Changing Global Security and Power Without Arms

In the news recently, Sony Pictures, the movie-making arm of the multimedia giant has been defeated by hackers who attacked the company’s servers, releasing embarrassing e-mails and sensitive information on the Internet.   The hackers have forced Sony to stop the release of a film which features the assassination of North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un.

Mr. Keith Burrowes
Mr. Keith Burrowes

While the US intelligence officials have claimed that the attack came from the North Korean government, North Korea has fired back calling for a joint investigation into the incident.  The reality is that it is entirely possible that sophisticated hackers could have routed its attack through the internet domain (if I have that term right) of a country that has not exactly been on the cutting edge of technology.  The only people claiming responsibility so far is a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace.  The complexity and import of this development cannot be overstated.  In essence, a company that has revenues that would surpass the GDP of many developing countries has been forced to stop the release of one its most anticipated films of the year.  In addition to that, it has sparked an international incident involving a global superpower and an unstable pariah regime.  There was a time when even cyber-warfare was fairly clear-cut and a natural extension of high-tech espionage, China infiltrating US databases and vice versa.  This however is something completely different.   The UN Economic and Social Council in 2011 held a meeting on Cyber Security in 2011.

The consensus was, “We have agreed that cybersecurity is a global issue that can only be solved through global partnership.  It affects all of our organizations…and the United Nations is positioned to bring its strategic and analytic capabilities to address these issues.”
It is perhaps time that the UN take further action.
Then there is the issue of climate change and the international response to resulting disasters, something I’ve written on before.  As I noted then, UN Secretary-General Ban’s tenure has been preceded by and encompassed extremes of natural disasters, from the tsunami that swept over Asia, to Hurricane Ivan, to Katrina, the Haiti and Chile earthquakes and now the flooding in computerPakistan. Whereas the chief concerns of his predecessors Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan were man-made conflicts – Iraq, the Balkans, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq again – it is clear that the greatest threat to the UN fulfilling its mandate, particularly the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, is the increasing prevalence of environmental/natural catastrophes.
Imagine the setbacks, for example, caused by the flood with relation to Pakistan’s achieving of Goal 1, which is to “Eradicate extreme hunger and poverty”, or Goal 2, which is to “Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.” Indeed, the very unpredictability of nature of within the past decade, calls into question the feasibility of the commitment to Goal 7, which is to “Ensure environmental sustainability”; and this is without bringing into the equation issues like the international gridlock on environmental policy, and multinational corporate irresponsibility as evidenced most clearly in the case of the recent BP oil spill.
The only option left, in my view, is the mitigation of the effects of natural disasters, and it boggles my mind why the international community, particular as encompassed by the UN, has not been retooling to put a more proactive mechanism in place to deal with the after effects phenomena like earthquakes, flood, tidal waves and hurricanes. As it is now, the approach is reactive, a strategy, or lack thereof, that is appearing more and more absurd when contrasted with the incidence of natural disasters; how many more catastrophes have to occur before the Mr. or his successor begins to look insincere in their expression of disbelief at the scale of the human tragedy?
The best bet may be some sort of emergency flood, one in which a substantial amount of easily accessible money is placed to deal with extreme natural disasters, with eligibility defined by a pre-established set of criteria. The difficulty of course, is achieving consensus to get the international community, particularly richer countries, to commit their financial resources to something that may or may not happen, with consequences that are thus difficult to project. It’s hard enough to get them to commit funding at adequate levels to existing causes, like poverty reduction and HIV/AIDS.
Failing this, or as an alternative to it, is the establishment of an international disaster insurance fund. Of course, the issues which plague regular insurance arrangements are going to come up– like the question of ‘risk’, for example; as well as problems that might by unique to that arrangement, such as the issue of reinsurance for example.
Then finally, there is the issue of the increase in armed conflict and violence by non-state actors.  Even as Israel and Palestine continue to fight each other, and even as tensions between Russia and Ukraine continue in the Crimea, the most deadly conflicts appear to be cultural and without any respect for national borders.  From the Janjaweed in Darfur, to Kony in Uganda, to Boko Haram in Nigeria, to ISIS in Iraq, to the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to the global Al-Qaeda network, violence carried out by groups without affiliation to nation-states has been on the increase.  There has not been a corresponding reconfiguration of the global security apparatus however to deal with this threat.
Whatever the mechanisms, global political leadership clearly has to do back to the drawing board to redefine its concept of [state] actors, emergency and global security.

(By Keith Burrowes)

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