Governing Borderless Threats

By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Strategicpipa

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Scholarly works are often embedded with the intention to seek fame, potentially, more funds, and faculty tenure (3Fs). Ironically, all three motivations are so powerful, and all-engrossing, that the academics often, if not quickly, lose sight of the 3 Fs, and end up cramming out the pages that no one can understand. The effects are disastrous in two ways.

First, readers/students that want to get ahead of the curve, potentially future policymakers and politicians, end up reading popular, folksy, and easily accessible books. Before long, they end up as avid fans of Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Mohamed El Erian, Nouriel Roubini, and a host of other authors who has made the materials more digestible. When the readers/students are caught in this lair, they hardly emerge intact, if at all. They will have utter contempt for those who cannot write in a more breezy manner, producing much vitriol against the academics, that in a way, signals the erosion of the knowledge-based society.

Second, readers/students who reject complex academic studies that seem to meander endlessly will find themselves wondering if they can ever get the subject right? In other words, they will lose the ability to discern and understand the subject-matter deeply. Before long, the readers/students will probably not pick up another book of the same topic, except to experience a sense of self-importance, as and when s/he wants to rekindle her/his interest.

Thus, if one believes that the pen is mightier than the sword, the same pen, if allowed to wax lyrical of/on a subject without any proper direction, can also sever the readers/students from the academia completely, thus, rendering them into random quarks that cannot reunite with the field.

This book, written with the best intention to explain how state and security governance can change and morph at the local and administrative levels, what the authors called the “implementation stage”, is an exercise in the superb mastery of the academic literature on non-traditional security across various divides.

First, the authors delved into the Copenhagen School, then the Paris School, and the Neo Gramscian and Post Structuralist frameworks. But by burrowing so deeply into these discourses, they actually end up risking losing their readers/students completely. But, just when the readers/students are about to give up, the constant use of footnotes and alternative sources, helped them to stay on. Why?

Well, precisely because Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri have shown enormous zeal to capture the subject, indeed, to explain it thoroughly, especially at the concluding chapters. And, the subjects are not the usual thoroughfare of international relations too. They verge on Avian Flu in Indonesia and Thailand, Environmental Haze in Southeast Asia, and Money laundering in Vanuatu too. Credit has to be given to the authors for such deliberate and conscious efforts.

Secondly, this book has out-shone the focus on nontraditional security that has been documented and produced by scholars at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang University. While Dr. Mely Anthony Caballero has done an outstanding job of writing about these issues, even taking up a role in the ASEAN Secretariat, her grasp of the materials hasn’t reached the depth and breadth of these two authors. Indeed, nor can the same be said of the Japanese scholars in Waseda University who have been working tirelessly to operationale the concept of “human security”, or, for that matter “comprehensive security”.

In a way, nontraditional security is an adjunct of “human security” and “comprehensive security” too. The Japanese scholars, especially those connected to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 1990s, have been latching on to these concepts. Within the lexicon of ASEAN, scholars and policymakers have tried to focus on “preventive diplomacy” too, as once pioneered by Boutrous-Boutrous Ghali, the late Secretary-General of the United Nations.

But what the authors do want to observe is the manner by which the apparatuses and mechanisms of addressing the non traditional security do begin to evolve, and change. In fact, once a state has declared “something” as an imminent threat, is there any follow-up action at all? And, are they sustainable? To be sure, the authors may well still be looking for 3 Fs. But given the copious footnotes and references and field works they have done, they do deserve all 3 Fs, if not just one: faculty tenure!

The issue is, do they want to label their approach as London-Murdoch School of Thought, consistent with what Copenhagen and Paris School had done? And, if the designation, for the first time in international relations, does acknowledge the importance of sister-city collaboration, then the snob appeal of confining a school of thought to a city, would begin to diminish, and in so doing, start to lay out the contours and challenges of a truly global one.