Index
Insecurity and conflict
Insecurity and conflict serves as the thematic umbrella for research which carries an 'on-the-ground' sense of the complexity of violence into broader frameworks of understanding. In Timor-Leste and around the world, we have seen over the past decade a number of destabilizing developments that have posed serious practical and conceptual challenges to conventional policy frameworks and responses. They are of a complex and unconventional nature involving non-state or multiple actors along with social, environmental and economic processes that do not accord with traditional models of state-based military threats. The use of militia forces in Timor-Leste, attacks by Islamic militants in New York and Washington, London, Kuta and Jakarta, and regional conflicts such as those in the Balkans, have been met with military responses that have often enough either complicated the violence further or secured a very limited kind of peace. In places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, we have seen utter failure in the military attempts at securing victory in the so-called 'War on Terror'; wars that typify the myriad difficulties encountered when orthodox military responses are used in an attempt to contain globalizing networks of people committed to violent political actions. While such spectacular violence tends to capture public attention, slower moving but no less deadly processes are also coming to challenge the conventional conceptions of security. The spread of disease, the threat to natural eco-systems, a global refugee crises, climate change, as well the impact of capital flows on local communities around the world, have all shown the increasing ways in which the sense of security people feel is intimately related to sets of complex flows and processes that cut across the formal categories of nation-states.
In terms of intellectual analysis, the common threads linking these developments together are, firstly, a concern for the nature of contemporary violence and, secondly, how an understanding of immediate violence can be drawn into more abstract patterns of social formation. The project begins from the critical position that the common attempt to read non-conventional security challenges through the lens of conventional state-based analysis has gravely distorted policy and imposed significant additional costs in human and financial terms. Overall, the project seeks to examine the deeper sources of insecurity: political, military, cultural, economic and health insecurity from local and regional arenas to the national and global. This, we argue, provides a stronger basis for understanding the grounds of conflict, violence and other forms of insecurity in the world today, and for orienting policy decisions in relation to national and regional security.
Insecurity and conflict research intersects with various other teaching and research programs at RMIT University, including the Human Security program in the Global Cities Institute. The most obvious point of intersection between these two programs is in the way both ask how forms of violence can be negated at the policy level. However, Insecurity and conflict remains a distinct area of research on a number of fronts, not least its global scale. While Insecurity and conflict research has carried us from Argentina to Palestine, Bosnia to Northern Ireland, the Human Security program concentrates on the urban domain and is limited to the Asia-Pacific. Secondly, the emphasis in the Insecurity and Conflict research has been on understanding violence rather than on different systems or approaches to understanding security. As the name suggests, the Human Security program takes a particular security doctrine and uses that as the central point for engagement and critique. For Insecurity and conflict research, the questions have long been much more around identity and social integration more generally.