The Current Global Human Security Predicament

Human security today is not primarily degraded by contained, isolated, localized dangers. Instead, citizen safety threats transcending state borders with global repercussions appear to be those most dangerous to world citizens' human security. These hazards generate mass public fears, where perceived "peril exists on a scale never before imagined" and "more capable of being delivered from one side of the globe to another, than at any time in history." Facing this cornucopia of dangers, national governments frequently fail to undertake effective citizen protection policies, and citizens frequently become victim of significant misperception. This ominous permeable border threat occurs within a largely anarchic global security setting.

Twenty-first-century dangers highlight greater difficulty in assessing (1) enemies, especially non-state foes, (2) threats, especially covert dispersed ones, (3) sufficiency of defenses, especially against transnational dangers, and (4) appropriate citizen protection, especially maintaining traditional freedoms. Such ambiguity has impeded effective state security policies, for it becomes exceedingly difficult to determine priorities in terms of what is most and least in danger and what threat management approaches are working and failing. This state-based threat ambiguity, involving either contradictory or imprecise information, seems more likely the smaller the number of powerful elites who know the enemy well, the lower the capacity to empathize with the adversary, and the fewer the communication channels among contending parties. Similarly, the mass public may lack systematic independent means to judge either the severity of incoming threats or the appropriateness of state threat responses. If the danger is abstract and not tangibly visible, slow-moving, and distant in origin, citizens may be most unable to recognize its significance, feel protected, or support state responses entailing mass public sacrifice.

ESCALATION OF PERMEABLE BORDER THREAT

In this context, permeable border threats have gone well beyond formal threats of direct military attack from states and often take on the guise of far more subtle and varied modes of "informal penetration" by non-state groups: "deadly transfers" across national boundaries include clandestine conventional arms, illicit psychoactive drugs, illegal human migrants (including the most demeaning forms of human trafficking), lethal infectious diseases (including spreading unintentionally deadly microbes and intentionally lethal biological agents), and incapacitating cyberattacks. Emerging threats have been typically covert, dispersed, decentralized, adaptable, and fluid, with threat sources relatively difficult to identify, monitor, target, contain, and destroy, and with these sources' past actions not necessarily a sound guide to their future behavior.

The sources of permeable border threats in today's world are quite diverse, with rogue states, terrorist groups, and transnational criminal organizations being the most common perpetrators. Rogue states, terrorists, and transnational criminals rise up because they cannot fit into the prevailing order or operate under its rules, so they become angry and frustrated and then decide to wreak global havoc. Recognizing the dominance of a system they reject, and lacking legitimate means to change it significantly in ways advancing their interests, they perceive the need to go outside the bounds of what the West defines as civilized behavior and ruthlessly use every tool at their disposal to achieve their disruptive ends. Given the world's open structure, they can continue and even expand these activities due to the low-profile nature of much of their unacceptable cross-national behavior and to the lack of effective international sanctions. Either way a kind of immunity from prosecution prevails due to their cross-national fluidity, serving to increase both their threat and fear among the world's citizenry. In many ways, these unruly forces of fragmentation appear to be very astute in assessing the global security environment: They realize that they are not functioning in a perfectly orderly and civilized security setting, and they reasonably assume that many others — including seemingly respectable and legitimate parties — will choose to collude with them for private gain or ignore these disruptive parties' behavior as long as it does not have a direct negative impact on the security interests of regimes turning a blind eye to this activity. Rogue states, terrorists, and criminals have been quick to adjust to the new tools that have become available, including the latest communication, transportation, surveillance, digital penetration, and weapons technologies. Such disruptive forces are quite globally savvy, for they "know that the main benefits of attacks on critical infrastructure is not the immediate damage they inflict, but the collateral consequences of eroding the public's trust in services on which it depends."

More than in the past, permeable border threat sources are focusing on mass population targets: Threats to people are morphing rapidly, often based on cultural-religious divides — and on critical elements of societal infrastructure. During the twentieth century, the record of civilian casualties was dismal: for example, in World War I, the 13 million civilian deaths outnumbered the 8.5 million military deaths, and in World War II about 80,000 Japanese were killed by the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; and the humanitarian organization Save the Children reports that "the percentage of civilians killed and wounded as a result of hostilities has risen from 5 percent of all casualties at the turn of the last century to 65 percent during World War II to 90 percent in subsequent conflicts." In the twenty-first century, the impact of this violence has fallen mainly on innocent bystanders: 75 percent of those killed in all wars in recent years are civilians; and "conflicts fought without the involvement of governments — among militias, rival guerilla groups, clans, warlords, or communal groups — are now more numerous than state-based conflicts." The West frequently identifies those holding extreme fanatical religious views as especially dangerous, but it does not understand these threat sources or know how effectively to contain, thwart, or neutralize them. Demographic shifts have caused those populations and countries with belief systems most different from the West to be growing the fastest, posing a major challenge to Western notions of citizen protection. Due to the mass public's increased vulnerability to permeable border threats, rogue state, terrorist, or criminal attacks on critical infrastructure — rendering ineffective energy grids, food or water supplies, means of communication or transportation, or the stock market or banking system — can be far more devastating than just assassinating a political leader.

Today's permeable border threats emerge not only from threat sources intent on global disruption but also from unintended accidents, natural calamities, or seepage of toxic substances. Concerns have risen about a type of danger — sometimes termed "threats without threateners" — lacking intentional initiation by hostile parties and not usually covered by either conventional threat concepts or traditional defense policy analysis. This threat cluster differs from traditional perils in that it tends not to be acute and short-term, zero-sum, reversible, susceptible to unilateral responses, controllable under national government jurisdiction, unity-promoting, or inexpensive. Aside from unexpected and undesired mass migration waves and devastating nuclear accidents (such as the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster), much of this emerging threat originates not from states or even humans but rather from natural phenomena. Examples of these nontraditional dangers include pandemic diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an infectious respiratory illness that in November 2002 appeared in southern China and spread to thirty-two countries and killed eight hundred people before being contained in July 2003; and natural cataclysmic disasters including hurricanes (exemplified by Hurricane Harvey, which was the costliest tropical cyclone on record when it hit the Houston area in August 2017), volcanoes, floods, and earthquakes. Within the last half-century, natural disasters and infectious diseases have killed far more people than civil strife, as evidenced by comparing the post–Cold War human devastation from floods and AIDS to the far smaller loss of life from domestic and international violence. While the frequency of natural disasters has remained relatively stable over the centuries, the toll of human death and property damage has dramatically increased — far outstripping the coping capacities of the local, national, and even global assistance efforts — at least in part because more people are now living in parts of the world highly vulnerable to natural disruptions. Similarly, with respect to infectious diseases, since the early 1980s "both the medical establishment and the general public were shocked to discover that the microbial adaptation was outstripping the ability of the scientific community to remedial treatments," with old diseases (such as tuberculosis) resurfacing in more drug-resistant forms.

Unorthodox permeable border threats — unsanctioned mass illegal migration, nuclear accidents, climate change, and pandemic disease — tend to be more neglected by the security establishment compared to orthodox human-initiated threats. This widespread tendency by political leaders to attend most to traditional threat sources, especially military invasion from hostile states, reflects an anachronistic deep-seated reluctance to grapple with the new set of dangers that do not involve an identifiable enemy and are far more difficult to manage effectively and legitimately. So when national government defense establishments think about citizen protection, they often focus on the wrong kinds of threats, traditional ones more common in the past that now occur either with far lower frequency or with far lower magnitude of devastating security impacts on the mass public.

When government officials and private citizens choose to focus on what might happen in the future regarding threat and threat responses, what emerges often relies on subjective perceptual predispositions — often projecting fears and desires onto others — which almost always play an important role. These personal psychological biases include (1) selective attention, ignoring incoming information that contradicts preexisting images; (2) wishful thinking, focusing just on positive outcomes where desires take precedence over expectations; and (3) cognitive bolstering, seeking out evidence to enhance the credibility of preexisting beliefs. Within government organizations, such distorting predispositions are often compounded by bureaucratic inertia, causing state officials to resist innovation, keep threat perceptions from appropriately adjusting to changing circumstances, dismiss ideas requiring significant change in standard operating procedures, and assume that what will occur in the future is simply an extrapolation of what has already occurred in the past.

STATE-CHALLENGING THREAT DYNAMICS

Permeable border threats pose a particular challenge in today's global security environment, given the existing state-centered system of citizen protection. National governments now appear to lack the level of control they used to have over threat management, over what enters or leaves their countries, and over citizens' behavior in response to their perception of threat and to their perception of state threat responses. Moreover, the anarchic global setting increases the likelihood that (1) states will perceive permeable border threat in different ways from each other, impeding the potential for cooperation and outside assistance in addressing dangers, and that (2) citizens will perceive the threat and state threat responses both different from each other and different from states, impeding the potential for a unified bottom-up mass public voice conforming to top-down state initiatives.

This decreased state control over threat and increased state and citizen probability of threat misperception is not universally recognized by political leaders or by members of the mass public. Many observers have difficulty accepting how much goes on beyond state influence or how commonly people persist in misunderstanding and misinterpreting major mass public safety threats and major state threat response consequences. This lack of recognition of limits of state control and the distortions in threat assessment constitutes a key impediment to citizen protection.

An ominous sequence of threat dynamics involving misconceptions and missteps by both states and citizens is displayed in figure 1.1. First, there is a proliferation of global turmoil, with a growing incidence of transnational tensions producing massive citizen discomfort. Due to global interconnectedness, even when disruption occurs halfway around the world it is likely to have some effects on observers. Second, there is global fear mongering, with the growing appeal of fear as a political security instrument. In this emotionally charged atmosphere, often national governments point to other countries and outside groups as scapegoats for any and all internal problems. Third, there is global anxiety escalation, with growing frustration among displaced peoples seeking safe havens. Outsiders become increasingly resentful that the entrance into a country of both their ideas and of they themselves is blocked. Fourth, there is global nativist reaction, with growing domestic ethnocentrism and xenophobia toward foreigners. The combination of ethnocentric feelings of cultural superiority and xenophobic fears of unknown alien influences can be truly toxic. Fifth, there is a global value clash, with a growing disjuncture between open multiculturalism and closed separatism. Here liberal internationalist values of tolerance and acceptance receive a direct challenge. Sixth, there is global access closure, with growing state efforts to reduce foreign influence and to fortify national borders. The widespread feeling of vulnerability, where foreign attitudes and behavior patterns become considered by the indigenous population to be direct threats to national identity, triggers a desire to protect one's country from any outside disruption — heightened vulnerability "suggests a need for action, a need to protect, care for, and otherwise reduce the possibility of damage." Seventh, there is global tit-for-tat hostility, with a growing action-reaction cycle of mutual hatred, fear, and distrust. Once the cycle of fear-based responses to incoming threat commences, it is extremely difficult to stop, for each side's resentful actions confirms the worst suspicions of the other side and justifies like-minded retaliation.

Whenever a significant permeable border threat emerges, a two-step sequence is involved in national governments' attempts to protect citizens from ensuing negative security consequences, and similarly a two-step sequence is involved in mass public attempts to interpret these pernicious developments. For states, first political leaders try to prevent permeable border threats from being actualized — these leaders' endeavor to keep a threat from being carried out and becoming a reality; and second, if a threat is carried out and/or becomes reality, political leaders try to contain it, minimize through safeguards the disruptive citizen impacts, and promote speedy recovery. Similarly, for citizens, civic groups form perceptions of the permeable border threat itself, deciding how dangerous they think it is to their well-being and way of life; and second, citizens form perceptions of state responses to the permeable border threat, deciding how effective and legitimate they think these are in terms of protecting them from harm, what kind of input or influence they wish to have regarding state responses, and what steps they plan to take on their own to protect themselves. The success of the two sets of reactions to permeable border threats is tightly intertwined, but not in a necessarily intuitive way: If the state launches successful policy responses that either prevent threat from occurring or contain threat once it does occur, then citizens could become overly complacent and underestimate the importance of the threat and their need to protect themselves; but if the state launches futile policy responses that do not prevent or contain threat, then citizens could become overly panic-ridden and overestimate the importance of the threat and their need to protect themselves. Given this perverse intertwining and the covert and multifaceted nature of permeable border threats, for states and citizens alike to carry out successfully each two-step sequence seems highly improbable.