Sex, Drugs, and Heavy Metal:

Abstract

Technological innovations over the past fifty years have had a profound and varied impact on the security of people worldwide. As this impact increases, weaknesses in conventional security thinking and behavior become apparent. Traditional understandings of security remain relevant in the post Cold War era, and policy-makers must continue to monitor and respond to threats posed by regional powers and rogue states.ii But today we must broaden our perspective to encompass neglected areas in which new threats are intensifying, vulnerabilities are real, and forward-looking policies are required.Many contemporary threats -- such as infectious disease, terrorism, and drug trafficking -- are transnational: they cross state borders but generally cannot be linked directly to the foreign policies or behavior of other states. Rather than being created and controlled by national governments, these threats are situated in a complex, dynamic, and global web created by modern communication, transportation, and information technologies. This web offers a vast array of incentives, opportunities, and capabilities to individuals and groups whose activities, intentionally or not, can threaten the core values of national security: territorial integrity and political independence; preservation of the well being, freedom, and property of citizens; and national culture.Transnational threats are difficult to neutralize. A terrorist may be trained in Libya, receive funds from a religious sect in the United States via a Caribbean bank, purchase weapons from a Russian crime organization, travel on a Canadian passport, and attack British tourists in Germany. Sever one of the links in this chain and he or she will quickly find a replacement. Even if governments in all the relevant countries can be persuaded to intervene, they may not be able to control the fluid criminal elements and black markets at work in their own jurisdictions. The transnational character of these actors and phenomena make them relatively impervious to traditional state-centric means of enforcement. Only by a concerted effort, involving the support of non-state actors from weapons manufacturers to commercial banks, can one hope to disrupt the transnational web of incentives, opportunities, and capabilities enough to discourage terrorism. A similar logic holds for many other transnational problems.In the following pages we discuss the increasing vulnerability of states to transnational threats and the sort of response strategies that might be effective. As numerous historians have made clear, how societies fare is closely linked to their ability to adapt to the diffusion of technology, the spread of disease, and environmental change. The failure to recognize and respond to the negative aspect of these changes in the past might explain why much of humankind lives in despair today. If, as we believe, the rate and magnitude of these transnational forces have grown, our understanding of them has improved, and the stakes are higher than ever, then much may depend on how well we respond to them today.