Search for security has been among the elemental instincts for survival in all living beings. In the animal life, as well as among homo sapiens, individuals and groups fend for their security needs in diverse ways based on their collective memories of the past. In the animal kingdom its expression is instinctive: stronger ones usually tend to be aggressive, eliminating all real and potential adversaries as threats against themselves and their sources of sustaining life; and the weaker ones usually tend to hide from their predators, or remain in herds to protect themselves. In human life too there are remarkable parallels, in the expressions of the search for security among individuals, groups, communities and nations based on their diverse historical experience embedded within their respective collective commonsense.

Our present concern is around the search for security of the states engaged in international relations, which is increasingly tending to be globalised in terms of three important aspects of sustaining life in the planet: production, consumption and the ideas as well as ingredients of good life. Globalisation of these critical components of life, in the context of the continuing relevance of the sovereign state in international relations, is creating new conflicts and exacerbating old ones among the states, and communities divided by the territorial boundaries of the states, thus spawning complex, interwoven sources of threat to the security of the existing states, and people, as also the macro-level global system underpinned by them. In the absence of a global sovereign, the uniquely globalised system has the potentials of replicating the parallel of the animal kingdom in terms of its security threats to the actors of the system, both collectively and separately.