Security and Complexity
Last updated: September 12, 2008
Author
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Jürgen Scheffran |
Published by Complexity (Wiley Periodicals)
Vol. 14 / No. 1 / September/October 2008
Summary
(special issue of Complexity, guest edited by Jürgen Scheffran)From the Introduction, “The Complexity of Security”:
With the end of the Cold War, complexity became a new paradigm of the international security debate. The decade of the 1980s that established complexity and chaos as concepts in the natural sciences was ended by the demise of the structurally simple East-West conflict. In 1989, seemingly minor events accumulated to chaos-like changes of global and historic dimensions, following a path that nobody expected or predicted. What was set into motion by Mikhail Gorbachev to reform the Soviet Union, escaped his control and finally turned into a wave that removed himself out of power. When the socialist system disappeared, the world that emerged from the ashes was more complex than before. It became clear that not only the military arsenals were relevant for security, but also economic and technological as well as social and ecological factors, on global and regional levels.
Today the international security landscape is quite fractal and complex. Decision processes and conflicts in the international system are determined by a variety of actors and factors, which mutually influence each other. While the concentration of power and the formation of cooperative structures among States can reduce complexity, the increasing influence of subnational and transnational actors has a rather opposite effect. In the emerging new multipolar world order, cooperation is essential for the effective management of major global problems. The global challenge in the next two decades is to achieve a peaceful transition in the international system, and develop and implement effective multilateral policies.