Security cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism in international affairs is a body of thinking and practice committed to building a more just and sustainable international order, but it has never been systematically applied to the question or practice of security. This article argues that both a range of transnational (event-based and systemic) insecurities, and state abuses of security discourse to compromise rights and cause insecurity, create a compelling normative and empirical case for a new security paradigm: security cosmopolitanism. It would aim to critique and reform both national and collective security policies and processes: to put better norms and ends to them, redefine their ontological foundations, and generate guiding ethical principles. It does so in the service of a distinctive understanding of global security as a universal good: one in which the security of all states and all human beings is of equal weight, in which causal chains and processes spread widely across space and through time, and in which security actors bear a responsibility to consider the global impact of their choices. This article lays out the key ontological and ethical frameworks for security cosmopolitanism. These challenge the dominant ontological foundations of national security (and international society) anchored in the social contract between citizen and state. Security cosmopolitanism argues that states cannot contain and immunize the national social body from external threats; rather, insecurity arises in a borderless way from the very histories, choices, powers, and systems of modernity. This generates both a new analytical model for global security and a different – relational, networked, and future-oriented – ethic of responsibility.