This entry will just sketch a number of preliminary findings HCSS has distilled from the 'homework' that we did in preparation for the first work package within the ETTIS project. The (quite voluminous) results of this study will be published in due course (and will undoubtedly still be adjusted), but I suspect that quite a few people may be interested in this and have therefore decided to present a little sneak-preview of this publicly (EU-)funded research effort here on my blog.
I see this study as a natural follow-up on similar work we have done at HCSS in the past 2-3 years like Joint Ops 2030, where we essentially started redefining defense capabilities; or Sinews of power, which we are still working on (but it is unfunded work and therefore unfortunately remains on our backburner), as well as much other related work we have done (and are doing) at HCSS and TNO for the Dutch (and other) government(s). The common thread through all of this work (and this blog) is the need for us to get better security value for security money. There is a broad global consensus - also in more 'peaceful' parts of the world as in Western Europe - that security still matters and cannot be taken for granted. It is also almost universally accepted - even among the more 'free market'-parts of the political spectrum - that the public sector has a key role to play in safeguarding the 'public good'-aspects of security. And so our governments continue to spend money on defense and security, as well as on research into these matters. But there is a growing sense that we just have to get better at balancing our public investment portfolio in this area. And that may require some more radical rethinking of what security is and how we can best deal with it than we have been able and willing to contemplate so far.
One of the most promising developments in this context is in my view the fact that the European Union is finally starting to put some real money (€1.4 billion within the current main EU's R&D program, which has the typically bureaucratic name of '7th Framework Program') into security research. Although essentially unspoken, one of the main ambitions of this EU 'security research' agenda is to do all of this on our own 'European' terms, i.e. differently from the United States or from any other key actor in the international system. This is not just a case of wanting to be different for the sake of being different, or an expression of anti-Americanism - although clearly shades of those sentiments are also present. But at a much deeper level, the EU's security research agenda is the expression of a shared sense that Europe, after a particularly bloody fratricidal century prior to World War II, really did stumble upon a novel approach to security, one that was different from anything tried before: security through integration. And most Europeans from across the political spectrum would probably still agree that this approach to security has been an astounding success story - something that tends to be overlooked in these dark days of Grexits and other Fixits.
There is also a more bureaucratic explanation for the EU's security research agenda's 'distinctiveness'. It is fair to say that the European Union's super-bureaucratic nature can drive anybody who comes into contact with it to despair - none more so than those of us inside the European Union who have to deal with it. But the monster serves a Hobbesian purpose: the Leviathan of the European Commission (the European Union's executive branch) remains the expression of a social contract that member states voluntarily entered into in order to suppress the more basal instincts within themselves that they still fear. [Anybody who doubts that these instincts were always simmering below the surface for all these years only has to look at passions that are now flaring in the European sovereign debt crisis.] So the fact that funding for the European Union's security research agenda falls under the purview of this unique 'Hobbesian' supranational body which also (purposely!) has the real money within the European Union even though its substantive competencies in the security field are primarily (though not exclusively) in the non-defense realm virtually guarantees a different research focus. Member states continue to fund defense and security research at the national level, and much of that work is very similar to analogous efforts in the US, China, India or elsewhere. National funding for defense and security also still (by far) exceeds common EU funding. But the common, EU share of the European members states' security research portfolio is growing. And here, the balance of power between the traditional 'defense' parts of security (which are still mostly jealously guarded by the EU member States themselves) and the NON-defense parts of security (where the supra-national Commission is increasingly showing its muscle) is clearly different than in any other administration in the world, including in most EU-countries at the national level. So although many European defense and security research organizations are extremely frustrated with the maddening bureaucratic ways in which EU-projects have to be run, they still tend to relish the opportunity to do really innovative security research on a scale that national funding mechanisms no longer allow.
There are now over 100 security-related EU-funded research projects, which typically have horrible acronyms (I was once tempted to submit a proposal under the acronym 'WIDOLA' - "we don't like acronyms") but also quite sizable budgets (upwards of €1M per project). ETTIS is one of the 'new' projects that started in 2012 with a large number of consortium partners and a budget €2.2 million (which is a lot less than it seems when you factor in all of the transaction costs involved in running such a consortium) and an expected lifespan of 3 years. The main premise of ETTIS is that the European Union wants to develop better ways to allocate R&D money for 'societal security'. How can we find out what we really need in this area? And how do we translate these security needs into R&D priorities. The first ETTIS work package, on which HCSS is in the lead, dealt with the very concept of security. And the work I am reporting on in this blog entry is based on the 'homework' the consortium has done that will - hopefully - find a place in the final reporting on the work package.
Our homework on the academic literature on 'security' (there is also another part that dealt with policy documents) focused on 4 aspects:
Our homework on the academic literature on 'security' (there is also another part that dealt with policy documents) focused on 4 aspects:
- what is 'security' (definitions);
- what are its dimensions,
- what are the sources from which security can be drawn (a new concept my HCSS-colleague Tim Sweijs brought in that is in line with our concept of sources of power - the best way of thinking about this is probably by analogy with a water source from which water is drawn) and
- what are strategies that can be used to deal with security.
The ETTIS consortium partners were of course keenly aware of the fact that there are quite a few review articles available about the (changing) nature of security, especially in the field of political science. We could therefore have taken the ‘easy’ way out and have once again summarized these well-rehearsed summaries. But many of these partners are involved in our nations’ as well as in the European Union’s research efforts in the field of security. And at least some of those partners - and HCSS definitely - have grown increasingly frustrated with some systematic biases that we observe in the focus of that research agenda, in which the afterglow of both the ‘Cold War’ and – going back further in time – the industrial-age security paradigm is still remarkably strong.
We therefore felt it might be useful to cast our analytic nets much more widely into the full range of academic disciplines to explore how other disciplines that have looked in-depth at ‘security’ deal with these problems. The research design behind this work package was unapologetically (and typically for HCSS) bold and broad. We set out to collect the widest possible set of documents from all (!) peer-reviewed academic journals that discuss definitions and dimensions of security. To do this, we took the largest available database of academic journals (EBSCO, containing a few tens of thousands of the main academic journals) and searched there for all articles that contain the words ‘definitions’, ‘dimensions’ and ‘sources’ in close proximity to the term ‘security’ This yielded tens of thousands of articles, of which we selected approximately 2000 of the most relevant ones (as determined by EBSCO’s relevance ranking algorithm). Anybody interested in the bibliography can consult it here. We then automatically (using a plugin we wrote for Zotero, which we have also made publicly available on github for others to use) sorted these 2000 articles by disciplines based on the classification scheme used by JournalSeek, a searchable database of online scholarly journals that covers about 90’000 academic journals and lists those by main and sub-disciplines. This sorted set of selected articles was then subsequently processed using both automated (textmining) and human analysis to look for new insights that may be relevant for identifying new and promising R&D avenues.
We therefore felt it might be useful to cast our analytic nets much more widely into the full range of academic disciplines to explore how other disciplines that have looked in-depth at ‘security’ deal with these problems. The research design behind this work package was unapologetically (and typically for HCSS) bold and broad. We set out to collect the widest possible set of documents from all (!) peer-reviewed academic journals that discuss definitions and dimensions of security. To do this, we took the largest available database of academic journals (EBSCO, containing a few tens of thousands of the main academic journals) and searched there for all articles that contain the words ‘definitions’, ‘dimensions’ and ‘sources’ in close proximity to the term ‘security’ This yielded tens of thousands of articles, of which we selected approximately 2000 of the most relevant ones (as determined by EBSCO’s relevance ranking algorithm). Anybody interested in the bibliography can consult it here. We then automatically (using a plugin we wrote for Zotero, which we have also made publicly available on github for others to use) sorted these 2000 articles by disciplines based on the classification scheme used by JournalSeek, a searchable database of online scholarly journals that covers about 90’000 academic journals and lists those by main and sub-disciplines. This sorted set of selected articles was then subsequently processed using both automated (textmining) and human analysis to look for new insights that may be relevant for identifying new and promising R&D avenues.
We have not come across a single review of the essence of security that has looked at as diverse a set of security issues as attachment security (psychology), tenure security (economics), social security (economics), (financial) ‘securities’, health security (medicine); school violence (education), ecosystem security (biology) etc. Some may be surprised that we included all these different forms of ‘security’ in this effort. We were surprised nobody had done this before.
This broad-stroke inquiry provided a rich harvest of very different views on what security is, including its definitions and dimension and sources as well as the strategies that can be used to increase it. As promised, I will provide some of the insights that struck us most.
As Chart 1 shows, our particular search strategy yielded a set of articles that came overwhelmingly from three academic disciplines (as defined and categorized by Journalseek): business administration, economics and social sciences. There were also more than 50 articles that specifically addressed definitions (or dimensions or sources) of security in the fields of Humanities, Computer and Information Science and Psychology. It should be stressed that these findings are to some extent an artifact of the choices made (mostly by EBSCO and by the Zotero-plugin we used, based on Journalseek, to sort the top-ranked journal articles from EBSCO into certain categories). But the key take-away here is that there are indeed a number of disciplines outside of the ones that we typically find back in the 'mainstream' security literature that have looked hard and deep at what security actually is.
With regard to definitions we identified a number of the key definitional ‘building-blocks’ that different disciplines chose to put together in different ways to construct their ‘definition’ of security. These include choices about the level-of-analysis at which security is analysed (individual, group, state, global), choices about such notions as ‘absolute’ versus ‘relative’, ‘objective’ versus ‘subjective’ and ‘positive’ versus ‘negative’ security, in addition to security as a ‘state’ versus security as a ‘process’. We note that the definition-related combinatorial choices made by political science as a discipline (and especially the subfields of international and national security studies) really make it the odd-man out in this group of disciplines that study security intensively. No other discipline puts so much emphasis on the state-level - which may not be overly surprising given the focus of political science on politics and the continued centrality of nation-states in these matters. But what may be more surprising, however, is that no other discipline puts so much emphasis on ‘relative’ security, on (allegedly) ‘objective’ security, on ‘negative’ security and on security as a ‘state’ instead of a process. We wonder whether these combinatorial choices are as self-evident as many political scientists seem to think they are. They may therefore merit further attention in both the formulation and the targeting of security policies.
The key take-away from our analysis of the various dimensions of security is that we uncovered a wide range of dimensions that the more mainstream literature is only dimly (and sometimes even not at all) aware of. Two examples that struck me personally as particularly promising were the dimension of 'attachment security' (the fact that people derive 'security' from a "secure base relationship integrat[ing] insights about affect, cognition and behaviour in close relationships across age and culture" - a concept that has been developped quite well in the field of psychology, with also shoot-outs to evolutionary biology and ethology) or 'tenure security', a central concept in economics that is seen as a key prerequisite for properly incentivized (and thus 'secure') economic interactions. We surmise that a more systematic and in-depth investigation of this issue would unveil far more of such discoveries. This observation is important in its own right, as it may push more mainstream security analysts to ponder why they include certain aspects of security and exclude others. We feel it is even more important because it opens a variety of new research avenues to establish whether these less-well-known or unknown dimensions of security contain any insights or even solutions that mainstream security analysis may have underestimated. It is perfectly possible that some of those may not be applicable or ‘translatable’, but as we will see in the next section - when discussing sources and strategies - even this bird’s eye analysis has already revealed some quite intriguing insights in this regard.
Our exploration of sources and strategies identified in academic disciplines turned out to be especially fruitful, certainly since our main objective was to enrich the ways of thinking, defining and dealing with security beyond traditional/current concepts, and to distill insights from other fields that may prove new, interesting and/or useful. We found far more interesting notions than we had expected initially - both in number and in their potential usefulness in the field of societal security. To mention a number of concrete examples that we found particularly stimulating:
This broad-stroke inquiry provided a rich harvest of very different views on what security is, including its definitions and dimension and sources as well as the strategies that can be used to increase it. As promised, I will provide some of the insights that struck us most.
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| Chart 1 |
With regard to definitions we identified a number of the key definitional ‘building-blocks’ that different disciplines chose to put together in different ways to construct their ‘definition’ of security. These include choices about the level-of-analysis at which security is analysed (individual, group, state, global), choices about such notions as ‘absolute’ versus ‘relative’, ‘objective’ versus ‘subjective’ and ‘positive’ versus ‘negative’ security, in addition to security as a ‘state’ versus security as a ‘process’. We note that the definition-related combinatorial choices made by political science as a discipline (and especially the subfields of international and national security studies) really make it the odd-man out in this group of disciplines that study security intensively. No other discipline puts so much emphasis on the state-level - which may not be overly surprising given the focus of political science on politics and the continued centrality of nation-states in these matters. But what may be more surprising, however, is that no other discipline puts so much emphasis on ‘relative’ security, on (allegedly) ‘objective’ security, on ‘negative’ security and on security as a ‘state’ instead of a process. We wonder whether these combinatorial choices are as self-evident as many political scientists seem to think they are. They may therefore merit further attention in both the formulation and the targeting of security policies.
The key take-away from our analysis of the various dimensions of security is that we uncovered a wide range of dimensions that the more mainstream literature is only dimly (and sometimes even not at all) aware of. Two examples that struck me personally as particularly promising were the dimension of 'attachment security' (the fact that people derive 'security' from a "secure base relationship integrat[ing] insights about affect, cognition and behaviour in close relationships across age and culture" - a concept that has been developped quite well in the field of psychology, with also shoot-outs to evolutionary biology and ethology) or 'tenure security', a central concept in economics that is seen as a key prerequisite for properly incentivized (and thus 'secure') economic interactions. We surmise that a more systematic and in-depth investigation of this issue would unveil far more of such discoveries. This observation is important in its own right, as it may push more mainstream security analysts to ponder why they include certain aspects of security and exclude others. We feel it is even more important because it opens a variety of new research avenues to establish whether these less-well-known or unknown dimensions of security contain any insights or even solutions that mainstream security analysis may have underestimated. It is perfectly possible that some of those may not be applicable or ‘translatable’, but as we will see in the next section - when discussing sources and strategies - even this bird’s eye analysis has already revealed some quite intriguing insights in this regard.
Our exploration of sources and strategies identified in academic disciplines turned out to be especially fruitful, certainly since our main objective was to enrich the ways of thinking, defining and dealing with security beyond traditional/current concepts, and to distill insights from other fields that may prove new, interesting and/or useful. We found far more interesting notions than we had expected initially - both in number and in their potential usefulness in the field of societal security. To mention a number of concrete examples that we found particularly stimulating:
- Beyond the State: most disciplines have multi-level approaches to security sources and solutions, but many single out the soc(iet)ial context as particularly relevant, meriting more explicit attention to policy solutions that deal with the nexus between individuals and the groups they belong to.
- Integrity and trust are viewed in many areas as key sources of security. Although more mainstream security scholars are certainly aware of this source and pay some lip service to its importance, they devote much less attention to how these sources can be stimulated to prevent or solve security challenges.
- Technology is viewed in most (though not all) disciplines as one of the key sources of security and as a tool that can be used in promoting security. But we are struck by the narrow focus on ‘hard’, physical technologies in the mainstream security literature, whereas most other disciplines seem to use a broader definition of technology and also to strike a better balance between physical and ‘social’ (or socio-technological) technologies (with clear implications for R&D)
- The same applies to power as a source of security. Power is a central theme in the mainstream literature, which tends to still focus predominantly on what political scientists now call ‘hard security’ - whether in the more subtle - and in our view also more profound- sense of Joseph Nye (i.e., power that can be used to induce others to change their position; or in the more popular notion of ‘tangible’ or even ‘military’). Even the mainstream literature now started focusing more attention on soft power (in Nye’s definition, the ability to co-opt others by getting them to want what you want, in popular parlance things like cultural power etc.). The main observation from our overview here is that the balance between hard and soft security solutions seems particularly tilted towards the former in the mainstream literature. Hard power is clearly present in virtually all other disciplines too, but in more balanced proportions (with psychology being an excellent example).
- Prevention and resilience. Most disciplines are starting to move upstream in dealing with security risks by focusing more on preventing security risks ex ante rather than ex post through the strengthening of actors or systems’ resilience. They do so primarily from an effectiveness and efficiency point of view. A salient example is provided by the health domain and the turn from (expensive, technological) cure to prevention and healthy life choices. The acknowledgement and acceptance of the fact that in a complex and dynamic world not all risks can be prevented pushes the debate in many disciplines towards an increased emphasis on resilience as a security strategy - which we do not find fully reflected in the more mainstream security disciplines.
- We also find back the multi-level approach to security that we saw in many disciplines’ definitions of security in their approaches to solutions and strategies. More so than in mainstream security discussions (which seem particularly captured by the ‘level-of-analysis’ debate which seems to urge them to pick one level as better than another) do we find back the idea that solution concepts should embrace solutions at multiple levels including individual, group/society, state and regional/global.
- Security with rather than security for/over. Many other disciplines focus on the importance of empowering individuals (e.g., through education, through the right sets of incentives, etc.) to act independently and be or become a source of security.
- Nicely tying in to the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ angle of security, language and communication are singled out key strategic instruments in a number of disciplines dealing with security in ways that they are typically not in the mainstream security literature.
- We tapped into some interesting ideas about the strategic use of timing – a largely neglected issue in most of the mainstream literature – which suggest that security strategies will benefit from taking numerous time related aspects into account, including such aspects as ‘time horizons’, ‘path dependencies’ and ‘anchoring’.
- Various psychological biases of individuals shed new light on the use and utility of ‘evidence based policies’, and call attention to the need of taking such tendencies seriously when formulating security strategies.
- Markets, which are sometimes viewed as sources of instability (at least by some schools in political science and certain more politicised subfields of economics), are now increasingly also seen as important potential sources of security and conflict-prevention in multiple disciplines. As an example: for many issues of economic scarcity, the price mechanism often plays an underappreciated role in adjudicating possible conflicts (e.g., scarce food leading to a price impulse that gives local farmers more incentives to be efficient and others more incentives to innovate). Thus deeper inquiry in how markets affect security may provide new promising strategies for dealing with various security issues.
- Liberty and democracy continue to be seen as relevant sources of security which should be included in a security policy agenda not just for normative reasons, but also because they arguably provide some of the most effective and efficient mechanisms to create sustainable security.
A final - in our view very important (and actionable!) - observation we would like to offer is that our analysis shows that there currently no truly inter-disciplinary security discipline. We clearly demonstrate that the topic of security is dealt with in depth in a wide number of disciplines - admittedly sometimes with different definitions, definitely from all sorts of different angles. but always still with the quintessence of security (as ‘se-cura’ or ‘free from care’) at the heart of the scientific inquiry. We also show that many of the disciplines are only vaguely aware of each other. Academics love castigating governments (in our view legitimately) for being overly stovepiped. But it seems clear that the current incentive structures in academia militate against truly cross-disciplinary efforts and therefore lead to very similar (and equally pernicious) stovepipes or siloes. Since governments in most countries still provide some funding to academia for applied security research, there may be a great opportunity here to counterbalance the existing incentive structure with some targeted funding.
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