If Pakistani householders look carefully at their electricity bills, they will find they have been charged an extra amount for NJP – the Neelum Jhelum Project. It has been going on for years and is an attempt by the Pakistani government to raise money for a hydroelectric project on the Neelum River, a tributary of the Jhelum in Kashmir.

But while Pakistan – unable to get loans for the project from international agencies due to the ongoing terrorism problem – is still raising money, India is diverting the water upstream, meaning there will not be enough of it in the Neelum for Pakistan to build the project it wanted.

India is within its legal rights to do this. Under the 1960 Indus Water Treaty (IWT), it is allowed to build run-of-the-river projects as long as it delivers all the water to Pakistan at the end of it. And that is exactly what India is doing; channeling the water for its own hydroelectricity project, before releasing it directly into the Jhelum further downstream. Pakistan is so incensed that, in late April, it announced it would approach the World Bank, which is the arbitrator under the IWT, in an effort to stop the Indian project.

Water is rapidly overtaking the territorial dispute over Kashmir to become the biggest bone of contention between India and Pakistan. And the rhetoric in Pakistan is getting uglier by the day. One of the first questions this Indian reporter faced in Islamabad in late March was: “Why is India stealing our water?” The question came from a Pakistani journalist at the start of a workshop on precisely this topic, which brought together journalists from India and Pakistan as well as water experts. After two days of discussion, the Pakistani journalist said: “Now I know India is not stealing our water and that it is sticking to the treaty. But does it not realise we need more water? How can we survive without it?”

Much of the reportage in the Pakistani media is not so nuanced, and charges of water theft by India – the upper riparian country – are bandied about regularly. There is no doubt that India has built and is continuing to build hydroelectric projects in the upper reaches of the rivers that flow into Pakistan. But it has been scrupulous in sticking to the IWT, which says India can build run-of-the-river projects on the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab rivers, as long as the quantity of water that flows into Pakistan through these waterways is not reduced. The treaty also allows India to store 3.6 million acre feet (MAF) of this water, before the rivers flow into Pakistan.

Whenever Pakistani government officials are asked about the water dispute, they agree that India is sticking to the IWT. But that is not the way it is reported in much of the Pakistani media, and even one of Pakistan’s Islamic fundamentalist groups recently said its ire against India was partly a result of it “stealing our water”.

This perception has grown due to “lack of transparency and lack of timely data from India”, said Danial Hashmi, senior engineer at Pakistan’s Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA). “That leads to lack of trust. We have to keep asking them for water flow data that should be coming to us automatically, and without delay.”

The origins of the water dispute lie back in the nineteenth century, when Britain ruled the subcontinent and British engineers started to build what became the world’s largest canal irrigation system in the Indus river basin. That became a huge issue when Pakistan was carved out of India in 1947, splitting the river basin and its canals. As it was located upstream, India had control of the rivers and there were repeated disputes over water flow until the World Bank mediated the IWT, giving the three eastern rivers – Ravi, Beas and Sutlej – to India and the other three to Pakistan.

India’s High Commissioner to Pakistan, Sharat Sabharwal, has repeatedly said: “The IWT has served both countries well and has been operational even in times of war. It assigned to Pakistan 80% of the water in the Indus system of rivers.”

John Briscoe, a water expert who has worked in the subcontinent for 35 years, was the World Bank adviser involved in choosing the neutral expert to adjudicate between India and Pakistan on the Baglihar dam in the Indian part of Kashmir. (Read John Briscoe’s article for chinadialogue here: “Bankrolling change”). Briscoe says that the IWT could be a “stable basis for cooperation if India and Pakistan had normal trustful relations. [Then] there would be a mutually-verified monitoring process which would assure that there is no change in the [water] flows going into Pakistan.”

Since both countries agree that India is sticking to its part of the IWT, why is less and less water available to farmers in Pakistan? Daanish Mustafa, an academic in the geography department at King’s College, London, said it was partly because the planners had not foreseen how there would be less water flowing down these rivers due to changes in the Himalayan environment.

Deforestation in the catchment area of the Indus basin means more and more silt is flowing down these rivers, choking the channels and reducing water flow. Another key issue is the dependence of these rivers on the Himalayan glaciers. While it has now been established that these glaciers are in no danger of disappearing in the next few decades, there is no doubt that they are receding due to global warming. A detailed satellite-based study by the Indian Space Research Organisation came to the conclusion this March that Himalayan glaciers have shrunk by 16% in the last 50 years.

In the entire Himalayan ranges, glacier melt is responsible for less than 10% of the annual flows in these rivers. But that is not the case in the Indus basin. As the westernmost of the river basins formed by the Himalayas, it gets much less of the monsoon rain than the eastern Himalayas and is consequently far more dependent on the glaciers.

So Pakistan is asking India for water in an environment where the total water flow is shrinking all the time. This had not been foreseen when the IWT was signed 50 years ago, but today it threatens to become the major flashpoint between the two nuclear-armed neighbours in south Asia, despite conciliatory messages from parts of the Pakistani establishment. “This is a problem that can be solved only through cooperation and not confrontation,” Pakistan’s environment minister Hameed Ullah Jan Afridi pointed out at the March workshop, which was organised by the voluntary organisation LEAD Pakistan and sponsored by the British government.

India is the upper riparian country in the Indus basin, but the rivers do not start in India. They start in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Unless China is brought to the discussion on how to control deforestation in the basin’s catchment area and how best the dwindling water supplies can be shared in a situation where glaciers are retreating due to global warming, the water-related tension between India and Pakistan can only get worse. Eminent Pakistani lawyer Tariq Hassan recently said: “Water is the most strategic issue facing the subcontinent. If there is a war here in the future, it will be over water.”

Independent experts like Briscoe say that, while India is sticking to the IWT, it needs to be more generous because of the “great vulnerability and legitimate concern of Pakistan” over water scarcity, which has already ensured that the Indus, the mother river of the subcontinent since pre-history, no longer even flows to the Arabian Sea but instead trickles to its death in the sands of Sindh.

About the author: Joydeep Gupta is a director of the Earth Journalism Network at Internews and secretary of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India.
Source: China Dialogue

Image Source: Sanju

Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin wall, one of the shameful symbols of the cold war and the dangerous division of the world into opposing blocks and spheres of influence. Today we can revisit the events of those times and take stock of them in a less emotional and more rational way.

The first optimistic observation to be made is that the announced “end of history” has not come about, though many claimed it had. But neither has the world that many politicians of my generation trusted and sincerely believed in: one in which, with the end of the cold war, humankind could finally forget the absurdity of the arms race, dangerous regional conflicts, and sterile ideological disputes, and enter a golden century of collective security, the rational use of material resources, the end of poverty and inequality, and restored harmony with nature.

Another important consequence of the end of the cold war is the realisation of one of the central postulates of New Thinking: the interdependence of extremely important elements that go to the very heart of the existence and development of humankind. This involves not only processes and events occurring on different continents but also the organic linkage between changes in the economic, technological, social, demographic and cultural conditions that determine the daily existence of billions of people on our planet. In effect, humankind has started to transform itself into a single civilisation.

At the same time, the disappearance of the iron curtain and barriers and borders, unexpected by many, made possible connections between countries that until recently had different political systems, as well as different civilisations, cultures and traditions.

Naturally, we politicians from the last century can be proud of the fact that we avoided the danger of a thermonuclear war. However, for many millions of people around the globe, the world has not become a safer place. Quite to the contrary, innumerable local conflicts and ethnic and religious wars have appeared like a curse on the new map of world politics, creating large numbers of victims.

Clear proof of the irrational behaviour and irresponsibility of the new generation of politicians is the fact that defence spending by numerous countries, large and small alike, is now greater than during the cold war, and strong-arm tactics are once again the standard way of dealing with conflicts and are a common feature of international relations.

Alas, over the last few decades, the world has not become a fairer place: disparities between the rich and the poor either remained or increased, not only between the north and the developing south but also within developed countries themselves. The social problems in Russia, as in other post-communist countries, are proof that simply abandoning the flawed model of a centralised economy and bureaucratic planning is not enough, and guarantees neither a country’s global competitiveness nor respect for the principles of social justice or a dignified standard of living for the population.

New challenges can be added to those of the past. One of these is terrorism. In a context in which world war is no longer an instrument of deterrence between the most powerful nations, terrorism has become the “poor man’s atomic bomb”, not only figuratively but perhaps literally as well. The uncontrolled proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the competition between the erstwhile adversaries of the cold war to reach new technological levels in arms production, and the presence of the new pretenders to an influential role in a multipolar world all increase the sensation of chaos in global politics.

The crisis of ideologies that is threatening to turn into a crisis of ideals, values and morals marks yet another loss of social reference points, and strengthens the atmosphere of political pessimism and nihilism. The real achievement we can celebrate is the fact that the 20th century marked the end of totalitarian ideologies, in particular those that were based on utopian beliefs.

Yet new ideologies are quickly replacing the old ones, both in the east and the west. Many now forget that the fall of the Berlin wall was not the cause of global changes but to a great extent the consequence of deep, popular reform movements that started in the east, and the Soviet Union in particular. After decades of the Bolshevik experiment and the realisation that this had led Soviet society down a historical blind alley, a strong impulse for democratic reform evolved in the form of Soviet perestroika, which was also available to the countries of eastern Europe.

But it was soon very clear that western capitalism, too, deprived of its old adversary and imagining itself the undisputed victor and incarnation of global progress, is at risk of leading western society and the rest of the world down another historical blind alley.

Today’s global economic crisis was needed to reveal the organic defects of the present model of western development that was imposed on the rest of the world as the only one possible; it also revealed that not only bureaucratic socialism but also ultra-liberal capitalism are in need of profound democratic reform – their own kind of perestroika.

Today, as we sit among the ruins of the old order, we can think of ourselves as active participants in the process of creating a new world. Many truths and postulates once considered indisputable, in both the east and the west, have ceased to be so, including the blind faith in the all-powerful market and, above all, its democratic nature. There was an ingrained belief that the western model of democracy could be spread mechanically to other societies with different historical experience and cultural traditions. In the present situation, even a concept like social progress, which seems to be shared by everyone, needs to be defined, and examined, more precisely.

In a study from the Center for Sustainable Development at Uppsala University in Sweden titled “Climate Change and the Risk of Violent Conflicts in Southern Africa,” authors Ashok Swain, Ranjula Bali Swain, Anders Themnér, and Florian Krampe examine the potential for climate change and variability to act as a “threat multiplier” in the Zambezi River Basin. The report argues that “socio-economic and political problems are disproportionately multiplied by climate change/variability.” A reliance on agriculture, poor governance, weak institutions, polarized social identities, and economic challenges in the region are issues that may combine with climate change to increase the potential for conflict. Specifically, the report concludes that the Matableleland-North Province in Zimbabwe and Zambezia Province in Mozambique are the areas in the region most likely to experience climate-induced conflicts in the near future.

Article source: The New Security Beat

Image source: The City Project

In a three-month investigation, a team of Northwestern University student reporters has found that the US security establishment is not adequately prepared for many of the environmental changes that are coming faster than predicted and that threaten to reshape demands made on the military and intelligence community. This is despite the fact that the Defense Department has called climate change a potential “accelerant of instability.”

The 10 Medill School of Journalism graduate students interviewed more than 200 current and former national security officials and experts and reviewed scores of official documents and reports. While reporting, they used social media to create a community of people interested in the intersection of national security and climate change, informing them of their work through Tweets, blog posts and an e-newsletter.

Among the project’s findings:

• The government lacks critical information about where and when climate changes will happen and what effect they will have on the U.S. military, intelligence and national security communities.

• In a major strategy review last year, the Pentagon acknowledged the challenge that climate change poses to its operations, including a dramatically increased need for intervention in future humanitarian crises. While military branches have begun global assessments of their vulnerabilities, many security experts say the work lacks senior level support in Congress and the administration and that military service preparations are not keeping up with environmental changes.

•  Work by the CIA and environmental scientists during the Clinton administration was largely ignored in the years of George Bush’s presidency. Although the CIA is now spearheading intelligence assessments to determine where climate change could affect global stability, that work may be in jeopardy as Republicans skeptical of climate control take control of key congressional committees.

• The nation’s satellite system, which provides the lifeblood of climate information, is in disrepair after years of inadequate funding and, in the past two decades, the intelligence community has struggled both internally and politically to respond to the challenges posed by climate change.

•  At home, critical infrastructure along the Gulf of Mexico is vulnerable to the stronger storms and more frequent flooding that are predicted due to climate change.

Stories in the series also explore how the U.S. defense and intelligence community is preparing for a melting Arctic, shifting disease vectors, altered glacial melt in the Andes and rising seas in South Asia.

In addition to traditional print and online pieces, the project allows audiences to explore the impact of climate change through creative interactive graphics that:

• demonstrate the impact of rising seas on domestic military installations;

•  visualize the cascade of consequences that could turn climate changes into national security threats and crises;

•  cast users as decision makers in a war game that plays out the consequences of climate change in four regional scenarios;

•  convey the interrelated history of scientific findings, extreme weather events and  political and defense policy as they relate to a changing climate through an interactive timeline;

• let users hear from the experts themselves and engage in the conversation; and

•  provide an online library of dozens of government, academic and think tank documents related to climate change and national security.

For more information on this timely initiative please visit the project’s Global Warning website. Further information about the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative can be found here.  

A new conceptualization of insecurity and instability is needed in a world with greater and freer movement of goods, services and people – both legal and illicit – greater demands on weakening governments and the internationalization of local conflicts. The new insecurity is fundamentally derived from the responses of people and groups to greater uncertainty in an increasingly volatile world. Governments, and increasingly other actors need to recognize this in order to promote sustained stability in the long-term, locally and internationally.

Security of persons and property is absolutely necessary for economic, social, or political development on any large scale; people must have a reasonable belief in their own physical safety and that tomorrow they will be able to capture the fruits of their labor today. This extends not just to people in underdeveloped countries. Insecurity is a global and natural phenomenon – although admittedly undesirable – experienced by all people to varying degrees. The financial crisis has brought a large amount of uncertainty to people in the United States and the European Union about their futures and has seen a surge in political mobilization and social upheaval across the Atlantic. In an age of globalization where borders are more open, people and goods more mobile, which simultaneously facilitates the spread of prosperity as well as risk; i.e., there is greater opportunity for everyone, not just those engaged in legitimate activities. Furthermore, global openness also requires that events in one part of the world are necessarily felt in other parts. We learned this lesson all too well during the financial crises of 1998, and are still learning it after the 2008 crisis.

Fundamentally, the question is still: how can we make lives and livelihoods better? The question is not restricted to the poor anymore, although the poor generally face much higher levels of risk and insecurity than the wealthy. The question is now focused on the creation and sustainment of secure, stable environments where people can exercise personal authority to improve their own outcomes. The answer is that lives are made qualitatively better when people’s environments are relatively stable, and they have the power to exercise autonomy over them.

The absolute rise in risk and insecurity resulting from an open, global economic system has reshaped the nature of insecurity in two ways. First, people internalize more risk. The 9/11 attacks and the 2005 London bombings, in addition to news stories of “home-grown” terrorists or uncovered attack plots that came close to being enacted, remind people in the developed world that they are not entirely protected against international threats to their security. Second, the rise in risk creates demand for greater state interventions to curb the proliferation of insecurity. It does this first by placing demands on states by its constituents, and second by other states’ demands that they take action against persons or groups that promote violence or insecurity elsewhere. As demands on the state to provide greater security and stability increase, the ability of the state to establish and maintain sole authority over the use of force is constrained. In many places the state is incapable or unwilling to establish, maintain and consistently deliver a fair and impartial rule of law – i.e., provide a stable environment in which people can go about their daily lives with the reasonable expectation that the integrity of their persons, family, and property will be secure.

As a side note, the inclusion of the term “unwilling” is deliberate here. Some states are unwilling to undertake necessary measures to establish secure environments, perhaps because they lack the resources, the opportunity cost of those resources is too high, or there is insufficient political will to allocate the necessary resources. In general, establishing authority over a space is a difficult task requiring huge amounts of money, manpower, experience, and a credible commitment to maintain those efforts into the long-term. To illustrate, in 2011 the United States Department of Defense spent an estimate $159 billion USD on operations in Afghanistan, most of these to train police and maintain security. If this number were the GDP for a nation, it would be the 58th largest economy in the world, far ahead of countries like Iraq, Angola, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Uruguay, Bolivia, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Mali, and many other nations that are being increasingly asked to take on greater roles of governance and responsibility within their own borders. Aside from a lack of resources, states have other agendas and demands on political energy. This has been the case in Rio de Janeiro since the 1960s. The favelas around Rio are mazes of ad hoc buildings and streets built up on hilly terrain – very easy to defend and very difficult to infiltrate for outsiders. That is essentially what the state has become for many in the favelas of Rio – outsiders. In Rio and other cities, poor areas are run by local “informal” authorities” who provide a form of governance in the absence of the state. Donos provide public security, dispute resolution mechanisms, and a clientelistic form of service delivery that acts in part as a substitute for government functions. While there have been actions taken to combat the control of the favelas by narcotrafficking donos, the government of Rio has been, in general, tolerant of their control of these areas even if vocal about their disapproval of the donos.

That “informal” groups provide some semblance of order is not to say that the lives of everyday people is secure in these areas. They are not. Yet, there are very few places in the world where there is absolutely no form of social control or order – someone is calling the shots practically everywhere. What is ultimately at the heart of growing local and regional insecurity are the dynamics at play between individuals who are seeking to reduce their personal insecurity, groups that promote or engage in illicit and/or violent activity, and states or other sovereign authorities. The social contract is being renegotiated as states compete with other groups for public authority, either because other groups are expanding into spaces formerly occupied or controlled by the state, or because the state is trying to expand into spaces formerly occupied or controlled by other groups.

This dynamic inevitably creates insecurity for individuals at the micro-level. People come under competing jurisdictions, and have to learn to negotiate blurry lines of authority and safety.  As security increases, the incentive to take sides rises. This happens globally. The aggregation of personal responses to insecurity generates the instability that policy-makers seek to mitigate. When the state cannot provide protection or opportunity, unemployed, disenfranchised young people join street gangs across the globe – Chicago, Mumbai, Johannesburg, Kinshasa. They join organized criminal networks that will offer employment and protection throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. They join rebel movements, taking up arms against a state that cannot make credible promises of opportunity, equality, or personal security. They join terrorist groups that can offer them immediate protection, access to resources, and a sense of belonging and identity – a buffer against an uncertain world and a framework for organizing and making sense of one’s environment.

Moreover, these decisions also have implications for conceptions of personal identity. Personal identity is a fundamental human need. People seek a sense of self, a way of organizing their world and the environments in which they find themselves. Instability necessitates changes in how people view themselves and their place in the world. As group, ethnic, regional, and national identities are redefined in the face of conflict or altered sovereignty, people are forced to renegotiate personal identities to incorporate these changes. In the face of dissonance between how they see themselves and the opportunities they have, people often adapt different identities to reduce this disconnect. This renegotiation comes through practice; as people practice new behaviors, they adopt their new identities. Hence, as people in areas of contested authority or beyond the reach of the state practice informality or criminality, this becomes a part of their identity over time.

Even for those that are not willing to commit to sides, the insecurity caused by ill-defined or blurry lines of authority within a political, economic or special space leads civilians to hedge their bets against a clear victor and pay tribute to both sides, to the extent that they can. Civilians must learn to talk out of both sides of their mouths, so to speak, to appease one authority without offending the other. This must necessarily weaken the ability of the state to exert authority in contested spaces and confound efforts to establish authority in these spheres.

The presence of criminal groups absolutely promotes this dynamic. Illicit, violent or other criminal groups have benefitted from the freer movement of goods and services at least as much as those in legitimate business. They have large stores of cash that they can use to buy favors and loyalty, as well as power and weapons to enforce order within their spheres of influence. In some parts of the world, illicit groups are the only groups with public authority – Jamaica, some of Rio’s favelas, most of Sinaloa, Mexico, the shantytowns of Mumbai, Nairobi, and even today, after a huge effort on the part of the Colombian government, parts of Calí and Medellín. These groups benefit from this kind of uncertainty on the part of civilians. They offer employment and an identity to young men, and favors, medication, and even some public services to the community. In return, they receive support – sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit – which builds legitimacy, which translates into authority. The more a non-state group can make state forces appear inept, corrupt, or unwilling to provide basic security to the people, the more people will turn to the group to provide it.

The result is that, in the course of trying to promote their own personal stability – access to resources, a sense of identity, employment, safety –people either actively engage in activities that promote instability for others, or they acquiesce to a system that sustains insecurity.

Furthermore, as boundaries become more fluid, formerly local or regional conflict takes on an increasingly international flavor with some unintended consequences.  Global supply chains for illicit goods and services imply an opportunity for many new types of illicit groups to participate. Hence,  the lines between types of violent destabilizing actors, activities, and events are blurry and becoming more so. Local street gangs in Latin American countries are being used by transnational drug-trafficking supply chains to enforce order in their zones of control and move drugs, people and weapons throughout the region. Similar gangs in megacities in India, Africa and Asia are being used like Tammany Hall-style political coercion delivering votes for local bosses. Formerly local gangs in the United States and elsewhere are adopting increasingly organized, hierarchical structures as their focus grows and their range of activities extends from local protection to drugs, prostitution, extortion and weapons trading. Some of them now resemble the top-down tiered structure of organized crime syndicates. Rebel groups use youth gangs in countries from Colombia to Nigeria as mercenary fighters, who then take their skills learned back to their neighborhoods with them. Rebel groups also are becoming less distinguishable from terrorist groups, and vice versa. As well, all of them are becoming indistinct from organized criminal networks and organizations as they turn to the movement and sale of illegitimate goods and services to finance their operations. Paramilitary groups and other violent non-state groups from across the globe convene in the Tri-Border Area of South America to laundery money and trade expertise and illicit goods. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) had well-known ties to the Cartagena and Medellin Cartels in Colombia, as well as the FARC, during the 1990’s. Previous demarcations between types of violence and insecurity as well as their perpetrators no longer apply as neatly as they used to.

The second consequence is that local, regional, or national crises have spillover effects across borders. There is little true “global” insecurity. Rather, local, national, or regional instabilities have spillover effects that affect people beyond the area where the instability originates. Porous borders, low state capacity, and poorly guarded information can cause leakages of weapons, people, and goods that can decrease security everywhere. Regional conflicts create power vacuums where local, violent terrorist groups can set up operations and perpetrate instability not only in their own areas of operation, but also far-off targeted countries. Intrastate conflicts in Africa directly affect the probability of war in neighboring countries. Drug trafficking and violence in Central America filter through even the heavily guarded US-Mexico border. However, these sources of instability are not, in themselves, global in origin. Rather they are the organizational, and in some cases societal-level, responses to insecurity and instability locally that contribute to global insecurity.
Third, insecurity breeds insecurity. Insecurity motivates people to take steps to reduce the insecurity to themselves – to exercise, or regain, control over their environment. Sadly, this often manifests itself in competition rather than cooperation, resulting in zero-sum approaches to reducing instability. If groups cannot cooperate effectively to reduce risk, which is often the case where insecurity exists, then one’s actions to reduce one’s own insecurity generates insecurity for others. As a simplified example, a man who burgles a home has generated insecurity for the homeowner even as the sale of the stolen items generates income for him.

Fourth, unless credible commitments can be made on the part of all groups involved, the third issue cannot be overcome.  In the absence of credible commitments, the actors fall into a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. None of them can credibly commit to provide security for one another. This can be the case between any combinations of states and non-state groups or actors.  In some parts of the world, there is no actor who can enforce societal contracts in which all sides agree to cooperate. States may not have either the capacity or the willingness to police their borders, ensure fair and enforceable dispute resolution, provide a fair and uncorrupt police force, or ensure tight control of the movement of goods and services – legal and illegal – within and beyond its borders. Partly, in an age of globalization, the sheer magnitude of movement and the increase in demands on the state makes this near impossible. Partly, despite rhetoric to the contrary, some states have not taken effective steps to try and a globalized world has made these places even more dangerous. However, the fact remains that without either a mechanism between competing parties, be they individuals, groups or states, or a third party who can credibly commit to enforcing contracts of cooperation over competition, it seems difficult, if not impossible, to overcome the problem of the third observation noted above.

Fifth, many things promote insecurity, and they cannot all be thought of as separable. Environmental degradation and pollution, climate change and constrained natural resources, porous borders and weak state capacity, social or economic exclusion, and structural or institutional exclusion all exacerbate problems of insecurity and incentivize individuals to seek alternative situations that increase their short-term security and stability. Groups in resource-depleted areas can often also face ethnic or sectarian violence over access to resources. People in areas where unemployment is high turn to illegal or informal modes of income generation. Additionally, these problems all exacerbate one another. Lack of state control over resources or their distribution permits poor custodianship of those resources. Porous borders make illegal economies more lucrative. Conflict weakens state capacity. Globalization itself worsens insecurity by amplifying its effects across borders.

Sixth, responses to insecurity can be seen as rational attempts to reduce insecurity. If a neighborhood has a high rate of crime and no police protection, it makes sense in the short-term to join a gang for protection. Unemployed, young men who face challenges in securing legitimate livelihoods join gangs to traffic drugs, or join rebel armies for a steady supply of food and pay. Socially excluded groups with no political means of securing access to resources will organize rebellions and wars to gain access. Related to this, steps to crack down on groups that cause insecurity may generate new problems, as the insecurity for the groups itself is increased. A notable example is that, as a result of the Mexican government’s crackdown on narco-trafficking groups, some groups have splintered off and begun extorting schools and other local officials. These are rational, if awful, responses to increased instability in the lives of the former traffickers. Attempts to crack down on insecurity should be ready for its expression in alternate forms.

While it is undoubtedly the case that policy-makers and academics have begun to prioritize efforts to mitigate the spread of the kind of insecurity discussed here, too much emphasis is still placed on actions and reactions at the group and national level. Daily insecurity happens at the micro-level, beginning with individuals’ perceptions of and reactions to the environment in which they find themselves. While insecurity and conflict are all connected at the micro-, meso-, and macro- levels, there needs to me more analysis of risk and insecurity that recognizes the effect of these societal dynamics in individuals as well as groups, and understand how the effects at one level aggregate or disaggregate to levels above and below.

Image source: bass_nroll