Losing Control: Global Security in the Twenty-First Century

"I used to work with the author, Paul Rogers, at Oxford Research Group and we ran the sustainable security programme together, and this book came out about ten years ago. The third edition has just been released this year. The reason why this is top of my list is that it introduces a key concept that was missing for this area and it’s a control paradigm, the notion of liddism. It’s basically a trend whereby Western states attempt to control threats to international security by military means, rather than understanding the nature of the threats and countering them at source. So, you can compare this to a pressure cooker where every attempt is made to keep the lid on, instead of turning down the heat. Some of the policies pursued during the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Well, there you have to identify some of the specific sources of insecurity and attempt to address them. So, for example, in that instance you may try to look at some of the reasons why some Muslims are being alienated and marginalised, particularly politically and economically, and try to work with local governments, mosques etc, to try to resolve some of these issues. The key concept is about going to the source of the threat rather than trying to counter it and keep a lid on it. If you try to control it then you end up in a situation where the pressure continues to build and the lid might blow up in your face. Then there is the notion that irregular warfare from the marginalised communities may in the end prevent powerful states from maintaining their positions through military force. So that’s the key concept that Paul introduces, and it’s a wonderfully written book and captures the whole essence of this in a powerful way. The second thing he draws attention to is the way that Western states very much focus on the wrong causes of insecurity: they are focused on traditional military causes, rogue states, terrorism etc, whereas the more pressing and fundamental causes are the widening socio-economic divide and environmental factors like climate change and competition over resources. Paul was ahead of his time in highlighting these issues. Nowadays these ideas are accepted. He is an academic but was aware that it is not enough to sit around thinking about these things. He understood the policy implications of his work and worked with think-tanks to try and push through recommendations based on his analysis. The thing with Iraq is that everyone was telling Tony Blair and policy-makers that this was a bad idea, but they pursued a different agenda. So what Paul was saying was unfortunately ignored. However, the flip side to that is that a million people marched on London to protest against the war and I think if the UK or America were thinking seriously about threatening military force against, say, Iran they would have to think twice. I’m not sure a government could survive politically if they were to do the same thing again. The sense of anger and injustice is too great."