Security Challenges at the Dawn of a New International Order

Security as the subject of scientific research

The history of scientific reflection on the issues of security is difficult to present, which results from the complex character of this phenomenon. Ontologically speaking, phenomena and processes which can be captured in terms of the subject of security are of a remarkably amorphous and hybrid character. In the era of globalisation, and particularly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the notion of security has gained on this complex character. The division into external and internal security, or international one, cannot be upheld today. One can assume after Paul D. Williams that international security as a subject of research was situated within security studies and was initially placed within the realistic tradition, which – as experts in international relations claim – is based on the politics of power¹. It is very much different in the liberal paradigm, but the 1983 work by Barry Buzan² was a breakthrough; the author proved that security does not concern only states, but also societies and people. It is in this strand of security studies where a deepened conceptualisation of internal security began. Most generally, it means everything which used to be connected with stability and public order in a given territory, and which was within the competence of the police, social forces, and special forces. In the German literature on the subject, security is captured in a more legal way and signifies the inviolability of the legal order, the rights and goods of particular individuals and the goods of institutions and organisations, as well as undertakings taken by the state in this regard³. One can also go further – Michel Foucault claims that in order to ensure security, one needs to reach for a repertoire of surveillance techniques directed towards individuals as well as techniques of diagnosing their state at any moment; from a classification regarding the state of mind based on such a surveillance, pathologies can be discovered. In Foucault’s terms, the mechanism of security is combined within a whole set of disciplinary practices⁴.

In the 21^st century, the notion of security is undergoing constant transformations and it is clearly getting broader and broader, as Leszek Kołakowski noticed a long time ago⁵. It turned out that strategic studies within international relations do not always provide an answer to questions connected with threats coming from the non-military or non-state sphere. Generally speaking, we have to do with a great diversity of threats to people, institutions, and certain values. Threats of a new kind have emerged; they concern social, economic, political, cultural, military, and technological life. For the first time in history, these threats have a global dimension and can encompass cybersecurity. In these fields, certain phenomena undergo securitisation, i.e. they generate threats. Securitisation consists in explaining how particular subjects, including the state and its institutions, present certain phenomena as threats in order to use extraordinary measures to eliminate them. Securitisation is governed by rules which do not necessarily refer to a real threat. It is sufficient to have the discursive ability to successfully endow certain practices with the traits of a threat. An important premise should be mentioned here – one which makes it possible to explain the phenomenon of securitisation today – namely the condition of a nation state in the era of globalisation. After the end of the Cold War, countries lived through a certain identity crisis. It is known that the state and security have always been connected with one another. We can repeat after Thomas Hobbs that extra civitatem nulla securitas. For some time now, nation states have been partly confronted and partly they generated a new form of threats, namely threats coming from the other, the alien. The securitisation of migration is an example of this. However, after 24 February 2022, in relation to the Russian Federation’s military aggression towards Ukraine, many countries have to do with a threat of war conducted by a state which can even become the global threat.

Moreover, a new property of these threats involves their amorphism, which consists in the lack of an accurate diagnosis of these events. We are moving only within the world of opinions and political decisions, i.e. within the subjective world. The current situation of the health threat by COVID-19 was in the stadium of great uncertainty, and it was even close to apathy and panic. In this situation, a question arises about to what extent we had to do with the securitisation of this phenomenon. Under these conditions, the role of a researcher is difficult, as there are no credible diagnoses of the emergent threats; again – we are moving within the subjective world. It is thus difficult to make conceptualisations of research problems.

The need arises to consider a new perspective of understanding security, and in particular perceiving threats. It is about the notion of the culture of security, which provides such a perspective that we can more objectively evaluate to what extent we feel safe or in danger. Most generally, the culture of security involves the entirety of convictions, values, and practices of individuals and organisations, which define what constitutes a threat and the means with which to counter this threat⁶.

The difficulties in formulating the definition of this notion testify best to the complex nature of security. It is not surprising, as the majority of concepts in social sciences are difficult to define. When trying to define what security is, one can use the maxim formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche, which expresses the view that phenomena which have a history are undefinable. However, one should not fall into this type of a definition-related pessimism, since the problem of defining security must be approached in a discursive way because of the fact that in its historical development, security used to receive a particular referent expressing itself through linguistic constructions which were defined by the main subjects of security. The discourse on security based on scientific knowledge is disrupted by the political discourse, and so we have to do with opinions, judgements, and propaganda. This places researchers in a very difficult situation.

Nowadays, there is a high demand for a greater precision in understanding the phenomenon of security. This results from the fact that security today is a key category for social sciences, and without it, it is difficult to explain many complex problems of the contemporary world. However, it needs to be emphasised that despite the great amount of literature on the subject, there is no consensus as to the very term ‘security’⁷. Thus, it is quite pointless to focus the academic efforts on searching for one, right definition of security itself; it is unachievable anyway.

This characteristics of the phenomenon of security, particularly in its broadened version, results in one correct postulate, namely that there is no conducting research on this subject within only one academic discipline. As Renate Mayntz noticed, the strong tradition of sticking to overdetermined rules within one discipline impedes the explanation of complex problems⁸. The diversity of opinions and views as to research and as to situating a given subject within a branch of science or a discipline is a controversial issue. It is the worst when disciplines are created artificially, and when artificial criteria of measuring and evaluating academic achievements in these disciplines are then generated. Of course, one does not need to assume that researchers rationally divided among themselves work on complex and diverse areas of social life. We have to do with scientific areas, fields, branches, and disciplines. Rob Riemen claims that ‘The university world today consists of specialists and their specialisations. They know – in the best case – all the facts […], although understanding is, unfortunately, something very different. Hence, the result is that in the scientific world, less and less is understood, and the inability to notice closer relationships and to explain the meaning is growing’⁹.

One needs to recognise the fact that two contradictory tendencies can be noticed in the development of science. One of them involves specialisation, while the other one consists in searching for the ideal of the unity of science. Karl R. Popper recognised that the for natural sciences, specialisation is a continual temptation, while for philosophers, it is the mortal sin¹⁰.

In the development of science, some opted for unity, while others for specialisation. In the 1950s, Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam even formulated a plea for the unity of science¹¹. The remarkable German philosopher Karl Jaspers also claimed that modern science lives on the thought about the unity of sciences, although it never achieved it. Thus, we have science that is shredded into various segments and disciplines.

In Poland, for 10 years, the system of science has included the discipline of security science within social sciences¹². This happened, because for some time, decisions regarding the system of science have been in the hands of clerks and not the environment of scholars. Until the moment of creating security studies in Poland, representatives of various fields and disciplines were dealing with the question of security. Their experiences and the context that security is a complex research subject engendered the postulate of interdisciplinarity, which, of course, has a wider justification. In a sense, it is an answer to the challenges that the process of science development is facing. First, it is connected with the internal crisis of the development of science, which manifests in the advancing professionalisation and specialisation of research, which was mentioned by R. Rieman. This postulate should be taken into account even if one assumes that the issues of security are an ascribed research subject within a separate discipline of security studies. Second, this is linked with the fact that the reality which is the subject of research has become more complex. It sounds trivial, but this is the case and it is difficult to argue with that.

With this in mind, if we assume that the complex issues of security are the subject of research in different disciplines within social sciences, this results in certain consequences of both theoretical and methodological character. The first of them concerns the challenges that researchers of security are facing due to the clash in social sciences between two research strands, namely the normative one and the neo-positivist one. The second kind of consequences, in turn, concerns stricte methodological issues.