SOCIETAL SECURITY

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INTRODUCTION

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• Societal security was just a sector of state security

• State can be destabilized through threats to its language,

culture, religion and custom

• Was reconceived in light of the process of integration in Western

and disintegration in East Europe

• Reconceptualized as a refferent object of security in it own right

• Concern the maintenance of collective identity : if a society losses

its identity it will not survive

• Represent a middle way between notion of individual and

global security

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 Aim

To highlight and explores the concept

of
Societal Security

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 Scope

• A Duality of State and Societal Security

• Society and Societal Security

• Threats to Societal Identity

• Defending societal identity

• Criticism

• Conclusion

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 A Duality of State and Societal Security

• State concerned with threats to its sovereignty if loses sovereignty, it will not
survive

• Societal security concerned with threat to identity and if loses will loses
identity

• More secure in terms of identity of societies, the less secure the state containing
them

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 Society and Societal Security

Society are unit formed by sense of collective identity

• Society are different from social group. Societies have a reality of

their own. Operate as units in international system and invariably
seen as having the right to survive

• Nation and states are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Society may

be nation- state but do not always refer to state population

• Most often equates ethno-national group, although religious group

may also be relevant unit for analysis

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 Threats to societal identity

• Societal identity can be threatened from the suppression of its

expression through to interference with ability to reproduce
across generation

• Ethnic cleansing : deliberate killing, violence against,

deportation of members of one society by another

• Cultural cleansing : systematic destruction of institution

and symbols designed to promote and maintain group identity

• Can be threatened through all five of Buzan sector`s of security

• State often take measures to defend their own societies

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"You have to understand that the cultural identity
of a population represents its survival in the future.
When Serbs blow up the mosque of a village and
destroy its graveyards and the foundations of the
graveyards and mosque and then level them off………
no one can ever tell this was a Muslim village.
This is the murder of a people`s cultural identity."

Jan Boeles
EU MONITOR MISSION
TO FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

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 Five Sector of Security
Societal Sector
Buzan, Waever and De Wilde - divided threats in the societal sector of security
into three main categories:

• Migration
- The host society is changed by the influx of those from outside ; by a shift in the
composition of the population

• Horizontal competition
- Groups having to change their ways because of the overriding linguistic and
cultural influences of others

• Vertical competition
- Those instances where either due to integration or disintegration , group are
pushed towards either wider or narrower identities, such as in former Yugoslavia
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 Military Sector
• External threats will threatened the society or societies within the state

• Threats to societal security be seen mainly in depopulation where enough

members of the society were killed

• Hinder or prevent collective identity being transmitted from one generation to

the next

• Internal aggression, when regime representing one group uses its armed
forces to suppress other minorities

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 Political Sector
• Threats most likely come from their own government usually suppression
to the minorities

• Political and military threats to societal identity closely linked

• Political can often be mitigated by the state itself : e.g. certain legislation
can be introduced in order to protect societal identity

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 Economic Sector

Capitalist system - undermine cultural distinctiveness by replacing

traditional identities with contemporary consumer by:

- Generating global product such as tv, computer and computer game

- Attitude ( materialism, individualism)

- Style ( english language)

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 Environmental sector

• Threat to society when identity tied to a particular territory, when culture is

adapted to a way of life strongly conditioned by its natural surrounding

• Endanger the existence of that culture and sometimes people themselves

• e.g the lost of huge area of amazon rainforest, seriously affected its
indigenous people in term of their traditional way of life

• Threat posed by deforestation, pollution, climate change

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 Defending Societal Identity

• Military means are often used to defend societal identity when liked to
territory

• Intra state level societal group have no means of armed protection and force
to provide their own security and compelled to employ non military
countermeasures

• Cultural nationalist strategies can be used when manifest as cultural

autonomy- involve the control over institution for culture reproduction such as
school, mosque, church

• Political nationalist strategist are also means of defending collective

identity.

• Secession is the most extreme form of defence for societal security

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 Criticsm

• The Charge of Reification

• Who Speak for Society?

• The Dangers of Voicing Societal Security

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CONCLUSION

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Q&A

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