Expanding the ‘security threat’
Competing claims about what constitutes the greatest threat to global security are an exercise in what sociologists call domain expansion. ‘Once a problem gains widespread recognition and acceptance, there is a tendency to piggyback new claims on to the old name, to expand the problem’s domain’, writes the sociologist Joel Best (9). In other words, once terrorism and security have been defined as big problems that require serious attention, other claim-makers can appropriate these concerns to serve their own interests. Various different problems are now repackaged as ‘global threats’. ‘The initial claims become a foot in the door, an opening wedge for further advocacy’, says Best. Anxieties about international terrorism are not only mobilised to promote the ‘war on terror’ – they are also activated to highlight issues that have little to do with terrorists. So when a recent report concluded that the spread of HIV is ‘as big of a threat as terrorism’, it was drawing on the cultural script of the post-9/11 era (10). Other fear entrepreneurs have presented poverty reduction as being indispensable in the broader fight against international terrorism (11).
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In one very important sense, however, the Malthusian security agenda is even more retrograde than the traditionalist security agenda. The traditional variety was usually focused on a specific enemy; in many instances the enemy was clearly identified – the Russians, the Cubans, or some specific group of subversives. Today’s security agenda, by contrast, is uncertain about how to distinguish friend from foe and what the problem really is. According to this view, there are no friends or foes. The new security agenda adopts a fiercely misanthropic outlook and blames human behaviour in general for threatening security. They believe that our behaviour – leading to population growth, consumption of oil, environmental degradation – is the real threat. For them, threats are transnational, global, interconnected; in other words, everything is a potential threat. Infectious diseases, environmental problems, economic discontent and terrorist violence are seen as being parts of a broader, generic security problem.
In years to come, this approach, which is now institutionalised through the US Department of Homeland Security, is likely to expand into more and more spheres of human experience. It is surely only a matter of time before the assumption implicit in the Malthusian security agenda – that we do not simply need a ‘war on terror’ but a ‘war on everything’ – will be made more explicit.
