Security, Modernity, Ecology: The Dilemmas of Post-Cold War Security Discourse

The sense of enhanced generated at least in some Northern countries by the events of 1989 was dissipated, in part, by the war in the Gulf. Although other military threats once again loomed on the political horizon, the slightly more distant memories of famine in Ethiopia and the blistering drought of the summer of 1988 in North America have not faded entirely. Concerns about the greenhouse effect and pollution remain, albeit now in slightly reduced media prominence. Fears of a global economic recession also undermined feelings of in Western states in the late 1980s. The old threat of Soviet attack may not be credible any longer, except to some of the nuclear strategists in the RAND Corporation or in the Pentagon, but there remains widespread unease about the future. The haste with which the US administration went to war in the Gulf, and provided liberal intellectual justifications for so doing, gave pause to most who argued that the age of peace had come with the end of the Cold War.1 Security remains out of reach, it seems. But, interestingly, the term itself also still appears to be extremely difficult to clearly conceptualize. The term is used frequently; it is the preoccupation of hordes of specialists, the security who formulate policy, study international politics, and pontificate on the television screens of an anxious world.2 Despite, or perhaps more accurately because of, the frequency of its use, the term is inherently ambiguous. Particularly in its usage as national security, its meaning is both taken for granted and imprecise; its flexibility is a virtue in the academic and political circles of the analysts, intellectuals, and policymakers.3