Debating insecurity in a globalizing world : an introduction

To restate the main purpose of this book, and to draw these varying parts and chapters together, Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence: Beyond Savage Globalization? is intent on rethinking the mainstream security paradigms. Overall, this edited collection is intended to provide a broad and systematic analysis of the long-term sources of political, military, and cultural insecurity from the local to the global. The book is intended to provide a stronger basis for understanding the causes of conflict and violence in the world today, one that adds a different dimension to the dominant focus on finding proximate causes and making quick responses. In other words, its intention is an analytical rethinking of the causes and structures of contemporary political violence. Too often the arenas of violence have been represented as if they have been triggered by reassertions of traditional and tribal forms of identity, or primordial and irrational assertions of politics. Such ideas about the sources of insecurity have become entrenched in a wide variety of media sources, and have framed both government policies and academic arguments. The argument of Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence-that most existing accounts of the sources of insecurity do little to help in understanding the global-local layers of violence in the world today-will challenge these common receptions and analyses of representation. Rather than treating the sources of insecurity as a retreat from modernity, the contributors to the book complicate our understanding of the patterns of global insecurity and take the debates simply beyond assumptions that we are witnessing a savage return to a bloody and tribalized world. Marx and Engels, quoted at the outset of this introduction, may have been right about the attempt in the West to create a world in their own image, but they were wrong about the consequences. Rather than steady progress built upon the blood of chaos and overcoming, the last few decades has continued the tragic violence of conflict and war, albeit with new intensities and in changing ways.