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Traditional Security and Cooperation

Disarmament, Arms control, Confidence Building Measures, Non-Traditional Notions, Global Security, etc.

Traditional Security and Cooperation

  • Traditional Security acknowledges a corporation’s efficacy in controlling violence. These constraints apply to both the aims and tactics of conflict
  • Traditional Security concerns have focused on challenges bothering the state’s fundamental ideals of regional stability and political independence
  • The very nature of Traditional Security is continually altering as a result of technological advancements
  • As is widely acknowledged today, war should be fought only for legitimate purposes, principally self-defence, or to protect others from genocide; it should also be restricted in terms of brutality and used only as a last choice after all other means have failed
  • Apart from these principles of conflict, Traditional security discusses a variety of additional forms of collaboration, including disarmament, arms control, and self-belief measures.
  • Traditional security obligates all governments to abstain from certain types of armaments
  • The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) both prohibit the manufacture and ownership of these armaments
  • The United States and the Soviet Union, on the other hand, were unwilling to give up another type of weapon of mass devastation, atomic weapons. As a result, they sought arms control

Arms control

  • Arms control regulates the acquisition or development of weapons
  • In 1972, the Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty attempted to prevent the US and Soviet Union from deploying missile systems as a protective shield to launch a nuclear assault, by prohibiting them from mass-producing such weapons
  • The United States and the Soviet Union also signed a series of other arms control accords, notably the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II, or SALT II, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)
  • “Arms control” is a blanket word that refers to international limits on the development, manufacture, stockpiling, spread, and use of small arms, ballistic missiles, and atomic weapons
  • Typically, arms control is accomplished via diplomacy, which aims to enforce such restrictions on consenting parties through treaty obligations and accords

    The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968

  • Restricted the purchase of nuclear weapons, it was an arms control pact
  • Countries that had tested and developed nuclear weapons before 1967 were permitted to retain them, but those that had not been required to relinquish their right to acquire them
  • The NPT did not eradicate nuclear weapons; rather, it restricted which nations may possess them

Confidence Building Measures

  • It is a mechanism through which nations exchange military concepts and intelligence with their adversaries
  • This is a technique for them to demonstrate that they are not plotting an ambush
  • This whole procedure is intended to guarantee that adversaries do not wage war due to miscommunication or misconception

By and large, conventional notions of security are preoccupied with the use or threat of military force. In conventional security, force serves as both the primary danger to and method of establishing security.

Non-Traditional Notions

Beyond military concerns, these conceptions of security include a broad spectrum of risks and hazards influencing the circumstances of human life. Additionally, non-traditional notions of security challenges have been classified as ones that are distinct from standard security risks.

Non-traditional notions of security have also been referred to as “human security” or “global security” since non-traditional notions of security extend beyond the security of nations or communities to the security of all humanity. 

Human Security

  • This notion is more concerned with the security of individuals than with the protection of states, since safe states do not always imply secure people
  • While protecting residents against foreign assaults is a vital requirement for their protection, it is insufficient
  • As a result, more people have been murdered by their own governments than by foreign forces during the previous century
  • However, the notions of Human Security can also be divided into two broad concepts
  • Human Security is a Narrow Concept: Its emphasis is on threats and violence to individuals “The safeguarding of groups and people from internal violence,” as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan puts it
  • Human Security in a Broader Context: The danger agenda should encompass hunger, illness, and natural catastrophes, since they together kill considerably more people than war, mass slaughter, and terrorism
  • Economic security and threats to human dignity are also included. In other words, the largest version emphasises what has been dubbed ‘liberation from desire’ and ‘liberation from fear,’ respectively

Global Security

  • Worldwide security as a notion developed in the 1990s in reaction to the global character of dangers such as global warming, international terrorism, and health crises such as AIDS and Avian Flu
  • Because these issues are global in scope and cannot be resolved by a single country alone, and because they may sometimes have a disproportionate influence on a specific nation, international collaboration is essential, but difficult to obtain

Conclusion 

Traditional security measures such as disarmament, arms control, and confidence building help to keep violence to a minimum. States are obligated to give up certain types of weapons under disarmament agreements. Arms control governs the acquisition of weapons as well as the sharing of ideas and information with adversarial countries. To alleviate poverty, manage migration, refugee movements, and control epidemics, cooperative security is required. Depending on the nature of the threat and the willingness and ability of countries to respond either nationally or internationally, cooperation can be bilateral, regional, continental, or global.