Security K - Northwestern 2024

Security K Aff and Neg – NDI 2024
Neg---Security K
Core
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Security narratives based on symptom-focused crisis compellence prevent systematic transition---try or die to avert collapse
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed 17, Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development, M.A. in Contemporary War & Peace Studies and P.D. in International Relations from the School of Global Studies at Sussex University, 2017, “Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence,” p. 1-12
Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of social protest in every major continent. Beginning with the birth of the Occupy movement in the US and Western Europe, and the Arab Spring, the eruption of civil unrest has continued to wreak havoc unpredictably from Greece to Ukraine, from China to Thailand, from Brazil to Turkey, and beyond. In some regions, civil unrest has coalesced into the collapse of incumbent governments or even the eruption of a prolonged state of internecine warfare, as is happening in Iraq-Syria and Ukraine Crimea. To what extent is this apparent heightening of geopolitical instability new? ¶ Increasing public dissatisfaction with government is correlated with continued government difficulties in meeting public expectations. Yet while policymakers and media observers have raced to keep up with events, they have largely missed the deeper causes of this new age of unrest—the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels, and its multiplying consequences for economic growth, industrial food production, and the Earth’s climate stability. ¶ Contrary to widely reported claims across mainstream media of a new era of prosperity heralded by the US-led shale oil and gas boom, the proliferation of contemporary climate, food and economic crises have at their root a single common denominator: the fundamental and permanent disruption in the energy basis of industrial civilization. ¶ This inevitable energy transition away from high quality fossil fuels to lower quality, more expensive energy forms—which will be completed well before the close of this century, and quite possibly much earlier—will force a paradigm shift in the organization of civilization. The twenty-first century, in this context, is a pivotal one for humanity as industrial civilization pivots through a process of systemic transition, driven by the complex interplay between human societies and biophysical realities. ¶ Yet for this shift to result in a viable new way of life will require a fundamental epistemological shift recognizing humanity’s embeddedness in the natural world. This, in turn, cannot be achieved without breaking the stranglehold of conventional models achieved through the hegemony of establishment narratives—dominated by fossil fuel interests and the banality of the mainstream media news cycle.¶ The central thesis of this study is that the escalation of social protest and political instability around the world is causally related to the unstoppable thermodynamics of global hydrocarbon energy decline and its interconnected environmental and economic consequences. It offers, in this sense, a biophysical approach to international relations, and argues that geopolitics remains fundamentally embedded in biophysical processes. This is not to reduce geopolitics to the biophysical—far from it—but to recognize that the dynamics of the geopolitical cannot be dislocated from the dynamics of the biophysical, and that biophysical processes are increasingly driving geopolitical instability to a degree unrecognized by policymakers, the media, as well as social and natural scientists.¶ Hydrocarbon energy decline can be understood as consisting of the following two intertwined processes: the inexorable reduction in industrial civilization’s production of net energy from hydrocarbon sources (fossil fuels) over the last decades; the acceleration of hydrocarbon energy production to attempt to make-up for this decline and sustain economic growth.¶ This process has in turn had two major consequences, namely: climate change and the corresponding destabilization of the Earth System due to the increasing quantity of greenhouse gas emissions due to hydrocarbon energy dependence; and the permanent slowdown of global economic growth due to the increasing costs of energy production relative to GDP. Climate and economic crises are, in turn, acting as amplifying feedbacks on the process of hydrocarbon energy decline, and in themselves are acting synergistically to undermine global industrial food production while simultaneously impinging on socio-political stability and human well-being.¶ While conventional policy and media approaches to socio-political instability tend to focus almost purely on ‘surface’ social symptoms—geopolitical competition, political corruption, economic mismanagement, ideological extremism, and so on—the deeper biophysical systemic drivers of instability are largely ignored or misunderstood. As such, missing from the vast bulk of conventional wisdom on escalating socio-political instability around the world is the crucial recognition of its central cause in a systemic process of hydrocarbon energy decline and concomitant civilizational transition toward an inevitable post-carbon future.¶ Currently, climate change is rightly and consensually recognized by the scientific community and has been accepted at least in principle by policymakers as a reality requiring an urgent collective response from human societies. However, despite growing recognition of the interconnected nature of these crises—illustrated through concepts such as the food-water-energy nexus—there remains a fundamental failure in the conceptualization of their interconnected nature in terms of the relationship between human societies and the biophysical environment, and relatedly, the relationship between human polities and the biophysical environment.¶ This root failure of conceptualization is perhaps the most significant factor focusing on the role of human agency in driving the current convergence of global crises. The failure is compounded by the necessarily compartmentalized nature of scientific specialization, which has produced a vast volume of information, but little in the way of epistemological mechanisms to integrate that into knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. It is further compounded by the transmission of incorrect conceptual diagnoses of global crises through the global mainstream media. The perpetual transmission of false and inaccurate knowledge on the origins and dynamic of global crises has created a situation in which as such crises accelerate, the human species as a whole is disempowered from being able to correctly understand these crises and their symptoms, and thus unable to solve them.¶ Yet to diagnose the intensifying perfect storm of climate, energy and economic crises requires a fundamental reconceptualization of their true nature as symptoms of an overall civilizational system which, increasingly, cannot be sustained by the biophysical environment.¶ This study offers an empirically-grounded social scientific theoretical framework for developing a holistic approach to this perfect storm through the lens of what this author has called the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ (as opposed to a ‘clash of civilizations’). My approach is not to create yet another new statistical model to add to the plethora of models that exist, but to strike at a deeper lacuna within the discipline of international relations—to create the beginnings of an accurate, integrated transdisciplinary theoretical basis for such modelling, derived from a holistic analysis of the relevant empirical data.¶ The study is divided into two main sections. The first consists of a general framework of the broad crises that this author considers to be integral to the biophysical processes driving geopolitical instability today. The second consists of a series of case studies which provide specific empirical data supporting and building on this general framework to test how and whether they are indeed acting out on local, national and regional levels as is my hypothesis. This opening section begins by building on this author’s previous work on the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ as an overarching analytical framework for the integrated examination of global climate, energy, food, economic and socio-political crises (Ahmed 2010 , 2011 ). This is achieved by establishing the inherent systemic interconnections between these crises on a global macro-level scale. The monograph then proceeds to explore how the general framework of biophysical factors aka the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ plays out at a micro-level within specific countries in key regions—the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South Asia, and North America. This examination takes us to the crux of my argument and provides specific evidence that the biophysical processes discussed more generally in the opening are, in fact, already having concrete geopolitical impacts accelerating the destabilization of human societies across the world, in a manner that can now be detected through a holistic and transdisciplinary empirical analysis. This not only provides surprising empirical vindication for our hypothesis that biophysical processes are playing an integral causal role in the intensification of political and geopolitical disruption on a global scale, it also provides us a basis to explore some tentative business-as-usual (BAU) forecasts.¶ This permits further exploration of the intersection between the thermodynamics of escalating hydrocarbon energy decline and the accelerating disruption of global industrial civilization. As prevailing social, political and economic structures become increasingly dysfunctional against the strain of hydrocarbon energy decline, the resulting rupture manifests in an increasing frequency of social protest and violent conflict.¶ Part of this study, then, identifies how conventional governmental, industry and media narratives of these crises for the most part fail to accurately understand them, not just due to a lack of a holistic-systemic frameworks for examining these crises as interdependent—but due to a fundamental epistemological failure that has allowed mythological ‘theories’ of human progress in the form of neoclassical and neoliberal economics to become entrenched as the dominant cognitive paradigm. The most powerful hegemonic component of this ideological capture of human collective cognition occurs through the global institutions associated with the mainstream media. The principal problem here is a highly compromised ownership and editorial structure that ties media outlets to the very prevailing structures of fossil fuel-centric power complicit in global crisis acceleration. The preponderance of fossil fuel-centric interests in conventional media ownership has led to consistently inaccurate reporting on energy issues, and their relationships with economic, food and climate crises, as well as specific conflicts.¶ Yet to some extent, and compounding the insular ideological approach of powerful government, industry and media institutions, there has been a similar failure from amongst experts in different fields of these crises, who have been unable to develop theoretical, conceptual and empirical frameworks to view their specialized data in its inherent interconnections with data from other fields. In other words, a lack of generalized systems training in our schools. Due to this problem, we are beginning to grasp only recently the extent to which geopolitical ruptures that overwhelm of the news of the day have been exacerbated by a convergence of crises studied largely separately in these disparate fields. There is, therefore, little understanding of how energy and resource depletion tangibly impact the political economies of different societies, and how these processes interact with the local impacts of global processes like climate change.¶ This has led to a knowledge deficit—specifically, a whole systems knowledge deficit comprising a paucity of reliable, actionable knowledge in the mainstream, exacerbating a sense of public apathy and confusion, and cementing a policymaking impasse among political leaders who remain subject to a fatal combination of intensive fossil fuel lobbying and media misinformation.¶ Among the most critical solutions to the ‘Crisis of Civilization’, then, is a concerted grassroots mobilization to rectify the whole systems knowledge deficit. This could be achieved in many different ways—whether through responsible journalism or more informed policy formulation based on the effective communication of interdisciplinary scientific research—but the end goal is the same: mass public education with a view to catalyze social action that is systemically transformative. Without addressing the knowledge deficit, the self-reinforcing cycle of amplifying crisis feedbacks cannot be overturned.¶ It is hoped that this study can begin contributing to addressing the whole systems knowledge deficit by firstly, establishing a scientifically-grounded systems theory framework for integrating data from different fields for the study of international politics; secondly, beginning the process of recognizing major geopolitical ruptures in the context of systemic crises driven by biophysical processes; thirdly, outlining the basis for a major, urgent new transdisciplinary research program bringing together the natural and social sciences to develop a holistic theoretical-empirical model of global crisis convergence; which in turn can pave the way for a fourth major, urgent new transdisciplinary action-research program on mitigating the impact of global crisis convergence, while transitioning human civilization to new more viable political economic structures that subsist in parity with their biophysical contexts. ¶ Chapter 2 The Crisis of Civilization as an Analytical Framework ¶ 2.1 The Human-Environment System as a Complex Adaptive System¶ The idea of a ‘Crisis of Civilization’ pivots around the goal of understanding human activity as a whole. It is premised on the fact that as a single biological species, human beings share common individual and social characteristics through which they interact with each other, with other species, and with the biophysical environment.¶ Global civilization constitutes the full mechanism of social organization by which this nexus of activities and interactions operates. I use a ‘Crisis of Civilization’ framework to examine multiple, seemingly disparate global and local crises. This does not obviate the specific and distinctive dynamics of those crises but permits examination of how these crises interrelate with one another in the context of the overarching global system of which they are part.¶ The theorization of human civilization as a “complex adaptive system” derives from the application of complex systems theory as developed in relation to biological systems and ecosystems (Kauffmann; Dyke; Homer-Dixon; Diamond). A rich and dense literature demonstrates that complex systems are found across the natural sciences in physics, chemistry, and biology (Ross and Arkin 2009), as well as in ecology (May et al. 2008) and economics (Farmer et al. 2012 ).¶ A system exists whenever a plurality of entities subsists in which each entity functions in some sort of relationship with the others. A complex system exists when the relations between these parts leads the system as a whole to display emergent properties and behavior which cannot be reduced solely to the nature of its different parts and their relationships. Those emergent properties can be codifi ed as overarching rules that characterize the system’s structure as a whole. In some cases this can be done mathematically, although this is a less useful approach when examining human societies. ¶ A complex adaptive system exists when the system as a whole is able to adapt— to generate a collective shift in its internal behavior in order to survive. Thus, while the relations between parts of a system generates the emergent structures that comprise the system as a whole, those relationships are, in turn, restrained and enabled by those wider structures. This circular relationship is integral to the system’s capacity to adapt to new environmental conditions. In time this is done by evolution; more immediately this can be done by behavioral changes or species shifts. ¶ Equally, due to the nested and interconnected nature of the components of a complex adaptive system, small perturbations in one part can have ramifying effects on other parts of the system, depending on how they are connected. This sort of internal positive feedback process means that the overall structure of a system can be greatly impacted by seemingly random occurrences—those structures can either be reinforced or undermined by these internal feedback processes. ¶ When such internal feedback processes reach certain thresholds, or ‘tipping points’, they can induce fundamental re-ordering of key structures in the system as a whole—the convergence of multiple tipping points, in turn, can generate a systemwide adaptive cycle of re-structuring, a ‘phase shift’, through which the system undergoes a transition to a new equilibrium (Holling 2001 ). ¶ The human-environment system is complex and adaptive because it represents a historically evolving civilizational form comprised of a vast interlocking array of nested sub-systems, including some from the earth’s geology, resources, oceans, and atmosphere; multiple living and non-living ecosystems across these domains; and human systems, comprised of psychological, cultural and ideological fi elds, relations of production and associated modes of energy extraction, technological and economic systems, and political structures. ¶ Thus, the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ framework is a systems approach that attempts to analyze the complex interrelationships between multiple global crises and human activities as a whole, thus understanding them not simply as discrete crises and activities in themselves, but as component factors of a wider global human environmental system with its own emergent properties and behaviors. ¶ This approach recognizes that each of these crises pertains to a specifi c subsystem in itself, with distinctive features and patterns of behavior, but equally recognizes that each of these sub-systems do not exist in isolation. Rather, their mutual interrelationship generates emergent patterns characterizing the system as a whole. Those emergent structural features, in turn, exert causal regulatory effects that shape, enable and constrain the behaviors of the sub-systems. ¶ A systems approach thus views particular crises and associated human activities as discrete sub-systems which are, nevertheless, inherently interconnected as subsystems in an emergent human-environmental system, captured through the concept of a world-scale human civilization. It is in this respect that the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ as an analytical framework is able to systemically locate multiple crises as interconnected features of a wider world-scale crisis in human civilization as an emergent macro-structure. By integrating detailed trans-disciplinary examination of crisis sub-systems with analysis of their systemic interconnections within the world-scale human-environment system, a much clearer picture of the precise drivers, dynamics and potential trajectories of these crises is possible. This permits discernment of a birds-eye perspective of overall civilizational structures and their emergent direction. ¶ Examining human civilization as a complex adaptive system, therefore, permits multiple global crises to be understood through the lens of a range of powerful concepts with solid empirical basis in the biophysical sciences—the thresholds and tipping points of feedback processes; how interconnections between di

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