From the Author:
Collectively, the authors have been thinking about or promoting U.S. national security for more than 60 years as military officers and educators focused on security studies. In both professions, we have continually confronted biases oriented toward studying great powers and big wars. That logic made more sense during the Cold War when Soviet and U.S. foreign policies under the shadow of nuclear exchange kept both countries on the verge of World War III. But as we commemorate the 20-year anniversary of Soviet collapse in 2011, both professions need to move beyond a doomsday scenario to fully understand the new (albeit 20 years old!) security environment. Blindfolding ourselves to this increasingly complicated and ambiguous contemporary world will only delay our ability to address today's security issues.
Global Security in a Borderless World is designed to be a textbook for those students, researchers, and practitioners thinking about international and national security. While this work is developed from a U.S.-informed security perspective, we believe that the analysis stands on its own. We offer a detailed examination of the challenges that threaten most human beings and their governments today, along with an alternative approach to thinking about national security, encapsulated in the concept of human security. As the influential United Nations Development Programme has phrased it, "security is a child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, a job that was not cut, and ethnic tension that did not explode in violence, a dissident who was not silenced."
Instead of protecting against the most catastrophic possibilities (nuclear attack), we think it is important to think about the most likely (non-state actors and transnational challenges). We must educate ourselves about the many issues that have often been decades in the making, and are now demonstrating their capability to threaten all human beings. These include issues such as climate change, pandemic diseases, endemic poverty, weak and failing states, transnational narcotics trafficking and criminal gangs, and vulnerable information systems. Engaging in critical thinking now will enable governments, militaries, and citizens to better provide for national and international security, while improving good governance and social and economic prosperity for all.
About the Author:
Derek S. Reveron is the EMC Informationist Chair and professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. His books include Exporting Security: International Engagement, Security Cooperation, and the Changing Face of the U.S. Military;Inside Defense: Understanding the U.S. Military in the 21st Century; Flashpoints in the War on Terrorism; and America's Viceroys: The Military and U.S. Foreign Policy. He serves on the editorial boards of the Naval War College Review and the National Intelligence Journal.
Kathleen A. Mahoney-Norris is professor of national security studies at the USAF's Air Command and Staff College in Montgomery, Alabama. She also teaches Latin American regional security issues at the Air War College. She is coeditor of Democratization and Human Rights: Challenges and Contradictions, and has written numerous articles and book chapters on civil-military relations, military education issues, and human rights. She serves on the editorial board of Joint Force Quarterly.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.