University Times

Phil Williams, director of the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies, gave his inaugural lecture Jan. 19 as the Wesley W. Posvar Chair for International Security Studies.

“To me, the glass is never half-full or half-empty. It’s almost always three-quarters empty,” Graduate School of Public and International Affairs professor Phil Williams said. International security scholars are “professional Cassandras,” he quipped, having made it their business to think about the unthinkable. “We have pessimistic forecasts, doomsday scenarios, worst-case thinking, various kinds of threat inflation,” he said.

“I worry about dystopian futures which are readily imaginable: water and food shortages; energy crises; unmanageable organizations; failed states; WMD terrorism; global climate change; resurgent great power rivalry; the revival of fascism; sustained clashes of civilizations; untrammeled nuclear proliferation; another enduring global financial meltdown; the growing power of global criminals and the spread of illicit markets; major pandemics,” he said. “Massive global instability looms over the horizon and the only issue appears to be how far away it really is.”

Today’s security challenges are more diverse and more pervasive than ever. Their unpredictable interactions increase the potential for instability, disorder and crises. What’s more, governments lack the capacity to deal with them, said Williams, director of the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies, in his inaugural lecture, “Security and Disorder in a Complex World,” as the Wesley W. Posvar Chair for International Security Studies.

Complex interactions among weak national governments, organized crime and gangs, and threats ranging from cyberwar and climate change to violence, poverty and the growth of feral cities, are heightening global security risks.

“One of the big elements is interconnection, amongst almost everything,” he said Jan. 19 in Posvar Hall.

“Connectivity leads to boundary-jumping and negative synergies. These problems interact with each other in some perverse ways, which makes them more difficult,” he said.

Whereas international relations once were the bounds of the discipline, “We need to think more about how complexity feeds into a lot of things we try to understand.”

Authority structures in crisis

More and more states are characterized by weakness and fragility or failing altogether. “The issue is not simply that governance is inadequate to meet security challenges, it’s that poor governance itself is a major source of insecurity,” Williams said.

“Many of the security challenges in the 21st century have far more to do with governance issues and poor governance than they have to do with traditional geopolitics.”

Unipolarity is long gone, with the unstable tri-polar system of China, Russia and the United States as great powers emerging, he noted. “A tri-polar relationship really complicates the security dilemma,” Williams said. In international relations, a triangular relationship is the least stable with one of the parties at risk of being the odd one out. Another danger is that action against one of the other powers can be viewed as threatening by the ones who weren’t the target of the action.

Non-state actors

The formerly state-centric system of authority increasingly has to deal with a multi-centric system of positive and negative non-state actors that range from advocacy networks to those less altruistic.

Among the challenges to international security is the rise of violent non-state actors. “Sometimes these VNSAs ally with states. Sometimes they confront states. Sometimes the state is the target, sometimes with insurgencies it’s the prize,” Williams said, arguing that in some ways it’s not surprising that governments are ill-equipped to meet these challenges.

Organized crime

Another complication is the intermeshing of criminal and terrorist networks with geopolitical competition.

“You have this wild card now of groups that are not fully under control necessarily, but often seen as proxies of power.”

In places where states cannot carry out their expected functions, Williams said, “those functional holes are filled by groups like organized crime,” which sometimes are closer to the citizenry than the state itself and may serve as a sort of social safety net.

For example, Russian organized crime became the ultimate arbiter for Russian business in the 1990s because there were no laws and regulations, he said.

Where there are few opportunities in the legal economy, the illegal economy and criminal activity become the alternatives, Williams noted.

Mexican drug trafficking organizations increasingly are moving into Central America. There is fighting in Guatemala and El Salvador and narco-colonization of West Africa by Mexican, Colombian and Venezuelan groups that have moved into places such as Guinea-Bissau.

Traditional gangs  — which are all about identity and belonging — are forging links with criminal organizations that are much more enterprise- and money-oriented, he said.

While Williams said the link between criminal organizations and terrorists “is greatly exaggerated,” he conceded that “nearly all these violent non-state actors in one way or another use crime as a funding mechanism to sustain their struggle.”

At one time, the concept of organized crime as a security threat was dismissed, but it’s harder to ignore today, Williams said. For instance, insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have appropriated such activities as extortion, kidnapping for profit, smuggling and drugs.

New product lines for criminal organizations aren’t hard to find. “We are going to see new black markets” in oil, water and food, he predicted.

Such elements already are evident in oil brokering in Nigeria; fights for control of oil terminals in the Russian and Ukrainian energy sectors, and in Mexico where Pemex, the state-owned oil company, has been infiltrated by the Zetas drug cartel.

“These new product lines are going to be pretty central. Organized crime is not going to go away; it’s going to get stronger and more formidable.”

The risk of cyberwar

A newer international risk is the threat of cyberwar, such as the cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007 and the country of Georgia in 2008, or the Stuxnet computer worm that targeted the Iranian nuclear program.

Anonymity — or at least plausible deniability — in the cyberworld complicates assigning responsibility and makes such attacks difficult to deter, Williams noted.

If a cyberattack is an act of war, what is the response?

“The answers are not easy to come by,” Williams said. “We still don’t understand the full dynamics of cyber-confrontation between great powers,” he said, noting it’s thought of largely in technical terms such as how to limit damage and recover infrastructure.

Rather than viewing a cyber-attack as an electronic Pearl Harbor, a better model is more like an electronic Cuban missile crisis, he said.

“A cyber crisis is not going to be something that is technical,” he said. “It’s going to be something involving two states — a lot of coercion, a lot of bargaining … It’s going to mirror what happens in the real world.”

The interesting question, he noted, is: If it happens in cyberspace, does it stay in cyberspace, or will it move into the real world? “That leads to some very interesting issues of cross-domain escalation,” Williams said.

Failing cities

The number of cities with populations greater than 10 million — and in some cases 20 million  — are growing, leading to manageability problems attributable to their size. Add poverty and the issues are magnified.

Williams said slums are “the emerging settlements of the 21st century,” adding that it is projected that by 2030 some 2 billion people will be living in slums.

“What does that do for recruitment for violent non-state actors? A lot,” he said, adding that failed cities might be a more frequent cause of risk than failed states. “At the very least, these cities are incubators for all sorts of security problems,” he said.

—Kimberly K. Barlow