Third world national security: Toward a new conceptual framework

This study is a preliminary attempt to reconceptualize the national security dimension of developing countries. Departing from the conventional monolithic approaches based on a military‐strategic orientation, the study places its emphasis on non‐military components of national security in the Third World countries such as economic vulnerability, ecological scarcity, ethnic fragmentation, and domestic coping machanisms which have been largely ignored. By incorporating these diverse security dimensions into an intergrative causal model, along with military‐strategic dimensions, the study applies this model to two concrete cases: South Korea and Lebanon. The basic contention of this paper is that an exclusive military‐strategic approach to the study of national security of developing countries is not only narrow, but also, misleading. To understand the security dilemma of these countries correctly, it is necessary to focus on non‐military factors in an integrative manner with specific attention to the contextuality of each country's security reality.