Non-traditional security: An evolving solution to new challenges

Searle, M.

The formulation of Non-Traditional Security (NTS) made three principle contributions to security sector discourse in the face of peculiar security challenges of the post-Cold War era. First, it opened space for non-military threats to be considered, allowing issues ranging from infectious disease, illegal drug trafficking, irregular migration, environmental degradation, financial turmoil, and natural disasters to be framed as legitimate security concerns. The resonance of this for the Asia-Pacific is plain, having experienced a financial crisis in 1997/1998;regular issues of pollution, haze, and the early impacts of climate change;Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Avian Flu pandemics and now COVID-19;massive migration;and regular and periodically massive natural disasters. Second, it stressed that many, if not most, of these newly-recognised security threats are transnational, rather than inter-state. Therefore, the scope for resolving security threats was expanded beyond simply engaging the appropriate state diplomatically or militarily to include private and non-governmental actors, and in so doing, shifting from a default of bilateral resolutions to one of multilateral ones including various state and non-state parties, producing a greater emphasis on broader societal coordination…. © 2021 by Editors.