Sustainable Security

A ‘sustainable security’ approach prioritises the resolution of the interconnected underlying drivers of insecurity and conflict, with an emphasis on preventative rather than reactive strategies.

Current approaches to global security are characterised by the ‘control paradigm’: an approach based on the premise that insecurity can be controlled through military force or containment, thus maintaining the status quo. The central premise of a sustainable security approach is that we cannot successfully control all the consequences of insecurity, but must work to resolve the causes. In other words, fighting the symptoms will not work; we must instead cure the disease.

ORG identifies four interconnected trends that are most likely to lead to substantial global and regional instability, and large-scale loss of life, of a magnitude unmatched by other potential threats:

• Climate change: Loss of infrastructure, resource scarcity and the mass displacement of peoples, leading to civil unrest, intercommunal violence and international instability.
• Competition over resources: Competition for increasingly scarce resources – including food, water and energy – especially from unstable parts of the world.
• Marginalisation of the majority world: Increasing socio-economic divisions and the political, economic and cultural marginalisation of the vast majority of the world’s population.
• Global militarisation: The increased use of military force as a security measure and the further spread of military technologies (including CBRN weapons).

While there are many other factors that can threaten the security of humans around the world (such as radicalisation (often being a result of marginalisation), rapid increases in the global population, the shortcomings of current forms of global governance etc.), these four drivers represent something new. Never before has humanity faced a world as interconnected yet so socio-economically divided, where environmental limits are so apparent and where traditional approaches to war-fighting and the use of force are so counter-productive.

The programme aims to develop the sustainable security concept and promote it to a wide international audience, ensure that voices from the global South play a central role in its development, and define specific options for sustainable security policies. These aims are achieved via in-depth research, dialogues with analysts and decision makers and providing new avenues for creative thinking and discussion on the real threats to global security in the 21st century.