For 50 years, sustained by the cold war, "security" has been defined primarily in military terms. Backed by doomsday nuclear arsenals, the cold war adversaries were locked in mortal competition.
But now that the cold war has faded away, a very different struggle for survival is emerging. After the slaying of the cold war dragon, James Woolsey, former head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, compared the future to living in a jungle inhabited by a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. There has been a shift from war between sovereign states to fighting within societies.
Since the end of World War II, there have been at least 130 wars, killing more than 23 million people directly and another 20 million through famine and other war-related disruptions. Whereas the number of major wars--killing at least 1,000 persons--stood at around a dozen in any given year during the fifties, and rose no higher than 20 a year during the sixties and seventies, it surged at the beginning of the eighties to more than 30, where it has remained ever since.
And as many countries may be bordering on war as are actually engaged in it. The post-cold war era is increasingly witnessing a phenomenon of what some have called "failed states"--the implosion of countries like Rwanda, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and others. Several other countries are among the ranks of what Professor James Rosenau of George Washington University calls "adrift nation-states"--countries that "have lost their moorings and may well be moving toward the edge of failure."
The outbreak of civil wars and the collapse of entire societies is being ascribed to the resurfacing of "ancient ethnic hatreds" revolving around seemingly irreconcilable religious and cultural differences. Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University went so far as to postulate a coming "clash of civilizations"--ethnically motivated communal violence. Some 40 percent of all countries have populations from five or more different "nations." Roughly half of the world's countries have experienced some kind of interethnic strife in recent years.
Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia have shown that the abundance and easy availability of arms can turn social and political upheaval into a violent disintegration of entire countries, triggering devastation on a massive scale. Although the public impression of the Rwandan conflict, for example, is mainly one of machete-wielding individuals on a rampage, the killing was in fact also conducted with machine guns, grenades, mortars, and land mines purchased from France, Egypt, South Africa, and another dozen or so arms suppliers that rushed in "like vultures to a carcass," as Stephen Goose and Frank Smyth of the Human Rights Watch Arms Project wrote in Foreign Affairs.
The twentieth century has seen the pursuit of "national security" elevated to near theological levels; modern military technology has dramatically increased the destructive power of weaponry, the range and speed of delivery vehicles, and the sophistication of targeting technologies. Yet arms ostensibly designed to enhance security increasingly imperil humanity's survival. We live in what is the most violent time in human history: the twentieth century accounts for 75 percent of all war deaths inflicted since the rise of the Roman Empire