Non-traditional Security Leadership and Cooperation in the Face of Great Power Conflict: The Rise of New Actors

The China–US relationship is a multidimensional complex one involving both traditional and nontraditional security issues. However, nontraditional security issues (NTS) have become paramount in reshaping Sino–US relations, though there is no absolute boundary between NTS and traditional security. With both traditional security issues and NTS issues being solved according to the involved nations' prior experience in dealing with traditional security matters, it stands to reason that there is a very fine line, if that, between NTS and traditional security and that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Although the energy threat is more likely to be considered a traditional security matter than concerns such as the terrorism threat or climate change issue, the energy threat actually contains some NTS characteristics, like how to get full use of natural resources and the relevance with climate change. This article, to some extent, explains the dynamic between traditional and nontraditional security through the case study of China–US relations.

Globalization has had a significant on the dynamics of trade. Moreover, these effects have also brought with it negative externalities that exacerbate a country’s propensity towards conflict. Countries today face new threats to security that were not included in a traditional security matrix: piracy, smuggling, transnational criminal organizations, cyber-attacks, terrorism, and ethnic/religious movements. Moreover, there are natural threats such as epidemics, climate change, and natural disasters. These threats all require greater cooperation among countries in a region. One mechanism that creates a pathway for a greater level of cooperation is through regional economic integration. The second half of the twentieth century was characterized by unprecedented progress towards global and regional integration. As a result regional institutions have been established to capture the network effect of economic integration as a means for greater cooperation on traditional and non-traditional security threats. Increasing economic interdependence, as a consequence of globalization, means that countries no longer find themselves in a zero-sum world. While much focus has been given to the link between economic interdependence and conflict, less has been given to the processes. The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between economic integration and conflict. Using intraregional trade share as a proxy measure for economic integration, regression analysis is conducted to examine this relationship among 31 countries in East and Southeast Asia. The quantitative analysis is followed by case study of ASEAN to lend support to the analysis and to explore the practicalities of building a security community in East Asia examining ASEAN’s capabilities for dealing with traditional security challenges, specifically, inter-state conflict.

The expectation that Russian will balance China’s growing presence in Central Asia and Northeast Asia is premised on fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of balance of power politics and of Russian great power capabilities. First, contrary to neorealist scholarship, secondary powers nearly always bandwagon; the traditional classical realist security studies literature’s focus on the centrality of capabilities, rather than on intentions and threat perception, explains non-great power behavior in the context of great power competition. Second, contrary to a widespread assumption, and following the understanding of the attributes of great power in the traditional security literature, Russia is not a great power in East Asia; it lacks the necessary relative great power capabilities in its Far East. China is the sole great power on mainland Northeast Asia. In this respect, the sources of Russian security policy will be similar to other secondary powers, both in East Asia and elsewhere.

This study aims to establish a causal relationship that how nontraditional security challenges does not necessarily qualify to acquire a high-priority position in strategic decision-making of Pakistan owing to entanglement with traditional security concerns. The study examines that continual focus on traditional security issues has induced ‘tunnel vision trap’ where Pakistan cannot transit or at least reprioritize traditional national security challenges with non-traditional security concerns by applying securitization theory. The study finds out that even after displaying responsibility and caution in how it approaches strategic red lines within and beyond its region, its high prioritization of traditional threat perceptions weighs down on its internal nontraditional security concern. The research concludes that for Pakistan, even transitioning from geostrategic prioritization of national interest to the pursuit of geoeconomic objectives does not divorce its traditional security priority in decision-making. Such a tethered securitization architecture renders all transitionary junctions to its strategic culture futile or inconsequential.

Objective – Issues dealing with security are perhaps the most profound issues since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. The notion is that the state's security is no longer just threatened by war but also by other circumstances and situations that might still harm the citizen's and states' well-being. In international politics, the realism paradigm considers security challenges in the classic sense that wars and military conflicts are the sole threats to the state. This viewpoint falls under the notion of traditional security. The other concept that governs state security might be more than only weapon battles and wars, and it falls under the idea and paradigm of idealism. Methodology – This paper will highlight a few issues concerning the Non-Traditional Security paradigm (NTS). In the end, the objective of this concept paper is to see the awareness of ASEAN members on the issues of NTS and how they respond to such matters. Findings – A total of 10 informants from different backgrounds but experts in the field of NTS will involve in the study, and the data for the study shall be collected using qualitative research methods. We hope a full picture of NTS during the COVID-19 pandemic can be presented from the findings. Novelty – Thus, this study suggests the blueprint for NTS to help people understand NTS. Type of Paper: Empirical J.E.L. Classification: Keywords: Non-Traditional Security Issues, Securitization, Awareness, ASEAN Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Yaacob, N.A; Yusof, M.I; Nurudin, S.M; Zain, Z.M; Mustapa, N.A. (2022). Recognizing ASEAN Nations' Realization and Commitment to the Issues of Non-Traditional Security (NTS), J. Bus. Econ. Review, 7(2), 151–159. https://doi.org/10.35609/jber.2022.7.2(4)

India is a rapidly growing democratic naval power. Moreover, its features such as the strong and fast-growing economy, newest military technologies and nuclear weapon make a big impression. Considering the other major powers, it seems that the world is becoming multipolar where India could have a significant role and become one of the major poles. It has been a subject for discussions among journalists and academics for a log time. On the other hand, there are a lot of discussions about India’s “friendly and mild” foreign policy; also, it is sometimes named the non-ambitious passive player in the international arena. The optimism with doubts: the paradoxical situation composed of the history of the impressive imperial civilization, modern-day economic growth, huge progress in technologies versus the major internal problems and “soft” state image. Here emerges the problem: why India’s foreign policy, despite its power growth, is still passive/neutral on the international arena? The hypotheses to answering this question are: 1. India’s role and status are restricted by its lack of power. 2. India’s role on the international arena is restricted by its ideological and neutrality traditions, which provide ontological security to India. The aim of this article is to ascertain and explore India’s status (regional or global) and to ascertain India’s role (self-identification) on the international arena by using the ontological security theory.The theoretical background of this essay is ontological security theory which ten years ago was absorbed from sociology and is quite new in the international relations and security studies. Its main arguments are: ontological security is the security of being; in addition to physical security, states also seek ontological security (security of the self); ontological security is achieved by routinizing relationships with significant others, after all players become attached to those relationships, even if they are dangerous to their physical security. This theory is strongly bound with the identity that India always gives the self culture prominence in its discourse and its friendly discourse in the Ministry of Defence annual reports. This is the reason why the ontological security theory was chosen to help understand and explain India’s foreign policy. First, links between ontological and traditional security are discussed in the first part of this work. There is a broad analysis of the assumptions of the ontological security theory in the same paragraph. Second, there is a short criticism of the ontological security. Finally, the ontological security theory as the India’s foreign policy explanation tool is discussed; the discourse analysis is introduced as a methodological instrument of the work, and the model of analysis of the second part of the work, is defined. The second part of the work contains the content analysis of experts’ articles and official documents of India’s Foreign Ministry, using the model defined in the previous part and ontological security for the results’ explanation.The analysis made in the second part of the work has shown that the ontological security theory is able to explain India’s foreign policy and does it. The first hypothesis (India’s role and status are restricted by its lack of power) was denied. This means that India can be a major global power. The second hypothesis (India’s role in the international arena is restricted by its ideological and neutrality traditions, which provide ontological security to India) was approved. Strictly, it means that India does not want to be a major power because of it self-identity and ontological security. India does not expose itself as a major power but thinks that is worth to be such. On the other hand, if India has absorbed the international politics routine form the British Empire, this could mean that India’s identity is to be a global power, but it does not want to publicise it yet.The study has shown that it is hard to regard India in the international community as a major power without special observation or using just the realism theory tools. Consequently, the ontological security theory has shown that it has the tools that can be used in countries’ foreign policy explanation.

Reviewed by: Non-Traditional Security Issues in North Korea ed. by Kyung-Ae Park Jerôme de Wit Non-Traditional Security Issues in North Korea edited by Kyung-Ae Park . Honolulu : University of Hawai’i Press , 2013 . 265 pp. When the international media discusses North Korea, the most common topic that is paid attention to is its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and its missile program. This is usually paired with reports on North Korea’s belligerent rhetoric and a reminder of its million men army that are a threat to Northeast Asian security, Seoul in particular. Scholars and policy makers with a focus on North Korea are also keen to focus almost exclusively on these topics and one can find many analytical papers on the North’s military, defense budget, fighting capability, the state of its weapons systems, military exercises, etc. These studies all focus on national security concerns and belong to the realm of traditional security. This edited volume of works by North Korea experts is an attempt to shift the focus away from these traditional concerns. The book’s argument is that the theories and notions of national security have failed to offer an adequate explanation of the national security threats posed by North Korea. The contributors believe that the North’s national security concerns are to a high degree informed by human security and non-traditional security (NTS) issues, and, once the causes of the North’s national insecurity are known, we are better able to handle the threats posed by the North to our (inter-)national security. The first chapter introduces the concept of NTS and examines in the context of North Korea how NTS and traditional security form complex and multifaceted connections. It describes how the indeterminate relationship between national and human security can be conceptualized by focusing on NTS issues. By using examples of the North’s insecurity issues in regards to food and energy security, this chapter explains how NTS issues can serve as an important variable in determining whether a state and its society can be deemed secure or unsafe. The next chapters all deal with a specific non-traditional security issue. Chapter two gives a brief history of North Korea’s energy problems and discusses the impact the lack of energy security has on the North’s economy and society. The authors of this chapter regard energy shortages as one of the reasons why North Korea uses the threat of military action to try to induce the international community to meet its demands. Addressing these concerns will in their opinion help the overall security of the Northeast Asian region and they suggest several assistance approaches. Chapter three examines the NTS issue of economic security in connection with women in North Korea. The author shows that the North Korean economic crisis has had different impacts on men and women in that it changed [End Page 147] the pattern of women’s economic participation, dragging women away from the formal labor market into the informal private economic sector. This has also forced a number of women to cross the North Korean border in their attempt to provide for both their own and their families’ livelihoods. On the one hand it seems that the new economic roles that women have assumed has given them a stronger voice in family decision-making matters and allowed them to develop, to some degree, a sense of self-consciousness and awareness of their own rights. On the other hand women’s economic insecurity has negatively affected other sectors of their NTS and human security resulting in new threats such as an increase in workloads, sex trafficking and sexual violence, and the stress of family breakdowns. Chapter four deals with political bias in labeling North Korea a criminal state. By giving an overview of how transnational crime is securitized, the author shows that issues surrounding North Korea’s criminal behavior are more fiction than fact, and that even in cases where North Korea does indulge in such activities, their scope is small in comparison to other players in this arena. Issues related to North Korea’s food insecurity are the focus of chapters five and six. The...

Confucian Democracy in East Asia: A Discussion of Sungmoon Kim’s <i>Democracy After Virtue: Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy</i>

Over the past two decades, maritime security threats such as piracy, illegal fishing and maritime terrorism in Southeast Asia have attracted greater attention and concern. Responding to these threats and ensuring national security have long been seen as the responsibility of governments. This is reflected in much of the literature on Southeast Asian security issues, which focuses largely on state responses to threats. However, the notion of the state as the sole provider of security is being increasingly challenged in many parts of the world, with actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private businesses playing ever more important roles in providing security. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the security sectors of Southeast Asian countries and security governance in the region, it is important to ask if this trend can also be observed in Southeast Asia. This special issue of Contemporary Southeast Asia (1) demonstrates that in recent years new actors have become involved in addressing national and regional security threats in Southeast Asia. The focus is on three distinctive types of actors--for-profit actors, not-for-profit actors and multilateral institutions--in responding to maritime security threats such as smuggling, piracy and illegal fishing. This issue investigates the ways in which new actors address these threats and considers how their participation has affected the role of the state as the primary provider of maritime security. It therefore offers insights into alternative methods for tackling contemporary maritime security threats in Southeast Asia, including hybrid forms of maritime security governance. Significantly, by revealing the contribution of new actors in Southeast Asia, a region where government responses and sovereignty have long played a central role, it demonstrates how and why established patterns of security governance in Southeast Asia are changing. This paper first situates our discussion in the broader theoretical debate that focuses on the rise of new actors in security governance around the world. The second section narrows the lens to Southeast Asia. It provides a brief overview of contemporary maritime security threats in Southeast Asia and discusses state responses to these threats. The third section elaborates our analytical framework, identifying the new actors discussed in this special issue and the nature of their responses to maritime security threats. It also examines the distinctive, often complex inter-relationships between these actors and the state across the region. Changes in Security Governance Economic, political and social problems such as financial crises and climate change that have emerged since the end of the Cold War seriously challenge existing state institutions worldwide. As a result, new actors have emerged that offer a wide range of governance responses to current problems at sub-national, national and international levels. (2) One area where new actors play an ever more important role is in responses to national and international security threats. Indeed, it has become increasingly clear that many contemporary non-traditional security threats, such as terrorism or transnational crime, cannot be addressed by existing national agencies or individual states alone. As a result, the line between national and international security has become blurred and security challenges are today met by a range of new actors. Three kinds of actors are arguably most important in addressing security challenges: (1) for-profit actors; (2) not-for-profit actors; and (3) multilateral institutions. The nature and scale of these actors' involvement depends on their motivations, capacities and interests. Their involvement can also be regarded in different ways. On the one hand, the involvement of new actors can be seen as ineffective in addressing security problems or as problematic --as exemplified by, the controversy and scandals that followed the large scale employment of private security firms in Iraq. …

This chapter continues the evaluation of spillover between the realms of traditional and non-traditional security analyses and practice begun in the previous chapter’s consideration of the North Korean challenging case. This chapter, however, further deconstructs the negative and counter-productive impact of state-centric security and development foci while also broadening the analysis of human security contributions to include conflict drivers from the arena of human development. In other words, analysis of the spillover between traditional and non-traditional security perspectives is expanded along both the vertical and horizontal axes. The challenging case study considered in this chapter, the conflict between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and various armed groups claiming to represent the Muslim population of the southern island grouping of Mindanao, is, by some estimates, the second oldest on earth (after the conflict between North and South Sudan), and certainly the oldest and apparently one of the most intractable conflicts in East Asia (Judd, 2005, p. 1).

The Big Question: Which Country Will Emerge as the Leading Power?

Although security - as a basic concept - is frequently considered in the study and analysis of policy decisions, its essential meaning ought to be more widely disagreed than agreed upon. Commonly considered a basic concept in policy and academic debates, security is in reality a quantity that is not basic at any register. The couching of emerging ‘non-traditional’ concepts such as environmental security and human security solely on their relationship to potential or real threats, most often within a topology of power, and the use of language that is inadequate to the often nuanced and almost always complex dynamics of such emerging identities imprisons such concepts within ‘traditional’ state-centered, national security paradigms. Moreover, not all security issues involve ‘threats’; rather, the notion of vulnerabilities is as serious to some peoples, and some regions, as the more familiar concept of threat. The issue truly is not one of ‘hard’ traditional security (often based on state-to-state power relationships) or ‘soft’ non-traditional security (which can involve multiple trans-national aspects), but rather the need for a focus on both. Too exclusive a focus on one form of security may cause a ‘boomerang effect’, resulting from failure to recognize, or deal with, other contending forms of security. Recognizing and acting on the best approaches to issues of security will prove the greatest challenge.

Non-traditional security issues have become Indonesian foreign policy agenda since the last two decades. It is influenced by the Cold War and the growing strength of non traditional security threats that are transnational and endanger the life of people. The non traditional security threats include climate change and environmental destruction, energy security, international migration, and international terrorism. As part of international community, Indonesia is also unavoidable from non-traditional security threats that require the handling of not only domestic policy but also foreign policy. To that end, this paper will examine the importance of non-traditional security issues in Indonesian foreign policy. Keywords : Indonesian foreign policy, non traditional security.

The South China Sea is one of the world’s security hotspots regarding territorial sovereignty disputes between China, Taiwan and some South-east Asian countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. Currently, the dispute situation in the South China Sea is increasingly complicated and tends to be more stressful because the region’s situation is not only heated up by territorial sovereignty disputes, geostrategic competition among great powers, but also heated up by various non-traditional security issues, including fisheries security issues such as overfishing, illegal fishing activities, conflicts over fisheries activities between countries. However, at present, there are no effective cooperative and rational mechanisms for fisheries in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, ASEAN is an important mechanism for managing regional security issues, including non-traditional security in the South China Sea. However, ASEAN’s role in this region is still relatively weak. Given that situation, the article analyses the current situation of fisheries security issue in the South China Sea and clarifies how ASEAN’s role in this sector plays out in the current period. What actions should ASEAN take to contribute to ensuring non-traditional security in the South China Sea in general and fisheries security in particular?

This study sought to critique the Statement “Traditional Focus on State Security is Inadequate and Needs to Encompass Safety and Well-being for those Living There”. It became clear that the traditional security concept stresses on military threats and by extension its application to the safety of people and communities. It largely addresses mere existence (survival) to define well-being and dignity of human beings within a populace jurisdiction. Despite its strengths, traditional security has its challenges/flaws that non-traditional security enhances. This study apart from establishing the focus of traditional security and its origins goes further to examine how non-traditional security attends to the well-being of states. Moreover, the study moves to give recommendation in its conclusion that inspite of weaknesses traditional security still offers inalienable security to states who are themselves traditional Westphalia outfits yet this is augmented with the paradigms that accrue due to contemporary security challenges. Nonetheless, this study underscores that whether traditional or non-traditional focus to state security, the final aim is safety and well-being of those living therein.