The Global Consortium on Security Transformation

The Global Consortium on Security Transformation has emerged from discussions within an informal network of researchers, civil society activists, security practitioners, development analysts and policy makers about alternative and in particular Southern responses to security challenges in a world of widespread poverty, inequality and insecurity.

Wide gaps have opened between the global vision of a more prosperous and secure post-Cold War world and the dismal realities of continuing violent conflict and poverty. These gaps reflect the lack of Southern-based engagement with the root causes, conflicts of interests, as well as problems of resources. Moreover, security, like development, tends to be conceptualised as something delivered by the North through aid programmes and policy interventions, rather than transformations rooted in the South, reflecting priorities and interests of those most at risk.

Critics argue that both the problems and the solutions have tended to be externally defined. Although donors and international agencies pay lip-service to local ownership and acknowledge the need to consult with a wider range of national stakeholders, they have generally been less prepared to contemplate fundamental reassessment of their own policies and programmes, still less critiques of the unequal global and national power relationships in which they are embedded.  

The problems lie deep in the present architecture of the international system and of North-South relationships. The countries and institutions of the industrial North retain disproportionate influence in the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions, and tend to dominate both the global security and the international development agendas. Both the developing South and the post-communist East are all too easily stereotyped as the more or less pliant recipients of assistance, targets of international interventions and subjects of reform initiatives. When they object, resist or try to divert the course of reform, they tend to be damned for their inefficiency, corruption, ‘lack of political will’, or reluctance to abandon violence. Whilst there may sometimes be truth in such charges, they also serve to divert attention from the root causes of conflict and underdevelopment, including unequal North-South relationships – and to disempower those best able to address them in their own regional neighbourhoods and national societies

Characterisation of global reform as a top-down, Northern-driven process not only fails to do justice to those struggling against poverty, injustice and insecurity in the South. It is also empirically misleading, since it tends to underestimate the dynamism of transformations in the South, and their global ramifications. The emergence of the East Asian NICs as strong competitors in the global economy; struggles by pro-democracy movements in the Third World and the former socialist countries; the current flowering of political Islam; and recent challenges to neo-liberal economic orthodoxy in Latin America are examples of transformations whose dynamism and global impact have been misunderstood or underestimated by Northern analysts and policy-makers.

The Consortium
The failures in a Northern driven global reform process strengthen the case for new approaches more attuned to the concerns of the South. The proposed Consortium not only aims to build on and strengthen Southern security research and policy analysis, enabling it to challenge Northern perspectives; but also to ensure research and policy is responsive to the voices and needs of those most at risk from poverty and insecurity. The initiative will not only to challenge conventional thinking, but also vested interests, which sustain the present theory and practice of international security and of international development. 

It is committed to rigorous empirical analysis of the relationships between security, equity and development. At the same time it is dedicated to promoting policy change through critical engagement with security policy-makers and practitioners, legislators, the media and civil society organizations.

Our starting point is the new thinking about security already beginning to materialise from the unique informal networks and exchanges, emerging in the different regions of the developing world. These networks bridge the worlds of development researchers, security analysts, policy activists, international agencies and donors, development and humanitarian NGOs, regional institutions, national governments and their security establishments.

Furthermore, the marginalised and insecure are often considered by policy makers as victims rather than agents of change. They are rarely provided avenues for articulating their own considered responses to their security situations in academic and policy arenas. On the other hand, researchers and policy analysts face great personal hazards in accessing and working with marginalised groups in volatile, insecure and repressive environments. The Consortium’s aim is to develop methodologies to meet these challenges and facilitate communications with a wider spread of grassroots policy constituencies.

In building the Consortium, we envisage a gradualist approach, building on these networks and informal connections in order to share experience, add value and create a wider framework for research collaboration, information exchange and policy engagement.

The Consortium is currently being coordinated by the IDS, Sussex. From the outset, the Consortium’s goals, decision-making structures and funding strategies have been designed to assure institutional portability, as well as to maximise South-South linkages. It is proposed that full ownership will be devolved to the Consortium’s Southern partners on a revolving basis by the end of 2007. Therefore, starting 2008, ICES will assume full responsibility for coordinating the Consortium for a three year period.

We aim to forge connections with a range of regional research and civil society organisations with broader interests in the interface between security and development.

Whilst South-South links will be prioritised, it is also our aim to develop these in tandem with South-North interchanges. The latter are essential in order to bring Southern research and policy perspectives to the attention of Northern researchers and decision-makers. Northern development assistance, financial flows, trade in conflict goods, humanitarian activities and interventions have manifold impacts in the North as well as the South. Moreover, Northern security institutions face many of the same issues of security governance as counterparts in the South, and can draw valuable lessons from the latter.

We aim to consolidate another key feature of the present regional networks, namely their engagement with policy makers and security practitioners, whose cooperation is essential to ensure that security transformations are achievable.