Introduction: 'New' Problems and 'Old' Solutions

Amy Eckert and Laura Sjoberg

We are in a conflict between good and evil. And America will call evil by its name. (President George W. Bush, quoted in Carver 2003: 1)

In response to this new 'conflict between good and evil,' the Bush administration in the United States implemented a 'new strategic framework' to address 'the new security threats that we face in the twenty-first century' (Bolton 2002). Pundits declared the previously illegitimate tactic of preventive warfare a 'legitimate tool for dealing with new security threats,' which includes the ability to 'kill terrorists, prevent weapons proliferation, halt genocidal killing, or stop the spread of deadly disease' (Daalder and Steinberg 2005). President George W. Bush reached out to the Russian government to which he had previously shown hostility, explaining that 'it's time to work together to address the new security threats that we all face.' These 'new' threats will require new tools and new tactics, 'new and imaginative solutions' for the 'threats that freedom-loving people will face in the near future' (Bush 2001). Bush (2002b) emphasized the newness of twenty-first-century security problems in the 'National Security Strategy of the United States,' even though many of the solutions and strategies contained within that document were borrowed from earlier security strategies and marked as new. The claimed newness of the problems, however, allowed the Bush administration to change the discourse of international security, from a continuous problem with access to both past and new solutions to a 'new' problem that requires radically different strategies. As such, the 'new military-strategic doctrine – sometimes called the Bush Doctrine – contains not a subtle adjustment but rather a radical change that elevates the danger of aggression, militarism, and war to an entirely new level' (Webb 2002). In other words, the new and decontextualized solutions to new security problems have 'frightening' implications for any understanding of international security (Webb 2002). This paradigm of 'newness' has become the dominant way of characterizing and dealing with security problems in the early twenty-first century. The departure of the Bush administration in the United States provides a critical moment to reevaluate and rethink this conceptualization – is newness and decontextualization the right way to think about twenty-first-century security? Or is there another, more fruitful, way?

The Bush administration is not the only government that points to a radical change in the security situation as motivation for a new approach to security problems. Tony Blair called the war in Iraq 'the front line in the battle against terrorism and the new security threat that we face.' He explained that it is 'a new and poisonous evil form of extremism' which threatens the 'basic values of humanity' (BBC News 2004). Russian President Vladimir Putin 'skillfully used a time gap between the [9/11] tragedy and the American retaliatory action to promote a Russian view on how the international community should reorganize itself in the face of a new security threat – thus promoting Russia's status in the international arena' and volunteering a 'new strategic partnership' with a president of the United States who had campaigned on the promise of being tougher on Russia (Chinyaeva 2001). In a 2004 White Paper on national defense, the Chinese government introduced a 'new security concept' which serves as 'the people's call for cooperation and world peace' in times of trouble (People's Daily 2004). Additionally, 'Japan has recently begun a process to transform its security strategy and envision a new role for itself' in response to a 'new security environment,' which includes a Chinese threat, ballistic missiles, terrorism, risk of invasion, and North Korea (Hwang 2005).

To be sure, the twenty-first century has quickly demonstrated that it is a century of very different threats to the one that preceded it. The newness of twenty-first-century security problems is not entirely contrived. The shocking attacks of September ii, 2001, carried out by a terrorist organization, put the US and the rest of the world on notice that the greatest threats could come from unexpected sources. During the Cold War, the United States' attention focused on threats from powerful states like the Soviet Union. The 9/ii attacks, carried out by a handful of individuals armed with box cutters and airline tickets, drove home the realization that the stable, predictable Cold War order had ended. The 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway put the world on notice that the daily infrastructure could be used in terrorist attacks (Litfon 2000). The 2004 tsunami (Huxley 2005) and 2005 Hurricane Katrina (Dyson 2006) brought attention to natural disasters as security issues. The genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s was the most efficient killing spree in history (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). As Mary Kaldor notes, 'in the context of globalization, what we think of as war – war between states in which the aim is to inflict maximum violence – is becoming an anachronism.' This is not to say, however, that security threats are decreasing. Instead, in the place of traditional war is 'new war, a mixture of war, organized crime, and massive violations of human rights. The actors are both global and local, public and private' (Kaldor 1999). In the twenty-first century, threats emanate not only from powerful states but increasingly from less obvious sources; not only from nuclear wars but from terrorism, disease, environmental degradation, military privatization, and other 'new' security issues.

These 'new' problems raise new questions about, and require the adaptation of inherited notions of, justice. A sense that the world is changing has created a state of urgency in politics – to look for new answers to these new problems. In the search for new answers, scholars and politicians alike often resort to stark and ahistorical, perhaps even anti-intellectual, solutions. The Bush Doctrine began by erasing the distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them, and expanded to 'strength beyond challenge' and 'extending liberty, democracy, and security to all regions'...