Globalization, Security, and Non-State Actors

Events of Globalization Week Spring 2006

Date: Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Time: 6:30-8:00 PM
Location: Lindner Commons, Room 602, 1957 E Street NW

Speaker

• Dr. Ersel Aydinli, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, The George Washington University
• Dr. Henry H. Gaffney, Team Leader, Center for Strategic Studies, CNA Corporation

Overview

Both Dr. Gaffney's and Dr. Aydinli's presentations focused on global terrorists broadly, and violent Islamist terrorism specifically.

Professor Aydinli argued that while global transformations have been producing spaces and motivations for much greater global (in)security interactions and entanglements, existing world governance systems have remained for the most part static and limited. In other words, while the overall political universe grows—due largely to global innovations such as communications and mobility revolutions—the state-centric Westphalian collectivity has not changed significantly in scope or influence. The result is an expanding territorial and deterritorial space that goes increasingly unchecked by states. Within this widening unregulated space, yet another uneven development has also been occurring.

According to Aydinli, intensifying global transformations are meeting with adventurous and empowered individuals and have begun to allow the creation of autonomous and independent non-state actors as security challengers. Yet out of these same interactions no efficient non-state agencies to help the states counter the security challengers have yet emerged. (The privatization of security in the form, for example, of mercenaries are still far from providing any meaningful global security in this unregulated realm.) Ultimately, states are being forced into a struggle against newly emerging actors whom they are poorly prepared to counter. Moreover, they are being forced to enter into an environment (both territorial and deterritorial) that they have not been designed to effectively patrol and secure.

What does this mean? It means that the rising security challenges posed by non-state actors are exceeding the expectation of states and statespeople, who have tended to feel that the "occasional" surge of transnational violence could be suppressed sooner or later by the states—a conviction based to a large extent on the conventional understanding that global non-state security challenges could not survive without some type of state support, but a conviction that recent examples, particularly the al Qaeda experience, no longer seems to hold true. Yes, al Qaeda may be a passing phenomenon, and by itself probably is not an existential threat to the United States or the world, but what it represents in terms of the global potential and feasibility for non-state actors as security challengers with destructive capacities rivaling those of states, should be seen as alarming.

Al Qaeda has already inflicted serious damage to global political institutions such as sovereignty. Therefore, it is imperative that we look and think beyond al Qaeda, or whatever the latest "label" of this evolutionary process may be, and focus on the "hows" of the process itself, so that we can better understand the current and future trends of globalization and non-state security challenges.

Dr. Gaffney noted the tendency among some to lump any organization not directly controlled by the state, including multi-national corporations (MNCs) and non-profit NGOs, with the “nomadic terrorists” of the world. In terms of Kenneth Waltz's tripartite division of levels of analysis—the individual, the state, and the state-system or world levels—states and their militaries tend to mired at the state level while globalization proceeds exuberantly at the higher level and Tom Friedman's "super-empowered individuals" at the lower level take advantage of globalization's connections to ensure freedom of movement and lines of communication.

Though there has been an empirically measurable diminishing pattern of conflict around the world, the main threat to global security, or at least that which the global community must attend to, lies in what Barnett calls "The Gap," which Gaffney identified as the Islamic world stretching from Morocco through Pakistan (and exlcuding India, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia). These are the sources of the nomadic terrorists (though some now are “home-grown” in Europe). The larger problem, whose solution might also help "drain the swamp" in which terrorists breed, is what Gaffney calls "the awkward connections" of these countries to globalization. How to more fully involve the countries in globalization, thus to create useful employment for their people, is a big challenge that certainly extends far beyond what the U.S. military or any other military can attend to.

Still, Gaffney concluded that al Qaeda (now essentially a metaphor) is hardly likely to bring down the U.S. or world economy, nor establish their caliphate, despite the strength or their aspirations or the effectiveness of future attacks. Nor are global terrorists likely to acquire nuclear weapons. The main security threat to a globalizing world comes not from non-state actors but from China, and then only if diplomacy fails in the resolution of the Taiwan issue.

Media

Speaker Bios

Dr. Ersel Aydinli

Dr. Aydinli was a post-doctoral research fellow during the 2004-2005 academic year with the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He is on leave from his position as an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University in Ankara. Before pursuing an academic career, Dr. Aydinli served as an officer in the counter-terrorism department of the Istanbul police. He lectures frequently for international organizations, such as NATO, on counter-terrorism issues.

Dr. Aydinli's current research is on the evolution of non-state security actors with a focus on global Islamist terrorist networks. His works have appeared in such journals as International Studies Review, International Studies Perspectives, Current History, Security Dialogue, Middle Eastern Studies and World Today. He is the co-editor (with James Rosenau) of Globalization, Security and the Nation State: Paradigms in Transition (SUNY Press, 2005).

Dr. Henry H. Gaffney

Dr. Henry Gaffney is the Director of the Strategy and Concepts Team in the Center for Strategic Studies (CSS) at The Center for Naval Analyses (CNA). He has been at CNA since 1990, specializing in broad studies of the evolving world security environment (including a big study on Globalization and the U.S. Navy). He recently completed a major study of the American Way of War and its Transformation, and has done a report for the National Intelligence Council on the Changing Nature of Warfare Through 2020. He has done studies of Applying Tranformation to the Global War on Terror and the Trajectory of the Middle East for the Office of Force Transformation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He has participated in the review of the studies program at the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) and was an observer for SOCOM [Special Operation Command] at the first international special forces conference in Tampa in June 2005. He also managed a program of studies and seminars with a counterpart Russian institute from 1991 through 2004.

Dr. Gaffney served for 28 years in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense prior to joining The CNA Corporation, working on NATO matters, particularly NATO nuclear weapons matters, including three years (1967-1970) at the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels. His most successful initiative was laying out the process (the High Level Group) and the options that led to “Euromissiles” offsetting the Soviet SS-20. After two years as Director of the Near East and South Asia office, where he had much to do with the initiation of the long-term security assistance program for Egypt, he spent most of the 1980s as the Director of Plans in the Defense Security Assistance Agency, which managed U.S. arms sales and security assistance programs throughout the world.

Dr. Gaffney received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1956 and his doctorate from Columbia University in 1967, where he specialized in the politics of the developing areas. He served as an officer in the U.S. Navy from 1956 to 1959, on destroyers in the Pacific. He was the recipient of two Defense Distinguished Service medals and one Defense Meritorious Service medal.

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