Global Security:
The Human Dimension
November 1996

November Article Abstracts

Title: Redefining Security: The New Global Schisms
Author: Michael T. Klare
"The major international schisms of the twenty-first century will not always be definable in geographic terms. Many of the most severe and persistent threats to global peace and stability are arising not from conflicts between major political entities but from increased discord within states, societies, and civilizations along ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, caste, or class lines. . . This is not to say that traditional geopolitical divisions no longer play a role in world security affairs. But it does suggest that such divisions may have been superseded in importance by the new global schisms."

Title: Environmental Scarcity, Mass Violence, and the Limits to Ingenuity
Author: Thomas F. Homer-Dixon
The uninterrupted supply of resources such as oil and certain "strategic" minerals has been traditionally identified as a national security interest. But this focus on nonrenewable resources overshadows the impact scarcities of renewable resources such as cropland and water supplies can have on "Western national interests by destabilizing trade and economic relations, provoking migrations, and generating complex humanitarian disasters that divert militaries and absorb huge amounts of aid."

Title: Population, Consumption, and the Path to Sustainability
Author: Janet Welsh Brown
"[A] population stabilizing at 10 billion or 11 billion should be able to live humanely on the planet's resources if governments take the difficult steps required to curb excessive consumption and manage resources sustainably-and if the United States takes the lead."

Title: Religious Nationalism: A Global Threat?
Author: Mark Juergensmeyer
Throughout the world, religious leaders are creating "a synthesis between religion and secular nationalism, providing a merger between the cultural identity and legitimacy of old religiously sanctioned monarchies and the democratic spirit and organizational unity of modern industrial society. . . We may be witnessing an unusual moment in history in which an accommodation to some aspects of religious nationalism will be necessary to achieve international security and domestic peace."

Title: Winners and Losers in the Global Economics Game
Author: Gerald Epstein, James Crotty, and Patricia Kelly
The global economy is central to understanding the human dimensions of international security. One of the most important aspects of globalization-the flow of investment capital and the business and state interactions that guide this flow-is examined here, where it is argued that "the increased mobility of foreign direct investment and multinational corporations is imposing real and increasingly severe constraints on workers, communities, and states."

Title: Trade Policy and Development: Spurring Good Growth
Author: Thea M. Lee
"If policymakers in the developed countries do not take note of the social disruption and inequalities generated by current trade and investment policies, then these policies will be replaced by ad hoc responses unlikely to be much of an improvement. If progressive and internationally minded people do not address the issue of trade policy, then xenophobic and isolationist alternatives will prevail."

Title: Rethinking Human Rights
Author: Jack Donnelly
Are human rights and national security concerns mutually exclusive? Or is it possible to think about human rights as an aspect of national security? Jack Donnelly argues that "While no country in the world today equates personal security-understood as the effective enjoyment of internationally recognized human rights-with national security, the conflict between the two has been substantially reduced."