Globalization and Conflict: National Security in a ‘New’ Strategic Era

The conventional wisdom since the suicide attacks of September 11 is that the world will never be the same again. According to President George W. Bush, September 11 changed the strategic thinking of the US. But despite proclaiming a new war against terrorism, it is not clear that the US, the world’s only superpower, has fundamentally changed its thinking on international security. A Cold War phenomenon known as the national security state, in which defence and foreign policy interests essentially merged, remains largely intact. Indeed, the ideas of global primacy and pre-emptive war, articulated in President Bush’s new National Security strategy of September 2002, have reinvigorated and extended the idea of the national security state.However, President Bush’s distinctively national approach to security, especially with respect to Iraq, does not sit comfortably with the broader requirement that international problems like terrorism need multilateral responses to be effective. This book examines the changing parameters of the national security state. Key themes are: globalization and the new security environment; the political economy of internal conflicts; specific security challenges of the contemporary period; and the instrumentalities of managing the ‘new conflicts’.