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Introduction

Te Quest or Global Security

Protection Without Protectionism and theChallenge of Global Governance

Mary Kaldor and Joseph e. stiglitz

In countries around the world, ordinary citizens eel under threat. As thisbook goes to press, citizens in the advanced industrial countries worry about their jobs and about their uture and that o their children. Will they be able to retire in comort? Will governments be able to deliver on the re-tirement benets they promised? Although those in many o the emergingmarkets have never had things so good, they understand the precariousnesso their ortunes.For those who see their way beyond the immediacy o the economiccrisis, there are more insecurities—rom violence, whether the home-breddomestic variety or that o terrorists rom abroad. And urther into theuture lie the risks posed by climate change.In other parts o the world, this gradation o risk operates the otherway round. Te threats o violence and climate change are experienced asimmediate dangers. In zones o insecurity, people are killed, raped, robbed,expelled rom their homes, kidnapped, or taken hostage. And in environ-mentally vulnerable areas, they are the victims o excessive ooding or o amine on an increasing scale. And beyond these immediate dangers, they are oen extremely poor, living on less than a dollar a day, without accessto clean water and sanitation, healthcare, jobs, or even homes.

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the Quest for global security

o be sure, individuals have always aced risks. Farmers were exposedto the variability o weather. Tose in coastal areas worried about maraud-ing pirates. Tere were always earthquakes, hurricanes, and droughts. Buttoday’s risks are unpredictable, with what statisticians call “at tails,” smallprobabilities o very, very bad outcomes. In the global nancial crisis, ex-ports o some countries ell by more than  percent. In some countries,youth unemployment has reached  percent.Moreover, many o these risks are global in nature. And this meansthat they may be beyond the ability o individual countries’ coping capac-ity. In traditional arming communities, the community provided a supportsystem or those who were temporarily acing hardship. As the nation-stateormed, responsibility or social protection shied to the state and or goodreason. Some o the most important risks aected virtually everyone in thecommunity; the risks were highly correlated. Te nation-state had scalresources that were greater than that o the individual or the market.In some ways, today the small nation-state is like the small rural com-munity. Many o the risks are national in character—such as a nationaleconomic downturn. Small countries eel at the mercy o events beyondtheir control, and they ace limited resources. Tere is little that Greece orIreland can do to restore their own economy. I the European and globaleconomies prosper, their economy will prosper; and i these economies donot, neither will theirs.Tere is, however, a dierence: Most o the risks acing arming com-munities were rom acts o nature—a ood or drought. Many o the risksacing countries today are man-made. Policies at the national and globallevel aect both the risks that individuals and countries ace and their ca-pacity to respond.Globalization has increased the scale and velocity o risk. A problemanywhere in the system can move quickly across borders. We saw how thesubprime mortgage crisis in the United States quickly became a globalcrisis. Avian u and SARS showed how diseases too could move quickly around the world. errorism—al-Qaeda—has become global. rying to de-prive it o a homeland in one country does little good; it quickly shis itsbase o operations elsewhere.Even though globalization has increased risks in these ways, it hassimultaneously decreased the ability o the nation-state—the politicalunit that in the preceding decades had increasingly taken on the role o protection—to perorm these roles. O course, the extent to which thisis true varies. Large nations such as the United States or China retain an

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