2 - Environmental Security and Biodiversity: Critical Policy Themes and Issues

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The end of the Cold War has fundamentally transformed the backdrop against which the quest for peace and security on the oceans is understood and organized. Undermining the centrality of the conventional military concerns affecting the security of the state, new issues such as pollution of the marine environment, unsustainable use of ocean resources, illicit trafficking, clandestine movement of persons, piracy, terrorism, and congested sea lanes have all emerged as new critical themes of discourses during the post-Cold War years (The Ocean: Our Future 1998, p. 17). This transformation was triggered primarily by the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the consequent diminished likelihood of global warfare between the two over-armed superpowers that had extended their naval power projections to all possible places across oceans. Nevertheless, while the existential nuclear threat looming large across oceans has receded over the years and new issues and themes such as environmental security have emerged as most critical, the international community has remained far too reticent about evolving alternative institutional frameworks for promoting and regulating peace and security across the world's oceans (The Ocean: Our Future 1998, p. 44).

Meanwhile, the dominant discourse on security continues to echo Cold War paradigms where concerns about the use and abuse of the oceans were perceived primarily in the context of navigational stationing and mobility, as well as the exploitation of sea lanes and other ocean resources by big powers with little regard to its sustainability. These military activities of the big powers, though, continue to be projected as if they are in the best interests of all humanity, while, in actual practice, the oceans continue to be the battleground for muscle flexing. All of this has kept basic questions about equity and justice in the margins of all security discourses. To a large extent, even the aforementioned new themes and concerns continue to be viewed through rather narrow prisms of statist security and development perspectives.