Introduction

The specter of nuclear weapons and their associated material continue to pose a significant threat to global security deep into the twenty-first century. While many in the international community indolently regard such devices as being remnants of the Cold War with a limited impact on global stability, this assessment could not be further from the truth. Notwithstanding the substantial reductions in nuclear arsenals since the early 1990s, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the risks emanating from nuclear (in)security have actually expanded: more states in more unstable regions have attained such weapons, nonstate actors continue to pursue them, and the command-and-control systems in even the most sophisticated nuclear-armed states remain susceptible not only to system and human error but, increasingly, to cyberattack. Even a limited regional nuclear war would have calamitous global consequences. Moreover, the failure of existing nuclear-armed states to disarm, the inability to impede new states from obtaining nuclear weapons, the potential of terrorists gaining access to such weapons and their concomitant material, and the potential “gaps” presented by the construction and expansion of nuclear energy plants all present serious security challenges in the twenty-first century.

There is a positive. The number of nuclear weapons has declined markedly since the Cold War's demise: down from a peak of approximately 70,300 in 1986 to an estimated 12,700 warheads as of mid-2022. However, their very presence remains a global strategic/ political driver, evident in their storage and possession across ninety-eight sites in fourteen nation-states. Some 9,500 of these weapons are in military arsenals, while the others are either in the process of being retired or awaiting dismantlement. Roughly 3,650 are operationally available, and some 2,000 are on high alert and gauged toward potential use within a very short timeframe. The largest possessors of nuclear weapons are Russia and the United States, which together hold 91 percent of the total global suite. Significantly, the United States “houses” its nuclear weapons on eighteen sites, including twelve sites in eleven states within the United States, and a further six sites in five European countries. Given the recent deterioration of US-Russian bilateral relations and the position of NATO in the US-EU security calculi, the placement and strategic consideration of such weapons remains a source of ongoing consternation.

Rationale

This edited collection will seek to unpack the key global security issues and challenges the world is facing in the third decade of the twenty-first century. It will consider the extent to which the omnipresent epochal juncture in the form of the global pandemic will redefine (and amplify) the associated security discourse, the applicable theoretical debates, and responses to the new and ongoing threats to our survival.

The intensification of global security across the first two decades of the twenty-first century has seen the old “compression of time and space” adage go to another level. While debates and realities between new and old wars remain in play, the continuance of environmental degradation and the advent of emerging technologies have contributed to what some analysts have described as a new era of “super threat multipliers.” Of course, in 2020 the global security environment entered a stage of heightened and protracted volatility, emanating from COVID-19's multifaceted and pervasive ramifications. The pandemic exacerbated prevalent global challenges, further exposing the fundamental triggers of insecurity and social and economic inequality, along with multiple layers of internal/external tensions. As the title of this book illustrates, the world is clearly going through what can be defined by every measure as a great epochal “age of crisis,” and so it is only logical to presume that it will be a transforming point in global security and, more broadly, modern history.

The tumultuous global response to the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the beliefs of even the most fervent internationalists and optimists. Most states, including the world's most influential, reshifted their focus inwardly, embracing travel sanctions in the initial stages, implementing export controls, hoarding or concealing information, and sidelining the World Health Organization (WHO) and other multilateral institutions. The pandemic appears to have uncovered, or perhaps reaffirmed, that the liberal order and the global community are illusions, while also illuminating the terrible effects of waning global cooperation. In more apt terms, the pandemic has clearly exposed both the limits of the present multilateral system and the gruesome, deadly costs of the broader structure's collapse. The conundrum is, of course, that if the contagion does spur policymakers to presume that multilateralism is doomed and encourages them to incite or fast-track its undoing, they will be establishing a platform where humanity will be poised to encounter a plethora of other costly tragedies.

Introduction

Emerging technologies play a pervasive role across many aspects of everyday life, including in the manufacture of goods and services, global navigation systems, user interface software, and self-driving vehicles (to name a few). In the context of war, the abstraction of violence, and global security more broadly, devices such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used extensively in counterterrorist operations, while lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) continue to pose ethical and reliability questions about the use (and potential for misuse) of military power. Unsurprisingly, the compounding aspects deriving from cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), and the transition from 4G to 5G (and 6G) all have the capacity to engender multiple complexities and disruptions across the state, nonstate, global governance, and security domains.

Other emerging technologies are also developing, such as advanced manufacturing techniques (3D printing), nanotechnology (including miniaturization of military technology), bioengineering (including biological weapons agents and human-machine symbiosis), quantum computing (including the potential decryption of classical information systems), and digitization technologies (including military tools and applications to manage “big data”). Further, it is evident that the most powerful state actors and multinational corporations are investing extensively in the range of such emerging disruptive technologies. While the dangers and security complications of the above-mentioned weapons and devices are not yet fully realized, policymakers will be compelled to address the threats presented by advanced weapons technologies and formulate international provisions to regulate or mitigate their use.

In providing a substantive examination across the emerging technologies “suite”—with specific focus on uninhabited vehicles (drones), LAWS, AI and cyber—this chapter seeks to elucidate the security challenges emanating from their development and at times aberrant advancement. Indeed, just as emerging technologies are disrupting many sectors of domestic economies, they are also transforming the global security arena. The power and pace of modern technologies call for new approaches to preventing a catastrophic conflict or mitigating a devastating miscalculation. However, diplomacy, deterrence, arms control, and direct military action, tools that have long been utilized to safeguard the national interest, are being challenged by precipitously evolving technologies that are presenting new problems with no clearly defined solutions. As the chapter conveys, while some efforts have been undertaken in the direction of regulating the usage and application of such technologies, coherency and agreement on pathways forward across the domains of states, nonstate actors, global governance, and security have been hard to attain.

It has long struck me as sadly ironic that one of the principal tools at the disposal of global powers by which to respond to humanitarian disasters inflicted on societies by their own leaders, has been to bomb the very country whose peoples have suffered. Those whose research and work focuses only on the subject may be immune to the irony but I have found that for students coming to the subject for the first time, the juxtaposition of problem and solution often appears quite stark.

As the editors of this thought-provoking collection point out, other aspects of the practice and theory of intervention are just as deserving of reflection and ripe for fundamental re-evaluation. For example, while it may have become clear that regime removal does not of itself guarantee a better future for the citizens post-intervention, it is not so obvious that ruling out regime change after a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) intervention would as a matter of course protect the citizens. Presumably if a regime has no qualms about inflicting harm on its own people once it may well do so again, as the experience of Syria would seem to suggest.

And, whether or not intervention encompasses regime removal, the question remains as to what then? And what of those from the previous state apparatus who are removed if regime change is enforced? Although none of these issues are new, they have been the subject of particular concern to the international community since the failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide and the decision to intervene without authorisation by the United Nations Security Council international during the Kosovo crisis in 1999.

The concept of the R2P has been the most tangible product of this review, and debate on the issues raised by intervention has, since the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, generally been centred on the R2P concept. Advocates of the concept tend to be those who feel compelled to find a way by which the international community does not become complicit through silence in atrocities.

The need to fundamentally rethink interventions is before us. Driven by a combination of pressing humanitarian need as well as conceptual and theoretical dilemmas that limit the value of analysis, it is evident we are seemingly at the crossroads. The crises in Syria and Iraq – the human rights abuses, the destruction of cities and the attenuating flows of refugees into Europe – have only been enough to garner specific military action from external powers in ways closely aligned to national interests. There is the sense that despite being decades on from the end of the Cold War and notwithstanding the varying kinds of interventions in the name of humanitarian ends that have taken place, we have come full circle. For all their challenges and faults, at the end of the twentieth century Kosovo and Timor-Leste suggested that there was enough benefit gained by interventions that they had a future in global politics. The post-9/11 military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have, however, come to dominate discourse as wars fought overwhelmingly for state security rather than humanitarian ends (even though the latter are used instrumentally as a justification at times). Moreover, as events in Syria have unfolded, it has become even harder to discern who would be assisted, and to what end, by a large-scale intervention like those that occurred across the 1990s. The widening of Syria's civil war into a regional one, and the toll on civilians (approximately 260,000 at time of publication), reflects elements that are described in ‘new wars’ analysis, and yet are overlain with shifting forms of globalised warfare, intersections with terrorism, while reaffirming what appears to be more classical superpower rivalries (though now it is between different versions of empire and capitalism). It is such a riven mess that it is quite possible that the only ‘end game’ will come in the form of general annihilation.