Increasingly, policymakers and scholars alike view many major security problems of the 21st century as novel in character that will have to be addressed through innovative and transnational mechanisms. In the 20th century, major challenges to personal safety came from interstate wars. In today’s increasingly globalized and fragmented world, the most pernicious threats to human security emanate from conditions that give rise to civil war, human rights depravations, epidemics, environmental degradation, forced labor and malnutrition. The 1990s was, in fact, the only decade of the twentieth century in which more people perished from sub-state conflict than from interstate wars. Perhaps, because the response of states and international organizations proved insufficient, the 1990s also produced an explosion in the number and importance of transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) attempting to address mounting crises in the field of human security. This program recognizes the critical importance of these emergent problems.
Activity
This program will generate and disseminate policy papers and advocate nonpartisan policy proposals, making its findings available to national and international policy makers, nongovernmental organizations, corporations and other interested organizations.
Project on Global Risk Terrains
The Program on Global Risk Terrains addresses the challenges of dynamically forecasting emerging threats and global insecurity through the study of the social and economic correlates of violence; the role of changing factors that come from globalization; the mitigating influences of prevention, control, and response; and the forces that might lead to changing values related to violence suppression.
Project on Global Cybersecurity Policy
The latter half of the 20th century saw technologies emerge allowing for the strategic utilization cyberspace. Technologies such as the Internet rendered geographic boundaries less relevant. The cyber environments, including those controlling critical infrastructures are essentially “up for grabs” by state and non-state actors. Threats to and breaches of the peace in cyberspace are becoming increasingly consequential as states continue to militarize cyberspace and exploit it in war. Much attention has been placed on finding technical solutions to securing cyberspace, however, policy solutions are equally important and largely overlooked. The aim of the project on global cybersecurity policy is to examine global cybersecurity policy debates at a local, national and international level, and to create a training program to increase awareness