This issue examines security perspectives problematizing notions of order, stability, and threats to them, while assessing policy, ideology, and economics in the contexts of war and peace, within the state-centric world order. Contributors provide insights into extremism, authoritarianism, and civilization at the national level, and on symmetric/asymmetric wars, world order, and the significance of current conflicts for future security dynamics, warfare, and West–East power shift.
The world has been plunged into another catastrophic war in the past year. On top of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Putin regime’s murderous invasion of Ukraine has brought with it carnage and human suffering not experienced in Europe since the wars in former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. This conflict reflects the new era that the global inter-state system has now entered. While the COVID-19 pandemic acted as a great accelerator of all of the underlying contradictions of the system, this war has crystallized some of them – in particular the sharpening of geopolitical relations between the (old and new) superpowers. The Russian invasion of Ukraine reveals the era of the relative decline of US power and the absence of a unipolar world, in which one imperial power was often able to impose its will internationally. Major changes have been happening in the world system, namely a shift in its hegemonic structures – a shift away from North America and Western Europe and toward the emerging economies, primarily in Asia, but also toward Latin America and Africa.
This war in Ukraine is historic. It is historic, less because of the war itself, than because of what that war is revealing about the world we live in, about the new organization of the world that is coming into being. The US has the goal to maintain itself as the dominant world power. China is working toward its goal of shaping a new global system with multiple power blocs, such as the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The military war in Ukraine exposes how far along we are in this global shift, in this military and economic competition. Putin undertook the invasion, driven by Great Russian chauvinism and a desire to establish an expanded Russian sphere of influence, with compliant regimes in countries on Russia’s border. He wants to obliterate Ukraine as an independent state and its right to exist. Putin has taken up once again the ideology of “Novorossiya” – “New Russia” – establishing an expanded area of Russian language, culture, and the assimilation of states or statelets into such an amalgam. This follows three decades of provocative eastwards expansion by NATO (the US-led Western military alliance), and the rearming of Russia’s armed forces.
Most other countries do business with both sides, and face sanctions and retaliation for whatever choice they make. There may be a historical alliance with the US, but there is also growing concern about America’s global position. In addition, there is also anger that US efforts to save itself are hurting many of its European allies.
This war has exposed economic nationalism as the new ideological reality governing the world system. It has exposed American decline, and the ways in which its elite is trying to shift the burden of adjusting to that new dynamic by offloading its effects onto the mass of people. All this reminds us that for a declining British Empire it took two wars (1776 and 1812) before it realized its changed position in the new world order, after initial feelings of disbelief, betrayal, outright fury, and resentment.
Talking of war inevitably involves talking about it in terms of right and wrong, even when we argue that war lies outside moral judgment, that in war self-interest and necessity prevail over morality. Thus, military strategy, the other language of war, can override the ethics of war. Nevertheless, we say that a particular war is just or unjust, or that a war is being fought justly or unjustly. The study of military ethics, especially Just War Theory, is increasingly institutionalized in programs of military training. Resistance to war has also drawn on ethical practices and discourses of morality. Anti-war movements appeal to moral standards, seeking to constrain militaries and the state through moral scrutiny. Ethics has become an increasingly important terrain on which war and military activity is legitimated and contested. The parameters of military conflict in the 21st century, compared with the Cold War period, have changed, as a result of technological progress and a changing architecture of global power relations. The last 20 years have seen a redistribution of economic power among the world’s great powers. China’s economy was one-eighth the size of the US economy just over 30 years ago; now it is roughly the same size in purchasing power terms. Other countries have also shown consistently high rates of growth, including India. On the other hand, we see a relative decline in the developed Western economies. Since 2008, every major power has undergone some form of deep internal economic crisis and readjustment. In the military and technological domains, US predominance continues, but new technologies have empowered small groups and individuals, further eroding the state’s monopoly on violence. The combination of economic crises, the social and political fragility they have induced, and new technologies, has created geopolitical shifts. Rising geopolitical competition increasingly happens through proxies rather than direct confrontation, so the prospect of conventional war between major powers is low, or was low, until the current conflict in Ukraine has turned into a major military confrontation.
Managing and creating gray zone conflict, activities that occur between peace and war, has been an important part of great powers’ international strategy. Many activities fall into this gray zone: from nefarious economic activities and cyberattacks, to mercenary operations, targeted assassinations, engaging surrogates in a conflict, instigating revolutions, and disinformation campaigns. Gray zone activities combine non-military and quasi-military tools and are at the threshold of armed conflict. They aim to thwart, destabilize, weaken, or attack an adversary. The onset of new technologies has provided states and non-state actors with more tools to operate and avoid clear categorization, attribution, responsibility, and detection, in the context of globalization, as well as the proliferation of the internet and social media. Increasingly, nations seek to promote their national objectives through aggression conducted covertly, or with obscure attribution, morality, and justification.
In the 21st-century, technology and military and political strategy blur the boundaries between peace and war, the military and the civilian, the conventional and the unconventional, the state and the non-state, the legitimate and the criminal, the moral, the immoral and the amoral. The Cold War has given way to “Cool War” involving constant offensive measures that seek to damage or weaken rivals through violations of sovereignty and penetration of defenses, using new technologies that change the paradigm of conflict. Actions are carried out by a long chain of performers, all giving and taking orders, everyone has a specific, focused task, while the people affected don’t appear fully human.
A key feature of many of the vital systems introduced for the digital age, including internet providers, search engines, hardware manufacturers, and software developers, was that they were owned and operated by private companies with global interests, wrote Freedman in The Future of War (2017). Smartphones carry capabilities like satellite imaging, navigation, data stores, instant, encrypted communications. These readily accessible systems made it possible for individuals and small groups to hurt others, as communities were exposed to new risks in hybrid wars. Hybrid warfare, often involving the use of drones, makes war elusive, ambiguous, easier, cheaper, and less risky for the attacker. Hybrid attacks are marked by vagueness, complicating attribution. When violence is committed remotely, who is responsible or complicit? Everybody, anybody, or nobody?
In March 2022, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, the White House announced that its military support package to Ukraine included 100 Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems, the Switchblade loitering munition known as the “kamikaze drone”, which had gained notoriety in the 2020 Nagorno–Karabakh War. The US was committed to providing over 700 Switchblades in total. Once airborne, loitering munitions hunt for a target and crash into it. Years earlier, Russia had created its own loitering munitions to counter insurgencies in Syria. The Russian manufacturer Zala-Aero Group designed the Lancet to autonomously locate and strike targets in designated areas, raising morality issues with the human-out-of-the-loop approach.
Debates about the rules and ethics of war have taken place for thousands of years, but those debates have relevance and new applications for theorists and practitioners today, as technology enables more and more ways to fight enemies: drones, satellites, computers, global positioning systems (GPS). The use of drones has been declared ethical and safe, effective in killing and enabling the West to fight “clean wars” for over two decades. As the use of drones has become much wider, employed by governments and militaries in civil, defensive, and aggressive wars, by superpowers and small states alike, is war becoming cleaner, moral, and just, or is warfare reduced to an endless series of cold-blooded murders?
Increasingly virtual wars are regarded as virtuous wars. While by 2023 such means have become widespread, it is the US that has led this virtual revolution. Its diplomatic and military policies are largely based on technological and representational forms of deterrence and compulsion that could be described as “virtuous war”, at the heart of which is the technical capability to actualize violence from a distance with minimal casualties. Virtual/virtuous war gives the digitally advanced a strategic advantage, while promoting a vision of bloodless, humanitarian, and hygienic warfare. Unlike other forms of warfare, virtual/virtuous war can “commute death”, keeping it out of sight and mind.
As Western support for Ukraine, moral and material, continues, peace negotiations become difficult, with neither side willing to concede defeat. Discussions around peace in a total war such as this one may be difficult, but not impossible, and China and other powers, such as Brazil, India, Turkey, and a group of African states, may play a crucial war in peace negotiations. The latest peace proposal came from China: on 24 February 2023, China called for a ceasefire in Ukraine and the resumption of peace talks, in a 12-point position paper it released, stressing the need to de-escalate and to undertake direct dialogue toward an end to the war. The paper includes China’s Global Security Initiative, emphasizing the importance of respecting the sovereignty of all countries, stopping unilateral sanctions, preventing the use of nuclear weapons and keeping nuclear power plants safe.
The Russia–Ukraine war, much like the wars in the Middle East – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen – has had significant impacts on neighboring countries, as it relates to refugees forced to flee their homes. Poland has taken 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees; Germany has taken a million and the UK has reportedly taken around 160,000. Nearly 3 million refugees from Ukraine were recorded in Russia by the end of 2022.
Talk of Russian atrocities, Russian aggression, and Russian strategies for global hegemony has replaced talk of Western evils: war crimes, aggression, hegemony, and impunity. Narratives that dominate current security concerns have President Putin as
In a world economy that has increased inequality, where a transnational elite of 1.5 billion people is drawing away from the remaining 6 billion (which includes the billion who are deeply impoverished), insecurity has been normalized at all levels: economic, political, military, health, food, environmental, and community. In the changing world order, inequality and insecurity remain at the core of debates on conflict, threat, displacement, warfare, domination, justice, as well as persisting alliances, divisions, and enmities.
Hamourtziadou, Jackson, and Winch, in “Russia’s and America’s 21st century wars: mirror images?” examine and compare 21st-century warfare in the context of two great powers: Russia and America. Russian and American invasions and subsequent wars are evaluated in terms of why and how they are fought, legal and moral considerations, impact, outcomes, and consequences. The paper examines similarities and differences in strategy and methods, expanding on the increasingly popular remote warfare. The authors assess the decisive role of science and technology in war, raising questions about the future of AI warfare.
In “Unjust war, wrongful justification and international humanitarian law”, Akhtar argues that it is plausible for the leaders who took the UK to war to be prosecuted for breaching international human rights law and international humanitarian law. This is because, first, the UNSCR 1441 was not respected by the British government that gave UN inspectors more time to investigate if Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, second, there is a measure of personal responsibility for those who gave the order for the invasion that has led to catastrophic consequences. The issue Akhtar addresses is the presumption of guilt that arises from the Chilcot Report’s findings, which has repercussions in terms of accountability for British Ministers in the Blair government (1997–2006) for war crimes.
Abdulkader explores security in Yemen through the lens of human security, in “The forgotten war: Yemen and human security”. Building on the UN people-centered concept of human security, she argues that all seven aspects are interlinked and vital for the peace and wellbeing of women, men, and children that must be “free from fear” and “free from want”, in order to live lives that are both safe and dignified. She examines the persisting insecurities in Yemen, in a war that the West seems to have forgotten.
In “From securing whiteness to securing publics? Marginalized communities and differential stakeholdership in domestic security in the UK”, Breen develops some conceptual questions about publics and stakeholdership in security, in the context of racialization and security for British Muslims. The author asks questions about the interests of publics vulnerable to the impacts of knife crime, and also about why protecting these publics has been comparatively under-invested, in contrast to Prevent and domestic counter-terror. In drawing this comparison, the article advocates for a reconceptualization of public policy to prioritize securing publics against vulnerability to extreme violence in ways which would provide more equitable stakeholdership in security.
The concepts of inequality, injustice, insecurity, and domination continue to be explored in Kehinde-Balogun’s “Policing third-world countries through a system of lending: The socioeconomic and political implications for Nigeria”. He argues that since the genesis of Nigeria’s public debt in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the country has been through economic hardship with poverty and stagnation to show for the humongous loans it has taken. While fingers have been pointed to the country’s corrupt leadership, feasible lessons have indicated colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism of Western domination. The most pressing issue has been Nigeria’s economic linkage with the IMF that has enmeshed the country in deeper debt and led to Nigeria’s economic doom. Like other African states, it battles the effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism: debt and subordination.
In “Re-evaluating Turkey’s global relationship and its shift toward the South-East Asian region” Roy-Mukherjee and Udeogu explore and evaluate Turkey’s foreign policy over the last two decades and the shift from the principle of Strategic Depth to that of Strategic Autonomy. The paper reviews Turkey’s current change in its international re-orientation toward Asia. The alliances that Turkey is forging with China, BRICS, and ASEAN, in the fields of science and technology, innovation, research, and development in renewable energy, while maintaining close ties with its Western allies, the authors argue, could lead to a confused foreign and economic policy.
Borley’s report “A reflection on the NHS, health security, and refugees” addresses the challenges faced by refugees to the UK from Afghanistan, and those faced by the NHS, at the sudden refugee influx in 2021, when Western forces withdrew from Afghanistan. The author examines the successes and failures of care provision in the NHS across the country, in particular Wolverhampton, whereby refugees accessed healthcare provision in a local Primacy Care Network. The report is informed by the author’s personal experiences while working within the local Primary Care Network, in addition to published research, in the context of health security. It highlights recommended improvements within the NHS to provide aid to the vulnerable, while preserving the system set out to create health security.
Skerritt, in “War as a counter-extremism strategy”, addresses Russian claims that it is countering neo-Nazi extremism, radicalization, and political violence in Ukraine. The author appraises the strategy of deploying the military to combat extremists. In his commentary, he contends that military intervention is not an effective strategy to combat extremism and that examples from the history of the dissenting West, particularly from the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, can provide support for this contention.
Hamourtziadou and Jackson, in “Hollywood and airpower: Myths and realities”, argue that the portrayal of aerial combat that is depicted in Hollywood movies such as Top Gun: Maverick contributes to an illusion of US state force as ethical, heroic, and grand. There is nothing heroic or self-sacrificial in the new ways America is fighting its wars, they argue. Its dark, delegated, and danger-proofing methods allow for war to be conducted at a safe distance from physical threat and with impunity. Drones, proxy fighters, and cyber weapons dominate America’s war tactics, making it a lot less heroic, a lot more cold-blooded, and looking more like a one-sided manhunt than anything resembling combat.
In “The not-so-innocuous question”, Chevolleau examines the racial microaggressions of the question “But where are you really from?” that exist everywhere in UK society: in job interviews, at bus stops, down the local pub, at business networking events, in staffrooms, and in boardrooms. The whitewashing of history has allowed for generations of white British people, who consider themselves to be the true “natives”, to accumulate a sense of superiority, entitlement, and privilege. In addition, the faux ignorance and innocence around the not-so-innocuous question of “But where are you really from?” allows the aggressor to place their victim in a place of abject discomfort, while portraying themselves as a victim of an over-sensitive (at best) or hostile (at worst) individual.