August 27, 2020
What change toward a New Necessary Normal will have to look like
I thought my readers here might be interested in an editorial I wrote recently for one of the leading peace research and policy platforms, Transcend. Below please find parts of the intro and the four solutions I believe we must discuss in relation to the Coronavirus as a security political problem.
Connecting dots is neither the trend of our times nor of day-to-day political decision-making. Over the years, time, space and intellectual focus has shrunk. It’s deplorable and dangerous for an increasingly complex world facing increasingly existential challenges.
For instance, during the European refugee crisis the dots between wars and refugee movements were hardly ever made. The focus was on how to limit refugees getting into Europe but hardly ever on the wars from which they fled. Western wars are untouchables.
The lack of connections between the dots of the Corona and security – human security in particular – would be another example.
The present author would see the handling of the Corona pandemic as the most fundamental documentation of the fact that not a single government has practised security the right way: billions of taxpayers’ dollars have been spent on weapons (that de-crease security in most cases), while there was nobody who had thought of face masks, thermometers, hospital equipment and facilities – for what must be called a perfectly predictable security challenge.
Instead, the Corona crisis has been seen as a failure of the health system and other systems – but hardly ever as a fundamental failure of everything termed security politics.
There ought to have been a global uproar by citizens against their governments’ de facto contempt for their security…”
Four major things to do
- Get a vision, a constructive program and think of solutions first
- Take from the military and give it to global civil problem-solution: The Necessary New Normal
- Implement the old concept of human security – from the individual to the global
- Develop common security through alternative civil-military, defensive defence
