of social
unrest and violent conflict around the world, although it is often a contributing factor, not the only
one (eg. Arab Spring).
Have higher food prices triggered “land grabs” in Africa?

As would be expected, higher international food prices beginning in 2007 triggered larger investments
in agricultural production worldwide, including the purchase or rental of underutilized farmland.
Many investors - including private firms and sovereign wealth funds from China, India, South Korea,
and oil-rich states in the Persian Gulf - saw land in Africa as potentially useful for the production of
both food and biofuels. Because most agricultural land in Africa is legally under the control of
governments rather than individual farmers, foreign investors began approaching African governments,
including less scrupulous local officials, with offers to lease substantial areas of farming land.
Between October 2008 and August 2009 alone, over 46 million hectares of farmland acquisitions were
announced.
The obvious risk with such land deals is that the local farming or herding populations currently on the
land will be uncompensated for any resulting disruption or destruction of their livelihood. Social justice
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were quick to brand this new wave of investments as a “land
grab” and to demand stronger protection for local communities. In many cases domestic investors had

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acquired more land than foreigners, and the implications for local farmers were seen to depend largely
on the crop production systems selected by the investor.
Have subsidies and mandates for biofuels contributed to higher international food prices?
Higher international petroleum prices were an important food price driver in 2007–2008, since they
encouraged a diversion of crops such as sugar, corn, and soybeans away from food and feed markets to
produce biofuels, such as ethanol from sugarcane and corn, or biodiesel fuel from vegetable oil. These
market-driven diversions were then reinforced by government policies designed to subsidize or even
require the use of food to produce still more fuel. With policies such as these in place, 70 percent of all
increased corn production globally between 2004 and 2007 went to biofuel use. Higher international
corn prices were one result. On the other hand, much of this diversion of food to fuel would have taken
place without government encouragement, simply because of higher petroleum prices in the market.
However, as an impression spread that biofuels policies were a contributor to high international food
prices, political support for biofuels diminished around the world. Responding to this new international
climate of concern, national governments began to back away from aggressive biofuels promotion.
Have higher international prices become a permanent feature of food politics?

Economists disagree on this question. Even the financial crisis and recession in the United States,
followed by a debt crisis and recession in Europe, had failed to bring prices back down to the historical
trend level. Many concluded that “the era of cheap food is over” and that traditional expectations of
falling food prices over the long term would have to be revised. Others recalled an earlier interlude of
very high international food prices in the 1970s, one that led to similar pronouncements that the world
had entered a new era. This earlier food price spike exhibited a number of characteristics similar to the
spike of 2008.
Consumption adjustments are made when international food prices spike upward, but most are made in
rich countries rather than poor countries because the rich are the heaviest users of international markets.
Chapter 4: The politics of chronic hunger and famine
How do we measure hunger?

In our personal lives, hunger is a sensation we feel regularly at mealtime. In the world of politics and
public policy, “hunger” is often used as a substitute word for chronic undernutrition, a long-term
dietary condition that includes either a protein-energy deficit, a micronutrient deficit, or both. The
visible indications of a protein-energy deficit include stunting (a low height relative to age), wasting (a
low weight relative to height), and underweight (a low weight relative to age). All of these conditions
can have serious medical consequences, particularly if they begin in the early months of life before
age two. Inadequate early nutrition can lead to reduced cognition plus increased susceptibility to
infectious disease and is a major cause of infant mortality.
How many people around the world remain chronically undernourished?

The FAO has estimated most recently that the world in 2010–2012 contained 868 million
undernourished people, or about 12 percent of the total world population at that time, which was
significantly below the 16 percent level that prevailed in 1990. Only 2% of hungry people live in the
developed world, the rest lives in the developing world, with 35% in South Asia, 27% in Sub-Saharan
Africa, 7% in Southeast Asia, and 6% in Latin America and the Caribbean. Among children, nutrition
has steadily been improving around the world.

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All crude estimates of global hunger tend to underestimate micronutrient deficiencies, which are
called “hidden hunger” because they are so often unseen. For example, a lack of iron in the diet tends
to escape direct observation, yet the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in the developing
world more than 40 percent of pregnant women do not get enough iron, leading to anemia, a risk factor
for hemorrhage and death in childbirth.
What causes chronic undernutrition?

The persistence of chronic undernutrition usually reflects a persistence of deep poverty, and it usually
goes away when poverty goes away. In addition, other risk factors for chronic undernutrition include
living in remote rural areas, having fewer years of schooling, and lacking secure access to land.
Hunger risks also increase with low social status and political marginalization, and ethnic minorities
are more likely to be hungry.
There are roughly twice as many poor and hungry people in the African countryside compared to urban
areas, and in South Asia the ratio is three to one. This greater prevalence of hunger in rural areas
represents a cruel paradox: rural dwellers usually produce food for a living, yet they are often the first
not to get enough for themselves. They work all day and waste nothing, but the food and money often
run out before the next harvest. They are “efficient but poor,” living in what development economists
describe as a “poverty trap.”
Does chronic hunger trigger political unrest?

Food price spikes can cause social protests, but chronic undernutrition is seldom a trigger for political
change. It should be, but it is not. Persistently poor and hungry communities seldom have the means to
threaten governments.
Is chronic undernutrition a problem in the United States?

In the United States, the top problem linked to diet is obesity, not undernutrition. This represents a
dramatic change from the middle years of the twentieth century, when deep poverty in America
generated widespread undernutrition, today’s poor are far less likely to under-consume food. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, the average American spent 41 percent of personal income on food
(compared to just 10 percent today) and low-income Americans often could not afford a healthy diet.
During the hard times of the Great Depression in the 1930s, several thousand Americans died each year
from diseases such as pellagra (niacin deficiency), beriberi (thiamine defi - ciency), rickets (vitamin D
deficiency), and scurvy (vitamin C deficiency).
During the second half of the twentieth century, such deficits were steadily overcome, thanks to a
decline in absolute poverty, a continued decline in food commodity prices, plus a new set of
government-funded anti-hunger interventions. Comparing poor children to middle-class children in
America, the average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals has become virtually identical for
both groups, and average calorie consumption for both groups is now comparably excessive.
the USDA reported in 2011 that 14.9 percent of all U.S. households were “food insecure,” and 5.7
percent had “very low food security”. “Food insecurity” means worrying at least once during the
previous 12 months about running out of food, or perhaps not eating for a whole day because there
wasn’t enough money for food.
Do developing countries have policy remedies for chronic undernutrition?

Many middle-income developing countries also operate nutrition-oriented “safety net” programs for
the poor. One of the most successful in recent years has been Brazil, where President Lula da Silva
launched a Zero Hunger (Fome Zero) program in January 2003. As of 2006, according to the FAO,
this program had reduced the nation’s undernourished population from 17 million to 11.9 million.

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Less prosperous countries are not able to afford such programs, and countries with less administrative
capacity are not able to implement them properly.
Supporting broadly based income growth has always been the best long-run approach for reducing
chronic undernutrition in developing countries.
What is the difference between undernutrition and famine?

A famine takes place when large numbers of people die quickly in a specific location because they have
not had enough food to eat. Some die from actual starvation - acute wasting - while others die from
diseases that attack people who are in a weakened state.
When have famines taken place?

Famine is as old as recorded history. By the twentieth century, famine had largely disappeared from
western Europe, but it continued to appear in Asia, Africa, and also in eastern Europe.
What causes famines?

Famines have diverse causes. In some instances, a natural event is the trigger, such as a drought that
can devastate both grain production and the forage needed for animals. In other cases, a crop disease
can wipe out staple food production. In still other cases, it can be rain-induced flooding, which disrupts
agricultural production and drives food prices in the market beyond the reach of the poor. Furthermore,
adverse impacts from drought can be compounded by violent internal conflict. Another case is the one
of the Russian city of Leningrad in 1941, where famine broke out when a surrounding German army
laid siege. Ideology also can cause famine, eg. Stalin intended with a coercive government takeover to
“socialize” the farming sector.
Amartya Sen’s warnings of famine dangers linked to unregulated markets remain popular, yet his own
later work shifted the emphasis to a concern regarding undemocratic political systems. Sen observed
that famines did not tend to occur in democratic political systems, where leaders know they will be
punished in the next election if they allow their own people to starve. Famines can end for nearly as
many different reasons as they begin.
What has been the most successful international response to famine?

The best international response to famine is to deliver food and medical aid, but not too soon and
not for too long. If international food aid is distributed too soon at feeding stations in rural market
towns after a drought, some people who are not yet starving will be tempted to leave their farms and
relocate to these feeding stations in search of free food, water, and medicine. If they stay, these farmers
will then be away from their fields when the rains return the next season and will not be in a position to
plant a new crop. They will become permanently dependent on food aid.
Can famine be prevented?

Famines are now prevented on a regular basis. In Africa today, even large-scale drought does not have
to result in famine. After a series of traumatizing emergencies in the 1970s and 1980s, the international
community fortunately set in place for Africa a famine early warning system (FEWS) based on regular
assessments of local rainfall patterns and market prices to ensure a more effective response to future
drought emergencies. This new international famine-prevention capacity can falter, however, in
countries torn by internal conflict.
In the modern era, we can conclude, natural disasters alone do not cause famine. When famines occur,
it is because armed groups (or national governments) intentionally block famine relief.

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Chapter 14: Who governs the world food system?
Is there a single world food system?

There is not yet a single centrally governed world food system. Food is still produced and consumed
mostly inside separate and separately governed nation-states. International food markets have grown,
but international trade still supplies on average only 10% of what people eat. One possible advantage
of such a fragmented and decentralized system is that no one political authority can disrupt the whole
system. The disadvantage is that when international disruptions do occur, no single individual or
institution will be fully empowered or equipped to respond.
In resistance to globalization, most food around the world continues to be grown, harvested, processed,
retailed, and consumed entirely within the borders of individual countries. Ninety percent of processed
foods are never traded because most countries do not want to depend on other countries for their basic
food supply, so they have set in place policies intended to preserve self-sufficiency.
National governments remain the dominant actors in food and farming. They are in a position to take
this leading role because of the exclusive legal jurisdiction that they enjoy, as sovereign states, over
farms and food markets within their borders. The differing policies that national governments pursue
can generate dramatic differences in food outcomes.
How do national governments exercise control?

The policy instruments used by governments to shape food and farming systems differ between rich
and poor countries. In rich countries, farm sectors receive lavish income subsidies and tax credits for
producers, on top of protective restrictions at the border. In poor countries, state interventions in the
agricultural production and marketing sector are just as powerful, but they are less likely to be pro-
farmer.
Which are the most important international organizations in the food and farming sector?
Above the level of the nation-state, the institutions of the United Nations system often take actions
intended to look like “global governance,” but usually these actions have little impact on core activities
within the food and farming sector. Some well-established international organizations (eg. WTO, IMF,
WB...) do influence global food and farming, but no more than the major national powers will allow.
Specific to food and agriculture, there are three “Rome institutions” within the UN system in addition
to Codex Alimentarius: IFAD, WFP, and FAO. In the area of agricultural technology development
and research, the most important international institution is the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
What has limited the influence of international organizations?

The political influence of these international food and agricultural institutions differs case by case. In
the 1980s and 1990s, the WTO achieved a measurable success by hosting a “Uruguay Round” of
negotiations that produced some reductions in the farm subsidy policies that had been distorting trade.
The Agreement on Agriculture that emerged from these negotiations in 1993 required industrial
countries to convert non-tariff agricultural border protections to tariffs. The agreement imposed no
restriction at all on direct cash payments to farmers, so long as those payments were de-coupled from
production incentives. The agreement also prohibited direct export subsidies, but it did nothing to
prevent governments from disrupting markets through export bans, which proved to be a larger concern
at the time of the 2008 price spike. Even when governments voluntarily accept policy restraints under
the WTO, they sometimes fail to comply.
The IMF and the WB had considerable influence over food and farming in the 1980s and 1990s, when
they used stabilization agreements, investment loans, and “structural adjustment” loans to shape the

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price and market environment for farmers in poor developing countries. Yet the policy changes they
hoped to induce were sometimes small or just temporary.
Of the three Rome-based UN food organizations, the WFP and IFAD are frequently praised for their
work, while the FAO is routinely criticized. The WFP has a proven record of preventing famine, but
the reputation of the FAO for taking effective action is not as strong: FAO technical advice has been
world class, but its operations are heavily dominated by an oversized central bureaucracy.
In the area of internationally funded agricultural research, the multiple centers of the CGIAR have had
a four-decade history of success in developing useful new farm technologies for the developing world.
The CGIAR’s methods have not always been ideal; too much crop science at the centers is restricted
to artificial conditions without being tested in actual farmers’ fields, and too often the new technologies
developed never reach the intended beneficiaries.
Do multinational corporations control the world food system?

Many activists assert that corporations do exercise control, through the monopoly positions they are
said to enjoy in key markets and through the corrupting influence they can exercise over national
governments. Intergovernmental organizations like the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank are
described by these critics as little more than the global agents of corporate control.
Grain-trading companies make money whether international prices are high or low, but they do so by
skillfully responding to price changes rather than by controlling those changes. In most countries,
especially developing countries, national laws do not allow patent claims on seeds. In addition,
corporate control over markets is weakened by competition.
The allegation that private food and agribusiness companies exercise influence over national
governments by paying bribes does have some foundation. Even in countries where bribery is common,
then, the bribe may not always be corporate control.
How much power do non-governmental organizations have?

International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are influential players within food and farming
sectors, especially in the developing world. Some development NGOs work almost exclusively through
projects on the ground, others work almost exclusively through social mobilization and advocacy. In
the areas of food safety and farm technology, advocacy NGOs sometimes succeed in exposing and even
blocking behaviors that they dislike (eg. anti-GMO campaigns).
Not all advocacy NGOs work to block things. In the area of food security, some groups like Bread for
the World use information and advocacy campaigns to promote food aid and agricultural development.
Others, like Oxfam, combine research and policy advocacy with actual development projects on the
ground. Still others, like Catholic Relief Services, work almost exclusively delivering humanitarian
relief.
In the area of agricultural development, however, there are limits to what NGOs from the outside can
accomplish on their own. They deliver excellent training and services but are less able to provide the
expensive investments in road construction, electricity, irrigation, and agricultural research needed in
many of the poorest countries. National governments supported by donor agencies with taxpayer
derived resources must take the lead here.
International NGOs in food and agriculture often export the concerns of rich countries into the
developing world. In areas such as health and human rights, this can be entirely appropriate, but with
agricultural technology, the concerns of the rich are not always well matched to the needs of the poor.
What is the role of private foundations?

Independently endowed philanthropic foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford
Foundation played an essential role in launching Asia’s original green revolution in the 1960s and

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1970s. Today it is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that does the most to promote the green
revolution cause.
By supporting seed markets, new agricultural science, and a “green revolution,” the Gates Foundation
knew that it would be inviting criticism from those in the NGO community who mistrusted this
approach. Soon after the foundation announced its new effort, an NGO based in the United States named
Food First warned that Bill and Melinda Gates were “naïve about the causes of hunger” and that their
efforts would only provide “higher profi ts for the seed and fertilizer industries, negligible impacts on
total food production and worsening exclusion and marginalization in the countryside.” Many in the
philanthropic community who are timid about facing hostile NGO criticism continue to shrink away
from supporting science-based or market-oriented agricultural development work.
9. Food security, sovereignty and conflict
CAP 1, Schanbacher- Globalization, Development, Food Security, and the Emergence of a

Global Food Regime
Introduction: globalization and food security

Within discussions pertaining to global hunger and malnutrition, the theme of food security has emerged
as a common concern for diverse groups of international financial and trade institutions, food rights
activists, nongovernmental organizations, and national governments. To the extent that food security is
located within complex social, economic, political, and cultural contexts, it is difficult, if not impossible,
to detach the role of food security from themes such as trade, agricultural reform, rural and economic
development, and global poverty.
The UN and the World Bank have played a direct and integral role in the development and policy
formulation of food security. The World Bank sought to promote global economic development
through increased economic integration. The IMF does not play a direct role in achieving food security,
but it is important to the extent that it works closely with the World Bank. Similar to the World Bank,
the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) was established in much the same spirit of tackling
global poverty, albeit with a specific mission to create a more efficient and egalitarian global
distribution of food. Currently, the FAO and International Fund for Agriculture and Development
(IFAD) function as development agencies of the UN.
The difficulty of clearly defining food security is that financial governance and international trade
arrangements often create additional obstacles to achieving food security globalization that is designed
to help poor and underdeveloped countries.
For the global governance institutions, food security is primarily an issue of producing enough food
to feed the world’s poor. As such, we need strategies that produce food in the most efficient and cheap
way possible. Once enough food is secured, we need a distributive paradigm that delivers food in the
most efficient and cheap way possible. IFAD and the FAO challenge this approach, arguing that while
we need to produce food efficiently and cheaply, the best way to do so is not necessarily through
unregulated trade liberalization, privatization, and deregulation. The IFAD and the FAO stress the need
to implement policies that enable the rural poor to develop economic foundations that allow them to
produce and consume the types of food they deem culturally important.
The international fund for agriculture and development (IFAID)

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IFAD is a subsidiary of the UN and a special agency concerned with food and global poverty. In
accordance with this inaugural mission statement, IFAD’s commitment is to work with the rural poor
through governments, donors, and nongovernmental organizations. Its strategy statement outlines six
major areas of focus, which offer objectives to ensure that the rural poor have the skills and organization
needed for successful development. IFAD stresses the need for bolstered and secure access to land and
water, which involves a larger effort to manage natural resources and engage in conservation practices
that will ensure the most productive use of land. Along these lines, IFAD also recognizes the need for
improving agricultural technologies, which, along with the creation of a broad range of financial
services, will serve to increase agricultural production and build a capital base. Ultimately, these
objectives aim to integrate rural economies into the global market. Securing access to land, water, and
natural resources is imperative for improving rural infrastructure and subsequently providing food
security, the most efficient and productive strategy for achieving these goals entails steady and guided
global integration.
Ultimately, this concept of development can be characterized as one in which the poor become
economically self-sustaining (e.g Microfinance institutions).
So IFAD’s strategy of knowledge management appears to be a genuine attempt to incorporate rural

farmers in development strategy discussions. Namely, strategies such as microfinancing reveal that,
instead of critically challenging neoliberal economic theories of competition, efficiency, and growth for
profit, IFAD seeks to use these theories to benefit the poor.
IFAD seeks to make the transition from self-sustainable farming and food production to larger economic
relations as beneficial and harmless as possible for the poor. Food security in this sense is not regarded
as a fundamental critique of current economic theory and policy, but rather as a practical strategy for
improving the livelihoods and productive capacities of the rural poor.
The UN and the Food and Agriculture Organization

Along with IFAD, the FAO is one of the most influential research and development arms of the United
Nations. The FAO contended food security is less a problem of production as it is an issue of distribution
and national governments’ commitment to institute social and economic policies to ensure that adequate
food resources reach the hungry. Part of this political willpower involves understanding current global
economic trends and crafting policy that utilizes these trends to the advantage of the poor. In addressing
poverty and hunger the FAO offers a “twin track approach,” in which poverty will be reduced only if
rural and agricultural reform plays a prominent role. Although the FAO recognizes the importance of
context specific research and policy implementation (i.e. depending on region, geography, etc.), it offers
some general guidelines for the future. Agricultural growth is crucial. Moreover, the utilization of new
technologies should focus primarily on the development of small-scale agriculture. With respect to
building economic infrastructure, trade can serve to benefit the agricultural poor as long as state
governments implement social safety nets to facilitate any harmful transitions into global market trade
arrangements. Accordingly, the FAO argues that trade liberalization is not always the best policy in
certain contexts.
The FAO’s expansive policy agenda provides a vision for the future of rural and agricultural
development that falls within a traditional, developmental food security model. Sustained food security
requires a multilateral approach that includes political fidelity to growth and trade, as well as economic
integration of the rural poor. These reforms must include a broad range of policy suggestions that focus
primarily on developmental economic modeling with a specific emphasis on agricultural growth. As
previously mentioned, part of bolstering rural agricultural growth requires making trade advantageous
to the rural poor. Current trends in economic globalization are thus viewed as opportunities for
achieving food security. There are still risks involved with transitioning from traditional models of rural

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farming and food production, but with the help of social safety nets and aid from developed countries,
these transition costs can be minimized. Farmers need assistance learning new agricultural techniques
as well as how to employ modern agricultural technologies. Furthermore, farmers need to develop a
greater knowledge of global-agricultural trends in order to produce crops that will be competitive on
the global market.
By avoiding a more rigorous critique of neoliberal and developmental economic theory, IFAD and the
FAO remain married to the belief that economic growth, competition, efficiency, and profiteering hold
the answer to achieving food security.
The WTO, the World Bank and IMF

The IMF, World Bank, and WTO have respective spheres of influence in propagating a certain vision
of economic and social globalization. Part of the difficulty of ascertaining how these organizations
conceive of food security is witnessed by the fact that they do not center policy prescriptions specifically
on food security; rather, they discuss food security in the context of larger economic and political trends.
However, reviewing their respective understandings of neoliberal economic globalization, global
poverty and hunger, and agricultural growth allows us to glean an understanding of food security. The
neoliberal economic model based on efficiency, competition, profit maximization, and a free market
provides the context for achieving food security.
The WTO
Of the three major global governance bodies, the WTO is the most influential in managing global trade
arrangements, which also affect agricultural policies. As such, the WTO plays an indirect role in the
success of food security policies insofar as trade arrangements potentially impact global production and
distribution of food. There is a coordinated effort on the part of the IMF, World Bank, and state
governments to establish a unified vision of the global economy as well as the trade arrangements that
would be most beneficial to developing countries.
However, since 2001, the Doha initiative has faced increasing criticism. According to the WTO, aid for
trade is a concept and strategy that allows developing countries with supply-side food constraints to
benefit from the current multilateral trading system. The WTO thinks aid for trade must address two
issues: WTO members must help developing countries implement policies conducive to multilateral
trade and help these countries adjust to economic lags that may result from the transition into global
trade arrangements. Ultimately, the idea is that aid for trade incentives serve to attract developing
countries to WTO standards and trade arrangements.
The FAO has warned the WTO of potential dangers of trade liberalization, but still recognizes the
potential for trade to bolster developing agricultural sectors. Ultimately, food security will be achieved
through economic integration based on a WTO (and IMF and World Bank) model. Again, this model
focuses on trade liberalization through the opening up of domestic markets and the reduction of trade-
distorting subsidies. Market access provides developing countries with the potential to deliver goods,
and specifically agricultural exports, to the world market through competitive and specialized
advantage.
The World Bank

To understand the World Bank’s contribution to food security, one must look first at the institution’s
primary function. The World Bank is currently a consortium of 185 countries that serves to provide
financial and technical assistance to developing countries. One of the prominent strategies utilized by
the World Bank in the last 30 years is the development of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs).
Given the potential for developing nations to export agricultural products, one of the main conditions
for enhancing growth involves the reduction or elimination of trade-distorting subsidies for developing

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nations to ensure that products can compete on a global level. As such, the Bank encourages increased
trade liberalization in both industrialized and developing nations as a way to ensure that the global
market is level for all countries. However, as far as the Bank is concerned, current forms of global
integration are here to stay, and the best strategy for improving agricultural productivity and food
security is to enable rural farmers and mitigate transition effects as they shift into larger economic
networks. In conjunction with IMF and WTO strategies, the Bank also highlights the need for sound
governance and institutional frameworks.
With respect to agriculture and food security, the Bank’s strategies can be expressed in its mission
statement: “Using agriculture as the basis for economic growth in the agriculture-based countries
requires a productivity revolution in smallholder farming.” This process involves a concerted effort by
local, national, and global governance institutions to reform agriculture in a way that benefits small-
hold farming. As a unique aspect of improving growth and development, agriculture can contribute to
reducing poverty and hunger in several ways Working together with the WTO, the IMF, and UN food
agencies, the Bank promotes a specific form of development that focuses on liberalization, privatization,
free trade, technology, and good governance. Even if more attention is paid to the potential of small-
scale farms, without recognizing that food and farming cannot be reduced to simple economic
phenomena, food security will remain a problematic concept. If the ultimate goal of the World Bank
and IMF is to integrate small-scale farmers into the global economy, food and agriculture will remain
tied to a purely economic understanding of human relations.
The IMF
Of the three global governance institutions, the IMF is arguably the least concerned with agricultural
development and food security. However, its function is still consequential for food security, and, as
such, it must be understood in the larger context of global governance. The IMF outlines three
foundational institutional objectives: surveillance, financial assistance, and technical assistance.
Financial assistance involves the processes by which the countries can request economic assistance, in
the form of loans, to regulate their specific macroeconomic climates. Loans are granted under
“conditionalities” in which applicant countries must adhere to specific economic policy prescriptions
coordinated by the consultant country and the IMF. Finally, the IMF provides technical assistance by
offering countries advice on how to effectively manage economic policy and finance. Most of this
assistance is offered to low and lower-middle income countries and involves a holistic approach that
promotes policy strategies that bolster surveillance and financial assistance. While the IMF is not as
influential with respect to food security as the WTO and World Bank, as a global institution dominated
by the G7 countries, it exercises its influence through global financial governance. Poor and developing
countries seeking IMF assistance must take certain steps to gain access to IMF funds, and the IMF
subscribes to the World Bank and WTO model.
The IMF focuses on developmental economic policies of free trade, liberalization, technical assistance,
and financial integration as key determinants for reducing global poverty. The IMF supports the same
theoretical ground of global development and trade policy as the World Bank and the WTO. By
coordinating with the Bank and the WTO, the Fund oversees financial aspects of governance, which in
turn promote neoliberal policies of free trade, privatization, and deregulation. Although the Fund is not
directly tied to issues of food security, it remains an important organization insofar as it also creates the
financial conditions in which food security is achieved.
Historical roots and the emergence of food security and a global food regime
These organizations offer a contemporary vision of how these topics should be guided in the future, it
is important to recognize that the present status of development, agricultural reform, and food security

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did not emerge out of a vacuum; rather, these issues have evolved primarily over the course of the 20th
century.
The “international food regime” that emerged in the postwar era was centered on the U.S.-directed
production/distribution/consumption models. The context of power relations between nation states, in
which the food regime was partly an issue of “international relations of food, and partly about the world
food economy.” The food regime that emerged between 1947 and 1972 was a tenuous combination of
the “replication” of the U.S. model and the “integration” of European and US agricultural sectors.
European states replicated the U.S. model by protecting certain goods in an effort to counter-balance
U.S. protective measures, while other parts of the world - specifically the Third World - were forced to
adapt their agricultural sectors to meet the demands of the evolving global food market. One outcome
of these policies was the emergence of agro-food corporations that sought to integrate European and
U.S. agricultural markets. While both Europe and the United States continued with their protectionist
policies, large corporations served as intermediaries between small and large scale farmers.
For Third World countries, this scissor grip became all the more problematic as the world experienced
a food crisis in 1973–74. Coinciding with the food crisis, the global economy witnessed the infamous
oil crisis in which oil prices also tripled. For Third World economies dependent on both food and oil,
these duel crises intensified hardships.
This Third World borrowing culminated in the massive debt crisis of the 1980s. As least developed and
developing countries fell further into debt, they were forced to seek out ways in which to manage their
balance of payment deficits (which usually amounted to simply paying off the interest to loans made
by industrial nations). As such, industrial nations, following the lead of the IMF and World Bank,
initiated a massive program of debt management. From the standpoint of the Bretton Woods institutions
this crisis was not a result of failed economic policy and management, but rather a failure on the part of
Third World countries to adequately subscribe to industrialized models of economic integration.
Summary
The current concept of food security can be understood through the developmental theory and policy of
global organizations such as IFAD and the FAO, as well as WTO trade arrangements and the World
Bank’s and IMF’s poverty reduction strategies. One common theme that pervades all of these
institutional strategies is the focus on alleviating poverty through developmental growth, with a
specific focus on agricultural reform, trade, and technological progress.
While food security plays only one role in curbing global poverty and reducing hunger, the way it is
conceived through theory and policy can illuminate broader perspectives on economic and cultural
globalization. UN organizations such as IFAD and the FAO view food security primarily in terms of
how it contributes to alleviating poverty; however, food security as a goal of alleviating poverty can be
distinguished from food security as an issue of developing rural economies and farming both to alleviate
poverty and to sustain the cultural livelihoods of the rural poor. In this sense, food security is not only
about ensuring that the world’s hungry have enough to eat, but also about how food functions on a
cultural and political level, namely as representative of the world views and lifestyles of the world’s
poor.
The inevitability of social and economic globalization is, arguably, most visible in the policy rhetoric
and strategies of the WTO, World Bank, and IMF. While IFAD and the FAO are slightly more hesitant
to subscribe to the idea that neoliberal and developmental economic theory is the panacea for curbing
global poverty and achieving food security, the WTO, World Bank, and IMF argue that economic
globalization holds the key to solving problems associated with global hunger and poverty.
SOVEREIGNTY IN A CHANGING WORLD - Conversi

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The concept “sovereignty” changed a lot through centuries: first it referred to the ruler like the King
and then with the French Revolution it became the “popular sovereignty” which was almost
immediately seized by the nation-state. Now with globalization the concept is changing again. The
focus of this article is the way the shifting meaning of sovereignty has been appropriated by new socio-
political actors and has informed emerging political agendas across the globe. Initially, we consider the
evolving historical meaning of sovereignty.
Sovereignty’s historical trajectory: from Westphalia to Globalization

In the past, the sovereign was a person o a group within whom ultimate political authority resided and
whose jurisdiction extended to a territory. It was ‘a form of segmental territorial rule that had none of
the connotations of possessiveness and exclusiveness, conveyed by the modern concept of sovereignty.
It represented a heteronomous organization of territorial rights and claims - of political space. With the
“cuius regio, eius religio” the attempt was to make the state’s territory more congruent whereas the wars
of religion resulted only in massacres of ideologically different people (wars brought ideological
homogenization while the 20th century persecution of “counter-entropic” minorities brought cultural
homogenization). Following the wars of religion, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) recognized, among
other things, the principle of non-intervention into the internal affairs of all signatories (providing basis
for the modern nation-state based international system and establishing mutual respect of territorial
integrity). Power became to be circumscribed by whatever territory a ruler controlled: absolute
monarchy era was begun. After the French Revolution, the entire edifice of absolutist legitimacy
crumbled and political authority became valid only if it reflected or embodied the will of the people (or
nation). In an era of fiercely competing nation-states, popular sovereignty presupposed an internal
cohesion and homogeneity (the ‘people’) that rarely, if ever, existed in reality. ‘Counter-entropic’
groups and individuals were eliminated through assimilation, discrimination, expulsion, and mass
murder (i.e. ethnic cleansing and genocide). The meaning of sovereignty has once again shifted since
the inception of neo-liberal globalization (Sassen described it as “de-sovereignization”). Sovereignty
has thus become globally ‘cruciform’: the developed world has formed networks of shared horizontal
sovereignty to project its power across the Global South through hierarchical networks of vertical
sovereignty to guarantee resource extraction. These changes in the notion and perception of sovereignty
have detracted legitimacy from the nation-state, as well as from specific governments, which are seen
as no longer fully in charge, nor accountable.
Liquid sovereignty and globalization

Bauman (2000) uses the concept of liquid modernity to denote a world that cannot stand still and, like
liquid, is in perpetual movement, so that its formless materiality takes the shape of the recipient(s) where
it is placed. A world dominated by increasing mobility of capital and social elites is also a world
permeated by precariousness, uncertainty, fear, and the frailty of human bonds. Thus, we identify a shift
from solid to liquid sovereignty: fluid liaison with a specific territory, rather than a perpetual bond or
solid relationship between place and power. Human, social, and political interactions become
increasingly characterized by provisional rather than permanent commitment and questionable loyalty.
This leads inexorably to exclusivism: ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities became the main targets
in the era of ascending ‘nation-statism’; they became the internal other whose fearing semblance was
mobilized by the ruler to chip away ever more rights and cultures from their terrorized populations.
Globalization, furthermore, will mean a further erosion of sovereignty with the “new sovereigns”
similar to powerful feudal lords but on a global scale and we are talking about Exxon, McDonalds,
Microsoft, Shell. Their sovereign decisions are taken outside any form of democratic consultation, thus
projecting a vision of remote or hidden forces dominating each single nation and individual. At the

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same time, their choices and actions have an unprecedented impact on individual behavior, society, and
the wider environment.
Climate change and Sovereignty’s finale: liquid vs residual sovereignty.

The short circuit produced by neo-liberal globalization is visible in the ultimate challenge posed by
climate change as the potential terminator of existential sovereignty (islands states covered in water,
States experiencing exodus can still be entitled as sovereign?). The responses to these unprecedented
challenges need to be sought in an entirely new lifestyle, mindset, and cultural understanding, beyond
the old étatiste territorial trap, as well as the self-destructive irresponsibility of the neo-liberal world
order. The endurance of a Westphalian definition of territory as inviolable space has led political leaders
to prioritize state ‘interests’ over global ones - at least amongst the most powerful states (with clear
repercussions on Kyoto and Copenhagen’s meetings). A way to overcome this residual sovereignty and
thus commit profoundly to a shift from a fossil fuels economy to a sustainable one is represented by
“cosmopolitan communities of climate change” which are transnational constellations of social actors
arising from common experiences of mediated climate threats. Transition movements are also arising
everywhere and they are social actors who have contributed to shaping global action against nutritional
impoverishment, corporate greed, and the abuse of agro-food biotechnologies. Amongst the new agents
of change, we focus on the movement for food sovereignty, which has spread internationally as one of
the most comprehensive and plurally articulated responses to the devastating consequences of neo-
liberal globalization.
Back to basics: food as a central sovereign subject.

“We are what we eat” reflects the strong bond between food and our well-being. Food is also strongly
linked to the territorial culture now threatened by globalization imposing standardized models of
production and consumption upon millions of people. A proliferation of initiatives has centered on the
need to reassert sovereignty not merely over land, but also over food production, distribution, and
consumption. The ‘food sovereignty’ movement was launched in 1996 by La Via Campesina, an
international network of peasant organizations: the idea is centered, not only on the notion of food as a
basic human right, but also on the right to produce and retain control over it. Its territorial dimensions
are mutable, fluctuating, and open to interpretation, but food production is intrinsically dependent on
control of soil, that is, sovereignty over land. But how does food sovereignty relate to the historically
evolving notion of sovereignty that we analyzed earlier? The section that follows discusses the extent
to which this notion is specifically relevant to the claims of sub-state nationalism and indigenous
peoples.
Whose sovereignty? Food sovereignty across ethnic and national boundaries

We focus on the ethnic dimension of food sovereignty as a transnational movement. As the movement
strives to achieve a significant international presence and attempt to change power relations, this ethnic
dimension often remains in the background. Throughout modern history, groups based on putative
common descent, that is ethnic groups and nations, have formed the legitimating backbone of political
authority and institution-building. Since the French Revolution, nationalism has thus accompanied the
era of modern popular mass sovereignty. However, because the ultimate actor in this territorial
entrenchment is the Westphalian state itself, recalcitrant minorities, indigenous peoples, and stateless
nations can hardly escape its iron cage. In other words, nations without a state provide no exception to
the logic of territoriality, since they manifest themselves and operate in an international system of states.
Can the principles of food sovereignty transcend these boundaries? Food sovereignty can be both
ethnic/national and universal/cosmopolitan: although La Vıa Campesina is a transnational coalition,
it remains firmly rooted in local identities, indigenous struggles, and resistance movements against the

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central state and neo-liberal policies. These struggles are often permeated with identity politics through
the intersection of environmental and ethnic dynamics - and often in contrast to state policies. However,
instead of remaining localized, this discourse links with broader international programmes and
participates in global social movements with shared aims and goals. Food security has also spread to
the cities where people are buying more and more organic and sustainable food but this highlights the
difference between food security of rich people and food security of peasants and poor.
Food sovereignty, the Nation, and the State

The grassroots character of food sovereignty does not preclude the possibility that ‘sovereign’ states
might enshrine it in their laws and constitutions. In fact, the concept has already been introduced into
state policies: the first country to constitutionally enshrine food sovereignty was Ecuador in 2008
(constitution recognizes food and water as basic human rights and the state obligates itself to ensure
that communities achieve self-sufficiency with respect to healthy and culturally appropriate food).
However, the principles of food sovereignty are difficult to implement from above and cannot be put
into practice without the social movements and grassroots mobilization. At the same time, the notion of
food sovereignty is closely linked to the rights of indigenous peoples: Article 2 of the Ecuadorian
Constitution proclaims Spanish, Kichwa, and Shuar as ‘official languages for intercultural ties. The
other ancestral languages are in official use by indigenous peoples in the areas where they live and in
accordance with the terms set forth by law’. The Ecuadorian Constitution has thus enshrined
plurinationality and plurinationalism. Expanding amongst Indigenous Peoples around the world, the
movement’s very ontological foundations rest on an exchange of knowledge and cultural encounters.
This has begun to spawn a form of ‘interculturalism’ as dialogo de saberes (dialog among different
knowledge systems) through cross-class encounters between diverse rural cultures, including peasants,
farmers, pastoralists, rural proletarians, and indigenous people. In short, it can represent a new way of
articulating sovereignty in opposition to both the neo-liberal world order and the nation-state system.
Thus, the very ethnic dimensions of food sovereignty contribute to a cosmopolitan understanding of the
interconnectedness of human experience and the multiple potentials of sovereign existence creeping up
within the interstices of the liquid neo-liberal world order.
To conclude food sovereignty operates in a liquid environment to affirm a multiple and ever-evolving
bottom-up set of principles, based on alliance building across continents, families, professions,
environments, cultures, classes, and gender so that it can be said to take a liquid form on the surface,
while embodying a variety of expressions of the broader contemporary trends towards liquid
sovereignty. However, food sovereignty is both institutionally liquid and immanently solid. While
it has to adapt to a variety of institutional contexts, it is firmly grounded on the most solid of supports:
land or soil. And, while its products are materially solid and tangible as food, it holds a deeply
transformative potential through a thriving unified message: the need to democratically change power
relations through a new relationship between small producers, conscientious consumers, and civic
society. It can be practical because, if people choose, they can exercise at least some control over what
they eat, providing they have the legal-political resources, know-how and willingness to free themselves
from food retailers and agro-business as they regain control of the supply chain.
Sovereignty in a Changing World: From Westphalia to Food Sovereignty
Once, Sovereign was a person whose jurisdiction extended to a specific territory.

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Charles Tilly stated that fragmented sovereignty was the dominant way of governance in the Middle
Ages and in early modern times.
After the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, the principle “cuius regio, eius religio” was introduced,
introducing state religion; from that moment on, wars of religion took place to make the territory more
congruent with the ruler’s religion creed (ideological homogenization).
The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 led to the principle of non-intervention into the internal affairs of all
signatories. Westphalian sovereignty applied to specific territories providing the foundation of the
modern international state system, based on respect for the principle of territorial integrity.
Power was circumscribed by the territory the ruler controlled.
Bodin and Hobbes introduced the exclusivity of sovereign jurisdiction, including the fact that sovereign
should not be bound by his own laws.
After the French Revolution, political authority became valid only if it reflected or embodied the will
of the people: absolutist centralism became revolutionary centralism; the state appropriated the notion
of sovereignty for itself so that political legitimacy and became increasingly based on national criteria.
The entire state structure represented “the people”: popular sovereignty presupposed an internal
cohesion and homogeneity, while counter-entropic groups and individuals were eliminated.
With the neo-liberal globalization of mid 1990s, a process of de-sovereignization started; sovereignty
became globally “cruciform”: the developed world created networks of horizontal sovereignty to project
its power across the Global South through hierarchical networks of vertical sovereignty to guarantee
resource extraction.
State’s flexible adaptations manifest in new forms of “graduated sovereignty” through different mixes
of legal compromises and controls tailored to the requirements of special production zones: neo-liberal
market-oriented agenda can strengthen in some areas.
“Post-sovereignty” deals with institutional aspects; there has been a shift from solid to liquid
sovereignty: human, social, and political interactions are becoming characterized by provisional
commitment and questionable loyalty.
Globalization has as consequence the erosion of sovereignty, creating new sovereign, similar to feudal
lords, but on a global level, who takes decisions outside any democratic consultation.
Climate change could be the final terminator of existential sovereignty: the neo-liberal system is
unlikely to be able to face the unprecedented climate change.
While this major issue changes completely the definition of sovereignty, territoriality becomes an
obstacle for the shift away from fossil fuel-era.
The Westphalian sovereign principle led many states to be more concerned with national interest rather
than global ones (definition emerged during the Kyoto and Copenhagen meetings).
The only alternative could be the creation of cosmopolitan communities of climate risk, transnational
social actors arising from common experiences of mediated climatic threats.

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Climate change is going to be a crisis more devastating than any other in human history, so this led to
“climate transition” in pursuit of more resilient sovereign futures founded on agro-ecological
production.
The movement includes movement for food sovereignty, emerging agrarian and peasant social
movements that amalgamate anti-globalization, pro-democracy, and environmentalist agendas; what is
proposed is a sovereignty model founded on practices of agrarian citizenship.
Food has been under attack by the forces of globalization, by forcing standardized modes of production
and consumption upon millions of people; the response has been articulated in several ways:
The idea of food sovereignty is centred on the idea of food as a central human right and on the right to
produce and control it (food is dependent to soil, so the territory of a state).
Food sovereignty remains a contested concept; while trying to define it, we can focus on the ethnic
dimension of food sovereignty as a transnational movement, even though it remains in the background:
a plural, multicultural vocation has emerged to avoid the trap of mono-culturalism.
It is important to identify which groups are typically involved: not only nation with states, but also
without states. How far is the ethnic element present in the articulation of food sovereignty? It can be
both ethnic and universal.
For example, although La Via Campesina is a transnational coalition, it remains rooted in local
identities.
The concept of sovereignty linked to food is indefinite and malleable and its diffusion amongst sub-
state nationalist movement remains unexplored; this happens because the concept has been associated
for a long time rural societies, but as it spread, it has taken a meaning amongst self-identified “stateless
nations”.
While developing countries are moving towards Western patterns of mass food consumption and
industrialized agriculture, developed post-industrial societies increasingly demand new consumer
products associated with sustainability and ecological citizenship: food sovereignty politics have
‘travelled from countryside to city as consumers-citizens anticipate ecological constraints.
Sovereign states might also introduce food sovereignty inside their constitutions: the first country to do
so was Ecuador in 2008, even though these principles are difficult to implement from above if there is
no social movement at the basis; this is important because food sovereignty is linked to the rights of
indigenous people.
The movement’s very ontological foundations rest on an exchange of knowledge and cultural
encounters: this begun with cross-class encounters between diverse rural cultures and it can represent a
new way of articulating sovereignty in opposition to both the neo-liberal world order and the nation-
state system.
The very ethnic dimensions of food sovereignty contribute to a cosmopolitan understanding of the
interconnectedness of human experience and the multiple potentials of sovereign existence creeping up
within the interstices of the liquid neo-liberal world order.

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10. Information, Cyber-security and Soft Power
The application of international law to state cyberattacks – sovereignty and non-intervention

Harriet Moynihan
Hostile cyber operations by one state against another state are increasingly common. It is estimated
that over 22 states are responsible for sponsoring cyber operations that target other states, and the
number and scale of these operations is growing. Cyber operations that cause injury or death to persons
or damage or destruction of objects could amount to a use of force or armed attack under the UN Charter
(although the threshold for what constitutes a use of force is itself an area of controversy). But in
practice, the vast majority of cyber operations by states take place below the threshold of use of force,
instead consisting of persistent, low-level intrusions that cause harm in the victim state but often without
discernible physical effects.
In the past, the ability of states to attribute cyberattacks of this nature to specific perpetrators (whether
a state, a proxy acting on behalf of a state or a non-state actor acting independently of a state) was very
challenging, particularly in cases where the attackers are operating at speed from multiple servers in
different jurisdictions, with the ability to hide their identity. However, developments in technology have
provided states with a greater ability to accurately attribute cyber intrusions, including through working
with private cybersecurity companies. Some non-governmental bodies also work on the attribution of
cyber operations.
In the last few years, states have become more willing to attribute cyberattacks to other states; something
they were reluctant to do previously. The amount of public attributions has increased significantly, as
has the number of states making those attributions. There is also a growing trend for states to work
together to attribute malicious state-sponsored cyber operations. There are also discussions among
states, academics and private-sector bodies about the feasibility of creating an international mechanism,
perhaps under the auspices of the UN, with responsibility for attribution of state-sponsored cyber
operations that interfere in another state.
States have agreed that international law, including the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention,
does apply to states’ activities in cyberspace. But how the law applies is the subject of ongoing debate.
Not only is the law in this area unclear; states are also often ambiguous in invoking the law or in how
they characterize it. For example, in relation to the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which the
US government attributed to North Korea, the then Secretary of State John Kerry stated that North
Korea had “violated international norms”. But when President Obama was asked if the Sony hack was
an act of war, he responded, ‘No, it was an act of cyber vandalism that was very costly… We will
respond proportionately, and we will respond in a place and time and manner that we choose’. The
reference to exercising a right to respond assumes an underlying breach of international law, but the
precise nature of the breach remains unclear.
The lack of agreement on how international law applies to states’ cyber activities has created legal
uncertainty. Some states may prefer this state of affairs, as it may be thought that any agreed regulation
of cyber operations could be contrary to their interests. But for states that adhere to the rules-based
system of international affairs, a clear legal basis should be necessary both to carry out cyber operations
and to make assertions that another state has violated international law. States that are the victim of
cyberattacks by other states need to be able to identify which rules of international law have been
breached in order to know what action they are permitted to take in response, including whether they
are entitled to take countermeasures (action in response to an internationally wrongful act by another

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state, which would otherwise be unlawful but which is permissible under certain conditions). Similarly,
states contemplating or undertaking cyber operations need to understand the parameters of the law in
order to ensure that their actions do not violate it.
While states are still at a relatively early stage in deciding and voicing how they consider that the
principles of international law apply to states’ cyber actions, there is a trend for states to be more vocal
about their views on the law in this area. Even when states put their positions on record, there will
inevitably be some differences and debates among states (and commentators) on how the law applies,
as there are in many other areas of international law, including the rules on the use of force and
international humanitarian law. It is also not unusual for states to adopt deliberately ambiguous positions
about the application of the law, to give them greater flexibility to act. But progress can be made in
analysing, and as far as possible agreeing, how existing concepts of international law apply in the cyber
domain.
CAP 4. Application of the Law to Case Studies
Do a state’s inherently sovereign powers extend to the activities of private citizens?

States that adopt a wide approach to the existence of their powers over all aspects of citizens’ behaviour
are more likely to invoke violation of sovereignty in relation to incursions of any kind by other states.
Such states may take the view that the non-consensual shutting down of an internet company’s activities
on its territory constitutes a violation of their sovereignty – or ‘cyber sovereignty’. But if the activity
targeted is that of a private citizen or company, it will not fall within a state’s ‘inherently sovereign
functions’, as that is established in international law. This is one of the difficulties of analysing these
issues through the prism of sovereignty, particularly if violation of sovereignty is conceived as open-
ended, without limitative criteria.
Cyber intrusion in relation to a single commercial entity or attacks directed at a financial system
as a whole
If a state-sponsored cyberattack is directed at a single commercial entity such as a private bank, this
would not engage the state’s inherently sovereign functions because it is a private entity rather than a
whole sector falling exclusively within the government’s powers. Government statements regarding
cyber intrusions on the financial sector (albeit by only a few Western states) support this approach,
treating such intrusions as private and as a breach of criminal law rather than international law. There
are certain factors that may indicate when a state’s malicious cyber activity is more likely to be treated
as falling within the target state’s inherently sovereign functions rather than being merely criminal
activity. When a state refers to another state hacking into ‘systems’ or ‘infrastructure’, as opposed to
referring to the target as a single private bank or company, this suggests behaviour that goes to the heart
of a state’s exclusive and independent state powers rather than simply a criminal attack.
The harm sustained by US financial institutions targeted by the [2011–13 distributed denial of service]
operation ran into tens of millions of dollars as a result of severe interruptions to their business activities.
Where the cyber intrusion is directed at disrupting the national bank or federal reserve of another state,
over which the target state exerts sovereign authority, the target state’s authority will be directly
engaged, and thus the principle of sovereignty or non-intervention will be potentially violated.
A cyber intrusion directed at a single commercial entity could potentially cause the host state to lose its
ability to control its economy as a whole, for example if it were to lead to a run on the banks that requires
the government to intervene with corrective measures to balance the economy in response. In this case,
too, violation of sovereignty may be implicated, because the practical effect of the unauthorized exercise
of authority (by cyber means) by the perpetrating state is to usurp the target state’s sovereign functions

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(control of the economy), regardless of whether the activity was coercive. Increasingly, states link the
maintenance of their economic security with their national security, which may increase the likelihood
that state-sponsored cyber intrusions on a state’s financial sector could be perceived by victim states as
an intrusion on their sovereign power to maintain public order.
Cyber operations to manipulate voting behaviour

Coercive efforts to manipulate voting behaviour could also amount to intervention in another state’s
affairs, on the basis that the attempt to manipulate the will of the people also amounts to an attempt to
undermine the target state’s sovereign will over its own political system. The covert element of
disinformation contributes to the fact that the target state is unable to hold elections that are ‘free and
fair’, because rather than there being a free marketplace of ideas, voters are being specifically targeted
with information without necessarily being aware of this, nor that the targeting is based on personal
data held by the targeting state. The deceptive nature of the cyber activity distinguishes it from a mere
influence operation.
If the cyber intrusion does not reach the level of coercion, the issue arises as to whether it could
nevertheless violate the affected state’s sovereignty. A pure sovereigntist may argue that it could, on
the basis that it is an unauthorized intrusion into another state’s territory by cyber means. A relative
sovereigntist would argue that a violation would occur only if there were sufficient scale or severity of
effects, but the point at which the line is drawn remains unclear.230 In the case of the 2016 US
presidential election, the highly intrusive nature of the Russian operation, and its extensive reach in
terms of numbers of the population, suggests that it could constitute a violation of sovereignty. But the
lack of agreement of criteria for violation of sovereignty, including what, if any, effects should be taken
into account, makes the assessment difficult.
Cyber intrusion into the fundamental operation of parliament

The operation of parliament falls within the sovereign functions of a democratic state. If it can be
established that the hostile state is conducting a cyber operation coercively in relation to the operation
of another state’s parliament, for example disrupting online voting mechanisms during a key
parliamentary vote, then such activity could meet the criteria for breach of the non-intervention
principle.
Cyber operations in relation to another state’s critical infrastructure

‘Critical infrastructure’ is a term used by governments to describe assets that are essential for the
functioning of a society and economy. In recent years there have been a number of examples of actual
or alleged cyberattacks carried out by one state in order to disrupt another state’s critical infrastructure.
Targeting of essential medical facilities

The provision of essential medical facilities to the population are an aspect of a state’s critical
infrastructure and as such fall within a state’s inherently sovereign functions. But the concept raises a
number of questions that have yet to be resolved, including how ‘essential medical facilities’ should be
defined. Countries have different ways of handling the provision of medical facilities within their
territory; from state-operated systems that are provided free of charge such as the UK’s National Health
Service (NHS), to private systems where each individual must pay. Arguably, the provision of essential
medical facilities such as emergency treatment for the state’s citizens falls within a state’s sovereign
functions regardless of whether the system is public or private.
In order for cyber activity against another state’s essential medical facilities to constitute intervention,
the activity would need to be coercive.

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Examples relating to espionage

Saying that espionage is not prohibited by international law is not the same as saying that it is lawful.
That question will depend on the means, method and effects of the intelligence operations, and therefore
blanket assertions cannot be made.
In terms of the prohibition on intervention, it looks as though states regard the principle to apply to the
activities of intelligence agencies as much as to other activities. With regard to other aspects of
sovereignty, the issue is perhaps more difficult. As noted in the non-cyber context, the majority position
among commentators is that with the exception of certain rules, espionage is largely left unregulated by
international law and as such is not prohibited by international law per se.
Cyber espionage can involve states taking active defence measures, including sitting on networks in
many different states to extract information from the internet or to prevent threats to their territory.
States are often aware that other states are conducting these activities but do not formally object.
Cyber espionage may also involve a state going into private servers located in a failed state to take out
malware spread by a terrorist group. Such activity may take place without the consent of the host state,
which may not be aware that the activity is taking place. The activity is not coercive towards the state
on whose territory the servers are located, so this kind of activity would not meet the threshold of
intervention.
States may also use cyber means to engage in economic espionage (for example, theft of IP), which is
capable of causing significant economic damage to the target state and the companies within it. The
extent to which this could violate sovereignty will again depend on whether sovereignty is perceived as
open-ended or delineated by some kind of threshold, for example the quantitative effects of the
economic loss caused to the target state’s economy.
CAP 5. Reflections on the Relationship between Sovereignty and the Non-intervention Principle
In practice, activities that contravene the non-intervention principle and activities that violate
sovereignty will often overlap in terms of the outcome. Those that view sovereignty as a self-standing
rule, violation of which can give rise to legal consequences, and those that view the non-intervention
principle as the main tool for addressing states’ cyber actions, are therefore not as far apart as might at
first appear. Both view much of states’ cyber activity below the use of force as a breach of international
law, with the target state entitled to respond. But they reach this conclusion through different routes.
A violation of sovereignty occurs when one state exercises authority in another state’s territory without
consent in relation to an area over which the territorial state has the exclusive right to exercise its state
powers independently. The non-intervention principle is breached when a state uses coercive
behaviour to deprive another state of its free will in relation to the exercise of its sovereign functions in
order to compel an outcome or conduct with respect to a matter reserved to the target state. The main
difference between the two principles is that coercive behaviour is required in relation to the non-
intervention principle, which is not necessary in relation to a violation of sovereignty.
Coercion is interpreted in this paper as ‘pressure on the victim state to deprive the target of its free will
in relation to the exercise of its sovereign powers in order to compel conduct or an outcome with respect
to a matter reserved to the target state’.
The difference of views between states on what constitutes a violation of sovereignty point to the value
of states trying to first reach agreement on what kind of cyber activity they consider to constitute an
internationally wrongful act, rather than focusing too much at the outset on the meaning of abstract
terms.
Indiscriminate effects

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Consideration should nevertheless be given to possible examples where the cyber activity in question
is better viewed through the prism of general sovereignty than the specific non-intervention principle.
These may include where the unauthorized exercise of authority by the state carrying out the cyber
activity gives rise to indiscriminate knock-on effects (effetti a catena) in other states from a
cyberattack directed elsewhere. These knock-on effects are unintended, without the perpetrating state
caring about the consequences for other states, rather than as a result of deliberately coercive behaviour.
In the case of the WannaCry ransomware cyberattack, which affected 300,000 computers in 150
countries, the perpetrating state attempted to extract hard currency from users, rather than to deprive
the state(s) on whose territory users were affected of free will in relation to the exercise of sovereign
functions. The attack on individual users had ripple effects in other states, including on critical
infrastructure in the UK, where GP surgeries and hospitals linked to NHS Trusts that had not updated
their software were affected. But the facts suggest that the disruption to the services affected was a side
effect of the original criminal enterprise, rather than coercive behaviour specifically directed at
subordinating the UK’s sovereign will in relation to the exercise of its government functions. If so, then
the intervention threshold would not have been met. Could the cyberattack still be considered an
unauthorized exercise of authority in relation to the sovereign functions of another state? The Tallinn
Manual 2.0 suggests that in certain circumstances it could.
But if this were the case, the scope of application of the sovereignty principle in the cyber context would
expand quite significantly. The nature of the internet is such that malware and viruses can easily
proliferate beyond borders with indiscriminate effect. In the WannaCry example, it could mean that the
sovereignty of each of the 150 states affected was violated (in the case of relative sovereigntists, this
would of course depend on the scale of the effects in the state concerned).
There is a need for caution when drawing insights from government statements (collective or individual)
given that thus far there have been relatively few. There may be reasons other than the law for states to
choose not to frame state-sponsored cyber activity as a violation of sovereignty, for example political
caution; fear of retaliation; operational tactics; or lack of certainty about how international law applies.
Non-intervention principle or sovereignty?

If the significant overlap identified above is accepted, one might ask: what is the point of the non-
intervention principle? The value of the principle, as with the rules on the use of force, is that it provides
an established customary rule for dealing with these issues. It has a firm existential foundation, content
that is reasonably well understood, and is an emanation of the principle of sovereignty.
The lack of clarity as to when a violation of sovereignty has been committed in the cyber context may
be one of the reasons that the UK government and some academic experts have argued that there is no
cyber-specific rule on sovereignty. This paper has argued that there is a (perhaps small) gap between
violation of the non-intervention principle and violation of sovereignty, but that it is not clear where the
limits are in relation to sovereignty.
On the issue of independent state powers, given that some states appear to conceive their inherently
sovereign powers to include sovereignty over their citizen’s data, placing greater reliance on
sovereignty in the cyber context risks bolstering a position (‘cyber sovereignty’) in which individuals’
freedoms online are undermined, contrary to international human rights law. As the definition of
inherently sovereign functions in international law concerns the regulation of a state’s political,
economic, social and cultural systems, it does not seem credible to categorize any kind of state-
sponsored interference in the matters of private companies or citizens as an internationally wrongful
act. In the absence of agreement on how sovereignty applies in the cyber context, the non-intervention
principle provides a more objective basis for assessing international wrongfulness than the sovereignty
principle.

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On the second issue, some suggest that where there is interference by one state in another state’s affairs
but no coercion, this should be considered to be a violation of sovereignty only in circumstances where
there are certain quantitative or qualitative effects.
Ultimately, it may be that what matters is the substance of the rights and obligations and not how they
are labelled (whether a violation of sovereignty or the prohibition on intervention). Nevertheless, it is
important to be able to reach common understandings on these issues, especially when there is so much
else in the cyber context in which states fundamentally disagree.
Conclusions
Until governments are more transparent about their views on how international law applies to their
cyber activities, and explain their practices, the conclusions below about the application of international
law to states’ cyber operations are necessarily cautious. The following conclusions and
recommendations are a result of extensive research and discussions, including at roundtables attended
by states’ representatives.
Conclusions on the law

International law is applicable to states’ activities in cyberspace. In the absence of relevant treaties other
than the UN Charter, existing customary international law must be looked to as a basis for the law
applicable in cyberspace. Publicly available state practice relating specifically to cyberspace is currently
sparse. But as with any other state activity, existing principles and rules of international law are
applicable to state activities in cyberspace, unless there is state practice with opinio iuris to indicate that
a relevant principle or rule is not applicable.
The principle of sovereignty applies in relation to states’ cyber activities, as it applies in the non-cyber
context. The principle has legal consequences.
A state’s authority and jurisdiction apply in relation to cyber infrastructure and operations within its
territory, as they do to other matters. Territorial sovereignty and the independence of a state’s powers
vis-a-vis other states are therefore applicable.
Violation of sovereignty
A state with an agent physically present in another state’s territory who is exercising state powers within
the territory of that other state without consent may be committing a violation of the latter state’s
sovereignty. Similarly, the remote carrying out of such an act by a state agent without consent, which
has a harmful effect on another state’s territory may also be a violation of sovereignty in certain
circumstances. This rule applies equally in relation to activities in cyber operations as it does in relation
to other state activities.
The precise limits of the application of this rule are not established in international law. It is not clear,
for example, whether there is some form of de minimis rule in action, as evidenced by the way that
states treat the activities of other states in practice. While some would like to set limits by reference to
the scale or severity of effects of the cyber activity, at this time there is not enough state practice or
opinio iuris to say that such limits are reflected in customary international law. The assessment of
whether sovereignty has been violated therefore has to be made on a case by case basis, if no other
more specific rules of international law apply.
Before a principle of due diligence can be invoked in the cyber context, further work is needed to agree
upon rules as to what might be expected of a state in this context. This should be discussed and agreed
upon by states.
The non-intervention principle

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The principle of non-intervention is the corollary of the principle of sovereignty, by prohibiting a state
from intervening by coercive means in matters within another state’s sovereign powers. This principle
applies to a state’s cyber operations as it does to other state activities.
The coercive behaviour is carried out by a state or by a non-state actor whose actions are attributable to
a state under the rules on state responsibility.
The element of coercion in the non-intervention principle describes pressure on the victim state to
deprive the target of its free will in relation to the exercise of its sovereign powers in order to compel
an outcome in, or conduct with respect to, a matter reserved to the target state.
The coercive behaviour can consist of a range of techniques: direct and indirect; overt and covert.
It is the fact of the coercive behaviour applied in relation to the sovereign functions of another state that
is the key to the non-intervention principle. The coercive behaviour does not need to succeed in
depriving the target state of its free will in relation to its sovereign functions. Nor does the state need to
know of the interference at the time it takes place.
Where there are state cyber operations affecting another state’s powers, but there is no coercion, the
principle of non-intervention does not apply. In such circumstances it will be necessary to ascertain
whether a cyber operation has violated the target state’s sovereignty in another way.
Overlap between non-intervention and sovereignty

In practice, activities that contravene the non-intervention principle and activities that violate
sovereignty will often overlap. How much overlap or gap exists between the two depends both on the
interpretation of coercion and on whether or not a form of de minimis threshold applies in relation to
violations of sovereignty.
In view of the overlap, it is perhaps not surprising that states refer to violations of international law in
general rather than specifying a particular branch of the law.
Because it is unclear whether there is a limit or threshold to violations of sovereignty, states may prefer
to use the more clearly established framework of non-intervention, where that is possible.
In due course, further state practice and opinio iuris may give rise to an emerging cyber-specific
understanding of sovereignty, just as specific rules deriving from the sovereignty principle have
crystallized in other areas of international law.
China’s Soft and Sharp Power
We need to rethink the concept of “soft power”: new authoritarian influences are forms of “sharp
power”, an activity of subversion, bullying and pressure to induce to self-censorship.
While soft power harnesses the allure of culture, sharp power behaviour at home and manipulate opinion
abroad.
Soft power is the ability to affect others by attraction and persuasion and it is sometimes used to describe
any exercise of power that does not involve the use of force; this is a mistake: power depends on whose
army and economy wins, but also in whose story wins.
China’s economic success has generated soft and sharp power, within certain limits; e.g. Chinese
economic aid package under the Belt and Road Initiative may appear attractive, but not if the terms turn
sour.
Other exercises of economic hard power undercut the soft power of China’s narrative.

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Sharp power is a type of hard power; it can be used as shorthand of information warfare because it can
manipulate information.
The concept of soft power, when first introduced in 1990, it was linked to two attributes: voluntarism
and indirection, while hard power rests on threats and inducements.
Truth and openness create a dividing line between soft and sharp power; advertising and persuasion
involve framing, which limits voluntarism, but deception in framing can be viewed as coercive.
Technics of public diplomacy viewed as propaganda cannot produce soft power; in an age of
information, the scarcest resources are attention and credibility.
This is why exchange programs that develop communication and personal relations among students are
far more attractive generators of soft power.
However, when visas are manipulated or access is limited to restrain criticism and encourage self-
censorship, even such programs can become sharp power.
Democracies that backlashed China’s attempts to exercise soft power, have to be careful not to
overreact: the soft power democracies wield comes from civil society, which means that openness is a
crucial asset.
China could generate even more soft power if it would relax some of its tight party control, while
manipulation of media and reliance on covert channels of communication often reduces soft power:
shutting down legitimate Chinese soft-power tools can be counter-productive.
Moreover, soft power can have positive sum aspects: if both China and the US wish to avoid conflict,
exchange programs that increase American attraction to China, and vice versa, would benefit both.
On transnational issues, soft power can help build the trust and create the networks that make such
cooperation possible.
It is important to monitor the dividing line carefully; the best defence against China’s use of soft power
programs is open exposure to such effort.
11. Pandemics and Security
The tragedy of vaccine nationalism: only cooperation can end the pandemic
By early July, there were 160 candidate vaccines against the new coronavirus in development, with 21
in clinical trials. Although it will be months, at least, before one or more of those candidates has been
proved to be safe and effective and is ready to be delivered, countries that manufacture vaccines (and
wealthy ones that do not) are already competing to lock in early access.
It is absent an international, enforceable commitment to distribute vaccines globally in an equitable and
rational way, leaders will instead prioritize taking care of their own populations over slowing the
spread of covid-19 elsewhere or helping protect essential healthcare workers and highly vulnerable
populations in other countries.

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That sort of “vaccine nationalism,” or a “my country first” approach to allocation, will have profound
and far-reaching consequences. Without global coordination, countries may bid against one another,
driving up the price of vaccines and related materials. Supplies of proven vaccines will be limited
initially even in some rich countries, but the greatest suffering will be in low- and middle-income
countries. In their quest to obtain vaccines, countries without access to the initial stock will search for
any form of leverage they can find, including blocking exports of critical vaccine components, which
will lead to the breakdown of supply chains for raw ingredients, syringes, and vials. Desperate
governments may also strike short-term deals for vaccines with adverse consequences for their long-
term economic, diplomatic, and strategic interests. The result will not only need less economic and
humanitarian hardship but also intense resentment against vaccine-hoarding countries, which will
imperil the kind of international cooperation that will be necessary to tackle future outbreaks - not to
mention other pressing challenges, such as climate change and nuclear proliferation.
It is not too late for global cooperation to prevail over global dysfunction, but it will require states and
their political leaders to change course. What the world needs is an enforceable covid-19 vaccine trade
and investment agreement that would alleviate the fears of leaders in vaccine-producing countries. Such
an agreement could be forged and fostered by existing institutions and systems.
Winners and losers

The goal of a vaccine is to raise an immune response so that when a vaccinated person is exposed to
the virus, the immune system takes control of the pathogen and the person does not get infected or sick.
The vaccine candidates against covid-19 must be proved to be safe and effective first in animal studies,
then in small trials in healthy volunteers, and finally in large trials in representative groups of people,
including the elderly, the sick, and the young. If one or more vaccines are proved to be safe and effective
at preventing infection and a large enough share of a population gets vaccinated, the number of
susceptible individuals will fall to the point where the coronavirus will not be able to spread. That
population-wide protection, or “herd immunity,” would benefit everyone, whether vaccinated or not.
It is not clear yet whether achieving herd immunity will be possible with this coronavirus. A covid-19
vaccine may prove to be more like the vaccines that protect against influenza: a critical public health
tool that reduces the risk of contracting the disease, experiencing its most severe symptoms, and dying
from it, but that does not completely prevent the spread of the virus.
It must be considered that vaccine manufacturing is an expensive, complex process, in which even
subtle changes may alter the purity, safety, or efficacy of the final product. That is why regulators
license not just the finished vaccine but each stage of production and each facility where it occurs.
Further complicating the picture is that some of today’s leading covid-19 vaccine candidates are based
on emerging technologies that have never before been licensed. Scaling up production and ensuring
timely approvals for these novel vaccines will be challenging, even for rich countries with experienced
regulators. All of this suggests that the manufacture of covid-19 vaccines will be limited to a handful
of countries.
And even after vaccines are ready, a number of factors might delay their availability to non-
manufacturing states. Authorities in producing countries might insist on vaccinating large numbers of
people in their own populations before sharing a vaccine with other countries. There might also turn out
to be technical limits on the volume of doses and related vaccine materials that companies can produce
each day. And poor countries might not have adequate systems to deliver and administer whatever
vaccines they do manage to get.
During that inevitable period of delay, there will be many losers, especially poorer countries. But some
rich countries will suffer, too, including those that sought to develop and manufacture their own
vaccines but bet exclusively on the wrong candidates. By rejecting cooperation with others, those
countries will have gambled their national health on hyped views of their own exceptionalism.

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And even “winning” countries will needlessly suffer in the absence of an enforceable scheme to share
proven vaccines.
Paging Dr. Hobbes

Forecasts project that the coronavirus pandemic could kill 40 million people and reduce global
economic output by $12.5 trillion by the end of 2021. Ending this pandemic as soon as possible is in
everyone’s interest. Yet in most capitals, appeals for a global approach have gone unheeded.
In fact, the early months of the pandemic involved a decided shift in the wrong direction. Overall, more
than 70 countries plus the European Union imposed export controls on local supplies of personal
protective equipment, ventilators, or medicines during the first four months of the pandemic. That group
includes most of the countries where potential covid-19 vaccines are being manufactured.
Nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations have adopted two limited strategies to reduce the risk of
such vaccine nationalism in the case of covid-19. First, they have developed plans to shorten the queue
for vaccines by investing early in the manufacturing and distribution capacity for promising candidates,
even before their safety and efficacy have been established. The hope is that doing so will reduce delays
in ramping up supplies in poor countries.
This approach is sensible but competes with better-resourced national initiatives to pool scientific
expertise and augment manufacturing capacity. What is more, shortening the queue in this manner may
exclude middle-income countries. It would also fail to address the fact that the governments of
manufacturing countries might seize more vaccine stocks than they need, regardless of the suffering
elsewhere. An alternative approach is to try to eliminate the queue altogether.
Given the lack of confidence that any cooperative effort would be able to overcome such obstacles,
more and more countries have tried to secure their own supplies (EU, US, China).
Learning the hard way

Global cooperation on vaccine allocation would be the most efficient way to disrupt the spread of the
virus. It would also spur economies, avoid supply chain disruptions, and prevent unnecessary
geopolitical conflict. Yet if all other vaccine-manufacturing countries are being nationalists, no one will
have an incentive to buck the trend. In this respect, vaccine allocation resembles the classic game theory
problem known as “the prisoner’s dilemma” - and countries are very much acting like the proverbial
prisoner.
By failing to develop a plan to coordinate the mass manufacture and distribution of vaccines, many
governments are writing of the potential for global cooperation. Such cooperation remains possible, but
it would require a large number of countries to make an enforceable commitment to sharing in order to
overcome leaders’ fears of domestic opposition.
The time horizon for most political leaders is short, especially for those facing an imminent election.
Fortunately, there are ways to weaken this disincentive to cooperate. First, politicians might be more
willing to forgo immunizing their entire populations in order to share vaccines with other countries
if there were reliable research indicating the number and allocation of doses needed to achieve critical
public health objectives at home, reducing the spread to the elderly and other vulnerable populations,
and breaking transmission chains. Having that information would allow elected leaders to pledge to
share vaccine supplies with other countries only if they have enough at home to reach those goals.
A framework agreement on vaccine sharing would also be more likely to succeed if it were
undertaken through an established international forum and linked to preventing the export bans and
seizures that have disrupted covid-19-related medical supply chains.
The result should be a covid-19 vaccine trade and investment agreement, which should include an
investment fund to purchase vaccines in advance and allocate them, once they have been proved to be
safe and effective, on the basis of public health need rather than the size of any individual country’s

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purse. Governments would pay into the investment fund on a subscription basis, with escalating,
nonrefundable payments tied to the number of vaccine doses they secured and other milestones of
progress. Participation of the poorest countries should be heavily subsidized or free. The agreement
should include an enforceable commitment on the part of participating countries to not place export
restrictions on supplies of vaccines and related materials destined for other participating countries. The
agreement could stipulate that if a minimum number of vaccine-producing countries did not participate,
it would not enter into force, reducing the risk to early signatories. Linking the agreement to existing
networks of regulators, might help ease such concerns and would also help create a more transparent
pathway to the licensing of vaccines, instill global confidence, reduce development costs, and expedite
access in less remunerative markets.
What you don’t know can hurt (and help) you

Even if policymakers can be convinced about the benefits of sharing, cooperation will remain a
nonstarter if there is nothing to prevent countries from reneging on an agreement and seizing local
supplies of a vaccine once it has been proved to be safe and effective. Cooperation will ensue only
when countries are convinced that it can be enforced.
The key thing to understand is that allocating covid-19 vaccines will not be a one-of experience:
multiple safe and effective vaccines may eventually emerge, each with different strengths and benefits.
Which vaccine turns out to be most effective may vary by the target patient population and setting.
Some may be more suitable for children or for places with limited refrigeration. Yet because the various
vaccine candidates still in development require different ingredients and different types of
manufacturing facilities, no one country, not even the United States, will be able to build all the facilities
that may later prove useful.
Today’s vaccine supply chains are also unavoidably global. The country lucky enough to manufacture
the first proven vaccine is unlikely to have all the inputs necessary to scale up and sustain production.
Because the science has not settled on which vaccine will work best, it is impossible to fully anticipate
and thus prepare for all the needed inputs. When it comes to creating an enforceable international
vaccine agreement, complex cross-border supply chains are a feature, not a bug. Even countries without
vaccine-manufacturing capacity can credibly threaten to hold up input supplies to the United States or
other vaccine-manufacturing countries if they engage in vaccine nationalism. American and European
policymakers now understand - or at least should understand - that what they don’t know about cross-
border lows can hurt them. Paradoxically, this lack of information may help convince skeptical
policymakers to maintain the interdependence needed to fight the pandemic. Not knowing what they
don’t know reduces the risk that governments will renege on a deal tomorrow that is in their own best
interest to sign on to today.
The power of fomo

Vaccine nationalism is not just morally and ethically reprehensible: it is contrary to every country’s
economic, strategic, and health interests. All the necessary tools exist to forge an agreement that would
encourage cooperation and limit the appeal of shortsighted “my country first” approaches.
But time is running out: the closer the world gets to the day when the first proven vaccines emerge, the
less time there is to set up an equitable, enforceable system for allocating them. As a first step, a coalition
of political leaders from countries representing at least 50 percent of global vaccine-manufacturing
capacity must get together and instruct their public health officials and trade ministers to get out of their
silos and work together. Combining forces, they should hammer out a short-term agreement that
articulates the conditions for sharing, including with the legions of poorer, non-manufacturing
countries, and makes clear what would happen to participants who subsequently reneged and undertook
vaccine nationalism.

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Davies, S. E. (2008) - Securitizing infectious disease.
How the international community, in particular, western states and the World Health Organization
(WHO), have combined forces to construct infectious disease as an existential security threat that
requires new rules and behaviours for its effective containment. The outcome of this has been the
development of international health cooperation mechanisms, by developing global health
mechanisms that primarily prioritizes the protection of western states from disease contagion.
The mechanisms by which norms are internalized may result in states acting in very different ways to
the same phenomenon. The result could be that the WHO becomes locked into one social construction
of infectious disease that crowds out alternative, potentially more effective, response mechanisms.
Security can be best defined as a 'self-referential practice, because it is in this practice that the issue
becomes a security issue not necessarily because a real existential threat exists but because the issue is
presented as such a threat'. Therefore, while the WHO ostensibly seeks to fulfil its mandate by
securitizing the health of all, states inevitably seek to secure the health of their citizens. The result has
been that the WHO has ended up running a global surveillance system that prioritizes western states'
concerns.
Three sections of this article:
● increased awareness of western states during the 1990s that infectious disease represent a
potential threat to their citizens’ health
● the WHO's securitization of infectious disease.
● why the WHO was so concerned with setting up a surveillance mechanism that retained western
interest and support
The securitization of infectious disease by western states

By the late 1970s there was some confidence that the risk of infectious disease had decreased. It was
widely believed that new treatments, vaccines and knowledge of microbes would lead to the eradication
of infectious disease as a major cause of death. Just a decade later, however, this optimism had proved
to be ill-founded. The outbreak and spread of HIV/AIDS, followed by the resurgence of stronger
microbe-resistant pathogens, such as malaria, TB, meningitis and dengue fever were compounded by
the fear that bioterrorists might use deadly pathogens as a weapon of war. Serious infectious disease
discoveries in the past decade have all served to increase calls for infectious diseases to be targeted as
threats to national security.
During the 1990s, awareness of the threat that infectious disease outbreaks could pose to their citizens'
health and to their countries' economic and political stability encouraged western governments to
develop responses in national security terms.
The USA has been a keen participant in disease surveillance and response since the mid-1990s. The
United States Department of Defense (US DoD) has had overseas infectious disease research
laboratories located in over 20 countries for nearly ten years, for the purpose of 'responding to outbreaks
of epidemic, endemic and emergent diseases', which demonstrates how seriously the United States
views the response to infectious disease as a key national security strategy.
There are three reasons for America's increasingly securitized response to infectious disease:
● the first is the threat of bioterrorism = US increased its financial contributions to multilateral
infectious disease surveillance operations

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● the US government started to connect the continuous evolution of naturally occurring infectious
diseases with globalization, coming to the view that such interconnectedness between poor and
wealthy travellers increased the risk of infection spreading across the globe
● the US government realized that infectious disease epidemics in foreign countries could
threaten US national interests
AIDS = The first line of defence is the application of 'prevention, treatment and control programs’.
Containment, then, was what USAID recommended as the best defence, to be affected by developing a
strong infectious disease surveillance capacity. The crucial factor was improved coordination between
international health organizations.
In Australia, particularly since the outbreak of SARS, academics, economists, politicians have all
warned of the dire potential consequences if the government does not prepare at the federal level for a
pandemic.
In 1997, the Canadian government set up an electronic surveillance system entitled Global Public Health
Information Network (GPHIN), which the WHO uses to this day as part of GOARN. Stricter border
controls and attempts to regulate migration have been key features in state responses to the spread of
infectious disease.
The EU has also sought to boost its shared health responsibilities through treaties and public health
surveillance. The EU, like the United States, Australia and Canada, has referred to its public health
strategy as a security response, aimed at creating a 'network for the epidemiological surveillance and
control of communicable diseases in the European Union. The EU has also created the European Centre
for Disease Prevention and Control, based in Sweden, which monitors the incidence of infectious
disease across Europe.
The WHO: a coordinated response

The identification of infectious disease as a matter of national security policy presented the WHO with
two possibilities. The first, advocated by the WHO itself, was that existing infectious disease regulations
needed reform to ensure that international cooperation with the new global health surveillance network
would be available.
Western countries' awareness of infectious disease and its potential threat to their citizens prompted
their interest in a system that would guarantee protection at their borders but could also operate as an
effective alert and response, or containment, system in the affected region.
The WHO worked very hard to situate itself as the best institution for managing both options (the
reform of regulations concerning epidemic outbreaks and the development of the surveillance system).
Reform of the existing International Health Regulations (IHR) was agreed to by 191 World Health
Assembly (WHA) member states in May 1995. The IHR embodied the WHO's mandate for managing
the response to an outbreak of one of the three infectious diseases that fall under the IHR mandate
(cholera, yellow fever and plague). However, at the 1995 WHA the WHO argued that the existing IHR
could not adequately address newly emerging public health emergencies. Five constraints on the
implementation of the IHR:
● the regulations were limited in their coverage (applying only to cholera, yellow fever and
plague)
● the IHR depended entirely on the affected government notifying the WHO of an outbreak
● there was nothing in the IHR to specify how the WHO and the affected country were to
collaborate and cooperate in the containment of the disease
● lack of incentives to encourage compliance. There was nothing the WHO could do to encourage
countries weighing the options of alerting the WHO and not doing so to report a disease
outbreak. In fact, if a state thought it would not get caught, there were probably more benefits
in many cases (in terms of trade and tourism) associated with keeping quiet than with reporting

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● there were no risk-reduction measures to prevent the spread of disease

The WHO argued that there needed to be an agreed 'checklist' of procedures that every state at risk
had to take to reduce the likelihood of the disease spreading and a collective response by all states to
contain outbreaks to prevent them from reaching epidemic proportions.
The WHO's proposal for IHR reform, and the WHA's agreement to it, came only a year after a political
and economic crisis during its response to an outbreak of the plague in India in 1994. It has been argued
that two lessons were learnt by the WHO from the experience in India in 1994. The first is that states
ought to be protected from the economic devastation that follows reports of a disease outbreak. The
second is that new measures might contain panic such as that which ensued in India.
Since its mandate was established in 1948, the WHO has been entitled by states to conduct surveillance
of disease outbreaks across the world. In tandem with its call for the revision of the IHR, the WHO
argued that there was also a need for a global surveillance network in order to manage outbreak
verification and response. This led to the first global infectious disease surveillance system, the Global
Public Health Information Network, being developed in Canada in 1997, a web-based electronic
system that scans the World Wide Web to identify suspected outbreaks of disease.
2000-2002: it was improved with the creation of GOARN, to 'improve epidemic disease control by
informing key public health professionals about confirmed and unconfirmed outbreaks of international
public health importance' → a global safety net that protects other countries when one nation's
surveillance and response systems fail.
As long as national capacities are weak, international mechanisms for outbreak alert and response will
be needed. GOARN, argues the WHO, is vital for effective international containment of infectious
disease outbreaks. WHO is able to achieve the goals of its strategic approach by bringing partners
together to focus and coordinate global responses.
This sense of urgency is reflected in the fact that during the same period in which the WHO was
developing GOARN, external funding for the surveillance project steadily increased. Thus it is not
surprising that the momentum for the WHO's surveillance system occurred at the same time that these
same states were increasingly linking infectious disease with national security.
The WHO has also stated that it expects most of its activity to be located in developing countries: the
WHO argues that, given the disparity among countries in public health infrastructure, it makes sense to
create an effective international response that deals first with the 'humanitarian needs of other countries
that are affected by [the] outbreak’.
The WHO argues that this is another reason why its role in global health security is so crucial. It
contends that its international partnerships make it of maximal use in a situation where 'financial,
political and institutional' restraints may inhibit cooperation in more specialized, regional surveillance
mechanisms. In addition, WHO representatives argue not only that the WHO's 'coordinated response
mechanism' can 'mobilize the appropriate resources that are necessary to contain the outbreak' but that
the WHO 'has an international mandate [and this] provides an element of neutrality'. The principal
justification for the establishment of a surveillance system was that 'as long as national capacities
are weak, international mechanisms for outbreak alert and response will be needed as a global safety
net that protects other countries when one nation's surveillance and response systems fail → a
combination of security interests, recognition of common cause and concern for image will
encourage states to cooperate: countries "will comply because of a sense of global solidarity in the
face of a common threat, but also because they prefer to maintain a good image and look responsible’.
The WHO worked hard during the 1990s to create awareness among governments of the threat that
infectious disease posed to humanity by encouraging changes to the IHR and promoting a surveillance
system that could alert the affected state and surrounding states to an outbreak of disease = a
containment mechanism.

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The securitization of infectious disease has been accomplished by both western states and the WHO.
While there has been a transfer of power that demonstrates the WHO's authority in disease management,
this development also reveals a choice by western states to defer to the authority of the WHO because
it has been able to present itself as best placed to respond to the infectious disease threat.
Why undertake infectious disease surveillance?

Since 2003 concerns have been raised about the consequences of securitizing health, especially
infectious disease: the primary concern has been that the securitization of infectious disease leads to
its being viewed as a threat only when those doing the securitizing (western states) actually feel
threatened. When these states feel safe, they tend to leave who remain under threat potentially deprived
of the assistance they need.
The WHO's initiative to create a global health governance response to infectious disease via revised
IHR and GOARN does, whether intentionally or not, favor western states' interests. The concern
about safeguarding their citizens enabled the WHO to situate itself in a position of authority in global
health governance. Western states have, in turn, permitted the WHO to occupy this authoritative role
because in doing so they could pass responsibility on to the international body and avoid all allegations
of imperialism.
Enhanced international cooperation, for health as for many other arenas, are prerequisites for
security. The functional separation of domestic and international diseases is losing its usefulness.
States have realized that their traditional reliance on international governance no longer works. The
WHO argues that states have recognized that its 'primary role' is to 'maintain global health security
through its global surveillance and response activities’; while the WHO has no enforcement
mechanism, states will comply for the various reasons noted above to do with self-interest, common
interest and public image.
SARS was the catalyst that led to the WHO's increase in power, forcing states such as America, Britain
and China to accept that there needed to be a 'reallocation of power above and below the sovereign
state’. It led states to realize that they were not more powerful than an unidentified microbe which could
empty cities, bring about devastating economic collapse and cause immense loss of life. This marked
the beginning of the post-Westphalian era, where governance involves states, intergovernmental
organizations and non-state actors.
GOARN is the perfect example of global health governance working. GOARN's infectious disease
surveillance in these situations did not rely solely on the cooperation of states: in the case of the SARS
outbreak in China, it was the participation of non-state actors in locating reports of the disease on the
internet that led to the WHO’s being alerted.
The WHO's primary funding for GOARN has come largely from donations by western states, prominent
among them the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK, and from the EU. At the same time, the
revision of the IHR could not have occurred without all the member states of the WHA consenting to
it; the same is true of the WHA resolutions that have supported the strengthened surveillance capability
of WHO's GOARN.
All of these states in their domestic policy have argued strongly for an enhanced international
surveillance network; this is demonstrated by the fact that, of the 130 partners in GOARN, a large
proportion of the facilities that assist the WHO are located in developed states. Therefore, the claim that
the WHO has achieved post-Westphalian authority must be measured against the fact that its authority
in surveillance is rooted overwhelmingly in the support and consent of states.
When states turn to international organizations to conduct tasks that they do not wish to do themselves,
a measure of authority inevitably passes from state to institution. This creates, over time, a situation
where international organizations’ power grows as they come to control the agenda surrounding a
specific area.

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The WHO has had a long history of directing and managing the tasks of global health awareness, but at
the same time its power to direct states to comply with the regulations concerning infectious disease
outbreaks has been weak. However, it succeeded in revising the IHR as a result of the West's increased
association of infectious disease with a security threat in combination with the WHO's assertion that it
was the best authority to manage this concern. In turn, the transfer of responsibility for infectious disease
control to the WHO has led to the management of infectious disease outbreak alerts through GOARN.
Through GOARN, the WHO has the authority to control the release of information surrounding
infectious disease outbreaks; but it also has the power to alert the international community when it is
not receiving the affected states' cooperation. Therefore, the WHO's authoritative power resides in its
management of information about infectious disease.
The WHO has secured its position on the global stage as the key referent authority in global health
security. On one hand, the shift of responsibility following the delegation of authority to the WHO has
given it the power to secure individuals against infectious disease. The WHO has the capability to locate
outbreaks of disease, in some cases before public health officials in the state affected are aware of it
themselves, and to take primary responsibility in containing the outbreak. On the other hand, this
authority has been delegated by a particular set of states to serve their interest.
Conclusion
Western states have encouraged the disintegration of old international governance rules by delegating
authority to the WHO in the area of infectious disease response: by strengthening their domestic borders
against the spread of infectious disease epidemics and simultaneously serves the WHO's interests by
increasing its authority in global health governance. The revision of the IHR and the development of
GOARN have met the needs of western states, while providing authoritative power to the WHO.
However, the obstacle of sovereignty has not been overcome. Attempts to verify outbreaks of disease
are still dependent for their success on state cooperation. The WHO and western states have
simultaneously securitized infectious disease, with the result that, while western states have been able
to ensure that progress made in disease surveillance and response mechanisms primarily suit their
national interests, the WHO has been able to increase its presence as a powerful authority in the
prevention of infectious disease. However, the WHO's authority derives from its powers under
GOARN, a surveillance mechanism that largely does what western states do not wish to be seen doing
themselves, namely, forcing developing states to comply (conformarsi) with infectious disease alerts.
Why the pandemic has revived hard-nosed realism - Gvosdev
When al-Qaida attacked the US on 9/11 it expected a realist response from all the other great powers,
allying in order to balance US power now that it was weak. The exact opposite happened, with the EU
invoking mutual defense guarantees in Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty and even China, Russia
and Iran offered support for the US campaign in Afghanistan that ousted the Taliban. All of them were
not motivated by altruism but by 2 factors: avoiding economic shock waves spread by the disruption
of US economy; the fear of being themselves the next targets of terroristic attacks that brought every
great power to refocus on a new organizing principle: preventing the anarchy and chaos that could be
unleashed by international terrorism (communitarian realism whose principles say that common
threats incentive cooperation, like with the 2008 crisis when the G20 took a vital global leadership role).
The pandemic, though, has turned out to be an accelerant of international competition, not
cooperation. Today, every major power seems guided by a traditional realist approach to power politics
that emphasizes competition over cooperation and sees outcomes in starkly zero-sum terms. Both China
(who offered loans and aid to countries amid the pandemic in order to replace the US influence in some

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areas) and USA (who focused on winning the competition for political systems and countering
authoritarianism growth instead of saving Americans’ lives) adopted an attacking foreign policy
instead of searching for cooperation. Many countries aren’t really dealing with the virus as an
infectious disease that killed 900 000 people and made the global economic contract by 5%. During the
pandemic, in fact, the US-China relations have accelerated their downward spiral, China’s pressure on
Taiwan and Hong Kong augmented and it started a border-conflict with India. Russia increased its
provocation toward the USA in Alaska, Syria and Ukraine. Turkey intervened in Libya and Israel moved
to advance its plans to annex parts of the West Bank. The strategic arms control regime is collapsing.
The risk of “great-power populism”: States, it seems, are either treating the pandemic as an irritating
distraction, or they have concluded that their opponents and competitors will suffer more from it, so
this is the right time to push for changes in the status quo (preventing the G20 from taking control again,
with its members too busy looking for weaknesses in each other). A reason why all this competition
arose is the surge of populism that depicted interdependence and connectivity as vulnerabilities
(especially during COVID that was said to be spreading thanks to globalization). Leaders and citizens
decided that trusting the others in an amorphous international community to guarantee security and
prosperity was risky (great-power populism). Most of G-20 countries have governments that endorse
elements of great-power populism (US, China, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, India, Mexico, UK) or have
governments that must accommodate these tendencies within their domestic body politics (Japan, ITA,
France and Germany). Almost all of them are focused on surviving and recovering faster than the
others, whilst COVID brings the others down. China also exploited the US withdrawal from the WHO
tying to fill the void left by Washington. Russia has been weakened by COVID and the oil price crash,
giving the USA the chance to test the limits of Putin’s commitments to his aggressive foreign policy in
places like Syria, Libya and Venezuela. If the USA turns inward as part of the Trump’s “America First”
policy it could lead long-standing allies to reassess their relationships and also could weaken the project
to sustain power around the world, favoring China and Russia.
The multipolar, post-pandemic World: the Atlantic Council sketched 3 broad scenarios for post-
COVID world. The first is a “downward escalator,” where a global depression accelerates isolationism
and creates conditions for open clashes between the United States and China. In the second, a “China
first” scenario, a more rapid Chinese recovery from the coronavirus crisis requires the U.S. and Europe
to work to defend their position against an expansion of Chinese influence throughout much of the rest
of the world. Only the third, “new Renaissance” scenario - in which, under U.S. leadership, the existing
liberal international order is rejuvenated and China and Russia pull back from their efforts to revise the
current global system - assumes that conflict can be tapped down. The world is clearly in a period of
contested multipolarity, with principle China and Russia’s aim being the one of breaking down the US-
led system of alliances.
12. Consequences of Global Challenges: Migration
Readings:
Anna Knoll, Francesco Rampa, et al. The nexus between food and nutrition security, and migration:
Clarifying the debate and charting a way forward. (Discussion Paper 212). Maastricht: ECDPM.
http://ecdpm.org/publications/nexus-between-food-nutrition-security-and-migration/.

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Cap. 11 Snow, International Population Movement, The Contrasting U.S. and European
Experiences
Immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are a constant that has been increasing in this century and
has reached critical proportions in some places. There are two basic stimuli for migration. One directly
involves immigration of people from the developing to the developed world. From an immigrant
standpoint, the motive may be both economic and political. For receiving countries, immigrants provide
necessary augmentation of shrinking labor forces and stimulate productivity. The result can be positive
for both sides, but its synergism is partially upset by the prospects that undesirables - especially terrorists
- will infiltrate the immigrants. The other stimulus is largely internal to the developing world in terms
of privation and atrocity associated with internal conflicts that produce massive refugee and asylum-
seeking populations.
The reasons they move are various and complicated, but the net result is a constant flow of people across
borders. Immigration has become particularly contentious in the United States over the last two decades
because of the large-scale movement of Mexicans and Central Americans across the U.S.-Mexico
border. Europe is host to a considerably larger immigrant population than the United States, especially
in a few select countries such as Germany.
Principle: Human Population Movement Forms, Dynamics, and Human Suffering

Definition of Koser → an international immigrant is “a person who stays outside his usual country
of residence for at least one year,” The global total of immigrants today is over 200 million people.
Forms of movement
There are various categories of people who seek to leave their homes to go to other locations, two that
will be explored are refugees and asylum seekers, they are often the result (or even the cause) of great
human suffering.
Legal immigrants are those individuals who have migrated to a country through legal channels,
meaning their immigration is recognized and accepted by the host government. Parts of Europe -
notably Germany - have long admitted workers from places such as Turkey to augment shrinking
workforces as their populations age, and the United States has historically given priority status to
people with particularly needed education and technical skills, such as scientists and engineers from
developing countries like India.
Illegal immigrants are “those who enter a country without proper authorization or who have violated
the terms of stay of the authorization they hold, including by overstaying.” The most publicized and
largest part of that total are irregular by virtue of illegal entry into the country; some of the most
problematic, however, are individuals who have entered the country legally but have overstayed the
conditions of their residence.
A special category of immigrants is refugees, “forcibly displaced people”. The largest numbers of
people within this category are refugees (displaced people living outside their native countries) at about
21.3 million, internally displaced persons or IDPs (refugees within their own countries) at about forty-
three million, and asylum seekers (people who have sought international protection but whose
applications have not been acted upon).
1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees says a refugee is “a person outside of his or
her country of nationality who is unable or unwilling to return because of persecution or a well-
grounded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social
group, or political opinion.”

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Immigration Motivations and Functions

One way to think about the reasons for immigration is in terms of “push” and “pull” factors. Push
factors are motives to leave a particular political jurisdiction. Pull factors, on the other hand, refer to
perceived positive attributes to attract immigrants to particular destinations.
People decide to leave for both political and economic reasons: politically to avoid conflict or
discrimination in their homeland, and economically in the hope or promise of a materially better life in
the country to which they immigrate.
As Koser points out, “large movements of people have always been associated with significant global
events like revolutions, wars, and the rise and fall of empires; with epochal changes like economic
expansion, nation-building, and political transformations; and with enduring challenges like conflict,
persecution, and dispossession.” These dramatic and tragic events are still obvious in places such as
Syria, and they are augmented in places touched by terrorism, notably in Middle Eastern locations.
The economic motivation, to move somewhere where economic opportunities are better than those
where one lives, is nothing new; the motivating factor is opportunity, which is manifested in the
availability of jobs. Demographics: population growth rates are highest in developing countries, and
that means the rising number of job seekers is greatest in these countries relative to the number of
available jobs. In the developed world, on the other hand, population growth rates are much lower.
The kinds of talents that immigrants can contribute:
● “highly skilled workers”: these workers, generally highly educated and possessing scientific
or engineering expertise at the cutting edge of the global economy, are the subject of “brain
drains” in one direction or the other.
● economic immigrants who have comparatively low skill levels: they are a double-edged sword
for the countries into which they move. On one hand, they provide labor when it is in short
supply, and particularly in low-paying or undesirable areas. Koser refers to these kinds of jobs
as “3D jobs: dirty, difficult, or dangerous”.
Unskilled immigrants (especially irregular immigrants) do jobs that the citizens are either unwilling to
do or that they will not do at the lower wages that migrants will accept. Thus, without a pool of such
laborers, vital services either would not be done or would only be done at higher costs.
Refugees can also be divided into skilled and unskilled groups. The skilled parts of the population are
more likely to be absorbed into the country to which they flee (although generally at much lower
standards of living), whereas the unskilled generally cannot be absorbed and become a burden on the
country.
The World Situation: The Human Tragedy Factor

There are two basic, overlapping continuing trends in worldwide immigration:
● demographic: the majority of this population movement is from the developing to the
developed world, and especially to Europe and North America
● political: fragile countries in parts of the developing world are disintegrating into violence
against population segments.
Population movements across political boundaries are always controversial to some extent. Unless the
people seeking to move are highly desired and have great contributions to make that are obvious to the
recipients, there will be resistance in the receiving country.
To reiterate Goldstone’s points, “the developed countries’ labor forces will substantially age and
decline, constraining economic growth in the developed world and raising the demand for immigrant
workers”.
Terrorism is pushing many people out of their homes and into the queue of migrants. It is also creating
anti-migrant/anti-refugee sentiments in many of the countries. The bottom line of this phenomenon
is the fear that allowing immigrants into a country will increase the likelihood that terrorists will be

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admitted as part of that influx. Anxiety over admitting people who are “different” has always been an
immigration concern. The fear of increasing terror adds to that concern.
Application: The Continuing U.S. and European Experiences

Both the United States and Europe are concerned about the quantity and quality of outsiders who seek
entry, although the concerns are both substantively and qualitatively different.
The U.S.-Mexican Border Problem

The migration of large numbers of people across the border from Mexico and Central America has
been an American political issue since the 1990s. With 1,933 miles of mostly desolate, rural topography,
it is a very long and difficult frontier to “seal,” as proponents of “the Wall” advocate. At the same time,
the U.S.-Mexico boundary is the world’s only direct land border between the developed and
developing worlds. The concern about the U.S.-Mexico border not only involves immigration, but the
integrity of the frontier also has strong implications for the trafficking of illicit drugs.
The Physical Problem → Almost all the solutions proposed for the U.S.-Mexico border revolve around
some better way to “secure” it, to make it more difficult for unauthorized people to come across the
border into the United States. The most extreme advocacies call for “sealing” the border, which
generally equates to making it impossible physically for unwanted outsiders to intrude on American
soil. Effectively securing these borders is clearly a formidable task. The current effort concentrates on
two forms of security: a border fence and larger numbers of Border Patrol and other human assets to
monitor activity.
The Border Threats → In addition, there is a question of the movement of illicit narcotics and the
consequent criminal behaviour they bring, and of the possible penetration of the United States by
terrorists.
Immigration → Throughout American history, what is now referred to as illegal immigration has
always been a part of the pattern, and the history of immigration politics is largely an attempt to
regulate both the quantity and quality of immigration in the country. The sheer volume of irregular
immigrants in the United States is the centre of the perceived problem in the American political debate.
One concern is the alleged criminality associated with illegal residents. The other concern is the demand
on social services (e.g., schools and medical facilities) made by irregular immigrants and their families,
a concern accentuated by the fact that most irregular immigrants pay only user taxes (e.g., sales tax) but
do not contribute to the Social Security fund or through payroll deduction.
The irregular immigrant community is divided into these two categories:
● economic immigrants
● criminal immigrants: people engaged in narcotics trafficking
Why do immigrants come illegally to the country? In the case of the economic immigrants, the answer
is economic opportunity: jobs. (Disparity of wealth between the United States and Mexico and Central
America.) They have come to the United States in the pursuit of economic advancement, including the
accumulation of enough money to send remittances back to their local communities and families at
home. If there are jobs available that irregular immigrants fill, then there must be a labor need that these
immigrants fulfil. That they have done so and continue to do so indicates not only that such
opportunities exist, but that they have not been sated. That is simple supply and demand. Moreover, the
dynamics suggest that there is not only a market for immigrant labor but also a continuing market for
irregular immigrant labor.
The simple fact is that illegal workers have advantages to employers over legal immigrants: they will
work at lower wages (they have no bargaining ability on wages), they will work longer (they are covered
by no labor laws or contracts), and they do not require employers to pay benefits such as Social Security

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taxes or health insurance. Moreover, if the kinds of jobs that irregular immigrants typically perform
became part of the regular economy, labor costs would increase (to minimum wage, at the least), which
in turn would drive up the costs of the services and the wages of other lower-end jobs.
Narcotics → The drug trade across the U.S.-Mexico frontier is both an immigration and a narcotics
policy problem. The drug and immigration issues intersect when members of the various drug
syndicates move across the border into the United States to better control their illicit operations. The
numbers of immigrants who are part of criminal immigration are quite small compared to the economic
immigrants, but their presence is amplified because of the spikes in violent crime that occur where they
are present. This violence is mostly between members of various drug cartels, but inevitably it spills
over into broader communities, inflaming anti-immigrant sentiments that are at least partially
misdirected.
Just as the availability of jobs has fueled economic immigration, so too has the demand for drugs
fueled the growing flow of drugs into the country. The difficulty is disentangling the narcotics and
illegal immigration aspects of the effects of border leakage. They really are two almost entirely different
problems with different sources, dynamics, and largely unrelated consequences. The only thing linking
them is the obvious fact that both drugs and unauthorized immigrants come across the border illegally.
Terrorism → The terrorism threat is not a specifically U.S.-Mexico border problem. The terrorism
threat, unlike the other two, is also more of a qualitative than a quantitative problem, and one that is
managed in a distinctive way. There are relatively few terrorists against whose entry the United States
must prepare, but the potential havoc that any one poses means that efforts must be essentially perfect
or they can yield disastrous results.
What separates the terrorism aspect of the problem in the American case from other components is that
there are few, if any, terrorists in the population seeking to enter the country for legitimate economic
reasons or criminal, drug-related reasons.
The European Problem

The migration problem for Europe is different. Most of the current concern is specifically related to the
problem of terror that has increasingly consumed much of northern, NATO-related Europe, and the
substance of migration more often involves refugees and asylum seekers than it does irregular
immigrants.
Immigration by Mediterranean and Middle Eastern people is more established in Europe because of the
ongoing need for foreigners across time. Europe is more proximate to the Middle East crucible of
terrorist activity than is North America, has welcomed and accepted people from these countries for
generations, and given European demographics and geography, has a difficult time excluding all those
who want to enter the EU area from the Middle East or North Africa. Europe is proximate to the
problem, vulnerable to it, and partially as a consequence of economically motivated immigration
policies, in a difficult position trying to stanch terrorist penetration.
Circumstance → Due to violent instability in the Muslim world, UNCHR statistics for June 2017
show that the three countries with the most refugees are all in the region close to Europe: Syria,
Afghanistan and Somalia.
Of these, the victims of the Syrian civil war represent the largest and most compelling problem: they
are part of a larger IDP problem that more than doubles that number, and the vicious nature of the civil
war makes the return of these refugees impossible in the near term.
In several European countries, these populations have not assimilated well, and the isolated ghetto
environments in which they reside are seen as prime recruiting grounds for groups such as IS. An
additional element that makes the identification of potential terrorists difficult lies in the fact that, in

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many cases, the countries from which the terrorists come are former colonies of the European countries
that are their destinations and that, as a result, provide a special status for these individuals.
The migration dilemma pits the question of population movement against the enduring question of
sovereignty. Part of the economic union’s structure is free movement of people across sovereign
boundaries without restriction or even routine monitoring of who comes and goes, which facilitates the
greater integration of the arrangement.
It is almost certainly one IS purpose in its attacks on Europe to stir anti-immigrant sentiment and further
to divide the immigrant/refugee population from the “native” populations of European countries.
Conclusion
Controversy and emotion increase when the migration consists solely or in large measure of refugees
seeking safety or asylum from disastrous conditions in their countries of origin. The causes of refugee
flows are normally disputed by the government of the originating country, which may also consider the
refugees radicals or political criminals. The decision to accept or reject refugees is difficult for the
receiving country, because it likely strains relations with the government of the country of origin and
may entangle it in the dynamics of what caused the refugee problem in the first place. The situation is
amplified if there are sizable numbers of political asylum seekers among the fleeing refugees.
Humanitarian suffering and deprivation counterbalance these factors, especially when those seeking
refuge are part of an even larger population of IDPs in the country of origin. These concerns all swirl
around the ongoing tragedy in Syria.
Chapter 14: Migrants and Refugees in Global Politics
The movement of people has helped shape the trajectory of history for as long as human communities
have existed. Ever since the first groups of modern humans left Africa to populate the world, population
movements have brought with them prosperity and devastation, cultural enrichment and annihilation,
cooperation and conflict. Mass migration has contributed to the collapse of some great power and the
rise of others. More recently, technological innovations have made long-distance relocation cheaper
and easier, while the combination of globalization and inequality has primed the world’s working-age
population to consider migration as a natural path to achieve economic opportunities and betterment.
Add to this the record number of refugees, asylum seekers and other forced migrants fleeing a surge in
political repression and wars, and it is safe to say that the movement of people will continue to be a
salient feature of global politics throughout the twenty-first century.
As the dynamics of forced migration makes clear, people do not only move out of a desire for a better
life. For many the decision to migrate is taken more out of necessity than choice. At one end of the
voluntary/forced spectrum we find highly educated professionals moving between countries in
pursuit of career opportunities, and welcomed by their host country due to the skills and resources they
bring with them. At the other end we find poor villagers gathering up their children and fleeing across
a border to escape war and ethnic cleansing, who find shelter of a sort in a refugee camp supported by
international aid agencies. Between these extremes (each is a minority among international migrants),
are a large group of people who migrate for a varied mix of personal, political, economic and security
reasons. The reception these migrants get in their host countries is also mixed, but over the past two
decades the trend has been one of increasing unease and even fear over immigration levels.
Today’s population movements pose economic, political and security challenges, not just to individual
host states but to regional organizations such as the European Union (EU) and to the international
community as a whole.

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An age of migration?
International migration (the movement of people across sovereign borders to live in a different country
to that of their birth) has always been a politically contentious issue, causing widespread concern among
the public and politicians both in high-income countries and the developing world. For many liberal
thinkers, migration is mostly a desirable phenomenon, a natural aspect of free-market dynamics,
particularly if migrants are allowed to integrate quickly into their host societies’ economic sphere, as
workers and taxpayers.
Hostility to migrants deepened in the wake of the global financial crisis, as job markets and wages
shrunk in traditional high-immigration countries, but such hostility cannot be explained purely as a
response to economic downturn or competition for jobs: anti-migrant sentiments have been building
up over decades, particularly in Europe, but also in other parts of the world, even in times of economic
growth and job creation.
In Europe, attitudes towards migrants hardened in the early post-Cold War period. For the first time
in decades, Europe had to deal with a mass refugee movement on its own soil, as a chain of wars of
ethnic cleansing broke out in the Balkans. The next milepost on the downwards path of anti- immigrant
sentiment came with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.
Alongside concern over jobs, the welfare state, communal cohesion and social integration, rose a fear
of letting in international terrorists through lax immigration systems, and this has brought to more
restrictive (and harmonized, in the EU) policies. Local and national elections in EU countries after
2015 (over one million migrants from Syria and other countries in that area) saw a lurch to the anti-
immigrant right, while in the United States, Republican Party candidates for the 2016 US Presidential
elections competed to make the most hardline anti-immigrant statements.
Are we indeed living in ‘an age of migration’, characterized by unprecedented levels of population
movement? Looking at the statistics, the answer is both yes and no. Immigration levels are high today
compared with recent history, and have accelerated in the past couple of decades. In proportion to the
world’s population, migration levels are somewhat higher today than they were at the height of the last
great wave of migrants a century ago. Then, international migrants constituted 2.5–3% of the world’s
population; in 2015, the proportion was 3.3%.
The origin and destination of migrants have changed dramatically, though. While the mass migration
movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century consisted mostly of Europeans emigrating
to the New World (North and South America as well as Oceania), Europe is now a major recipient
of immigrants, although a majority of them (53%) are Europeans moving from one part of the
continent to another. A general trend, both within Europe and globally, is for migrants to move from
less (but not the least) rich to the richest parts of the world, from struggling or less dynamic economies
to stronger ones with more jobs on offer.
Turning to forced migration, there were in 2015 more than 60 million displaced persons around the
globe (highest since WW2), counting refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced people and others
in refugee-like situations. If the growth trend continues at the same rate, the world could in the years to
come experience international migration of a magnitude well beyond the peaks of earlier eras of mass
migration, at least since the Industrial Revolution. Contemporary migration patterns also differ in their
characteristics from previous migration periods, and offer distinct challenges and opportunities.
Migration numbers
There are around 243 million international migrants in the world today. The cumulative effect of
migration in the post-war period has led to significant demographic changes in some countries,
especially in major cities. Most migration, whether internal or international, is towards urban centers,

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and the world’s fast-growing megacities are increasingly diverse and multi-ethnic, teeming with new
arrivals from nearby rural areas as well as abroad. This kind of migration was almost steady.
Regarding forced migration figures, the trend has been more uneven. A peak in the early 1990s was
followed by a long slump before climbing to another peak in the mid-2010s. As a proportion of overall
international migration figures, forced migration across international borders remains small (c.19.5
million refugees and asylum seekers in the total of 243 million). Despite this, the impact of
displacement across borders on world politics has taken on a new significance. One reason for this
political significance is the dramatic, uncontrollable and sudden nature of many refugee flows.
A new, and contested, category of forced or partly forced migrants, ‘environmentally induced
migration’, has in recent years been introduced as part of the climate change debate. It is clear that
migration will be an important option for individuals and societies in their responses to worsening
environmental conditions such as rising sea level, melting glaciers and desertification. Most climate
change models suggest that global warming causes more frequent extreme weather events, and there
are signs that environmental shocks (tsunamis, typhoons, earthquakes and other natural disasters) are
more frequently leading to sudden mass movements of people, although not usually across international
borders.
The significance of mass refugee flows in global politics is also due to the rise of the norm of
humanitarian intervention, most recently in the manifestation of a Responsibility to Protect. Since
the end of the Cold War, refugee movements have been frequently listed in the United Nations Security
Council as cause for international action due to ‘threat to international peace and security’.
The global political significance of refugees is also due to the challenges to sovereignty and border
control created by the legal framework of the international refugee regime, which asserts the right of
individuals to seek asylum and not to be returned to their home country if in danger of persecution (non-
refoulement). The vast majority of the world’s asylum seekers come from war-torn or repressive
countries.
Some scholars have been talking about a “global refugee crisis”. From around 20,000 asylum
applications in Europe in 1976, numbers peaked in the EU during the wars in the Balkans, with 667,770
applications in 1992, down to a still high 291,220 in 1998. After more than a decade of relatively low
asylum figures, numbers rose again from a low of 235,900 new asylum claims in 2010 to 570,800 in
2014, and to then explode in 2015, with 1.26 million new asylum claims.
International migration is not only a result of economic growth, but of economic inequality. Broadly
speaking international migrants travel from less developed countries to high-income countries, and from
repressive and unstable countries to more democratic, open ones. Immigration, then, could be seen as a
reflection of economic and political success.
Direction of flows – still mostly a regional phenomenon

The rise in asylum requests in the North in the 1990s is an example of how the direction of migration
flows is changing. Today a substantial number of the world’s migrants make their journey from the
Global South to the Global North. The change is particularly visible in Europe, which has gone from
a continent of emigration to one of immigration.
Most international migration, however, remains intra-regional. Even after the migration and refugee
crisis in Europe took off in the summer of 2015, more than half of the continent’s immigrants came
from other European countries. For Asia and Africa, more than 80% of migrants move within the region.
Syria’s destructive war shows how conflict often creates concentric circles of humanitarian need and
displacement, with asylum seekers who travel beyond their own region constituting a small minority of
everyone affected by the conflict. Before the 2015 Syrian influx, the only mass flows of refugees and
asylum seekers to European countries in the post-Cold War period have come from within the European
region: from the countries of the former Yugoslavia and, to a lesser extent, Russia.

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Responses to migration movements: migration management and control

In Western Europe, the steep rise in asylum applications in the early 1990s contributed to strong
electoral results for populist anti-immigrant and far-right parties in countries such as Austria,
Denmark, France,the Netherlands and Norway. Consequently, talking ‘tough on immigration’ has also
become a mainstream pursuit. During the 2015 migrant and refugee crisis in Europe, anti-immigrant
parties did well in elections across the continent, entering into government in some countries.
The past two decades have seen, in tandem with this political rise of anti-immigrant sentiments and
parties, a gradual tightening of legal migration routes across the Global North entailing harsher visa
regimes and stricter border controls. This has been particularly visible in the case of asylum systems,
where preventative (and punitive) measures against asylum seekers have taken a range of forms:
widespread use of detention centers (even for children); withdrawal of the right to work while
pending application outcomes; distribution of benefit payments in vouchers instead of money;
making family reunification slow and difficult; and even confiscating valuables belonging to asylum
seekers in order to pay for their upkeep. National measures to clamp down on unauthorized migration
can be seen as a series of ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ strategies with global effects, where each country
tries to make itself less attractive than its neighbor and thus shifts the burden of hosting refugees, asylum
seekers and unwanted migrants onto other states.
One way of avoiding this race to the bottom while managing immigration flows is through multilateral
cooperation and coordination, and particularly strengthening international migration (and forced
migration) management regimes and organizations. Migration issues are now routinely placed high on
the agendas of various regional and global institutions. However, an overarching international migration
regime is difficult to achieve, since states value control over their migration policies in order to be
flexible to adapt these to the changing demands of economic and political circumstances; the trend
towards unilateral, ‘each country for themselves’, versions of migration management and asylum
policies has strengthened in recent years, in tandem with the rise in migration and asylum seeker
numbers.
Despite several pre-existing EU-wide agreements on immigration, a joint border agency, and a Common
European Asylum System, the influx of over one million refugees and migrants in 2015 led to human
misery and chaotic scenes along the so-called ‘migrant trail’ and caused a political crisis within the
EU. While some countries, notably Germany and Sweden, decided to welcome refugees, most
others responded by closing borders and tightening already strict asylum rules. EU summit after
summit led to half-hearted agreements on ‘burden sharing’ and migration management, but with
widespread dissent and little practical impact. Instead of cooperation to manage the flows, Europe saw
a domino effect of events, as the unilateral decisions of one EU member state affected its neighbors,
which consequently instituted their own unilateral measures. The domino effect made the migration
flow harder to manage for the EU as a whole, and more arduous and dangerous for the migrants.
If a closely integrated region such as the EU struggles to cooperate on immigration policy, it is no
surprise that inter-regional cooperation between poorer migrant-sending and richer migrant-receiving
countries has also proven difficult to achieve. There have been several attempts at serious reform of the
refugee regime in the twenty-first century in order to achieve better burden sharing and deal more
efficiently and humanely with so called mixed flows of forced and economically motivated migration.
None of these efforts have had much success.
The pros and cons of international migration – why a backlash?

The focus has been on ‘irregular’ and ‘illegal’ migration, ‘bogus asylum seekers’, ‘mixed flows’ (of
refugees and economic migrants), people smuggling, trafficking and in general what has been termed
‘the criminalisation of migration’. With international terrorism added to this already heady mixture

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of concern and fear over migration, it can be argued that there has also been a partial securitization of
population movements.
Migration’s benefits: an uneven picture

It is not straightforward to determine the economic impact of migration, or to assess whether this impact
is mainly of a beneficial or harmful nature. This is partly because migration figures are not accurate, a
particular problem in the case of irregular migration: in 2014, IOM estimated that around 50 million, or
more than one fifth, of all international migrants were irregular. The difficulty is also due to the political
controversies surrounding immigration, which have made cost-benefits analyses often highly
politicized.
What is safe to say is that migration’s benefits are uneven, whether viewed from the perspective of
sending country or host country. Focusing on sending countries first, emigration can be a pressure valve
for countries such as Nigeria, Morocco and the Philippines with fast-growing and youthful populations
and high unemployment. But emigration can also hamper development. Since it is often the resourceful
and educated who take the leap, emigration can rob developing countries of their most valuable workers
and entrepreneurs (‘brain drain’).
Early research on remittances (trasferimenti di denaro) tended to dismiss their significance, suggesting
that they merely increase immediate consumption among the migrant’s family and relatives. Today it
is clear that remittances can have a strong developmental role. It is a capital flow mostly unhampered
by bureaucracy and corruption, which tends to improve nutrition, health and education among
recipients. Due to the size of remittance flows, the question of how to maximize their impact on
development is high on the research agenda of the World Bank, IOM and migration research centers
across the world.
The economic impact on migrants’ host countries is also uneven. In the UK, the anti-immigration think
tank Migration Watch released a controversial study in 2007 suggesting that the overall economic
contribution of immigrants to GDP per capita was almost negligible. It suggested that the very small
benefit to the host (or ‘native’) population was far outweighed by the social costs of migration on
‘already overburdened infrastructure, housing, health and schools’ and ‘an increasing impact on
employment and added strains on community cohesion’. Others argue that the UK economy would not
have boomed in the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s were it not for young and dynamic immigrants
working in a range of sectors from construction to banking and hospitals. The fact that even an anti-
immigration think tank could not find data to show an outright negative economic cost-benefit analysis
of migration is a sign that immigration into developed countries in most cases has an overall beneficial
economic impact on host economies. Research has also shown that migrants tend not to be ‘job
stealers’, but complement the domestic workforce by filling skills gaps, taking jobs locals do not want,
and adding vitality to the demographics of the otherwise rapidly aging populations of high-income
countries.
From identity concerns to national security

Concerns over immigration levels often relate to identity and culture as much as to the economy. As
many migrant-receiving countries continue to struggle with the aftermath of the global financial crisis
of 2008, security-related anxieties have been compounded by economic concerns and protectionist
instincts. Stagnating growth, and in some cases recession, has sharpened the sense of competition
between locals and new arrivals.
Mixed motives are not a prerogative of immigrants

It is difficult to separate out concerns raised by the economic, cultural/identity and national security
impact of migration. Cultural/identity fears provide a vaguely formulated but pervasive background

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atmosphere to more clearly articulated and specified concerns relating to the national security of the
state and the economic welfare of its citizens.
Conclusion: Immigration challenges and opportunities for twenty-first century world politics
Migration challenges are not likely to abate in the coming years. Immigration controls have gone some
way to reduce some inflows into some countries, but immigration correlates more strongly with
economic growth than with migration control policies. Near-complete immigration control in a world
with an increasingly globalized labor market is not possible without creating a politically authoritarian
and economically autarkic state disregarding both the rights of the individual and the logic of the market.
A combination of demographic trends and economic realities – as well as the entrenchment of human
rights – will ensure that international migration remains a central feature of world politics. Considering
the inequalities of the world economy, motivated individuals will continue to find ways to relocate to
improve their prospects. And most states acknowledge the importance of immigrants to their economies.
But migration can also constitute an economic cost, and can be a source of political instability and
communal tension. There is a risk that international frameworks for migration management and refugee
protection could buckle under the pressure of states’ short-term unilateral measures to curb influxes.
13. Consequences of Global Challenges: Populism
“Tribal World: Group Identity Is All.” - Amy Chua.
Tribal world - Group identity is all

Humans are tribal animals = necessity of belonging to a group since once people connect with it, their
identities can become powerfully bound to it.
U.S. analysts and policymakers usually focus on the role of ideology and economics and tend to see
nation-states as the most important units of organization. In doing so, they underestimate the role that
group identification plays in shaping human behavior. They also overlook the fact that, in many places,
the identities that matter most-the ones people will lay down their lives for, are not national but ethnic,
regional, religious, sectarian, or clan-based.
This blindness to the power of tribalism affects not only how Americans see the rest of the world but
also how they understand their own society. But tribalism remains a powerful force everywhere. To
truly understand today's world and where it is heading, one must acknowledge the power of tribalism.
Neurological studies confirm that group identity can even produce physical sensations of satisfaction.
Seeing group members prosper seems to activate our brains' "reward centers'' even if we receive no
benefit ourselves. Under certain circumstances, our reward centers can also be activated when we see
members of an out-group failing or suffering. Group bonding increases oxytocin levels, which spurs "a
greater tendency to demonize and dehumanize the out-group" and which physiologically "anesthetizes"
the empathy one might otherwise feel for a suffering person.
Identity over ideology

U.S. policymakers tend to view the world in terms of territorial nation-states engaged in political or
ideological struggle: capitalism versus communism, democracy versus authoritarianism. Such thinking
often blinds them to the power of more primal group identities.

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Ex. Vietnam war → the most humiliating defeat in US history. US policymakers underestimated the
extent to which Vietnamese people in both the North and the South were motivated by a quest for
national independence. They saw North Vietnam's communist regime as China's pawn. This was a
mistake of staggering proportions. Hanoi accepted military and economic support from Beijing, but it
was mostly an alliance of convenience, since for over a thousand years, most Vietnamese people had
feared and hated China, which had colonized it for a millenium. Washington also missed another ethnic
dimension of the conflict. In Vietnam, a deeply resented Chinese minority known as the Hoa made up
just one percent of the population but historically controlled as much as 80 percent of the country's
commerce and industry. Because U.S. policymakers completely missed the ethnic side of the conflict,
they failed to see that every wartime policy helped turn the local population against the United States.
Pashtun power
After the 9/11 attacks, the United States sent troops to Afghanistan to root out al Qaeda and overthrow
the Taliban. Washington viewed its mission entirely through the lens of "the war on terror," fixating on
the role of Islamic fundamentalism, and yet again missing the central importance of ethnic identity.
Afghanistan = complex ethnicity mix → Pashtun: the largest ethnic group that dominated the region
for more than 200 years. But the fall of the country's Pashtun monarchy in 1973, the 1979 Soviet
invasion, and the subsequent years of civil war upended Pashtun dominance.
In 1992, a coalition controlled by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks seized control. The taliban emerged a few
years later = it is not only an Islamist movement but also an ethnic movement. Pashtuns founded the
group, lead it, and make up the vast majority of its members
U.S. policymakers and strategists paid almost no attention to these ethnic realities. In October 2001,
when the United States invaded and toppled the Taliban government in just 75 days, it joined forces
with the Northern Alliance, led by Tajik and Uzbek warlords and widely viewed as anti-Pashtun. In the
new, U.S.-supported Afghan National Army, Tajiks made up 70 percent of the army's battalion
commanders, even though only 27 percent of Afghans are Tajik. Seventeen years after the United States
invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban still controls large parts of the country. Today, many American
academics and policy elites are aware of the ethnic complexities of Afghanistan.
Underestimating the political power of group identity also helped doom the U.S. war in Iraq. The
supporters of the 2003 U.S. invasion failed to see the depth of the divisions among Iraq's Shiites,
Sunnis, and Kurds, as well as the central importance of tribal and clan loyalties in Iraqi society. They
also missed the existence of a market-dominant minority. Sunnis had dominated Iraq for centuries, first
under Ottoman rule, then under the British, who governed indirectly through Sunni elites, and then
under Saddam Hussein (a sunni). Saddam favored Sunnis, especially those who belonged to his own
clan, and persecuted the country's Shiites and Kurds. On the eve of the U.S. invasion, the roughly 15
percent of Iraqis who were Sunni Arabs dominated the country economically, politically, and militarily.
By contrast, Shiites composed the vast majority of the country's urban and rural poor. At the time, a
small number of critics warned that under these conditions, rapid democratization in Iraq could be
profoundly destabilizing → democracy led to sectarian warfare, eventually giving rise to the so-called
Islamic State (also known as isis), an extremist Sunni movement as devoted to killing Shiite "apostates"
as it is to killing Western "infidels."
For the first time during the Iraq war, the U.S. military educated itself about the country's complex
sectarian and ethnic dynamics-recognizing. By forging alliances between Shiite and Sunni sheiks and
by pitting (opporre) moderates against extremists, the U.S. military achieved dramatic successes,
including a precipitous decline in sectarian violence and in casualties among Iraqis and U.S. troops
alike.

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The Trump tribe

Americans tend to think of democracy as a unifying force. But democracy under certain conditions
can actually catalyze group conflict. In recent years, the United States has begun to display destructive
political dynamics much more typical of developing and non-Western countries: the rise of
ethnonationalist movements, eroding trust in institutions and electoral outcomes, a popular backlash
against both "the establishment" and outsider minorities, and, above all, the transformation of
democracy into an engine of zero-sum political tribalism.
These developments are due in part to a massive demographic transformation. For the first time in
U.S. history, whites are on the verge of losing their status as the country's majority. When groups feel
threatened, they retreat into tribalism. In recent years, the United States may be seeing the emergence
of its own version of a market-dominant minority = "coastal elites”. Wealth in the United States is
concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people, most of whom live on the coasts. This
minority dominates key sectors of the economy, including Wall Street, the media, and Silicon Valley.
Although coastal elites do not belong to any one ethnicity, they are culturally distinct, often sharing
cosmopolitan values such as secularism, multiculturalism, toleration of sexual minorities, and pro-
immigrant and progressive politics. Like other market-dominant minorities, U.S. coastal elites are
extremely insular, interacting and intermarrying primarily among themselves.
2016 US elections = the rise of a populist movement in which demagogic voices called on "real"
Americans to "take our country back." In the United States, being anti- establishment is not the same as
being anti-rich. Poor, working-class, and middle-class Americans of all ethnicities hunger for the old-
fashioned American dream. When the American dream eludes them-even when it mocks them-they
would sooner turn on the establishment, or on the law, or on immigrants and other outsiders, or even on
reason, than turn on the dream itself.
Stemming the tribal tide

Political tribalism is fracturing the United States, transforming the country into a place where people
from one tribe see others as immoral. For tens of millions of working-class Americans, the traditional
paths to wealth and success have been cut off.
Americans’ status has become hereditary. More than ever before, achieving wealth in the United
States requires an elite education and social capital, and most lower-income families can't compete in
those areas. Political tribalism thrives under conditions of economic insecurity and lack of
opportunity. For hundreds of years, economic opportunity and upward mobility helped the United
States integrate vastly different peoples more successfully than any other nation. The collapse of upward
mobility in the United States should be viewed as a national emergency.
But U.S. citizens will also need to collectively fashion a national identity capable of resonating with
and holding together Americans of all sorts → Public service program that would encourage or
require young Americans to spend a year after high school in another community, far from their
own, interacting with people with whom they would normally never cross paths.
Increasing tribalism is not only an American problem, Variants of intolerant tribal populism are erupting
all across Europe.
Chapter 9: Nationalism and Identity
In the nineteenth century, nationalism was an important historical force in the developed world,
combining nation-states with a national economy that formed a building block of the world economy;

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similarly, national liberation movements after 1945 played a progressive function as they were
unificatory, internationalist (in opposing ethnic tribalism) and emancipatory. However, the rise of the
European Union (EU) and a host IOs such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank show the limits of state sovereignty in the contemporary world. Its goals of making political and
ethnographic boundaries are unrealizable in a world of global economic disruptions and mass migration.
Nationalism and nation-states in historical context

According to Held’s conceptualization of globalization, this phenomenon has long preceded the era of
nationalism, whether we have in mind frameworks of markets, empires or religious civilizations.
Indeed, as nationalists emerged during the nineteenth century within these broader frameworks, they
struggled to form often scattered populations into solidary nations and nation-states. Because of this
challenging environment, to secure their goals of creating distinctive and united homeland and self-
governing populations, nationalists have needed, from early on, to muster networks beyond the
territorial state.
Nations not only originated within global networks and processes; they can be said to be in part
products of such processes, and draw on older historical experiences derived from them to negotiate
external threats. Because populations can be subject over time to many such experiences, nations tend
to have multiple and layered pasts which frame their often competing concepts of homeland,
geopolitics, friend–foe relations, cultural exclusiveness and historical destiny that orient their policies
in the present.
There has never been a golden age of nation-states. Nation-state formation coincided with the
expansion of transnational capitalism, and the permeability of state frontiers to the movement of
goods, capital and people. The era of national states was marked by extensive immigrations and the
largest emigrations in European history. Recurring economic dislocations led to rival internationalist
ideologies (revolutionary socialism) and imperial competition between the great powers led to crises
such as world wars, class revolutions (e.g. Bolshevik) and further population movements, resulting in a
sense of threat to national territory, identity, solidarity or independence.
When we consider the role of nationalism in world politics, we have to recognize that warfare has been
one of the fundamental catalysts of nation-state formation and of the current international state system,
and that the world of nation-states is recent. The shift from a world of empire to one of purportedly
nation-states came about through ‘waves of war’ between imperial powers, in which the language of
national self-determination was employed by rival sides to encourage national and ethnic minorities
to revolt against their imperial rulers, producing paranoia, ethnic persecutions and genocide.
The Charter of the UN outlawed war between states, except under special circumstances, and truncated
the right of self-determination, now redefined in statist terms to refer to the rights of political units to
maintain their territorial integrity without external interference.
Contemporary nationalism and security issues

The world wars might seem to represent the end of the European nation-states as sovereign actors after
the loss of empire and the rise of the US and the USSR as superpowers of continental scale and
proponents of rival universalist ideologies. Recoiling from the experiences of total war, blamed on
nationalist rivalries between the great powers, the major European states formed the EU with the aim
of converting the continent into a zone of peace and democratic progress. This revulsion against
nationalism has been accompanied by a rapid decline in expenditures devoted to the military and rise
in those geared towards social welfare.
Western nation-states continue to wage war, and in spite of the overhang of imperial guilt have felt
required to engage in many overseas interventions when confronted by the security problems of many
of the new postcolonial states in Africa and Asia that have a global reach. The collapse of Soviet bloc

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in the 1990s inspired hopes of a harmonious new world order, but it triggered state disintegration and
ethnic cleansings in the Balkans and elsewhere that produced waves of refugees that destabilized
surrounding states. It is argued that peacekeeping wars of international coalitions are unlike the
previous existential conflicts that inspired mass nationalist passions: they're wars of choice not of
national defense.
The security problems are in large part provoked by the proliferation of intrastate conflicts in the rest
of the world (new wars), which fragment states into ethnic units. Internal struggles cannot be described
as civil wars since there is little concept of state, citizenship or borders. These are identity wars where
ethnic classifications are used by predatory leaders as a means of subverting the state or in the process
of achieving (communal) ethnic cleansing.
A problem facing Western governments in a post-imperial world is the growing suspicion of the military
narratives of Western nation-states and an awareness of the victims of war that erodes the heroic ethos
on which collective sacrifice for the nation depends. King has observed that military press releases set
the dead as individuals closely knit to families and bound by professional loyalties to soldier comrades.
This erosion of a sense of national collective is increased by the recent multicultural character of
Western societies, whose composition is shaped by immigrants from former colonies who tend to
be critical of heroic imperial progress stories → cult of victimhood
After 1945, as they entered or re-entered an international order governed by human rights norms,
many new (and not so new) states with compromised pasts struggled to overcome pariah status in the
international community and faced pressures to confess to events that threatened to contaminate key
founding myths.
Although all this suggests that national identity and state formation are being transformed in much of
the world, there is little evidence that they are being eroded in the security area. Power politics allied to
nationalism continues in large parts of the world; whereas memories of the Second World War
encouraged a politics of reconciliation in Western Europe, in Asia the perceived unwillingness of
Japanese governments to apologize for war crimes has heightened nationalist tensions with Korea and
China, expressed in territorial disputes over the Senkaku islands.
International coalitions, in spite of their difficulties, can strengthen national identities, and
international military action may reinforce the salience of nationalism as a legitimating force. Coalitions
create significant challenges for militaries: the problems of divided commands and separate forces
answering to national governments. But they may also strengthen national identifications among their
publics, for example when invidious comparisons are made with the contributions of other nations or
when complaints are made that their nation is being drawn into an unnecessary conflict by a hegemonic
power.
It is by no means obvious that overt great power nationalism has been banished from international
politics. The new post-Soviet context is of an increasingly multipolar world (rather like the long
nineteenth century) in which we find a series of powerful states building their militaries to challenge
US hegemony. Outside the great states, the politics of victimhood may reinforce nationalist claims.
Claims of victimhood have been taken up by the powerless, by indigenous peoples, descendants of
former slaves and survivors of genocide, appealing to international ‘public opinion’ to press Western
governments into a recognition and redress of grievances.
Constructing one’s nation as a victim can also be a ploy of political elites to divert popular attention
from poor performances. Eg. African nationalists cited centuries of European intervention in Africa
from the time of the slave trade to later colonization to excuse their inability to meet the expectations
of their populations and to obtain as recompense foreign aid from the West; same with the China and
its concept of ‘a century of humiliation’. Such self-victimization tends to reinforce exclusive ethnic

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conceptions of nationality. Populations which perceive themselves as victims are often blind to the
oppressed status of other groups.
Nationalism, non-military challenges and global institutions

What of other global challenges to the nation-state in the contemporary world? Of these there are many:
capitalism, environmental dangers, identity politics, post-nuclear geopolitics… As Michael Mann
observes, few networks extending beyond the territory of the nation-state are truly global. Most are
transnational, international or macroregional.
Global and transnational institutions play a more important role in setting the rules of the game in
world affairs. There appear to be two caveats to this. The first is the example of a regional organization
like the EU that seems to be increasingly eroding the economic autonomy of European nation-states. A
second caveat is the relative weakness of many postcolonial states in the face of global pressures.
So far there is little evidence of a global consciousness superseding national interests; rather, national
interests are being secured through multiple global (and regional) agencies. In this regard, small-to-
medium-sized powers such as Ireland, Australia and Sweden view participation in organizations such
as the UN as an effective means of achieving their national goals. Successive Secretary-Generals have
looked for support to NGOs, as embodiments of an emerging global civil society, to advance the causes
of peace and development, which has caused an explosion of transnational agencies (such as NGOs,
scientific networks) pressing nation-states on environmental and human rights issues.
The great powers such as the US and China show no willingness to subordinate national interests to
‘world opinion’. The rise of international institutions has made the political games of national elites
more complex rather than subsuming them into larger entities. National actors can play off different
levels of power in order to maximize their autonomy. In turn, political elites also use national interest
arguments to persuade populations to support measures of economic globalization.
The difficulties of operating on different political levels may intensify nationalism: Tønnessen suggests
that as state elites become preoccupied with the global or the regional stage, they are likely to alienate
themselves from their national societies and to face nationalist challengers from below, as we see from
the rise of populist nationalism in Europe. The very capture of rule-making global institutions by
Western nation-states, particularly after the Soviet collapse, has reinforced nationalism in the states of
the developing world. For them globalization is associated with Americanization, that is to say with
covert nationalist and neo-imperialist agendas that create further stratifications between rich and poor.
The enabling conditions of a Western-dominated global order, already under challenge, now seem to
be fading even before the current financial crisis, which some have viewed as (economic) de-
globalization.
Chapter 16: Democracy’s Meaning, Progress and Recession
Democracy, in a mainstream understanding, involves the recruitment of state position holders and the
making of public policies in ways that allow participation by, and promote accountability to, ordinary
citizens. There have been some “waves” of democracy (Huntington) globally in the 20th century, but
the first forms of democracy appeared during the European Enlightenment.
What is democracy?
Modern democracy has principally been understood by scholars in two competing ways: a mainstream
‘procedural’ view and a more critical ‘substantive’ one. Procedural democracy emphasizes the civil
liberties by which citizens confront governments and the competitive elections by which citizens fill
state positions, then afterward hold governments accountable. It gives priority, then, to institutions and

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processes, while remaining agnostic over the policy outcomes that result. In sharp contradistinction,
substantive democracy privileges social equality between classes, ethnic communities, genders, and
other forms of identity and affiliation. It gains expression through idioms of ‘social’, ‘economic’, and
‘industrial’ democracy. In this view, policy outcomes that promote equality across multiple social
cleavages take precedence over any regularized institutions and processes.
Social equality may be a precondition for democracy, or it may follow as a policy outcome, but equality
and democracy cannot be the same thing. Accordingly, in mostly reaching consensus, analysts of
democracy and democratic change today hold that a procedural understanding of democracy is best.
Civil liberties include free speech, press and assembly, enabling citizens to communicate freely, then
organize in pursuit of their interests and causes. Elections, meanwhile, must be free, fair, regularly held,
and meaningful, promoting accountability.
Democratic preconditions and motivations

Democracy’s functioning requires that participation strikes a fine balance between vigorous
competition and restraint. Accordingly, politicians, political parties, civil society organizations and
social movements compete over state positions and policy outcomes, though not at all costs. Winners
must display magnanimity after claiming office, while losers prepare to compete another day. This rare
configuration of ‘restrained partisanship’ led scholars to investigate the preconditions that might
underpin democracy’s complex sets of institutions and procedures. These included appropriate
historical legacies, past experience with democracy, social structures, developmental levels,
institutional designs and cultural outlooks.
In examining the social structures deemed necessary for democracy, theorists have mainly peered
through the lenses of socio-economic classes and ethnicity. According to modernization theorists,
urban middle classes were more crucial than the bourgeoisie. Uplifted by general prosperity and made
confident by their business and professional dealings, members of the middle class sought to extend
their independent decision making from their private pursuits to political life. This led them to support
political parties and join civil society organizations in ways that enabled them to hold governments
accountable.
According to others, it is the industrial working classes that are the most reliable democratizing agent.
Organized into powerful trade unions and seeking representation in government in order to improve
welfare for themselves, workers drive democracy by pressing for democratic concessions from the
government and the capital-owning classes who often collude with one another.
Ethnicity too lacks any straightforward impact on democracy’s prospects. In societies in which multiple
ethnic communities reside, democracy was stronger due to the dense mosaic of impenetrable ethnic
redoubts and cultural baffles that resisted any systematic intrusiveness of state power.
A less ambiguous thesis, then, first proposed by Seymour Martin Lipset (1959), focuses on
developmental levels and democratic outcomes. Put simply, it contends that as societies grow richer,
better educated, and more differentiated, ascriptive hierarchies and patterns of deference begin to break
down, encouraging social groups, especially middle classes, to grow more participatory. Usually parsed
as modernization theory, this expectation, along with its more contemporary refinements, has been
enormously influential.
Given the ambiguities that haunt the search for democracy’s preconditions, political science seemed to
abandon it, at least for a time. To be sure, the causal connection between high levels of development
and democracy are robust.
How does democratic change take place?

With legacies and structures seemingly indeterminant, leading democracy theorists shifted attention to
the contingent choices of national leaders and elites. They assessed the patterns by which elites

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interacted with one another (whether in restrained or warlike ways) and the appeals through with elites
sought constituencies (either galvanizing or under-mobilizing in tenor). A vast new literature
accumulated that came informally to be called transitology: ‘there is no transition whose beginning is
not the consequence – direct or indirect – of important divisions within the authoritarian regime itself’.
Focusing intently, then, on inter-elite relations, a new vocabulary emerged that included hardliners and
soft-liners in the authoritarian coalition, engaging with minimalists and maximalists in opposition
parties and movements. Further, in tracing the ways by which the coalition unraveled, ‘popular
upsurge’ set in, and as democratic change unfolded researchers identified patterns of top-down
‘transformation’ (as in Spain and Brazil), bottom-up replacement (Portugal, the Philippines and
Indonesia) and a more evenly negotiated process that Huntington termed ‘transplacement’.
Some constraining conditions were gradually discovered. In particular, the pathways by which
democratic change took place were tracked back to the distinctive forms of authoritarian rule from
which they had emerged. By contrast, under personal dictatorships, with strongmen having so
personalized the state apparatus and world of business, they had no counterpart to the barracks to which
they might safely retreat. Under personal dictatorships, then, it is only through bottom-up replacement
that democratic change can take place.
Finally, single-party and single-party dominant systems, while often resilient, lack the blunt coercive
capacity of militaries. Hence, where economic crisis or societal pressures loom large, they may be
willing, though grudgingly, to cede state power. They may even be positively incentivized by the fact
that in contrast to personal dictatorships, they possess party organizations that may, through competitive
elections, win back a stake in any democratic order.
New attention was given to executive and legislative institutions, with parliamentary systems of
representation seen to better perpetuate democracy than presidential ones can. Governance reforms were
also heavily canvassed, in a quest for rule of law and transparency. State capacity was re-examined as
scholars discovered that democracy’s persistence in late-developing countries depended partly on
economic performance.
Transitology, then, while once having been expected to flow logically and seamlessly into the study of
democracy’s consolidation (‘consolidology’), spawned a new subset of investigation into
authoritarianism’s durability and even its resurgence.
As debates over democratization continued to shift away from elites, they began also to address the
variegated terrain of civil society. In particular, scholars focused on the ways in which its political
activists coordinated direct action strategies, raised political education and levels of mobilization, and
then, in turning to political society, filled the interstices between opposition parties in order to
effectively cement new coalitions. Additionally, while the study of democratic transitions had long been
conducted in domestic arenas, attention spread to external factors. Further, as ever more countries
democratized during the third wave, this in itself seemed to give impetus to democratic change in yet
other countries.
Can democracy be globalized?

In an increasingly global economy, international investment flows, production chains, trading networks
and economic shocks have concentrated decisional power in a few financial and regulatory nodes.
Power has thus been shifted out of the hands of sovereign governments, rendering elections – and
citizens who vote in them – nearly pointless. Moreover, in combating the cross-national problems that
more globalized activities create, many more international or regional organizations need to be formed.
Observers have thus noted the need for regulatory and enforcement agencies whose authority effectively
supersedes that of particular governments and national borders.
But as multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the
World Trade Organization (WTO) are joined by an array of new regulatory agencies, questions grow

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over how to maintain popular sovereignty in this new and complex setting. Organizations and
movements of what is sometimes called global civil society have taken up this call, sometimes through
direct action, mounting mass protests at the venues where multilateral institutions have met.
Mechanisms for increasing the responsiveness and accountability of multilateral institutions and
regional agencies have been imaginatively proposed, but have been described as utopian. Dahl notes
that even in established democracies, citizens are rarely able to influence their government’s conduct
of foreign affairs.
Does democracy make a difference?

Even where democratic change has taken place, avoiding the pitfalls of globalization and the setbacks
inherent to recession, questions are regularly raised over whether it makes any difference in ordinary
people’s lives. On one level, democracy’s worth seems clear. In respecting the civil liberties of
individuals and social groups, while registering the choices of citizens through elections, democracy
allows for what is commonly cast as popular sovereignty, therein raising human dignity in ways that
authoritarian regimes cannot. More broadly, in its respect for due process and human rights, democracy
spares citizens the arbitrary detention and extrajudicial killings that so frequently characterize coercive
authoritarian rule. Democracy may in concrete ways advance ‘human security’ too; also at the global
level, democracy may contribute to more ordinary security (democratic peace).
Democracy theorists responded to some cases of degenerating democracies with a new research agenda
on consolidation, trying to weave notions of regime stability and quality into their conceptualization.
In addressing stability, lengthy investigation was conducted into requisite elite-level attitudes,
supportive mass-level outlooks, and appropriate institutional design, with something between 10 and
14 years of continuous functioning, as well as two government turnovers, as indicative.
Democratic recession?
Where democratization has taken place, it has rarely broken down. Diamond provides a list of
some 25 cases of democratic breakdown between 2000 and 2014 (Russia, Ecuador, Bolivia…). He
explains that few of them, though, have involved out-right military coups. Rather, breakdowns have
mostly been instigated by democratically elected executives who, as their terms unfold, resort to such
abuses and manipulations – sometimes to the point of jailing and killing – that institutions are
‘desecrated’ and opposition is ‘suffocated’. Even so, abusive executives usually stop short of instituting
the tightly closed dictatorships seen in the past. Instead, as they have grown ‘more resourceful and
sophisticated’, they have learned to use some of the tools of democracy in order substantively to avoid
democracy, producing a range of ‘hybrid regimes’. For example, under what Andreas Schedler
conceptualizes as ‘electoral authoritarianism’, executives who at heart are autocratic hold regular
elections, but they have truncated civil liberties beforehand, thereby hindering opposition parties from
contesting effectively. In these cases, then, executives have borrowed or retained some of the elements
of democracy in order substantially to avoid it. Of course, even under conditions of electoral
authoritarianism, governments have, in underestimating the intensity of societal discontents, sometimes
been ‘stunned’ by the results of the elections they have held; these defeats can in themselves amount to
democratic change, thereby producing yet another pathway of transition that has been conceptualized
as democratization-by-election. But even after democratization takes place, some social groups,
especially those based in new urban middle classes, sometimes grow alienated with the democracies
that follow.
Against this backdrop of mounting impatience over democracy’s functioning, autocratically minded
executives and some middle-class citizens have been drawn to alternatives, chief among them the
‘rationalized authoritarianism’ (eg. China). With its high growth rates and rising level of

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development, China has set a powerful example of what can be achieved despite, or perhaps even
because of, its deepening suppression of civil liberties and political freedoms.
Today’s democratic recession seems unlikely to re-flower in any fourth wave of democracy. The
Arab Spring, in all the countries that it swept save Tunisia, has bred even harsher dictatorships than
those it replaced or, as in Libya and Yemen, has only brought chaos. Still, surveys have shown that
citizens around the world report that they find democracy, however they might conceptualize it, to be
the best form of political regime.
14. Consequences of Global Challenges: Changing Balance of Power
Chapter 3 – Power and Rising Power
Power is defined as the ability of the possessor to cause the object of that power to do something it
would not otherwise do; in the anarchical international system, it means the way by which differences
between states are resolved.
One of the constants of international relations is the need to influence one another: the anarchy of the
international system is the result of the status of sovereignty as the system’s primary value as the way
to ensure the ability of states to pursue those conditions most important to them, their vital national
interests. This creates the need to promote and protect the state from its adversaries and adversarial
situations: the dynamic for self-protection and self-promotion is self-help.
Self-help can create adversary situations and the only solution is the concession or engagement in a
compromise; the operative element of self-help is the ability to get someone to do something they
would not do.
Power is an elusive concept: traditional realists use the term in various ways to include its defined
dynamic and as a means to categorize both states and the likely outcome of interchanges between
sovereign states in power-related situations. Power may take on numerous forms, one of which is
military force, but it is not immutable: military force lets, through the years, more space to economic
force. Despite many attempts to minimize the role of power, in order to promote other approaches to
the problem, the role of power remains at the base of much international interchange.
There are three concerns linked to power:
1. The nature of power in application: the distinction between power as a concrete attribute
that can be measured and power as a relationship between parties. As a concrete attribute allows
the observer to compare the relative “amount” of power, through indicators and measures, two
parties possess so that one can predict how a power confrontation will turn out in advance, but it is
not always satisfactory. One succeeds in getting someone to do something they would prefer not to
do because of intangible, non-measurable factors such as comparative will and importance; the
application of power also tends to be situation-specific.
2. The instruments of power: tools to maximize ability to exercise power are known as
instruments of national power: they are the physical attributes that states use to persuade others;
these instruments can be diplomatic, economic or military. Diplomatic power is based on the
quality and persuasiveness of a country’s diplomatic corps, the attractiveness of its political profile
and positions on important issues and the standing and respect others have for a country’s leaders,
but also on the ability to deploy instruments in support of diplomatic and political efforts. Economic
power is the availability and willingness to use economic rewards and deprivations to gain

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compliance with a country’s demands. Military power involves the threat or actual use of military
force to help achieve a country’s goals. In addition, Cybersecurity and warfare represent a case
in point of an instrument of power.
3. Typologies of states (linked to power reputation): there is a ranking of states based on their
power: super-powers, major-powers (leaders in the region), medium and minor or lesser
powers. Status as a power is also considered in terms of whether a state’s relative power is on the
decline or ascendancy.
What is a rising power? A country that because of increased military, economic, or other power, is
playing or has the potential to play an increasingly prominent role in the international system. Rising
powers change the relative power balance between the major powers; the degree and extent to which
rising powers challenge the given order depends to a great degree on the areas in which the rising powers
seek to influence the existing order and establish their own places.
Traditionally, world power was military in content, but power status is not unidimensional: there is
economic capability. The impact of rising states creates foreign policy questions for countries affected
by the rising power: the basic question is whether the impact will help or hinder the realization of
interests of the affected power; changes are never entirely clear in advance. The contemporary period
produces uncertainty for two reasons: one is that judgments about rising states are based mostly upon
economic projections, and these are inherently difficult and uncertain. The second source is that the
current crop of rising powers is drawn from the developing world: we do not know how they will
handle increased affluence internally and how they will project expanded status on the world stage is
uncertain.
The case of China: the world’s oldest continuous civilization began to reemerge in the late 1970s when
Deng Xiaoping implemented his famous “Four Modernizations” campaign to build a stronger and
more modern country. Now China is the greatest challenger to American economic primacy.
Because of its physical and population size, China cannot avoid being a major power, but the self-
imposed isolation bred stagnation. The country is not well blessed with natural resources: it has the
world's largest reserves of shale oil and gas, but Chinese lack the hydraulic fracturing technology to
mine; it also lacks significant sizable traditional petroleum reserves and that is why it is very active in
the Middle East and in the South China Sea. China’s only sizable energy resource is highly polluting
coal.
Most of the Chinese population lives in the eastern part of the country, which is also the most
economically developed area; its population is the largest in the world: population growth rate is 0.45
percent, life expectancy has extended to 73.5 years. China’s future lay in economic reform: it built an
economic system that borrowed heavily from the capitalist West but retained some of the traditional
trappings of the communist PRC, and this was the first modernization. The second and third
modernizations were industry plus science and technology, which led to investment, foreign know-
how, special economic zones, ecc…; the fourth modernization was the military one.
China’s economic ascent is influenced by litany of domestic woes: its internal preoccupations include
a mounting political crisis of regime legitimacy, population pressures, corruption, ecc…
Analysts critical of the notion that China poses a threat often point to factors in Chinese development
that limit the threats China could pose:
1. The first is demographic and points to the extremely uneven character of Chinese development
the aging population (reduced workforce) and the politico-economic problem (bargain between
people and the CCP);
2. The second is the natural resource crisis: most of the energy generated by China comes from
the burning of highly polluting coal (air pollution problem), there is a problem linked to water

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(China is a water-deficient country), shale oil and natural gas exploitation involves the highly
polluting use of extraordinarily large amounts of water.
China’s economy is rivalling the economies of the world’s major powers in sheer size. Most of that
growth resulted from manufacturing consumer goods that require little scientific contribution from
China and much of it is based on artificially controlled low labour costs used to achieve comparative
advantage. The result is surpluses from foreign sales but that does not add to the vibrancy of China’s
innovative sector and thus its potential for future technologically based growth. Labour pool will have
to be addressed in terms of things such as human services and this will produce a significant burden.
There are barriers to trends of the recent past, while a dimension China is interested in is foreign policy;
China must become a world political power as well and it has two major problems:
1. Problem regarding the DPRK linked to its possible collapse and the reunification under the
regime of South Korea opposed because it would place a potentially adversarial regime on its
borders and because of the migration of Korean communists into China.
2. The other problem is the South China Sea, because of trade routes and of the oil beneath the
surface.
Chapter 2: Ways of War in the Twenty-First Century
Any idea that war had gone away after the end of the Cold War proved illusory. Throughout the 1990s,
civil and ethnic wars proliferated across the globe. These ‘new wars’, characterized by ethnic
cleansing, identity politics and endemic violence, demanded (even military) action on humanitarian
grounds. It was immediately apparent, though, that the Western powers preferred to not engage with
these wars directly and sought to avoid military action, especially after the ill-fated US intervention in
Somalia in 1993 (“Mogadiscio’s lesson”). However, when bloody conflict erupted in both Rwanda and
in the Balkans, intervention appeared imperative, not out of limited state interest but out of
humanitarianism.
Civilian casualties have always formed part of the ugly tapestry of war. Yet by the end of the twentieth
century, civilians, as opposed to ‘regular’ troops, were unquestionably bearing the brunt of conflict. The
events of 9/11 transformed the context of war. Rather than forgetting war, states such as the US and the
UK proved enthusiastic for military action against not just those who had perpetrated the terrorist attacks
but those deemed unsettling to international order and Western interests. Hence, with the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, a traditional type of warfare returned. The ‘9/11 wars’ as they were dubbed did not
prove easy because, as we go on to argue, these wars were, despite expectations, in essence ‘new’ wars.
The insurgents in Iraq and in Afghanistan have transformed these wars into the type of quagmire where
troops encounter the brutality of not just insurgency but endemic violence waged by a confusing and
ever-changing variety of substate actors. The disintegration of Iraq in particular after Western
intervention has provided the breeding ground for ISIS, multiple militias and criminal gangs.
How did it happen? The evolution of the interaction of liberal states with these new wars can be broken
down into five rough phases:
1. the early 1990s witnessed an uneasy confrontation with the new wars
2. around the turn of the millennium, the combination of growing humanitarian sentiment
encouraging action and the seemingly endless possibilities a possible solution was suggested:
that of humanitarian wars fought at a distance
3. the early stages of the 9/11 wars witnessed the return of more traditional forms of war and a
keen awareness of the utility of force, so humanitarian intervention seemed to be replaced by

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short, sharp, effective wars of national interest (or alliance solidarity) prompted by conventional
motivations relating to state security
4. Western forces found themselves caught up in the wars they had spent the 1990s trying to keep
at a distance
5. involved a retreat from putting ‘boots on the ground’ and a reversion to the trend of the late
1990s
After more than a decade of war and increasing casualties on all sides this has led to an emergent
paradigm that we dub ‘war at a distance’. The hope is to keep ‘boots off the ground’ and find
alternative ways of countering and killing opponents. This trend is exemplified by the widespread use
of drones and has become characteristic of the second Obama Administration, by the reluctance to
commit ‘ordinary’ troops and utilize instead strategic and tactical bombing as well as an overt
encouragement of rebel groups. The way of war is now increasingly defined by military action at a
distance, we will continue to see at least two contradictory trends in war. This is, first, that liberal powers
are loath to sacrifice service personnel and, second, that opponents increasingly find novel ways to
exploit the technology gap and the weak spots of democratic states. One important characteristic of this
is that opponents now refuse to stay ‘in theater’ to be hunted down and killed.
New wars
While the end of the Cold War did not bring about the kind of ‘New World Order’ which the first
President Bush envisaged, it certainly marked the closing chapter of the old order. Nuclear stalemate
and conventional war in Europe quickly seemed outdated.
These new conflicts, also labeled as “destructured”, displayed a disturbing mix of characteristics:
● seemingly inconclusive and intractable
● often identity-based
● a mixture of old and new, primitive and modern
● more guerrilla raids and massacres than set-piece confrontations between clearly identifiable
armed groups
● battle lines were blurred with high levels of collusion between supposed antagonists
● violence was often directed at civilians in the form of massacre, mutilations and rape
● child soldiers, mercenaries, arms dealers and criminal gangs all littered the landscape of these
conflicts
The pressure from the western population to “do something” in those conflict areas grew by seeing
images of suffering in the media. Humanitarian actors flooded into these zones of conflict: aid
workers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), peacekeepers, provided a distinctive feature of the
1990s wars. But military and political responses remained uncertain in these ‘wars amongst the people’.
Peacekeeping and intervention proved problematic as was witnessed both with the US intervention in
Somalia and the obvious failure of will to defend the people of Srebrenica during the Balkan Wars, but
the perils of doing nothing were laid bare in Rwanda when around a million people were slaughtered.
So, the West ignored new wars for the most part, largely dismissing them as the atavistic eruptions
of innate tribalism in the Third World or seeing them as unconnected to their own strategic concerns.
However, a number of trends evident through the 1990s prompted policymakers to shape a response to
the chaos apparently continuing unabated around the globe. Humanitarian wars were fought with
financial cost but little or no risk to Western soldiers, utilizing the latest technology and satisfying a
mounting urge to respond to the slaughter (“risk-free but effective warfare.”): this response remained
highly selective.
The 9/11 wars

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The phrase ‘war on terror’ is not one that was dreamt up by George W. Bush. It was used as early as
the nineteenth century to refer to fighting attempts by anarchists to assassinate political leaders. After
the attacks of 9/11, President Bush, however, resurrected the term and argued that the ‘war on terror’
would begin with the group which had perpetrated 9/11, al-Qaeda, but would be accompanied by a
wider war against the enemies of the United States. This wider war was used not just to justify the use
of military force in Afghanistan and Iraq but also underpinned a series of controversial activities (eg.
use of torture at detention facilities in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba).
Afghanistan and Iraq were purportedly wars of necessity. In both cases, the agility, flexibility and
superiority of Western military forces in defeating a regular enemy was displayed. Yet, in both arenas
the nature of the wars evolved. In Iraq, the ‘descent into chaos’ was relatively rapid. Meanwhile, in
Afghanistan the Taliban which had indeed been ejected from Kabul was infiltrating provinces in the
south and east of the country. What had started and continued from the 1990s as wars waged with air
power, special forces and general ‘shock and awe’ rapidly turned into arenas of civil war, insurgency
and overt and covert intervention by other powers such as Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Iraq and Afghanistan

Events in both Iraq and Afghanistan did not play out according to the script. What were meant to be
post-conflict state-building scenarios typified by gradual stabilization and democratic consolidation
moved in the opposite direction. Iraq was beset by the bewildering specters of sectarian strife, death
squads, beheadings, suicide attacks and wholesale human rights abuses. In essence, new wars had
arrived in these two countries. Of course, the 9/11 wars were also fuelled by resistance to perceived
occupation, but this only served to heighten passions. Western forces, finding themselves embroiled in
conflicts they did not fully understand, searched for solutions in works that had barely been dusted off
since the 1970s; these were the classics of counter-insurgency.
The subsequent Iraq surge between 2006 and 2008 became, at the time, the exemplar of how to fight
modern war. An important point is that whatever gains it achieved were ultimately offset by the
political decision to withdraw troops completely in 2011. This gave the new leaders of Iraq space and
opportunity to reverse many of the policies instituted during the surge, thus alienating the Sunni
population. This in turn provided the fertile ground for the emergence and rise of the Islamic State
(IS) group, which established a grip on parts of Iraq and Syria as well as gaining a foothold in
Afghanistan, Yemen and India.
Counter-insurgency is certainly not for the faint-hearted and the twin surges of Iraq in 2006 and
Afghanistan in 2009–2010 suggested that the war-at-a-distance, risk-free paradigm of the 1990s had
been discarded and ‘real’ war had returned.
The death of COIN (counter-insurgency)

In Afghanistan, by 2005, the war was problematic on a number of counts and by the time that President
Obama was elected there was a widespread view that the US was, if not losing that war, then certainly
not winning it. The Taliban and associated insurgent groups had proved resilient, resourceful and
operationally flexible. Indeed, it had become a ‘smarter insurgent’ force. Rather than engaging in large-
scale assaults on foreign forces, the targets were changed to smaller, more vulnerable enclaves. These
tactics proved lethal with the widespread use of roadside bombs and suicide missions. The american
response was to build institutions at the national and at the subnational level designed primarily to win
the population over to the government by providing civilians with enhanced security and better services.
Counter-insurgency in the Afghan theater, despite the much vaunted experience of the Americans and
British, certainly proved unable to bring about easy victories. Indeed, after more than ten years, the
decision to ‘draw down’ troops in Afghanistan demonstrated that the Western powers preferred not to
prolong the presence of boots on the ground.

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It was clear that a genuine appetite for counter-insurgency had diminished. This was evidenced by the
increasing reliance on force protection, a retreat into fortified outposts, the use of drones, special forces
and private military corporations.
Drone chic
Drones were initially used for reconnaissance purposes, but began to be increasingly used in combat
missions after President Bush’s Secret Memorandum of Notification authorized the CIA to kill members
of al-Qaeda in what was rather quaintly termed ‘anticipatory self-defence’. The introduction of
unmanned systems transforms the very agent of war, rather than just its capabilities. The growing
sophistication of drone technology and the increasing use of it promote the assumption among many
that drones are adding to the ‘dehumanization of war’. There can be “collateral damage” as a result
of drone strikes because technology is not always good at sorting out the combatant wheat from the
non-combatant chaff.
The utilization of drones provides an excuse that, although wars may be ‘lost’ and original political
objectives unfulfilled, somehow drones deliver what could not be accomplished through conventional
war and the deployment of militaries: the defeat of the enemy. Drones can indeed kill people in
increasing numbers but do little to address the underlying causes of conflict or the attraction of the
terrorist cause. In fact although it may be possible to decapitate the leadership of insurgent groups in
the short term, in most insurgent groups there are many others willing to take the place of those killed
or assassinated precisely because the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people have not been won.
As David Kilcullen, one of the most astute contemporary commentators on counter-terrorism, pointed
out, drone strikes often ‘giv[e] rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the
extremists’: he argues that the political costs of using the technology may well outweigh any military
benefits. With the constant evolution of military technology, we’re starting to talk of “post human
war”, with drones that will be completely autonomous and not controlled by remote operators.
Blowback (contraccolpo, ripercussioni)

There is a palpable sense of exhaustion and frustration among policymakers and soldiers in the West.
Yet, as the 1990s demonstrated, withdrawal and inaction are hardly options in an era when Western
populations – confronted daily with media reports of conflict around the world – demand their
representatives intervene to put a halt to injustice, suffering and violence.
We’re assisting to a decline in the number of civil and ethnic conflicts over the last two decades.
However, a number of developments suggest the West cannot wave goodbye to the new wars this
century just yet. The observed decline in the number of conflicts cannot hide the burning reality of the
many new wars that rage unabated in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and that show little sign of
imminent resolution. Furthermore, in a global age, the militant groups, criminal gangs and pirates
operating on the fringes of the civilized world repeatedly confront Westerners in multiple contexts.
Predicaments (situazioni difficili)

Counter-insurgency has been shown to be a hazardous military road to take. Western states will most
likely find themselves embroiled in an era of clandestine war, special operations, counter-terrorism,
secretive intelligence operations and proxy conflicts involving the training and equipping of foreign
armed forces or rebel groups tentatively aligned with the West. The use of force for security reasons
will likely be supplemented by humanitarian interventions characterized by precision bombing, no-fly
zones, naval blockades and covert action, often followed by multilateral peace operations and security
sector reform programs. These deployments will be accompanied by a wider array of counter-piracy,
hostage-rescue, defense diplomacy and other smaller-scale missions. Putting such operations into
practice will require investment in hugely expensive technologies, the management of a network of

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outposts and secure bases from which to house teams of trainers, advisors and specialists, as well as
complex contractual arrangements with an array of private organizations.
Patterns of wars
A dominant feature of modern Western culture is the profound ‘debellicization’ of society. The
perception of war as a virtuous activity was gradually delegitimized during the twentieth century and
although war continued to fascinate, it was no longer deemed desirable. These attitudes were
consolidated through post-war social trends of mass consumerism, shrinking family sizes, the decline
of civic militarism, democratization, redefinitions of masculinity and the growth of an individualistic
youth culture. Other cultural patterns include the growing concern for human rights and the emergence
of prosperity as a dominant socio-political value. Such popular norms have increased restrictions on
when and how war is waged. Further, the media saturation of modern wars has meant the suffering of
grieving families, of wounded soldiers and those who experience ongoing psychological problems on
their return are relayed to millions in intimate, agonizing detail.
New wars and New Cold Wars?

The terrorist attacks on Paris and Brussels by ISIS symbolized the effects of ‘blowback’. The
emergence of IS after the Iraq War and the establishment of a caliphate carved out of the Middle East
has been profoundly shocking for citizens who wish war to be in the past. More importantly, the
evidence of transnational fighters and supporters moving from advanced and sophisticated urban
cities such as London into war zones have called into question much of the liberal democratic agenda
such as multiculturalism.
Although the end of the Cold War effectively saw off communism as a threat, religious sentiment of
a radicalized type has proved attractive and effective at stoking conflict in the Middle East and in
European states themselves. At a time when war weariness is indeed a feature of life there is the
possibility of a return of Cold War politics. Sanctions and diplomacy are the preferred method of dealing
with the great powers of Russia and China. Yet the ability of these methods of seeing off the challenges
of these emerging powers is questionable at best.
15. Conclusion: Governance, Instability and Power
Chapter 5: International Organizations: Can They Break Free from States?
Collectively, international organizations (IOs) are one of the core actors in international relations
(IR), especially since the dawn of the post-World War II era. A key issue for the twenty-first century in
relation to IOs is: are there any significant IOs that have been able to move beyond internationalism to
become supranational (between and above nation-states, respectively) in their governance? Can IOs
break free from states?
This issue has various important implications, not least of which is the very effectiveness of the IOs to
operate and perform their mandates in the first place. And since the mandates of most IOs, including
the most prominent ones, proclaim to relate in one way or another to advancing human welfare globally,
this issue concerns us all. Thus, can IOs operate above, and perhaps even against, the core interests of
states, including the most powerful ones (eg. USA)?
Background and history

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The term “international organization” usually refers to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). IOs
should be distinguished from NGOs, because NGOs explicitly strive to play an advocacy role for a
particular issue independent of governments (and sometimes against governments), and treaties (eg.
GATT, WTO…), since a treaty does not have a stand-alone organizational structure with a headquarters,
dedicated staff and so on that could potentially grant it autonomy from member states.
It was after WW2 that the great bulk of the largest IOs in the early twenty-first century have their
origins (ECC, UN, NATO…). This can be considered the first wave of IOs in the post-World War II
era, largely established and curated under the umbrella of American hegemony, as discussed below.
The second wave of IOs was born of a changing world order in the 1960s and 1970s, what some
characterized as the decline of American hegemony and the rise of the “Third World”: the most
important IO in this wave is the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Parallel to NAM with similar goals
was the formation of the Group of 77 (G77) in 1964.
While NAM still exists today with 120 member states, it largely ran out of steam by the mid-1980s.
There were a number of reasons, but fragmentation in the face of the Third World debt crisis and the
ascent of ‘free market’ ideology, what some term ‘neoliberalism’, played a major role in quashing a
unified Third World movement for national state-led development. This was counterpoised by the
establishment of Western-led, often informal, organizations in the 1970s, such as the Trilateral
Commission and Group of Seven (G7), in addition to a restructuring in the role of the IMF and
World Bank to deal more with the Third World → consolidation of the Western-centric IOs
One significant IO from this era that remains relevant today, however, is the Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), founded in 1960 with specifically the attempt to wrest control
of domestic oil production and prices from Western transnational corporations (TNCs). OPEC’s most
dramatic global impact was the 1973–1974 oil embargo against countries (including the United States)
that supported Israel during the 1973 Arab–Israeli War.
By the 1990s (end of Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union), a third wave of IOs came with
the resurgence of Anglo-American ‘free market’ ideology led by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s:
a more or less liberal global capitalism dramatically expanded, ushering in what many refer to as the
age of ‘globalization’. Most important in this wave is the establishment of the WTO in 1995, the
culmination of four decades of freer trade negotiations led by the United States via GATT. China – one
of the primary anti-capitalist states of the twentieth century – joined the WTO in 2001. Coupled with
these new IOs was the consolidation and expansion of certain existing Western-centric IOs, such as the
EU, NATO and the OECD: eg. the EEC transformed into the EU in 1993, marking significant progress
in European integration and supranationalism.
The fourth wave emerged as a possible challenge to the Western-centric world order with the second
rise of the Third World – or what is now popularly seen in depoliticized terms as ‘emerging markets’.
This wave arose in the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street crash and ensuing global financial crisis and
Great Recession, and is focused upon the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), but
most of all China. The latter has spearheaded a number of initiatives, from the earlier Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) in 2001, and more recently the AIIB, NDB and the Silk Road Fund:
the success of the fourth wave in presenting an alternative to the Western-centric world order is still
an open question.
It is almost universally recognized that the first wave was established in the context of American
hegemony. The United States had two primary, inter-related, goals: to maintain and expand a
globalizing capitalism centered upon them and to defeat anti-capitalist struggle. By the 1960s and
1970s, it seemed that there were increasing obstacles towards these goals (Third World + Vietnam War),
the various IOs created in the second wave were often used as evidence of American decline. The key
question then for the current era is whether ‘this time it’s for real’ for American decline. On the one

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hand, the world in the twenty-first century is now more open to American business than ever before and
virtually all challengers to global capitalism have been vanquished. On the other hand, certain formerly
Third World nations are indeed making some attempts to carve a more independent niche for themselves
within global capitalism, as some more or less embrace a state capitalist model as opposed to the ‘free
market’, most of all China. If this is the case then an increasingly multipolar world could allow more
space for IOs to break free from states.
The United Nations: intergovernmentalism vs. supranationalism

The UN has become the most globally expansive IO ever created and also one of the most successful.
It has currently 193 members all represented in the GA, along with five permanent members of the
Security Council (and 10 rotating members), and a plethora of issue-specific organizations and
initiatives.
It is the latter that render the UN a hybrid organization, one that is firmly intergovernmental in the
structure of the General Assembly and Security Council - realm of inter-state interests and conflict - but
also with the beginnings of supranationalism in the many ancillary organizations (eg. UNESCO,
UNHCR…) - realm of a cosmopolitan vision of protecting human rights and advancing human
development. These two divergent visions sometimes lead to tension and even dysfunction.
The goal of the UN is to maintain international peace and security through cooperation by solving
international problems of an economic, social, cultural and humanitarian character and promoting
respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all.
The Un has been unsuccessful in preventing a number of ‘breaches of the peace’ in which millions of
people died: Korean War, Vietnam War, Iran–Iraq War, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the US-led
invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. None of these wars, with the exception of the Korean
War, were approved by the UN Security Council, which is supposed to be the ultimate arbiter of the
use of force in international law: it seems that the UN cannot prevent states from going to war, especially
the most powerful ones. The UN hardly has any control over its most powerful member and we’ve
seen it through the huge number of vetoes accounted by the US and the Soviet Union.
Speaking about human rights, in 1948 the UN General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, a majestic document that represents the first global enshrinement of basic rights to
which all of humanity is inherently entitled. But this cosmopolitan ideal has run up against the central
contradiction of the UN, that it is also intergovernmental, which is founded upon respect for sovereignty
and non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs. The primary implication of this is that the UN
has no real authority to enforce the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, virtually every
member state contravenes one article or another of the Declaration.
As for eradicating poverty and advancing human development, the UN’s success has been more
ambiguous. For example, some hail the UN Millennium Development Goals as being successful, while
others find their very design to be a failure. One problem is how to measure poverty and determining
what is a ‘liveable’ wage, another is how to deal with inequality.
What is certain, however, is that a number of specialized UN agencies do in fact make life better for
millions. UNHCR aids the lives of 13 million forcibly displaced persons around the world. The UN
WFP (2016) ‘reaches more than 80 million people with food assistance in 75 countries each year’,
including emergency disaster aid. The UN World Health Organization (WHO) is credited with
eradicating smallpox by the late 1970s, and is active around the world addressing all manner of health
issues. The list goes on. In any case, while these agencies are primarily funded by member states, they
have a fair degree of freedom in their operations, as long as they do not challenge the core interests of
the most powerful member states, and capitalism more generally.
The European Union and NATO

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The EU is the world’s premiere example of a supranational IO. After decades of increasing
integration, the EU now encompasses certain institutions and policy areas at a supranational level with
which member states are expected to comply, and a unique monetary system. The EU also represents
all member states at international trade negotiations and at such IOs as the G20, UN and WTO, even if
some member states still maintain their own delegation.
Nevertheless, there are significant areas in which the EU’s supranationalism has probably reached its
limits, from defense and foreign, to industrial and social welfare policies. A recurring theme since the
1950s, especially from French officials, was a desire to create a ‘European Defense Force’ separate
from NATO. NATO became the de facto entry gate for subsequent EU membership for former Eastern
Bloc countries, reaffirming, intertwining and arguably strengthening the security role of the United
States in Europe. Thus, by the twenty-first century, efforts towards a European Defense Force
independent of NATO have largely been abandoned. A huge participation to the debate whether support
or not US missions was after the US-led invasion of Iran in 2003, which let emerge national interests.
National politics also resurfaced during the Eurozone, and especially Greek (facing Germany), debt
crises. This reveals that EU member states are perfectly capable of creating internal divisions without
the intervention of the US and demonstrates the limits of EU-wide unity and solidarity when political
economies are still predominantly nationally oriented – despite the decades-long consolidation of EU-
wide supranational institutions and governance structures.
China-centered international organizations

China-centered IOs are unlikely to break free from their core sponsor, the Chinese state. But can the
Chinese state break free from the IOs that were established under the aegis of American hegemony and
present an alternative to the world order that these IOs serve to maintain, that is, a more or less
liberal global capitalism?
In the midst and aftermath of the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression, there were
calls (from China with BRICS in the first place) for new policies and regulations, and even for a new
financial, or at least monetary, international order. This is what the fourth wave of IOs is about, there
are now headline-grabbing IOs – namely the New Development Bank (NDB) and Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank (AIIB), headquartered in Shanghai and Beijing, China, respectively – that were not
established under American hegemony, and are often interpreted as a challenge to the latter, an
alternative to the USA-centered system.
For over a decade China has been offering vast sums of loans on a bilateral basis (over $650 billion
from 2001 to 2011), especially to countries in Africa. It is partially in this context that China is now
reversing its insistence on bilateral relations and is creating multilateral financial institutions to improve
its image and gain greater acceptance and legitimacy. In any case, it is unclear how a vehicle for
infrastructure investment, whether the NDB or the AIIB, seriously challenges the IMF and World Bank.
Chapter 6: Globalization and Governance
Of all the issues that will challenge policy makers in the twenty-first century, none is more important
than the fate of the state. The state, after all, is at the center of national politics and power, and still
remains the most consequential actor in the international system – or some states do, at least. As we
shall see, while all states are subject to an array of forces we can conveniently package under the heading
of ‘globalization’, not all states were created equal. On the contrary, one of the more important debates
in contemporary international relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE) is about the
capacity of states to manage national affairs at a time of greater international economic integration and
political interdependence.

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The rise and reconfiguration of the state

The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War, is invariably seen as the birth of the
modern state form. The key claim to historical significance resides in the fact that the Treaty helped
establish the idea of a mutually constitutive system of states, each distinguished by independent
sovereignty and authority within national borders. Indeed, so successful was the nation-state in this
regard that it swept away all competitors and became the default form of political organization across
the world for over 300 years.
But before we begin to think about the forces that may be undermining or reconfiguring the state, it is
useful to remind ourselves of the qualities that propelled its rise and that of the West more generally.
The triumph of the West

One of the more striking features of ‘recent’ human history has been the ascendancy of the West, it is
worth emphasizing both how remarkable and how unexpected it was, as well as the factors that
underpinned it. One thousand years ago the proverbial observer from Mars might have been forgiven
for thinking that China would have inevitably become the world’s dominant power, even after 1648.
Crucially, however, China did not develop the institutions that allowed capitalism to flourish and drive
social change as it did in Western Europe. Europe’s transformation from a feudal backwater to a
dynamic capitalist economic system was a consequence of a unique set of historical circumstances in
which the interplay of economic and coercive forces helped to consolidate the state form. Europeans
established institutions that encouraged trade and facilitated capital accumulation in a way that other
parts of the world did not.
The state debate

There are many types of states. The most common designation these days, perhaps, is between those
states that have the capacity to act effectively and those that are failing. Some States are more effective
than others, a lot depends on their size, their economy and their internal organization.
Policy change – whether the domestic or the international variety – always creates winners and losers.
Some states, however, have greater amounts of described as ‘infrastructural power’, or the power to
‘penetrate its territories and logistically implement decisions’, so they have a greater capacity to
coordinate and act through society to achieve policy goals.
Will global governance reflect the preferences of the powerful rather than optimal policy responses to
collective action problems at the international level?
The age of globalization

No other words have come close to globalization’s ubiquity or apparent ability to capture the
multidimensional, omnipresent nature of forces that are apparently transforming the international
system. Inevitably, however, there has been a critical backlash with some scholars questioning the
accuracy and usefulness of a term that apparently says so much with such brevity.
Even though globalization as an idea has only become prominent over the last few decades, some
scholars argue that if we take it to mean greater interconnectedness at a global level, then something
like globalization has been around for hundreds of years. Migration has been one of the most important
and dynamic forces in human history. Globalization has always represented a potential challenge to
political leaders whose authority is based on a national frame of reference.
Violence has been a key element of the historical evolution of human societies and of the international
system of states. Seen in this context, it is no coincidence, perhaps, that the idea of globalization became
so prominent during the 1990s when geoeconomics seemed to have trumped geopolitics. Policymakers

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during the 1990s began to focus on national economic competitiveness, rather than traditional security
concerns and threats.
Human interactions have been speeding up and becoming institutionally denser; they also routinely
transcend national and even regional boundaries, a more interconnected and ‘smaller’ world. The
establishment of production networks and value chains that transcend national borders has been one of
the most important and distinctive aspects of this process. Many corporations in the private sector have
clearly benefited from their enhanced ability to take advantage of different production locations around
the world and, as a consequence, individual nation-states find themselves in a competition to attract
potentially mobile foreign investment.
The balance of power between private sector actors and the state has in many cases shifted decisively
towards TNCs (transnational corporations) in particular and footloose international capital more
generally. Adding to the difficulties faced by individual governments is the fact that it is increasingly
difficult to tax effectively TNCs that are able to utilize tax minimization strategies such as transfer
pricing and profit shifting. TNCs operate in, and take advantage of, a regulatory environment that has
been created by states, but they’re still reliant on states to solve collective action problems and to provide
the sort of regulatory environment that actually allows cross-border commerce to take place securely.
The creation of huge, structurally important financial markets could not have happened in quite the way
that it did without the active participation of some of the more powerful states of the era. The very idea
that there is any longer such a thing as a discrete ‘national economy’ that states can manage has been
called into question as the transnationalization and cross-border integration of economic processes blurs
economic boundaries. States consequently find themselves sandwiched between potentially
incompatible domestic and international pressures over which they have a limited capacity to exert
influence.
Global governance
Even those scholars who focused primarily on the world of IR generally assumed that the state was the
key actor in such processes. The assumption that states exist in an anarchical self-help system that places
a premium on survival no longer looks analytically compelling and governance is about establishing
and institutionalizing the ‘rules of the game’ so that actors know how to behave in any given set of
circumstances. To solve some collective action problems, cooperation and coordination across national
borders have become a functional necessity and this happens through institutions that allow complex
social networks and relations to develop.
Rosenau talked about ‘governance without government’, global order refers to ‘those routinized
arrangements through which world politics gets from one moment in time to the next’. While states
undoubtedly remain important, global order or governance involves a growing array of non-state
actors, which both facilitate and determine patterns of transnational interaction.
Non-state actors are gaining importance year after year, many of the activities and responsibilities that
were formerly the jealously protected prerogatives of sovereign states have now been passed on, or
taken up, by them. Another distinctive feature of evolving patterns of governance at the international
level is the number of new organizations that enjoy a degree of authority and legitimacy that has been
traditionally associated with states.
On the one hand, some states have given responsibility to key aspects of the policymaking process to
unelected technocrats who are judged to have the requisite expertise to manage a particular issue area.
On the other hand, however, the very fact that such people are unelected raises important questions
about their legitimacy and accountability.
For Weiss, global governance is the combination of the informal and formal values, rules, norms,
procedures, practices, policies and organizations of various types that often provides a surprising and
desirable degree of global order, stability, and predictability. The important points to stress here are

lOMoARcPSD|9140152
about the collaborative nature of possible responses to problems that individual states cannot solve or
provide for when acting alone.
For Barnett and Duvall power is manifest through social relations and can be direct or diffuse.
‘Compulsory power’ is direct and refers to the way that some actors have power over others. Great
powers typically have greater material resources than smaller powers and can coerce or cajole
compliance; this sort of ‘structural power’, which refers to the ‘determination of social capacities and
interests’, is one of the defining characteristics of any interaction between actors with different material
and even ideational assets. Indeed, some actors are consequently able to utilize a form of ‘institutional
power’, which refers to more indirect and diffuse forms of influence, and is one of the distinctive
features of the modern international system.
What Barnett and Duvall call ‘productive power’ is, perhaps, the most distinctive feature of the
contemporary system and emblematic of new forms of governance. Productive power refers to the
constitution of all social subjects with various social powers through systems of knowledge and
discursive practices of broad and general scope. Conceptually, the move is away from structures, per
se, to systems of signification and meaning...to networks of social forces perpetually shaping one
another. Persuading, rather than coercing, other states into compliance is much more common in
today’s world.
Is global governance feasible? What would it look like?

The state’s unchallenged authority and capacities are no longer assured. The widely held idea that there
is currently a ‘crisis of global governance’ misses the new ways in which powerful agencies interact
and influence state actions. The European Union (EU) remains the benchmark for demonstrating just
how far states can go in not only ‘pooling’ hitherto sacrosanct sovereignty, but also in how extensively
they are willing to reconfigure the internal architecture of states. The EU has already developed deeply
interconnected transboundary mechanisms with which to coordinate its actions in ways that are
strikingly at odds with much mainstream IR theory. And yet the EU also serves as a painful and
prominent reminder of the limits to such cooperation: when faced by a seemingly unending series of
economic and social crises, the EU also demonstrates that there are still important, seemingly non-
negotiable limits to how much states are actually willing to cooperate for the greater good.
If the influence of ‘the West’ is in decline then the nature of global governance will reflect this shift in
the underlying structural distribution of power. The question will be whether China or any of the other
rising powers can translate this material weight into some form of institutionalized productive power
and transform the way governance occurs at the global level.

Major Issues in International Politics

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Major issues in international politics

major issues in international politics (Università degli Studi di Trento)

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1. Introduction – International Relations Theories and the International System

Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)

Chapter 2 - National Interest and Conflict

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Chapter 3: Non-traditional Security and World Politics

Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)

2. What Kind of World Do We Live In?

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COLD WAR ORDER

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

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SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY

The liberal vision

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Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)

The Concept Of Energy Security: Beyond The Four As Di Cherp.

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GOLDTHAU THE HANDBOOK OF ENERGY SECURITY

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Chapter 3 Sustainability, Climate Chang e And Transition In Global Economy

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Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)

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Chapter 4: The Development Nexus Of Global Energy

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Scaricato da Giuseppe Cianciafara (cianciafarag@gmail.com)

4. Energy Security, Sovereignty and Conflict

Goldthau, Andreas. Handbook of Global Energy Policy

The peak oil controversy

The sources of controversy

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Oil supplies are dynamic

The Erroneous economics of “Peak Oil”

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The perilous politics of peak oil

New perspective for oil policies and strategies

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Chapter 11: Cooperation And Conflict In Oil And Gas Markets

Patterns of conflict and cooperation

The HISTORY of cooperation and conflict in the international oil market

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Vertical cooperation and conflict among oil companies

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International Governmental organizations (OPEC and IEA)

Cooperation and conflict in international gas trade

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The future of cooperation and conflict in global energy markets

Chapter 12 The Gs And The Future Of Energy Governance In A Multipolar World.

History of the Gs and international Energy Policy (G8)

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How has the G20 done?

An Accord on climate change